This is a radical abridgement of Matthew Arnold’s 1861 lectures, On Translating Homer. I have retained only about 10% of the original text, focusing on some of his key insights into the practice of translation. I have worked primarily through excision rather than alteration.

I have also eliminated Arnold’s specific critiques of other translators. His comments on Francis Newman, in particular, were highly controversial at the time and sparked an "energetic" public feud that dominated the original volume. A scholar of great learning and brother to Cardinal Newman, Francis had published an Iliad that used deliberately "quaint" and "homely" language to reflect Homer's supposed primitivism. Arnold found this approach "ignoble" and launched a public feud that dominated the original lectures. None of that is in this abridgement.

I would encourage anyone who has interest in the area to read the full collected work for added depth as well as insights to the famous translation-oriented feud.

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Lecture I

It has more than once been suggested to me that I should translate Homer. That is a task for which I have neither the time nor the courage; but the suggestion led me to regard yet more closely a poet whom I had already long studied, and for one or two years the works of Homer were seldom out of my hands. Attention will be more and more directed to the poetry of Homer, as the most important poetical monument existing. It may safely be asserted that the task of rendering him will still be attempted by other translators. It may perhaps be possible to render to these some service, to save them some loss of labour, by pointing out rocks on which their predecessors have split, and the right objects on which a translator of Homer should fix his attention.

It is disputed what aim a translator should propose to himself in dealing with his original. On one side it is said that the translation ought to be such ‘that the reader should, if possible, forget that it is a translation at all, and be lulled into the illusion that he is reading an original work—something original’ (if the translation be English), ‘from an English hand’. On the other hand, Mr Newman, declares that he ‘aims at precisely the opposite: to retain every peculiarity of the original, so far as he is able, with the greater care the more foreign it may happen to be’; so that it may ‘never be forgotten that he is imitating, and imitating in a different material’. The

translator’s ‘first duty’, says Mr Newman ‘is a historical one, to be faithful’. Probably both sides would agree that the translator’s ‘first duty is to be faithful’; but the question at issue between them is, in what faithfulness consists.

My one object is to give practical advice to a translator; and I shall not the least concern myself with theories of translation as such. But I advise the translator not to try ‘to rear on the basis of the Iliad, a poem that shall affect our countrymen as the original may be conceived to have affected its natural hearers’; and for this simple reason, that we cannot possibly tell how the Iliad ‘affected its natural hearers’. For all great poets affect their hearers powerfully, but the effect of one poet is one thing, that of another poet another thing: it is our translator’s business to reproduce the effect of Homer, and the most powerful emotion of the unlearned English reader can never assure him whether he has reproduced this, or whether he has produced something else.

Evidently the translator needs some more practical directions than these. No one can tell him how Homer affected the Greeks; but there are those who can tell him how Homer affects them. These are scholars; who possess, at the same time with knowledge of Greek, adequate poetical taste and feeling. They are the only competent tribunal in this matter: the Greeks are dead; the unlearned Englishman has not the data for judging; and no man can safely confide in his own single judgment of his own work. Let not the translator, then, trust to his notions of what the ancient Greeks would have thought of him; he will lose himself in the vague. Let him not trust to what the ordinary English reader thinks of him; he will be taking the blind for his guide. Let him not trust to his own judgment of his own work; he may be misled by individual caprices. Let him ask how his work affects those who both know Greek and can appreciate poetry. I consider that when Bentley said of Pope’s translation, ‘It was a pretty poem, but must not be called Homer’, the work, in spite of all its power and attractiveness, was judged.

How is he to proceed, in order that his work, tried by this test, may be found most successful?

First of all, there are certain negative counsels which I will give him. Homer has occupied men’s minds so much, such a literature has arisen about him, I advise the translator to have nothing to do with the questions which have been discussed with learning, with ingenuity, nay, with genius; but they have two inconveniences,—one general, one particular for the translator. The general inconvenience is that there really exist no data for determining them. The particular inconvenience is that their solution by the translator, even were it possible, could be of no benefit to his translation.

I advise him, again, not to trouble himself with constructing a special vocabulary for his use in translation in obedience to any theory about the peculiar qualities of Homer’s style. The frame of mind in which we approach an author influences our correctness of appreciation of him; and Homer should be approached by a translator in the simplest frame of mind possible.

