panting liver pours a flood of gore,
That drowns his bosom till he pants no more.
‘It is not to be doubted,’ Pope had written 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 trivialising, ‘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 towards Achilles and holds him by the knees. It is Achilles’s ears that are deaf to him, his heart and his mind that remain 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 meagre 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 further. 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, the heroic editor of the Examiner, in which he had just published 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 we 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. It is a repeated experience with Homer that he 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 it. 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 anagnōrisis, 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 did 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 bent both knees
and his strong hands-and-arms; for sea had killed his heart.
Swollen all his flesh, while sea oozed much
up through mouth and nostrils, he then breathless and speechless
lay scarcely-capable, terrible weariness came to him.
The Greek word Chapman translated in The sea had soak’d his heart through – the phrase which Keats loved so much – is dedmēto, 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
