"
Who could have conjectured that even Pope would wander away so far
from his matchless original? "Wretches!" cries Theoclymenus, the
seer; and that becomes, "O race to death devote!" "Your heads are
swathed in night," turns into "With Stygian shade each destined
peer" (peer is good!) "impending fates invade," where Homer says
nothing about Styx nor peers. The Latin Orcus takes the place of
Erebus, and "the burning coasts" are derived from modern popular
theology. The very grammar detains or defies the reader; is it the
sun that does not give his golden orb to roll, or who, or what?
The only place where the latter-day Broome or Fenton can flatter
himself that he rivals Pope at his own game is -
"What pearly drop the ashen cheek bedews!"
This is, if possible, MORE classical than Pope's own -
"With tears your wan distorted cheeks are drowned."
But Pope nobly revindicates his unparalleled power of translating
funnily, when, in place of "the walls drip with blood," he writes -
"With sanguine drops the walls are rubied round."
Homer does not appear to have been acquainted with rubies; but what
of that? And how noble, how eminently worthy of Pope it is to add
that the ghosts "howl"! I tried to make them gibber, but ghosts DO
gibber in Homer (though not in this passage), so Pope, Fenton,
Broome, and Co., make them howl.
No, Pope is not lightly to be rivalled by a modern translator.
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