These are negative counsels; I come to the positive. When I say, the translator of Homer should above all be penetrated by a sense of four qualities of his author;—that he is eminently rapid; that he is eminently plain and direct, both in the evolution of his thought and in the expression of it, that is, both in his syntax and in his words; that he is eminently plain and direct in the substance of his thought, that is, in his matter and ideas; and, finally that he is eminently noble;—I probably seem to be saying what is too general to be of much service to anybody.

Coleridge says, in his strange language, speaking of the union of the human soul with the divine essence, that this takes place

Whene’er the mist, which stands ’twixt God and thee,

Defecates to a pure transparency;

and so, too, it may be said of that union of the translator with his original, which alone can produce a good translation, that it takes place when the mist which stands between them—the mist of alien modes of thinking, speaking, and feeling on the translator’s part—‘defecates to a pure transparency’, and disappears.

First, Homer is eminently rapid, and to this rapidity the elaborate movement of Miltonic blank verse is alien. The inversion and pregnant conciseness of Milton or Dante are, doubtless, most impressive qualities of style; but they are the very opposites of the directness and flowingness of Homer, which he keeps alike in passages of the simplest narrative, and in those of the deepest emotion. Homer moves with the same simplicity and rapidity in the highly-wrought as in the simple passage.

To suppose that it is fidelity to an original to give its matter, unless you at the same time give its manner; or, rather, to suppose that you can really give its matter at all, unless you can give its manner, is just the mistake of our pre-Raphaelite school of painters, who do not understand that the peculiar effect of nature resides in the whole and not in the parts. So the peculiar effect of a poet resides in his manner and movement, not in his words taken separately.

Therefore, I say, the translator of Homer should penetrate himself with a sense of the plainness and directness of Homer’s style; of the simplicity with which Homer’s thought is evolved and expressed. He has Pope’s fate before his eyes, to show him what a divorce may be created even between the most gifted translator and Homer by an artificial evolution of thought and a literary cast of style.

And yet, in spite of this perfect plainness and directness of Homer’s style, in spite of this perfect plainness and directness of his ideas, he is eminently noble; he works as entirely in the grand style, he is as grandiose, as Phidias, or Dante, or Michael Angelo. This is what makes his translators despair. Homer is precisely the incomparable poet he is, because he has done it. His translator must not be tumid, must not be artificial, must not be literary; true: but then also he must not be commonplace, must not be ignoble.

Lecture II

I must repeat what I said in beginning, that the translator of Homer ought steadily to keep in mind where lies the real test of the success of his translation, what judges he is to try to satisfy. He is to try to satisfy scholars, because scholars alone have the means of really judging him. A scholar may be a pedant, it is true, and then his judgment will be worthless; but a scholar may also have poetical feeling, and then he can judge him truly; whereas all the poetical feeling in the world will not enable a man who is not a scholar to judge him truly.

But, if the scholar in judging a translation looks to detail rather than to general effect, he judges it pedantically and ill. The appeal, however, lies not from the pedantic scholar to the general public, which can only like or dislike but cannot judge; it lies from the pedantic scholar to the scholar who is not pedantic, who knows that Homer is Homer by his general effect, and not by his single words, and who demands but one thing in a translation,—that it shall, as nearly as possible, reproduce for him the general effect of Homer.

Homer always composes as Shakspeare composes at his best; Homer is always simple and intelligible, as Shakspeare is often; Homer is never quaint and antiquated, as Shakspeare is sometimes.

For Homer is not only rapid in movement, simple in style, plain in language, natural in thought; he is also, and above all, noble. I have advised the translator not to go into the vexed question of Homer’s identity. Yet I will just remind him that the grand argument—or rather, not argument, for the matter affords no data for arguing, but the grand source from which conviction, as we read the Iliad, keeps pressing in upon us, that there is one poet of the Iliad, one Homer—is precisely this nobleness of the poet, this grand manner.

So the insurmountable obstacle to believing the Iliad a consolidated work of several poets is this: that the work of great masters is unique; and the Iliad has a great master’s genuine stamp, and that stamp is the grand style.

Poets who cannot work in the grand style instinctively seek a style in which their comparative inferiority may feel itself at ease, a manner which may be, so to speak, indulgent to their inequalities. The ballad-style offers to an epic poet, quite unable to fill the canvas of Homer, or Dante, or Milton, a canvas which he is capable of filling. This is a convenience; but it is a convenience which the ballad-style purchases by resigning all pretensions to the highest, to the grand manner. For this reason the ballad-style and the ballad-measure are eminently inappropriate to render Homer. Homer’s manner and movement are always both noble and powerful: the ballad-manner and movement are often either jaunty and smart, so not noble; or jog-trot and hum-drum, so not powerful.

