Homer in 1951
Ilty GILBERT MURRAY, O.M.
WHY do publishers produce so many new translations of Plato and Homer ? Why do so many people buy and presuniably read them ? It is understandable, no doubt, in the case of Plato. He is mostly dealing with problems that are still unsolved, and he never claims to have completely solved them ; he helps one to think again and perhaps to see deeper, and that is a work that is never finished. Then he writes prose, and the peculiar charm of his style can to some degree be got across into another language—the irony, the intimacy, the ease with which he passes from light to grave, from sublime to familiar. Plato can certainly bring us something ; but what can Homer bring ?
To Greek scholars, I suppose, the most obvious and incom- parable beauty in Homer is a matter of music and atmosphere— marvelously singing metre and a magical. language which transports a reader instantly into a remote heroic world. These things cannot be reproduced, for the simple reason that even if some supremely skilful metrist were to reproduce the metre, and some genius like Milton concoct a language like the Homeric dialect, the result would be something obviously strange and artificial, whereas to the Homeric poet and his audience both "Motion and metre were just .given by the tradition, his natural and inevitable means of expression. Our tradition gives blank verse or possibly rhyming couplets ; when they prove completely unlike a Homeric hexameter we can grope, like William Morris and Mr. Lucas, for an approach to the hexameter in a metre like that of Sigurd the Volsung. But, even then, what of the language ? It is a language never .spoken by men, a language Impossible in prose, created for the hexameter and otherwise Inexplicable.
The clue is in the first three words of the Iliad: "Sing, 0 goddess, of the wrath." It is to be sung, not spoken, and sung not by men but by a goddess ; or at least, if that is the unattain- able ideal, not quite sung but uttered in a special voice by an aoidos, a vales, filled with the goddess's spirit. It is, in fact, the language of magic. Such a conception is, of course, not com- pletely strange to us. Most poets, if given their head, fall into something like song—Yeats. for instance, or Tennyson. And we still have turns of language that transport us at once into an atmosphere of emotion, especially religious emotion: "Thus saith the Lord, Thou shalt not . . ." or "A voice was heard in Ramah . . ." is enough to do it. There is the same effect In poetry almost everywhere. The Land of Heart's Desire has a different language from everyday life, a different voice, and other lights and shadows. That is why the Icelandic skalds speak in kennings, why shamans have their own language, and perhaps why it is a relief to many to write in dialect. The Imagined peasant or common soldier is thought of as nearer to Nature, further from the prosy civilised commonplace.
Still, even in translation the Homeric diction, with its perpetual epithets, its "honoured mothers," and "rose-fingered Dawns," Its "high west wind shouting over the wine-faced sea" and the like, does somehow make art impression of its own. It needs, of course, an imaginative effort in the reader ; but if that is once made it does somehow, even in prose translation, make a bridge between us moderns and the Homeric world. It does to some extent lead us into a life which has just the grandeur and naked- ness and simplicity that the highest poetry needs. , As W. P. Ker and Chadwick have pointed out, it is the life of the Heroic Age, the time of the great migrations or invasions, when northern chieftains with their commandos, by land or sea, were carving up the old Minoan civilisation. It was, in Chadwick's phrase, "a time of Mars and the Muses " •' the heroes had no cities, no .fixed roots, only the spear and shield and the songs, or "glories of men," which they carried within them ; no homes except the camp or the ship, no law except Honour, nothing to A fifth-century Athenian would set his son to learn Horner by heart "so that he might become a good man." He was quite right. By knowing the heroic poets, Homer, Virgil, Milton, you move on to a higher level. You associate with men, as Aristotle would say, "higher than yourself." And that does you good.
But apart from that, the Iliad is, after all, a great story, know- ing war and knowing honour, but seeing beyond both.of them. It shows Achilles' honour extending into hubris and disaster. It sets immediately upon the fiercest of the fighting in Book V the infinite tenderness of the scene in Troy. Hector and Andromache are no longer our enemies ; their parting, with the awful shadow of doom awaiting them, moves us more than the carnage of the battlefield. The Homeric tradition understands the wives and mothers of heroes as it understands the heroes themselves. The scene has its parallel later on, after the hubris of Achilles in rejecting Agamemnon's atonement, after the death of Patroclus and the wild self-reproach of Achilles venting itself in an orgy of revenge, when old Priam stands before Achilles begging for his son's body. "Think of thine own father, Achilles ; I tkm more miserable than he ; for I have done what no man on earth has done before, kissed the hand of him who killed my son." And old and young, conqueror and conquered, enemy and enemy, weep together for the misery that has come to both.
And the end of the whole poem, the last note struck in the great piece of music, is the praise .of the great foe by the three women who loved him most, his mother, his wife and the outcast whom he saved and protected.
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