Why Homer Matters (5 page)

“It is not to be doubted,” Pope writes in his own preface, “that the
Fire
of the Poem is what a Translator should principally regard, as it is most likely to expire in his managing.” But that is what has happened here. Apart from what Leigh Hunt, the great liberal editor of the
Examiner
, called Pope's trivializing, “cuckoo-song” regularity, he has lost something else: Homer's neck-gripping physical urgency. In the Greek everything is about the body. The boy crawls toward Achilles and holds him by the knees. It is Achilles's ears that are deaf to him, his heart that remains unapproachably fierce. The boy puts his hands on Achilles's knees to make his prayer, and then the sword goes into the liver, the liver slipping out of the slit wound, the black blood drenching the boy's lap and “the darkness of death clouding his eyes.” Nothing mediates the physical reality. Homer's nakedness is his power, but Pope has dressed it. “The panting liver … pants no more”; that is so neat it is almost disgusting, as if Pope were adjusting his cuffs while observing an atrocity. Dr. Johnson called the translation “a treasure of poetical elegances.” That was the problem.

Keats had undoubtedly read Homer in Pope's translation; there are echoes of Pope's words in what Keats would write himself. But he was ready for something else. His life was constrained in the crowded and meager streets of south London, filled with the “money-mongering pitiable brood” of other Londoners. He had been to Margate with his brothers and had seen “the ocean” there in the pale shallows of the North Sea, but nowhere farther. In early October 1816 he went for the evening to see his old friend Charles Cowden Clarke, who was living with his brother-in-law in Clerkenwell. Cowden Clarke had been lent a beautiful big early folio edition of the translation of the
Iliad
and the
Odyssey
made by the poet and playwright George Chapman.

The two men began to look through its seventeenth-century pages. Clarke's friend Leigh Hunt, who had just published in the
Examiner
the first of Shelley's poems to be printed, had already praised Chapman in the August issue, for bottling “the fine rough old wine” of the original. In the next few days Keats was about to meet Hunt himself, with the possibility in the air that he too might swim out into the world of published poetry and fame. The evening was pregnant with the hope of enlargement, of a dignifying difference from the mundane conditions of his everyday life. To meet Homer through Chapman might be an encounter with the source.

It is touching to imagine the hunger with which Keats must have approached this book, searching its two-hundred-year-old pages for something undeniable, the juice of antiquity. The two of them sat side by side in Clarke's house, “turning to some of the ‘famousest' passages, as they had scrappily known them in Pope's version.” Chapman had produced his translations—almost certainly not from the Greek but with the help of Latin and French versions—between 1598 and 1616. Homer often seems to haunt the present, and Chapman himself had met him one day in Hertfordshire, not far from Hitchin, where Chapman had been born, Homer masquerading as “a sweet gale” as Chapman walked on the hills outside the town. It was a moment of revelation and life-purpose for him, so that later he could say, “There did shine, /A beam of Homer's freer soul in mine.” The eighteenth century had not admired what Chapman had done. Pope had called it “loose and rambling,” and Chapman himself “an Enthusiast” with a “daring fiery Spirit that animates his Translation, which is something like what one might imagine
Homer
himself would have writ before he arriv'd to Years of Discretion.” Dr. Johnson had dismissed it as “now totally neglected.” But Coleridge had rediscovered it. In 1808 he sent a copy of Chapman's Homer to Sara Hutchinson, Wordsworth's sister-in-law, the woman he loved. “Chapman writes & feels as a Poet,” he wrote, “—as Homer might have written had he lived in England in the reign of Queen Elizabeth … In the main it is an English Heroic Poem, the
tale
of which is borrowed from the Greek.”

Chapman's distance, his rough-cut unaffectedness, stood beyond the refinements of the Enlightenment, as if he were the last part of the old world that Homer had also inhabited, before politeness had polluted it. Here the romantics found Achilles as the “fear-master,” and horses after battle which liked to “cool their hooves.” Cowden Clarke and Keats were hunched together over pages that were drenched in antiquity. Ghosts must have come seeping out of them.

Something that had seemed quaint to the eighteenth century now seemed true to the two young men. They pored over Chapman together. “One scene I could not fail to introduce to him,” Cowden Clarke wrote later,

the shipwreck of Ulysses, in the fifth book of the “Odysseis” [Chapman's transliteration of the Greek word for
Odyssey
], and I had the reward of one of his delighted stares, upon reading the following lines:

 

Then forth he came, his both knees falt'ring, both

His strong hands hanging down, and all with froth

His cheeks and nostrils flowing, voice and breath

Spent to all use, and down he sank to death.

The sea had soak'd his heart through
.

It is the most famous meeting between Homer and an English poet. Keats had read and stared in delight, shocked into a moment of recognition, of what the Greeks called
anagn
ō
risis
, when a clogging surface is stripped away and the essence for which you have been hungering is revealed.

At this stage Odysseus has been at sea for twenty days. For nearly two hundred lines he is churned through the pain Poseidon has wished on him: “Just as when, in the autumn, the North Wind drives the thistle tufts over the plain and they cling close to each other, so the gales drive the raft this way and that across the sea.” The sea is never more vengeful in these poems, never more maniacally driven by violence and rage. The raft is overturned and broken, the giant surf hammers on flesh-shredding rock. It is one of Odysseus's great tests. His name itself in Greek embeds the word
odysato
, meaning “to be hated,” and that adjective appears twice in this storm. He is the hated man on the hateful sea. This is his moment of suffering, and the sea he sails on is loathing itself.

