![]() It’s just one of many tiny effects that accumulate to make this at once the grandest and the most minutely detailed there is ever likely to be.This Etruscan painting from a tomb shows the Judgement of Paris. Pope manages this in English by dragging the line out with the many s sounds- “deeps,” “tumultuous,” “mix” and by placing “deeps” before “tumultuous,” he forces your tongue to drag a bit as it searches for the helpful “t” in “tumultuous” to latch onto again before you can move on. In Homer, those two gurgling adjectives, paphladzonta and polyphloisboio slow the line down mightily-you have to chew on them a bit, roll them around in your mouth, make the surf-noises. One small example of the many beauties of this translation is the precision and detail of the fifth line. But as his rendering of our passage shows, there’s virtually no attempt here to reproduce the sound effects in the Greek:Īs when from gloomy clouds a whirlwind springs, That bears Jove’s thunder on its dreadful wings, Wide o’er the blasted fields the tempest sweeps Then, gather’d, settles on the hoary deeps The afflicted deeps tumultuous mix and roar The waves behind impel the waves before, Wide rolling, foaming high, and tumbling to the shore: Thus rank on rank, the thick battalions throng, Chief urged on chief, and man drove man along. ![]() What I like best about Mitchell’s version is its strong five-beat rhythm-arguably the best yet in English. To my mind, the sensitivity to sound effects shown by both of those translators isn’t strongly present in the new translation by Stephen Mitchell. Nonetheless, it’s a strong, successful rendering, with an energy and verve appropriate to the lines themselves. By importing the diction of warfare into the first part of the simile (“battle-lines” of waves, a “vanguard” of waves), he actually weakens the impact of the simile overall. The big mistake, to my mind, is the way Fagles blurs the line between the two parts of the simile: the waves and the battle-lines of Trojans. Some readers will appreciate the way that Fagles (who wrote poetry of his own) amplifies Homer’s “curved” and “white-flecked” waves into waves with “shoulders rearing, exploding foam,” although a little of this poeticizing goes a long way. And at the end of this passage he uses a striking repetition of the word “waves” to suggest the important repetitions of both sounds and words in the original (particularly that “some … others” construction). So on the Trojans came, waves in the vanguard, waves from the rear, closing.įagles’s sensitivity to the alliteration of “l” is clear, especially in his first two lines (“squall of brawling gale-winds” is really good), and it’s nice that he tries to suggest Homer’s line-ending alliterations with his end-rhyming “roaring” and “closing”. If you repeat those languidly unspooling words, you’re making the noises of the surf.ĭown the Trojans came like a squall of brawling gale-winds blasting down with the Father’s thunder, loosed on earth and a superhuman uproar bursts as they pound the heavy seas, the giant breakers seething, battle lines of them roaring, shoulders rearing, exploding foam, waves in the vanguard, waves rolling in from the rear. ![]() ![]() So the sixth line is packed behind the fifth, imitating its sound cluster precisely the way in which the Trojan ranks, packed together in battle formation, are massed one behind the other.Īlso of note is the way that the two adjectives in the fourth line- paphladzonta, the “roiling” waves, and polyphloisboio, the “greatly-roaring” sea-replicate each other’s consonants: the “p”s, the “ph”s, the “l”s, the soft “s”s and “z” sounds. (In other words, the near-rhyming words do what the waves do.) And, as if to make the analogy concrete, the sixth line-which reconnects the imagined world of the sea to the narrated world of the Trojans at war-repeats the “some before … others hard behind” language of the fifth: the waves are all’ … ep alla the Trojans are alloi … ep’ alloi. Note, first of all, how the last words of the first, third, fifth, and sixth lines of this passage all end with the same sound combination, loaded with liquid “l”s ( aellêi, “maelstrom” polla, “many”: ep’ alla, “others hard behind,” ep’alloi, “others hard behind”): these liquid “l” sounds (with some explosive “p”s thrown in in the third, fifth, and sixth lines) beautifully evoke the sounds of the roiling waters, even as the insistent repetition of the “p-ll” sound cluster from line to line gives a sense of whitecaps breaking on the beach, one after another. (just so) (the Trojans) (in front) some (were packed together) (but)( hard behind) (others) HOSS TROE-EHS pro men ALL-oy ah-RAY-roh-tehz, OW-tahr ep’ ALL-oy ![]()
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