Monday 4 July 2016

Coleridge's Iliad Translation



This is yet another of Coleridge's planned-and-never-undertaken projects. It came out of a discussion with Joseph Cottle in the mid 1790s about translating Homer in such a way as to establish 'the occasion of the superiority of the Greek Poets to ourselves, from the privilege they had of improving the sound of their words by a poetic dialogue.' Coleridge's idea was to translate each individual Homeric hexameter line with a short rhymed quatrain. In his Notebook he jotted down one such stanza for Iliad 1.34 and another for Iliad 1.49, and that was as a far as he got. J C C Mays prints these two verses under the title 'Translations of Homer Iliad 1.34, 49':
(a)
Down along the Shore
Of the Sea of much roar
All malcontent
The poor Priest went.—

(b)
Ho! Phoebus for ever!
Dread was the clangor
As he strode in his anger
Of the Silver Quiver!—
The first of these translates 'βῆ δ’ ἀκέων παρὰ θῖνα πολυφλοίσβοιο θαλάσσης'; 'he went out in silence along the shore of the much-resounding sea'. The malcontentedness and pitiableness of the priest is Coleridge's addition. The second renders: 'δεινὴ δὲ κλαγγὴ γένετ’ ἀργυρέοιο βιοῖο'; 'terrible was the twang of the silver bow.' Clangor is κλαγγὴ, 'klangē', which is handy; Phoebus is implied in the line, since his is the silver bow, but is not actually mentioned. Clearly, STC's approach entails a degree of expansion and interpretation.

It's not a lot to go on, really; only two lines. Of the two quatrains the second is rather better than the first, I think. 'Down along the shore of the sea of much roar' is prosodically clumsy, 'sea of much roar' sounds daft and the rhyme is too jingle-jangle. The interesting question is whether STC's second quatrain, with its two sets of rhyme that are both in themselves half-rhymes (ever/quiver, clangor/anger) and that half-rhyme with each other, is intentional. If so, this might make for an interesting exercise in Homeric translation, actually. I wonder how it might look?
(1)
Sing the wrath, goddess,
Of mighty Achilleus
Great son of Peleus
Whose wrath destroys us.—

(2)
It brought dire scenes
Upon the Achaeans
Blood flowing in streams
And no end to their pains.—

(3)
Dispatching many souls
Of valiant heroes
Descending in woe
To Hades below.—

(4)
Turning their once grand
Bodies to mounds
Of carrion for hounds
On dusty ground.—

(5)
And birds of all kind;
And so the great plan
That Great Zeus began
Was brought to its end.
I wonder how long you could spin this sort of thing out before it became simply annoying?

[The image at the head of this post is 'Homer and His Guide' (1874) by William-Adolphe Bouguereau]

3 comments:

  1. How long? About that long. But I think it's the seriousness of the subject that kills it - the verse form could romp on for pages if you let it.

    STC's first verse is awful - but in all honesty "Dread was the clangor/As he strode in his anger" isn't much better. It works slightly better, perhaps, if I make a half-rhyme of it by softening the 'ng' of 'clangor' (i.e. clang-or instead of clang-gor), but then I can't stop thinking of the Clangers. It's hopeless.

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    1. Yes, I think you're pretty much right. Five lines is enough: hundreds, let alone thousands, of stanzas like this would put anyone in a stupor. Clangor/anger does seem to me a half-rhyme (gor not the same as ger, although maybe that's just the way I say the word. The Soup Dragon would not approve).

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