Throughout the
Odyssey
he is the man of many parts, inventive, ingenious, with many skills and many gifts, but here is merely
polytlas
, the man who dares many things, suffers many things and endures many things. Only when a goddess-bird and then Athene herself come to his aid can he finally drag himself to the shore.

Here in a virtually literal translation is what Homer says as Odysseus emerges from the surf.

                                             he then bends both knees

and his strong hands-and-arms; for sea has killed his heart.

Swollen all his flesh, while sea oozes much

up through mouth and nostrils, he then breathless and speechless

lies scarcely-capable, terrible weariness comes to him.

The Greek word Chapman translated in “
The sea had soak'd his heart through”
—the phrase which Keats loved so much—is
dedm
ē
to
, which means “overpowered” or “tamed.” It comes from a verb,
damazo
, of immensely ancient lineage, its roots spoken in the steppelands of Eurasia at least six thousand years ago, used to describe the breaking-in of animals and later the bending of metal to your desires and needs. It is essentially the same word as “tame” in English, or
domo
in Latin, the word for reduction, to kill in a fight, to domesticate and dominate. But in the
Iliad
it also appears as a word for seduction, or more likely the rape of girls. Young girls, enemies, heifers and wives are referred to in Homer by words that come from the same stem. So Odysseus here is tamed and unmanned by the sea. The sea defeated him. As a hero reduced to the condition of a heifer, his heroic willpower temporarily overcome, he is no better than a corpse, bloated, destroyed, owned, possessed and dominated.

Pope, encased in the language of politesse, fell short when faced with this challenge.

                                      his knees no more

   Perform'd their office, or his weight upheld:

His swoln heart heaved; his bloated body swell'd:

From mouth and nose the briny torrent ran;

And lost in lassitude lay all the man.

On a sofa? you might ask.

Others have tried and failed: “For the heart within him was crushed by the sea,” wrote Professor A. T. Murray in 1919; “Odysseus bent his knees and sturdy arms, exhausted by his struggle with the sea,” was E. V. Rieu's prose version, in the bestseller published by Penguin in 1946; “his very heart was sick with salt water,” wrote the great American scholar-poet Richmond Lattimore in 1967; “The sea had beaten down his striving heart,” Lattimore's successor, Robert Fagles, in 1996.

Keats was right. None approaches “
The sea had soak'd his heart through
” perhaps because Chapman's English has absorbed the vengeful nature of the sea Odysseus has just experienced; has understood that his soul is as good as drowned; has not lost the governing physicality of the Homeric world, so that Odysseus's heart appears as the organ of pain; and is able to summon a visual image of a marinated corpse, blanched and shriveled from exposure to the water, as white as tripe. Chapman had understood
dedm
ē
to
: Odysseus's sea-soaked heart is a heart with the heart drained out of it.

Clarke and Keats read Chapman together all night, and at six in the morning Keats returned to his Dean Street lodgings—his “beastly place in dirt, turnings, and windings”—with Chapman looming in his mind. On the journey home across London he had begun to frame the sonnet which on arrival he wrote down. The manuscript, which he paid a boy to take over to Cowden Clarke that morning, so that it was on his breakfast table by ten o'clock, survives. The big, loopingly written words of that first morning text are not quite the same as what is usually printed.

On the first looking into Chapman's Homer

Much have I travell'd in the Realms of Gold

   And many goodly States and Kingdoms seen;

   Round many Western islands have I been,

Which Bards in Fealty to Apollo hold.

Keats's draft of his Homer Sonnet, written in October 1816.

Oft of one wide expanse had I been told,

   Which
low
deep brow'd Homer ruled as his Demesne:

   Yet could I never judge what Men could mean,

Till I heard Chapman speak out loud, and bold.

   Then felt I like some Watcher of the Skies

When a new Planet swims into his Ken,

Or like stout Cortez, when with wond'ring eyes

   He star'd at the Pacific, and all his Men

Look'd at each other with a wild surmise—

   Silent upon a Peak in Darien—

It was the first great poem he wrote. And it is a poem about greatness, not about first reading Homer; nor even about first reading Chapman's Homer; it's about first looking into Chapman's Homer and, from one or two fragments and passages, understanding for the first time what Homer meant. It is as if that big 1616 folio were a sort of aquarium into which he and Clarke had peered in amazement, looking up at each other as they found the beauties and rarities swimming in its depths. No other version had given Keats this plunging perspective into the ancient. Politeness had dressed Homer in felicity, when his underlying qualities are more like this: martial, huge, struggling through jungle, dense, disturbing and then providing that moment of revelatory release, of a calm pacific vision emerging onto what had been fields of storm or battle. Men had assured Keats that Homer possessed such a realm, but he had been unable to see it in the translations he knew. Here at last, though, was the moment when, cresting a rise, a new and deeper, ineffably broad landscape had opened in front of him. Homer might be dressed up as a cultural convenience, a classic, but in truth he is not like that. He is otherness itself: impolite, manly, cosmic, wild, enormous.

Keats made a mistake: it was Vasco Núñez de Balboa, not Cortés, who first sighted the Pacific Ocean. He didn't correct that, but when he came to revise this poem for publication he did change a word or two, most importantly the seventh line. In the first early-October-morning version, after his night of revelation, it had been

Yet could I never judge what Men could mean,

which acts as the core of the poem, the rejection of the instruction and learning he had received, substituting it with the vast scale of the new understanding that Chapman had given him. For publication, he replaced that with