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Continental Humanists and Chapman's Iliads

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 January 2019

Edward Phinney Jr.
Edward Phinney Jr.*
Affiliation:
University of Southern California
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Extract

Conventional criticism of the Homeric translations of George Chapman has generally limited itself either to invidious comparisons between the English of Chapman and the original Greek of Homer or to enthusiastic pronouncements on the beauty and the poetic value of Chapman's translation as an independent poem. A more sophisticated criticism, however, has been the objective of such modern Chapman scholars as George deF. Lord and Allardyce Nicoll, and the success, for instance, of Mr. Nicoll's labors may easily be judged from a comparison of his recent Pantheon edition of Chapman's Homer with the florid Victorian edition to which Swinburne wrote an introduction. Meritorious as their researches have been, however, both Mr. Lord and Mr. Nicoll have often obfuscated the understanding of Chapman's text by underestimating the influence of continental humanism upon his methods of translation.

Type
Research Article
Information
Studies in the Renaissance , Volume 12 , 1965 , pp. 218 - 226
Copyright
Copyright © Renaissance Society of America 1965

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References

1 Chapman's Homer, ed. Allardyce Nicoll, I (New York, 1956), 723, s. v. pall. All citations of Chapman in my text are from Mr. Nicoll's edition.

2 Franck L. Schoell, Études sur Vhumanisme continental en Angleterre a la fin de la Renaissance (Paris, 1926), p. 152.1 have translated the French.

3 de F. Lord, George, Homeric Renaissance: the ‘Odyssey’ of George Chapman (New Haven, 1956, Yale Stud, in English 131), p. 24.Google Scholar See also F. M. Combellack, review of Professor Lord's book in C.P., IIV (1959), 58.

4 Phyllis Bartlett, ‘Chapman's Revisions in his Iliads', ELH II (1935), 104. See also George G. Loane, ‘Chapman's Homer', Comhill Magazine CLVI (1937), 637-644, and the same author on ‘Chapman's Method', T.L.S. 24 July 1937, p. 544.

5 Schoell, p. 166.

6 See Anatomy II, II, VI, 4 and I, II, 1, 2.

7 Schoell, p. 166.

8 Nicoll, 1, xiii. For a review of those passages where Chapman openly admits his debt to Spondanus, see Alfred Lohff, George Chapmans Ilias-Übersetzung (Berlin, 1903), pp. 4-9. 33. The first scholar to note the influence of the continental humanists on Chapman, particularly of Spondanus, was Heinrich Regel, Vber George Chapmans Homerübersetzung (diss. Halle, 1881), reprinted in Englische Studien in 1882. Of this work, Nicoll, 1, xi, has said that if we want a detailed analysis of the relationship of Chapman's Homer to its original, ‘we can find all the information necessary in H. M. Regel's excellently painstaking study'. Actually, the study is very general and of little use. Its importance lies in the suggestions it makes, not in the information it divulges. By far a better work on Chapman's debt to the humanists is the book of Franck Schoell cited previously, although here again Schoell is rarely specific.

9 A fine study of the Elizabethan moral-heroic ideal, of which Chapman's Homer is one manifestation, is to be found by Smith, Hallett, Elizabethan Poetry: a Study in Conventions, Meaning, and Expression (Cambridge, Mass., 1952).CrossRefGoogle Scholar

10 Citations from Spondanus in my text are translated from his Homeri quae exstant omnia (Basel, 1606). I should like to thank Professor F. M. Combellack of the University of Oregon for generously lending me this rare book from his own magnificent library, in addition to copies of Scapula's dictionary, Valla's and Hessus’ translations, and the dimcult-to-obtain German studies of Regel and Lohff.

11 Ovid, Metamorphoses, i. 218-239.

12 I have consulted the 1652 edition of Scapula's Lexicon Graeco-Latinum, published at Leyden.

13 Scapula had been an apprentice of Henri Estienne. See Schoell, p. 148.

14 For a list of sixty-four instances in which Chapman consulted Scapula, see George G. Loane, ‘Chapman and Scapula', Notes and Queries, 10 June 1939, pp. 405-406.

15 Nicoll, 1, 728, s. v. reciprocal.

16 I have consulted the following editions of Valla and Hessus: Helius Eobanus Hessus, Homeripoetarum omnium seculorutn longe principis, Ilias de rebus ad Trojam gestis descriptio. Latino carmine reddita (Paris, 1550); Laurentius Valla, Homeri poetae clarissimi Ilias … e Graeco in Latinum translata: et nuper accuratissime emendata (Venice, 1502). I have not as yet found any definite influence of the work of these authors upon the text of the Iliads, although reference to them in Chapman's notes is frequent.

17 H. C. Fay believes that Chapman made use of Valla mainly while translating the fourth through the sixth books of the Iliads. See ‘Chapman's Materials for his Translations ofHomer', Rev. of English Stud. D (1951), 121-128. Mr. Fay's examples, however, are not always beyond question. For instance, Mr. Fay (pp. 122-124) attributes Chapman's interpolation about the Errant Field (Iliads vi. 201-203) to Valla; yet Spondanus (p. 142) says fully as much as Valla does about the Errant Field into which Bellerophon fell, and Spondanus also uses some of the same terminology that Valla uses. Considering Chapman's dependence upon Spondanus’ work, it is more probable that Chapman found his information in that edition.

18 Nicoll, 1, 7-13.