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Homer and Pope

WHETHER Pope's version of Homer is a good translation (its excellence as an Augustan poem is not in doubt) has been open to question ever since Dr. Bentley called it a 'pretty poem'. Bentley was a scholar, and his qualifications therefore as a literary critic are not above suspicion, but his judgement (made impromptu in any case) has superficial truth. The accidents of language, expression, and metre produce one effect in Homer, another in Pope. No doubt Pope also fails by Dr. Arnold's criterion of nobility (in the uplifting Victorian sense) as well as in those of speed and lucidity. Yet in spite of its Augustan exterior Pope's is clearly the best lasting of all versions in English. There are many reasons for this distinction; the two that interest Mr. Mason are these. First, Pope's style has a certain credibility. It is easy to show—and Mason does not hesitate to show again and again by merciless verbatim quotation—that the currently popular translations are banal and defaced by spuriously poetical tricks. Pope at least had command of a fine poetical style and a sense of how heroes would speak if they spoke English. Second, Pope has an intuition of the qualities of human nature represented in the Iliad that are not limited in time and place. Genius, both in poet and translator, sees more in the world than is felt by common clay. One might allow these qualities to the poem, while reserving judgement on the translation. That, no doubt, is the line one would take if one saw in Homer a composer of sagas, no more, or a primitive novelist: Pope the poet would be interposing a barrier to understanding. Mason does not show any interest in saga or in the insights that comparative study of preliterate epic sheds on Homer, but it is probable that his attitude would be the same as that which he displays to those who reduce Homer to a bald narrator. Every age is selective, according to Mason, and will absorb only so much from the past into its vital consciousness. What the world in general seeks from Homer is not an adolescent pleasure in battle or romantic delight in reunited spouses, but the sublimity of his grandest moments. Consequently the translator must have the capacity to rise on at least some of the occasions when Homer rises. At his most rigorous Mason even demands that the rendering of such scenes should qualify as a contribution to English poetry. Naturally by such a standard he sees something in Pope but nothing in the translators of the last fifty years.