The Man of Many Devices
By E. E. KELLETT Tins book shows precisely that mingling of genius and eccen- tricity which we expect in everything associated with Lawrence of Arabia. It was natural that he should be attracted by the Odyssey. Like the hero of the poem, he had " seen the cities and known the minds of many men " ; and, whatever the Odyssey is or is not, it is a story of adventure such as Lawrence loved. And yet the attraction is ,curiously mingled with repulsion. He speaks of Odysseus as a " cold-blooded egotist," and of Penelope as " sly and cattish." Telemachus is a prig, and Menelaus a worse prig. As for the poet himself, he was a bookworm, no longer young, living from home, a mainlander, city-bred, domestic, and—how Lawrence knows it one cannot guess—dark-haired ; " married, but not exclu- sively," often hungry and thirsty. He had no particular genius, a smaller poetic gift than William Morris, but a power of self-criticism which enabled him to mimic with success a genius so mighty as that of the author of the Iliad. He misses his every chance of greatness. He might have been terrible in his description of Hades, but terrible he was not : and even his pathos ran to seed and became mere feebleness.
Views like these are strange qualifications for an admiring translator, and yet it is plain that amid all this repulsion Law- rence does admire. He gave four years to his task, and accepts not only lines but whole paragraphs which most critics reject ; he loves " Homer " so well that he loves even his spurious work ; and he allows him virtues which many would deny him. Thus, for instance, he thinks him a " good seaman, neither land-lubber nor stay-at-home." It is true that Homer has contrived to make us fancy that a few days at sea, and a wreck or two, are nearly the whole of his story, and deluded Andrew Lang into imagining the Odyssey a synonym for " surge and thunder " ; but read his descriptions to a Cornish sailor and mark the effect. A captain who, when his ship is struck by a squall, does not take in sail, and who when-all his men are thrown " like gulls " from the black vessel, walks up and dciwn over the splitting keel, would meet with short shrift from his owners. Very different is the " land-lubber " St. Luke'S account of a shipwreck.
Similarly, though Lawrence dislikes Odysseus himself, he is drawn to him. What repels him, I think, is the boasting ; and this, I should fancy, is because Lawrence felt in himself a strong tendency to the thrasonical, which lie crushed as St. Anthony crushed his tendency to the sensuous. Such a hatred, however, is not far removed from affection ; and beneath Lawrence's depreciation of the bragging hero I read a secret liking. Somewhat similar is his uncertain attitude towards Odysseus' craft and versatility. Lawrence had plenty of this himself ; but whereas the devices of the Greek were devoted to escaping from dangers, those of the Englishman were spent in avoiding them. " Odysseus will not be stayed," said Athene, " though he be bound with chains of iron " ; but it was often his own rashness that had forged the chains. Law- rence admired the skill with which he broke loose ; but he was annoyed by the way in which he had courted unnecessary trouble. One is reminded, by contrast, of Charles Fox's delight in the Odyssey, Fox must have thought of himself as a political Odysseus, always in scrapes, and always, with infinite ingenuity, extricating himself from them. Lawrence preferred to keep out of them altogether.
The view one takes of one's author will inevitably influence one's translation ; and it is interesting to sec how Lawrence's somewhat curious ideas are reflected in the version he has given us. It has had, he tells us, twenty-seven predecessors, and it will not be the last. The fact is that every age will want its own—nay, that every man wants a fresh one as his The Odyssey of 'Homer. By T. E. Shaw (T. E. Lawrence). (Oxford University Press. 10s. 6d.) experience widens and his moods change. Very early one becomes dissatisfied with the so-called translation, half of which Was Pope's and the other half by Pope's,drudges, and of which the famous couplet, ' "Close to the cliff with both his hands he clung,
And stuck adherent, and suspended hung ; "
is scarcely the worst specimen. Yet Pope suited the Angus. tans.. Chapman, again, with his puns and conceits, is Homer in ruff and doublet, such as the Elizabethans wished. Worsley's Spenserians, though often beautiful,. divide -a running narra- tive into separate paragraphs, and sometimes infuse into it a languor like that which overcame the Lotus-eaters. Matthew Arnold preferred hexameters ; his attempts pleased him, but nobody else. When young, I was immensely struck with the astonishing tour-de-force of Arthur Way—a tine-by-line version, in which the narrative portions were adorned with an internal rhyme : " There in his need thus prayed Odysseus -the man toil-worn, While on to the city the maid by the strength of the mules was borne."
Way's conception of the Odyssey was of a masculine, vigorous, and almost torrential poem. He laughed at Samuel Butler, and would have nothing to do with the ancient idea that it was written for women in the poet:s old age. If we accept this view, his rapid couplets can scarcely be bettered. Butcher and Lang had a different purpose. In their endeavour to give us the sort of feeling a Greek of the age of Pericles may be supposed to have had for an archaic but intelligible poem, they produced a version which the blaspheming enemy dubbed a mass of Wardour Street English.
Lawrence, regarding the poem as less an epic than a novel, and its style as " soft," naturally chooses prase as his medium, and deliberately renounces all chances, of greatness, Unlike Butler, to whom the " authoress " was constantly, laughing, now satirizing men in general and now mocking Alcinous in particular, Lawrence asserts that " at our remove of thought and language we cannot guess if the poet is smiling or not." You must therefore be neutral in your version. This second Homer is a sort of Horace, whose talent consists in knowing precisely what he can and cannot do. Lawrence, therefore, aims at a poetical prose a little less antique than Butcher and Lang's, and, as he puts it, allows " tenterhooks but not railway-trains." His Odysseus is " the various- minded man," not as Morris had it, " the shifty,", nor, in Way's style, " the hero of craft-renown." And here arises a question. What of the " fixed Homeric epithets," those marks of the heroic manner as of our own ballad-fashion ? Are we to retain. a trick by which Achilles is swift:footed when lying on couch, and Menelaus loud-voiced when silent ? Lawrence knows that this lends to the Odyssey much of the " naivety " which he finds there, but he shuns it. He varies the invariable. He gives us the " honey-sweet lotus ". ; but in place of " a honey-sweet return " he has " you come here, Odysseus, in quest of a comfortable way home." Occasionally, as in the prefatory invocation to the Muse, the afflatus seizes him. The plain version is, " From some point or other, goddess-daughter of Zeus, speak to us also " ; Lawrence is ornate : " Make the talC live for us in all its many bearings." Elsewhere he is nearer to his original. As we have seen, he dislikes pathos ; but he cannot resist the appeal of that most touching passage in the whole poem-- Antielcia's story of her death : " No archer-goddess with piercing sight came upon me in the house and felled me with gentle arrows ; nor any set diseaSe with a sorry wasting to drain the life froM my limbs.' Rather it 'was my longing for you—your conning ways, 0 my wonderful Odysseus, and your tenderness—which robbed me of the life which had been sweet."
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