fade away and are dead. Therefore let us with all speed
give up this quarrel and let the mortals fight their own
battles.
Homer, Iliad, XXI, 462–7 (Lattimore)
Apollo thus: To combat for mankind
Ill suits the wisdom of celestial mind:
For what is man? Calamitous by birth,
They owe their life and nourishment to earth;
Like yearly leaves, that now, with beauty crowned,
Smile on the sun; now, wither on the ground:
To their own hands commit the frantic scene
Nor mix immortals in a cause so mean.
Pope, Iliad, XXI, 535–42
The poet is very happy in interspersing his poem with
moral sentences; in this place he steals away his reader
from war and horror, and gives him a beautiful admonition
of his own frailty.The note concludes with the citation of a similar sentiment in
Ecclesiastes XIV, 18. The dramatic rhetorical question For
what is man? points the sentiment, but is in itself simply
recalling the urgency of the Psalmist. In the italicized phrases,
the difference between the divine and human nature is made
more colourful and pointed, but the passage is not as ornate
as the nightpiece; to use a phrase from Pope’s own description
of Homer’s style in his preface, it retains ‘a graceful and
dignified simplicity’.^18 If we turn from this to the ‘bald and
sordid’ simplicity of the lines when literally rendered, it will
be apparent that, even if the translator elects not to go the
way of Pope, something must be done, for in the words of
John Denham, a pioneer of creative translation in the
previous century:
poetry is of so subtle a spirit, that, in pouring out of one
language into another, it will all evaporate; and if a new
spirit be not added in the transfusion, there will be nothing
but a caput mortuum.^19Johnson believed that in his Homer Pope had wonderfully
enriched English poetry and his final point of admiration is