Our fourth axiom,—that Homer is not only graphic; he is also noble, and has the grand style. Human nature under like circumstances is probably in all stages much the same; and so far it may be said that ‘the truly classical and the truly romantic are one’; but it is of little use to tell us this, because we know the human nature of other ages only through the representations of them which have come down to us, and the classical and the romantic modes of representation are so far from being ‘one’, that they remain eternally distinct, and have created for us a separation between the two worlds which they respectively represent.

Lecture III

Homer is rapid in his movement, Homer is plain in his words and style, Homer is simple in his ideas, Homer is noble in his manner.

So the translator really has no good model before him for any part of his work, and has to invent everything for himself. He is to be rapid in movement, plain in speech, simple in thought, and noble; and how he is to be either rapid, or plain, or simple, or noble, no one yet has shown him. I shall try to-day to establish some practical suggestions which may help the translator of Homer’s poetry to comply with the four grand requirements which we make of him.

His version is to be rapid; and of course, to make a man’s poetry rapid, as to make it noble, nothing can serve him so much as to have, in his own nature, rapidity and nobleness. It is the spirit that quickeneth; and no one will so well render Homer’s swift-flowing movement as he who has himself something of the swift-moving spirit of Homer. Yet even this is not quite enough. Pope certainly had a quick and darting spirit, as he had, also, real nobleness; yet Pope does not render the movement of Homer. To render this the translator must have, besides his natural qualifications, an appropriate metre.

England and Italy here stand alone; Spain, France, and Germany, have produced great poets, but neither Calderon, nor Corneille, nor Schiller, nor even Goethe, has produced a body of poetry in the true grand style, in the sense in which the style of the body of Homer’s poetry, or Pindar’s, or Sophocles’s, is grand.

But Dante has, and so has Milton. But the grandeur of Milton is one thing, and the grandeur of Homer is another. Homer’s movement, I have said again and again, is a flowing, a rapid movement; Milton’s, on the other hand, is a laboured, a self-retarding movement. Milton charges himself so full with thought, imagination, knowledge, that his style will hardly contain them. Homer is quite different; he says a thing, and says it to the end, and then begins another, while Milton is trying to press a thousand things into one. So that whereas, in reading Milton, you never lose the sense of laborious and condensed fulness, in reading Homer you never lose the sense of flowing and abounding ease.

[The translator] will find one English book and one only, where, as in the Iliad itself, perfect plainness of speech is allied with perfect nobleness; and that book is the Bible. The Bible, however, is undoubtedly the grand mine of diction for the translator of Homer; and, if he knows how to discriminate truly between what will suit him and what will not, the Bible may afford him also invaluable lessons of style.

I said that Homer, besides being plain in style and diction, was plain in the quality of his thought. It is possible that a thought may be expressed with idiomatic plainness, and yet not be in itself a plain thought. I say, then, that in Shakspeare the thought is often, while most idiomatically uttered, nay, while good and sound in itself, yet of a quality which is curious and difficult; and that this quality of thought is something entirely un-Homeric.

‘Homer not only moves rapidly, not only speaks idiomatically; he is, also, free from fancifulness’. So essentially characteristic of Homer is his plainness and naturalness of thought, that to the preservation of this in his own version the translator must without scruple sacrifice, where it is necessary, verbal fidelity to his original, rather than run any risk of producing, by literalness, an odd and unnatural effect.

A translator cannot well have a Homeric rapidity, style, diction, and quality of thought, without at the same time having what is the result of these in Homer,—nobleness. Therefore I do not attempt to lay down any rules for obtaining this effect of nobleness,—the effect, too, of all others the most impalpable, the most irreducible to rule, and which most depends on the individual personality of the artist.

Here I stop. I have said so much, because I think that the task of translating Homer into English verse both will be reattempted, and may be reattempted successfully. There are great works composed of parts so disparate that one translator is not likely to have the requisite gifts for poetically rendering all of them. Such are the works of Shakspeare, and Goethe’s Faust; and these it is best to attempt to render in prose only.

For Homer has not only the English vigour, he has the Greek grace. For Homer’s grandeur is not the mixed and turbid grandeur of the great poets of the north, of the authors of Othello and Faust; it is a perfect, a lovely grandeur. Certainly his poetry has all the energy and power of the poetry of our ruder climates; but it has, besides, the pure lines of an Ionian horizon, the liquid clearness of an Ionian sky.