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Robert S. Miola, ed., George Chapman: Homer’s Iliad, and Gordon Kendal, ed., George Chapman: Homer’s Odyssey
by Sarah Van der Laan

George Chapman: Homer’s Iliad. Edited by Robert S. Miola. MHRA Tudor and Stuart Translations 20. Cambridge: Modern Humanities Research Association, 2017. ix + 468 pp. ISBN 978-1781881187. £35 (cloth). ISBN: 978-1781881194. £20 (paperback).

George Chapman: Homer’s Odyssey. Edited by Gordon Kendal. MHRA Tudor and Stuart Translations 21. Cambridge: Modern Humanities Research Association, 2016. ix + 506 pp. ISBN: 978-1781881217. £30 (cloth). ISBN: 978-1781881224. £20 (paperback).

George Chapman’s translations of the Homeric poems have long enjoyed an anomalous status, viewed as both translations and works of considerable literary merit in their own right; how many translations have become the subjects of iconic sonnets? Spenserians who have not (or not yet) joined Colin Burrow in the ranks of ‘Chapmaniacs’ should reconsider.[1] True, Chapman’s first attempt at Homeric translation appeared in 1598, too late to shape Spenser’s use (or, probably, knowledge) of the Homeric poems. But comparison of Spenser’s works with Chapman’s Seaven Bookes of the Iliades and Achilles Shield — and even his later translations of the Iliad, Odyssey, and Batrachomyomachia — illuminates the challenges Spenser faced, and the solutions he arrived at, in adapting and responding to Homer’s poems in English poetry at the end of Elizabeth’s reign. Spenserians should therefore greet the MHRA Tudor and Stuart Translations Series’ excellent new editions of Chapman’s Iliad and Odyssey with enthusiasm and interest.

Chapman himself would undoubtedly be pleased to know that his translations have come to enjoy the treatment normally afforded to works of literature that are not translations: with the appearance of the MHRA volumes, three presses now have editions of Chapman’s translations in print, with diverging editorial policies and paratextual materials. At the bargain end of the market, Wordsworth Classics offers a lightly-revised edition of Richard Herne Shepherd’s nineteenth-century edition, in two formats. The separate volumes of the Iliad and Odyssey feature Adam Roberts’ clear and thoughtful introductions, which provide an entry into the Homeric poems and Chapman’s world for novice readers, and very brief endnotes. An even more minimally-packaged single-volume edition of both poems features an introduction by Jan Parker that consists almost entirely of book-by-book plot summaries, plus a ‘glossary of unfamiliar words’ and a ‘glossary of names’ that fill approximately a page and a half each. Unfortunately, the minimal apparatus of the Wordsworth editions makes it difficult for all but the most advanced reader to grasp Chapman’s meaning and fully appreciate his poetry, while the nineteenth-century modernization of the text renders it unappealing to scholars.

At the opposite end of the spectrum, Princeton University Press offers a revised edition of Allardyce Nicoll’s mid-twentieth century edition, which lightly emends the text and faithfully reproduces Chapman’s marginalia and commentaries. This two-volume edition has the added benefit of presenting substantial excerpts from Chapman’s earlier attempts on the Iliad (Achilles Shield and the first two of his Seaven Bookes of the Iliades), complete with the prefatory material in which Chapman lays out the theory and principles behind his translation practices. Nicoll’s edition is useful for scholars interested in the intellectual history of Chapman’s edition, in the history of the book, and in classical reception, but Nicoll too offers little support to readers unprepared to wrangle with Chapman’s highly wrought English.

The MHRA edition vastly improves our ability to appreciate Chapman’s Homer as English poetry. The new edition presents a far more accessible text of Chapman’s Homer than any previous edition. Both editors modernize Chapman’s spelling and punctuation, and understandably so. The punctuation in particular of Chapman’s edition is eclectic to say the least, and as Gordon Kendal remarks, ‘However passionate Chapman was about obscurity, he wanted to be understood’ (35). Each editor has followed slightly different practices. Robert S. Miola’s Iliad volume displays a slightly lighter touch in both modernization and marginal glosses, while Kendal’s Odyssey volume richly glosses the text and inserts one-line plot summaries into the text. As an editorial practice, this is not far from the early modern custom of printing marginal notes to mark plot developments and indicate who speaks to whom. Chapman shared in this common practice: ‘Neptune’s progresse to the Æthiops’ appears in the margin against Odyssey 1.35–6, for example, and ‘Pallas to Jupiter’ against 1.74. Yet the intrusion of these summaries into the column of Chapman’s text itself is jarring; one wishes that the early modern practice of relegating these summaries to the margins had been continued. (There would certainly have been room for them; the generously-sized pages accommodate text, marginalia, footnotes, and running headers in refreshingly legible type, and still leave room for a reader’s notes).

