The Recovery of Homer

The dramatic date of Dante’s Divine Comedy is 1300, and it was composed some years after that. Within a few years of this composition Italy would be the focal point for a renewed interest in Greek and Greek literature and the movement now known as the Renaissance. The fourteenth century Italian humanists Petrarch and Boccaccio were two early scholars interested in the recovery of the Greek language and the Homeric poems. Petrarch obtained Greek manuscripts of the poems fTom Byzantium and commissioned a word-by-word Latin translation from Leo Pilatus. This was followed by the translations into Latin by P. C. Decembrio and Lorenzo Valla in the fifteenth century. Within about a century of the first Greek printed editions of the Iliad and the Odyssey in 1488, the Homeric texts were beginning to regain their privileged place in the history of European literature; they would have a profound impact on visual and musical traditions as well.

By the middle of the sixteenth century, both prose and verse translations of the poems existed in French and Latin, and these were followed at the end of the century with translations into English. Although Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida takes as its theme the medieval romance, Shakespeare also incorporates Homeric scenes that he may well have read in English, French, or Latin translations of the Iliad. In 1581, Arthur Hall published his Ten Books of Homer’s Iliads in England, which were based on the French version of Hugues Salel. In 1598 George Chapman published the first of his enormously influential poetic translations, entitled Seven Books of the Iliads of Homer, Prince of Poets (books 1, 2, 7-11). This was followed by Achilles’ Shield, also in 1598, Twelve Books in 1608, a complete translation of the Iliad in 1611, and Homer’s Odysses ( ca. 1615).

More than two centuries later Keats articulates the profound impact of Chapman’s translations in his poem ‘‘On first looking into Chapman’s Homer’’ (1820):

Much have I travell’d in the realms of gold,

And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;

Round many western islands have I been Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.

Oft of one wide expanse had I been told That deep-brow’d Homer ruled as his demesne;

Yet did I never breathe its pure serene

Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:

Then felt I like some watcher of the skies When a new planet swims into his ken;

Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes He star’d at the Pacific - and all his men Look’d at each other with a wild surmise - Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

In this poem knowledge of the Homeric texts by way of the translations of Chapman opens up an entirely new poetic world. Although by Keats’s time the Iliad and Odyssey were available in many translations and Greek was being studied throughout Europe, Keats’s poem could be interpreted as capturing the precise moment when, for England at least, Homer ceased to be the shadowy poet of the past, venerated but not familiar, and became instead a body of poetry that could be absorbed and understood.

Chapman was criticized by some for his often free translations of the Homeric texts, as would be Alexander Pope in the early eighteenth century. Both poets were attempting to capture what they saw to be the spirit of the original. Chapman believed that he had a special connection to Homer, which he articulated in Neoplatonist terms, that allowed him to surpass all other translators that had come before him in revealing the true meaning of the Homeric texts (Underwood 1998: 20-1). For Pope, translating Homer was a means of furthering his poetic career. His Iliad and Odyssey, like Chapman’s, were attuned to the poetics of his day, and in the early eighteenth century it was Augustan Rome, not archaic Greece, that evoked admiration and emulation. Pope’s challenge was to elevate the Homeric epics to the reputation of Virgil’s Aeneid, which continued to be the standard by which epic was measured in Neoclassicist England. The result was two poems that are very different from their Greek originals. The renowned classicist Richard Bentley famously commented: ‘‘It is a pretty poem, Mr. Pope, but you must not call it Homer’’ (Underwood 1998: 32-3). Translation is necessarily an act of interpretation (see Chapter 12, by Armstrong), and interpretation is necessarily grounded in the aesthetics and cultural norms of one’s age. Every generation since the Renaissance has produced new translations of Homer and commentaries that reflect both advancements in scholarship and current conceptions about poets and poetry.