Homer's Iliad and Pope's Vile Forgery

W HAT IS the purpose of a translation ? Should it, as Matthew Arnold contends, reproduce "the movement and general effect" of its original ? Or should it, in Douglas Knight's words, merely maintain "some ordered relation" to its text ?2 Undoubtedly the aims of translation differ from age to age. Vladimir Nabokov, perhaps the most extreme advocate of the modern "servile path," concedes that he forfeits elements of form to achieve "total accuracy and completeness of meaning."3 This sacrifice of form would have seemed a "pedantic" aberration to Pope and his contemporaries. Even Richard Bentley's famous attack on Pope's Homer did not fault it for the level of its diction or for its heroic couplets; as Richmond Lattimore observes, "Neither Bentley nor Pope would have considered any verse form more appropriate."4 For the Augustans, form was a necessary component of meaning. There are, of course, many other differences between the twentiethcentury attitude toward the translator's role and the Augustan viewpoint. While Pope might count on his public for some small familiarity with Homer's Greek, a modern translator can no longer depend on his reader's classical knowledge. The kind of historical scholarship prevalent in the last two hundred years has distanced us from Homer; current linguistic theory has made the present-day translator skeptical about his ability to capture Homer's "Poetical Fire." Pope works within the unbroken heroic tradition of Virgil and Milton, certain that nothing less than the idiom of the Latin and English epics will approximate Homer's "Rapture."