Unlike previous editions, both editors integrate essential and extensive support for readers into their texts. Copious marginal glosses clarify obscure phrasings and obsolete diction. Footnotes, impressive in both quantity and quality, serve various functions. Many provide longer paraphrases of Chapman’s sense, which is frequently extremely compressed or perplexingly oblique. Others alert the reader to Chapman’s frequent divergences from, additions to, or expansions of Homer’s text. Still others alert the reader to places where Chapman followed his source, the 1583 Greek-Latin edition with extensive commentary by Jean de Sponde. Chapman’s translation often reflects either Sponde’s commentary or the Latin translation Sponde’s edition included; at other times Chapman takes issue with Sponde or corrects a mistake in the Latin translation. These notes are significant scholarly achievements in their own right, and they enable the reader to consider dimensions of Chapman’s poiesis that otherwise require reference to the growing body of scholarship on Chapman.

It is not easy to mediate for a modern readership Chapman’s mediation of Homer for an audience far more familiar with Latin than Greek. Translation choices such as Chapman’s use of Latin rather than Greek names for the gods, which would once have rendered Homer more familiar to an audience steeped in Virgil, now startle the reader used to modern translations of Homer. Both editors seek sensible compromises. This reviewer prefers Miola’s practice of identifying the gods in marginal glosses first by their Greek names and then, in parentheses, by the Latin names Chapman uses. Kendal follows Chapman’s practice of referring to the gods by their Latin names, even when Chapman himself runs into error, as he does for example in conflating Helios and Apollo: separate gods with separate genealogies in the Homeric poems. Kendal’s choice is understandable, given his charge to edit Chapman, not Homer. But it may cause some confusion for the reader more familiar with Homer’s Odyssey than Chapman’s Odysses. Perhaps a brief word of explanation might be added to future editions of the statement on editorial practices.

Each editor’s introduction is a serious work of scholarship that deserves wide attention. Miola’s introduction to the Iliad traces Chapman’s development as an English poet through the decades he spent translating Homer, from the ‘predictable rhythms and rhymes’ of his first attempts to the ‘flexible, expansive, and powerful epic style’ of the completed Iliad and Odyssey (5). Miola draws attention to Chapman’s linguistic innovation — this reviewer had not realized how many English words, from ‘asinine’ to ‘stupidly’ to ‘vociferous,’ the OED cites as first appearing in Chapman’s Iliad (2). He considers Chapman’s translation in relation to Chapman’s work as a dramatist and illuminates the poetic and dramatic sensibilities that lie behind Chapman’s many departures from Homer’s style and content. And he does a beautiful job of locating Chapman’s uses of Sponde’s edition and other Renaissance dictionaries and reference works within a ‘transnational humanist movement’ (13), to which he demonstrates that Chapman unquestionably belonged in both his translation practices and his interpretive approach. Chapman’s use of numerous Latin and bilingual resources in order to fashion a Homer who exemplifies and responds to Christian vices and virtues locates him in the mainstream of both Renaissance classical reception and Renaissance epic.

Like Miola, Kendal considers Chapman’s departures from Homer. Kendal’s emphasis on variety and multiplicity in Chapman’s style complements rather than duplicates Miola’s. He explores Chapman’s enhancement of both causality and psychological complexity to great effect, and he offers an illuminating reading of Chapman’s heightening of contingency, of alternative possibilities for plot and character alike. Kendal provides a biographical overview of Chapman, focusing heavily on his religious poetry and the role of faith in his thought and poetry. Indeed, while both editors follow much scholarship in emphasizing the strain of Christian Stoicism in Chapman’s reading of Homer, Kendal makes an extended argument throughout his introduction for reading not only Chapman’s translation, but his uses of Stoic and Platonic philosophy and allegory, through a Christian theological lens. This reading has recently been supplemented by Jessica Wolfe’s exploration of the ironic, sceptical side of Chapman’s translations; readers interested in Chapman should consult Wolfe’s Homer and the Question of Strife from Erasmus to Hobbes alongside Miola’s and Kendal’s readings.[2]

