The Odyssey. Homer

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СКАЧАТЬ herself into her work under the name of Nausicaa.

      The main arguments on which I base the first of these somewhat startling contentions, have been prominently and repeatedly before the English and Italian public ever since they appeared (without rejoinder) in the "Athenaeum" for January 30 and February 20, 1892. Both contentions were urged (also without rejoinder) in the Johnian "Eagle" for the Lent and October terms of the same year. Nothing to which I should reply has reached me from any quarter, and knowing how anxiously I have endeavoured to learn the existence of any flaws in my argument, I begin to feel some confidence that, did such flaws exist, I should have heard, at any rate about some of them, before now. Without, therefore, for a moment pretending to think that scholars generally acquiesce in my conclusions, I shall act as thinking them little likely so to gainsay me as that it will be incumbent upon me to reply, and shall confine myself to translating the "Odyssey" for English readers, with such notes as I think will be found useful. Among these I would especially call attention to one on xxii. 465–473 which Lord Grimthorpe has kindly allowed me to make public.

      I have repeated several of the illustrations used in "The Authoress of the Odyssey", and have added two which I hope may bring the outer court of Ulysses' house more vividly before the reader. I should like to explain that the presence of a man and a dog in one illustration is accidental, and was not observed by me till I developed the negative. In an appendix I have also reprinted the paragraphs explanatory of the plan of Ulysses' house, together with the plan itself. The reader is recommended to study this plan with some attention.

      In the preface to my translation of the "Iliad" I have given my views as to the main principles by which a translator should be guided, and need not repeat them here, beyond pointing out that the initial liberty of translating poetry into prose involves the continual taking of more or less liberty throughout the translation; for much that is right in poetry is wrong in prose, and the exigencies of readable prose are the first things to be considered in a prose translation. That the reader, however, may see how far I have departed from strict construe, I will print here Messrs. Butcher and Lang's translation of the sixty lines or so of the "Odyssey." Their translation runs:

      Tell me, Muse, of that man, so ready at need, who wandered

       far and wide, after he had sacked the sacred citadel of

       Troy, and many were the men whose towns he saw and whose

       mind he learnt, yea, and many the woes he suffered in his

       heart on the deep, striving to win his own life and the

       return of his company. Nay, but even so he saved not his

       company, though he desired it sore. For through the

       blindness of their own hearts they perished, fools, who

       devoured the oxen of Helios Hyperion: but the god took from

       them their day of returning. Of these things, goddess,

       daughter of Zeus, whencesoever thou hast heard thereof,

       declare thou even unto us.

       Now all the rest, as many as fled from sheer destruction,

       were at home, and had escaped both war and sea, but

       Odysseus only, craving for his wife and for his homeward

       path, the lady nymph Calypso held, that fair goddess, in her

       hollow caves, longing to have him for her lord. But when

       now the year had come in the courses of the seasons,

       wherein the gods had ordained that he should return home to

       Ithaca, not even there was he quit of labours, not even

       among his own; but all the gods had pity on him save

       Poseidon, who raged continually against godlike Odysseus,

       till he came to his own country. Howbeit Poseidon had now

       departed for the distant Ethiopians, the Ethiopians that are

       sundered in twain, the uttermost of men, abiding some where

       Hyperion sinks and some where he rises. There he looked to

       receive his hecatomb of bulls and rams, there he made merry

       sitting at the feast, but the other gods were gathered in

       the halls of Olympian Zeus. Then among them the father of

       men and gods began to speak, for he bethought him in his

       heart of noble Aegisthus, whom the son of Agamemnon,

       far-famed Orestes, slew. Thinking upon him he spake out among

       the Immortals:

       'Lo you now, how vainly mortal men do blame the gods! For of

       us they say comes evil, whereas they even of themselves,

       through the blindness of their own hearts, have sorrows

       beyond that which is ordained. Even as of late Aegisthus,

       beyond that which was ordained, took to him the wedded wife

       of the son of Atreus, and killed her lord on his return,

       and that with sheer doom before his eyes, since we had

       warned him by the embassy of Hermes the keen-sighted, the

       slayer of Argos, that he should neither kill the man, nor

       woo his wife. For the son of Atreus shall be avenged at the

       hand of Orestes, so soon as he shall come to man's estate

       and long for his own country. So spake Hermes, yet he

       prevailed not on the heart of Aegisthus, for all his good

       will; but now hath he paid one price for all.'

       And the goddess, grey-eyed Athene, answered him, saying: 'O

       father, our father Cronides, throned in the highest; that

       man assuredly lies in a death that is his due; so perish

       likewise all who work such deeds! But my heart is rent for

       wise Odysseus, the hapless one, who far from his friends

       this long while suffereth affliction in a sea-girt isle,

       where is the navel of the sea, a woodland isle, and

       therein a goddess hath her habitation, the daughter of the

       wizard Atlas, who knows the depths of every sea, and

       himself upholds the tall pillars which keep earth and sky

       asunder. His daughter it is that holds the hapless man in

       sorrow: and ever with soft and guileful tales she is

       wooing him to forgetfulness СКАЧАТЬ