A classical translation and a moving unusual collection build for a double achievementNever 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 beget 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, or 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 distinguished unread texts of the English canon, but as advantageous as, and better than Homer? That’s a tall order.
Most contemporary translators of Homer never get to test Nabokov’s suggestion against the Homeric Hymns for the advantageous reason that they beget 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, and Congreve,Shelley and Richard Hole, but a short extract by John D Niles is the sole 20th-century example. The publication of a unusual 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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Source: theguardian.com