238 LIBRARY OF OLD AUTHORS. 



Chapman s translations. Coleridge, sending Chapman s Homer 

 to Wordsworth, writes, What is stupidly said of Shakspeare 

 is really true and appropriate of Chapman; mighty faults 

 counterpoised by mighty beauties It is as truly an ori 

 ginal poem as the Faery Queene ; it will give you small idea 

 of Homer, though a far truer one than Pope s epigrams, or 

 Cowper s cumbersome most anti-Homeric Miltonism. For 

 Chapman writes and feels as a poet as Homer might have 

 written had he lived in England in the reign of Queen Elizabeth. 

 In short, it is an exquisite poem, in spite of its frequent and 

 perverse quaintnesses and harshnesses, which are, however, 

 amply repaid by almost unexampled sweetness and beauty of 

 language, all over spirit and feeling. * From a passage of his 

 Preface it would appear that Chapman had been criticised 

 pretty sharply in his own day for amplifying his author. And 

 this one example I thought necessary to insert here to show my 

 detractors that they have no reason to vilify my circumlocution 

 sometimes, when their most approved Grecians, Homer s inter 

 preters generally, hold him fit to be so converted. Yet how 

 much I differ, and with what authority, let my impartial and 

 judicial reader judge. Always conceiving how pedantical and 

 absurd an affectation it is in the interpretation of any author 

 (much more of Homer) to turn him word for word, when 

 (according to Horace and other best lawgivers to translators) it 

 is the part of every knowing and judicial interpreter not to follow 

 the number and order of words, but the material things them 

 selves, and sentences to weigh diligently, and to clothe and 

 adorn them with words and such a style and form of oration as 

 are most apt for the language in which they are converted. 

 Again in his verses To the Reader, he speaks of 



The ample transmigration to be shown 

 By nature -loving Poesy, 



and defends his own use of needful periphrases, and says that 

 word for word translation is to 



Make fish with fowl, camels with whales, engender. 



For even as different a production 



As Greek and English : since, as they in sounds 



And letters shun one form and unison, 



So have their sense and elegancy bounds 



In their distinguished natures, and require 



Only a judgment to_ make both consent 



In sense and elocution. 



There are two theories of translation literal paraphrase and 



* Literary Remains, vol. i- pp. 259, 260. 



