The Culture of the Ancient Epithet: Gerard Manley Hopkins and the Translation of Imagination

Abstract

A culturally nuanced translation of archaic Greek verbal culture can only be achieved with reference to the original audience. In Bacchylides 17 (‘Theseus’ Dive’), the fifth-century poet's compound epithets operate entirely within an epic-lyric tradition, in contrast to the fourth-century verbal innovation of Timotheus. Poetry in the English language has always followed Timotheus more than Bacchylides, reaching a climax in the theory of ‘inscape’ and expressive epithets of Gerard Manley Hopkins. As a classicist, Hopkins was intimately familiar with Greek poetic diction, and his notebooks record that he interpreted the Iliad's traditional epithets contextually and not merely lexically. Analogically, we may imagine Greek audiences as projecting their own personal contexts and experience into the interpretation of the traditional compound epithets of Bacchylides 17.