Spleen might be said to be translation of the classical
underworld in terms appropriate to the polite society illustrated
in the poem. From these dissimilar images drawn from the
literature of the past and the society of the present, Pope’s wit
creates a new combination integrating past and present.
The integration of past and present is what he aims for in
the translation of Homer. On the one hand, he used every
means at his disposal to avail himself of the learning of his
day and arrive at the best historical understanding of the
poems following his own advice in the Essay:
Know well each ancient’s proper character:
His fable, subject, scope in every page;
Religion, country, genius of his age.
(ll. 119–21)Had the moderns of Pope’s day made such an effort to
acquire this historical understanding:
None e’er had thought his comprehensive mind
To modern customs, modern rules confined;
Who for all ages writ and all mankind.
(cancelled from the Essay after l. 124)Deliberate modernizing he therefore despised. On the other
hand the ancient poem has to be reconciled with the modern
world and modern expression. This is the eternal problem of
translation which must always be a compromise between the
original and the translator, for there can be no such thing as
an absolute translation. In years to come translations of our
own day, which may now seem nearer to the original than
Pope’s, will appear equally of their time while lacking in most
cases the creativity to transcend it. Pope made a virtue of
necessity and aimed at fidelity not to Homer’s words but to
his spirit and to all that is implied in the equation of Homer
with nature. While never intending to impose modern sense
upon Homer, he nevertheless used a modern form, the heroic
couplet, to render the classical hexameter, and would not
have been in sympathy with the desire for an ideal
reproduction of Homer’s metrical effect expressed by
Matthew Arnold in his Lectures on translating Homer. He
was equally wary of archaizing: