A classical translation and a moving new collection make for a double achievement
Never short of an opinion on these matters, Vladimir Nabokov ended his 1941 article “The Art of Translation” with a series of “requirements” for the production of an effective translation. According to the first of these, the translator “must have as much talent, or at least the same kind of talent, as the author he chooses”. This leaves the field open for British Council-sponsored versions of promising young Bulgarians or Finns, but puts translators from the classics in an awkward position. Admiring Gavin Douglas’s 16th-century translation of Virgil’s Aeneid, Ezra Pound solved this problem by pronouncing the translation better than the original. George Chapman’s Jacobean translation of The Iliad is a wonderful thing, and one of the great unread texts of the English canon, but as good as, better than Homer? That’s a tall order.
Most modern translators of Homer never get to test Nabokov’s suggestion against the Homeric Hymns for the good reason that they have tended to ignore these poems. Pendants to The Iliad and Odyssey, the Homeric Hymns are a series of 33 addresses to the gods, ranging from a few short lines to more than 500 lines in length. The Oxford Book of Classical Verse in Translation includes translations of the hymns by Chapman, Congreve, Shelley and Richard Hole, but a short extract by John D Niles is the sole 20th-century example. The publication of a new version of these poems by Peter McDonald is thus an important addition to the canon of ancient Greek poetry available in English.
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