A Homer of our own
Christopher Gill
To Homer Through Pope H. A. Mason (Chatto and Windus £2.75) While Rieu's Penguin translations of Homer sell by the thousand on English bookstalls, and American campus bookstores sustain Richmond Lattimore in a comfortable retirement, H. A. Mason advocates a different guide back to the ancient poems — Alexander Pope. The idea that we shall recover the spirit of the first Western epic from the versions of this most sophisticated Augustan poet has the taste of paradox. But this is Mason's claim, or rather, a subtle variant of this. If we study Pope's translation, together with the poet's own Notes (printed together in the recent Twickenham edition by Maynard Mack), we shall see how Pope modified Homer's style in an effort to reproduce the essential virtues of the epic. The English poet adapts the crude elements of the poem — baldly factual or near-colloquial passages — to preserve the nobility of tone he admires in the original. He deletes comic touches, and stresses the elements of pensiveness or pathos in the characters, to underline the seriousness of the epic view of man. In place of the ancient hero, the man of action, another figure steps forward, more thoughtful, more feeling — the Augustan gentleman. Homer's nature-similes, with their simple descriptive language and their loose relationship to their context, are translated into the elegance of English Pastoral, and, by rhetorical heightening, more thoroughly dovetailed to the surrounding narrative. Inspired by Dryden's translation of the Aeneid, Pope attempts something similar to Virgil's transformation of Homer in his age. An English Iliad emerges: what Homer would (or should) have written to make an epic for eighteenth century ears. What justified Pope's modifications was the sense that, under the surface, Homer had the same view of Nature and Human Nature, as fitting within a fine and harmonious whole, as the author of the Essay on Man.
But was Pope right to think this? If a critic professes to take us "to Homer through Pope," we are entitled to learn whether or not we arrive. And if we do not arrive (as Mason implies from time to time) we want to know which parts of the Homeric landscape the Augustan does not show. On this point the book is very vague. Partly this is because Mason is (as he presents himself) very much a traveller towards the original epic. His comments on the world of the Iliad and the Odyssey range from the slight to the conventional. It is with other translations, rather than the Greek, that he compares Pope's versions. And his treatment of the Homeric style (so crucial for a critique of translations) never touches on its chief feature, the formulaic character which derives from its oral composition. But then, fundamentally, Mason is not inter ested in style as such, style as the distinctive expression, the voice ' of a period of literary history, or of an individual poet. For him style (or a successful style) is a clue, an indication that a poet, whoever he is, is really 'trying,' is properly engaged in the poetic quest: charting the depths of universal human experience. 'Serious ' literature is that which satisfies our "one permanent
need ... to discover the greater human
Nature, which the best minds have caught glimpses of in observing and imagining." If a translator, as much as an original poet, seriously tries to glimpse this Nature, his poetry will have a natural force and authenticity. And if a translator expresses in his own tongue the human truths he finds imaged in another, if " deep answers deep" in this way, the translation will be great poetry in its own language. Indeed,
for Mason, it is a mark of Pope's comparative failure as a translator that his version is not better English poetry than it is: it shows that the translator was not quite serious enough about the human truths of the Iliad.
In this strenuous search for the authentic note in literature, there is little room for precise demarcations between Homer's and Pope's views of human nature. For all writers, at their best, grope to delineate the same universal humanity. And in Mason's book we find little reasoned critical discussion, rather an intense personal struggle as the author weighs chunk after chunk of verse translation to find the nuggets of true poetry. In the author's sometimes elephantine prose style, in which the abstract jostles with the colloquial (giving, at its worst, the impression of a schoolboy imitation of Henry James), this struggle can seem comic. (As when Mason recounts his dream that Pope and Homer arrived arm-in-arm to interrupt his work; Pope harangued him in a pastiche of Augustan prose, while the blind poet stood silently by.) At such moments we hear only too clearly the sound of the lectures from which the book was adapted; and behind Mason's orotund tones, we hear another flat but penetrating voice, that of F. R. Leavis. But the whole struggle is honestly maintained, from the initial clarion for Pope to the final, judicious critique of the poet's version. Nobody should look here for the 'introduction to the Iliad" the subtitle offers: it is, rather, an energetic, if eccentric, treatment of a comparatively neglected part of Pope's oeuvre.
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