CHAPMAN'S MATERIALS FOR HIS TRANSLATION OF HOMER

Abstract

OF the materials used by George Chapman for his translation of Homer, the importance of two, Spondanus's edition of Homer and Scapula's Greek Lexicon, was established by Dr. Franck-Louis Schoell in his L'Humanisme continental en Angleterre (Paris, 1926); and Chapman's use of them has been further studied by Prof. H. B. Lathrop in his Translations from the Classics from Caxton to Chapman (Univ. of Wisconsin, 1933) and by Phyllis Brooks Bartlett in an article, 'Chapman's Revisions in his Iliads', in E.L.H. (Baltimore, 1935). His use of three other works is the subject of the present article: these are Valla's Latin prose translation of the Iliad, Eobanus's Latin verse translation, and Calepinus's Latin Dictionary. i. LaurentiusValla, 1407-57, whose patrons were the Medici of Florence, translated Herodotus, Thucydides, and two-thirds of the Iliad, which was completed by Raphael Volaterranus (but Chapman refers to it as 'Valla' even in xvii and xviii, where it is Raphael's work). Repeatedly reprinted in the following century, it was not used for bilingual editions, being too free, but formed a small handy volume by itself. The accepted version for bilingual editions,' printed with some verbal variations in Spondanus and in successive editions of Stephanus, was faithfully literal, but so un-Latin as to be frequently misleading and always disagreeable to read. Valla's translation is free, and sometimes it makes mistakes and shirks difficulties, but it is good Latin prose, as if Homer had been a Roman historian. The idiom of prose history marks even the opening words of the Iliad: the Greek poet says, 'Sing, goddess, of the wrath'; the Latin prose period begins, Scripturus ego quantam .... Now, that Chapman read Valla he himself often declares: in his Commentaries on books xIII, xIv, xv, xvII, and xvIII, and in the Prefaces to the Reader, both verse and prose. But he never commends him. The Commentaries reject individual interpretations, and the Prefaces example him as 'ten times more paraphrastical' than Chapman himself, who was being taxed with circumlocution. We shall get a good notion both of Valla's style and of Chapman's strictures if we examine the passage in the prose Preface. (The relevant lines are III. 422-30.)z Schoell, op. cit., says the author of this was Andreas Divus. But the British Museum copies of Divus, dated 1537 and 1538, differ much from Spondanus, and often for the better; they are, it is true, revised editions. 2 All references are to Chapman's lines, not Homer's, unless the contrary is stated. 4690.6 9