George Chapman's Translation of Homer's Iliad

Abstract

The Iliads of Homer Prince of Poetts, Translated according to the Greeke, by Geo Chapman, was published in 1611, though parts of it had appeared as early as 1598. The Odysses [sic] came out in 1614 and The Crozone of All Homers Workes (i.e. Hymns, Batrachomyomachia, etc.) about 1624. Chapman's position as the greatest translator of Homer lasted for a century. His work was then superseded by Pope's. It came into fashion again in the nineteenth century with the enthusirastic advocacy of Keats, Coleridge, and Lamb, and was reprinted or edited several times. But now it is little read, and that is a pity. I propose to indicate its value both as an English poem and as a document in the history of the classics.The Odysses and most of Chapman's other translations were written in rhymed decasyllables; but the metre of the Iliads is rhymed fourteeners, the Common Measure, as it is called in hymn-books. It had been used by other translators before Chapman; by Phaer for Vergil, by Turberville and by Golding for Ovid, and by one Arthur Hall for a bad translation of Iliad i-x.1 It had the practical advantage that rhymes were not too frequent, and to my mind it has dignity; but it was going out of fashion, and the Iliads was the last great work in which it was used. Neither in the decasyllables nor in the fourteeners does the metre bound the sense, as it does in, say, John Gilpin or Pope's Homer: frequent enjambement and variations of pause and of stress permit an effect (so far as metre is concerned) as free as Homer's unrhymed hexameters.