Would you please tell me where in Homer the “descent of Apollo” occurs?1Sri Aurobindo
Letters of Sri Aurobindo
CWSA 27
Fragment ID: 6740
Examples from Classical and Mediaeval Writers [1]
Would you please tell me where in Homer the “descent of Apollo” occurs?1
It is in the first fifty or a hundred lines of the first book of the Iliad.2
I don’t suppose Chapman or Pope have rendered it adequately.
Of course not – nobody could translate that – they have surely made a mess of it.
Homer’s passage translated into English would sound perfectly ordinary. He gets the best part of his effect from his rhythm. Translated it would run merely like this, “And he descended from the peaks of Olympus, wroth at heart, bearing on his shoulders arrows and doubly pent-in quiver, and there arose the clang of his silver bow as he moved, and he came made like unto the night.” His words too are quite simple but the vowellation and the rhythm make the clang of the silver bow go smashing through the world into universes beyond while the last words give a most august and formidable impression of godhead.
Would you consider this line of Dante’s as miraculously inevitable as Virgil’s “O passi graviora”?
e venni dal martiro a questa pace
That is rather the adequate inevitable.
And, is it possible to achieve a prose-inevitability – with rhythm and everything as perfectly wonderful as in poetry? Take, for instance (I quote from memory):
O mors quam amara est memoria tua homini pacem habenti in substantiis suis.
or
Fulcite me floribus stipate me malis quia amore langueo
or
Et his malis omnibus mors furibunda succedit.
I don’t think any of these has at all the same note as poetry gets – it is fine writing, but not the inevitable.
18 September 1934
1 See page 186 – Ed.
2 The passage begins with line 44 of the first book of the Iliad: bē de kat’ Oulumpoio karēnōn chōomenos kēr. – Ed.