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Longfellow's work; it was rather due to the strong hold taken, by the theory of a literal rendering, on the poet's mind.
Overliteral-ness appears to be the Nemesis of a genius for translating; the longer a man works, the more precise he becomes.
The second of Mr. Boyesen's great American translators is Bryant; and here I should utterly dissent from him. The best introduction to Homer in English is Matthew Arnold's ‘Essay on Translating Homer;’ or rather it would be, but for its needless and diffuse length, which prevents many persons from really mastering it; but I do not see how any one, after reading it, can look through a page of Bryant's version without a sense of its utter tameness and its want of almost all the qualities defined by Arnold as essential to Homer.
Mr. Lawton has finely said, at the beginning of his admirable papers on Aeschylus in the Atlantic Monthly1 that ‘the Homeric poems offer us, as it were, a glimpse of a landscape scene by a flash of lightning.
What came before and immediately after we cannot discern.’
But in
1 August, 1888.
Boston, Lee and Shepard Publishers, 1892.
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