Page:On translating Homer (1905).djvu/52

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of strangeness, strong or weak, when he reads them, than when he reads in an English book 'the painted savage', or, 'the phlegmatic Dutchman'. Mr Newman's renderings of them must, therefore, be wrong expressions in a translation of Homer, because they excite in the scholar, their only competent judge, a feeling quite alien to that excited in him by what they profess to render.

Mr Newman, by expressions of this kind, is false to his original in two ways. He is false to him inasmuch as he is ignoble; for a noble air, and a grotesque air, the air of the address,

Δᾶερ ἐμεῖο, κυνὸς κακομηχάνου, ὀκρυοέσσης,

and the air of the address,

O, brother thou of me, who am a mischief-working vixen,
A numbing horror,

are just contrary the one to the other: and he is false to him inasmuch as he is odd; for an odd diction like Mr Newman's, and a perfectly plain natural diction like Homer's,—'dapper-greaved Achaians' and ἐϋκνήμιδες Ἀχαιοί,—are also just contrary the one to the other. Where, indeed, Mr Newman got his diction, with whom he can have lived, what can be his test of antiquity and rarity for words, are questions which I ask myself with bewilderment. He has prefixed to his translation a list of what