Against these many positive interventions must be weighed one unfortunate omission. Neither edition reproduces the mise-en-page of Chapman’s folio, with its marginalia. Miola’s Iliad displaces Chapman’s marginal notes to the end of each book, where they join the longer commentaries that Chapman appended to each book of his translation. Kendal’s Odyssey does not reproduce them at all. No doubt practical considerations weighed heavily here; given the need to gloss the text so extensively, contriving a layout that made room for both Chapman’s marginalia and the editors’ would have been a challenge. And Chapman’s Odyssey is much more lightly and less systematically annotated than his Iliad, especially in the second half of the poem. Kendal does incorporate occasional and selective quotations and references to Chapman’s marginalia into his footnotes to the translation. His introduction discusses what he believes to be the most important and refers the reader to Nicoll’s edition for the rest.

These decisions reveal a systematic choice to focus on presenting an accessible text of Chapman’s translation, rather than the original paratexts and material form of the book. No doubt this choice follows from the vision laid out by the series editors, Neil Rhodes and Andrew Hadfield, in their general editors’ foreword: ‘The series aims … to present these texts as literary works in their own right’ (viii). This laudable aim is consistent with contemporary trends in translation studies and especially studies of early modern translation. And it is true that readers fortunate enough to enjoy access to EEBO through institutional subscriptions — not a given in this age of shrinking resources for humanities scholarship — can consult the original page layout in its facsimiles, or in Nicoll’s edition. Yet one cannot help wishing that an exception to the general series practice had been made for these volumes, for Chapman’s notes and commentaries form an intrinsic part of his text, which must be seen and grasped if the translations are to be understood as ‘literary works in their own right’. Much can be learned from Chapman’s marginalia —not only from their content, but from their layout. The reader paging through Nicoll’s Odyssey will quickly notice what a seventeenth-century reader would, that after book 1 Chapman concentrates his annotations on books 6-10. These are the books that contain the Phaiakian episode and the encounters with Polyphemos and Circe. The Cyclops and the sorceress with a fondness for pigs remain two of the most memorable episodes of the Odyssey today, but Odysseus’ encounter with Nausikaa and his brief sojourn at the Phaiakian court receive relatively little attention. The visual cues of the marginalia direct the modern reader to a section of the poem that, though often overlooked by non-specialists today, proves essential to Chapman’s understanding of Odysseus and of the human condition he exemplifies.

The new MHRA editions undoubtedly surpass previous editions for classroom use. They make it practical, perhaps for the first time, to incorporate Chapman into courses on Jacobean poetry, on classical reception and the history of translation, on the materiality of the early modern book. The editors lend expert support to a reader with relatively little experience of Elizabethan and Jacobean poetry, and the Iliad edition in particular presents enough of Chapman’s paratextual material to give a reader unfamiliar with early modern editions a sense of how classical texts were packaged for their readers, what kinds of assumptions translators and editors made about what a reader wanted and needed from an English translation of a Greek work (and consequently who that reader might be), and how readers would have approached something so simultaneously iconic and novel as an ‘English’d Homer’. Though reference to Nicoll or EEBO will still be required for some aspects of scholarship on Chapman’s Homer, the serious scholar too will benefit immeasurably from both the editors’ careful attention to Chapman’s meaning and their footnotes and introductions, which signal many points of contact between Chapman and his source texts and thus help to elucidate patterns in Chapman’s engagement with Homer and his intermediaries. It is to be hoped that through these editions, new audiences will hear ‘Chapman speak out loud and bold’ and share with Keats the thrill that seizes ‘some watcher of the skies / When a new planet swims into his ken’.

 

Sarah Van der Laan

Indiana University

 



[1] Colin Burrow, ‘Chapmaniac,’ London Review of Books 24/12 (27 June 2002), 21-24.

[2] Jessica Wolfe, Homer and the Question of Strife from Erasmus to Hobbes (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015) [reviewed in SR 47.2: https://www.english.cam.ac.uk/spenseronline/review/item/47.2.35/]

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48.2.15

Cite as:

Sarah Van der Laan, "Robert S. Miola, ed., George Chapman: Homer’s Iliad, and Gordon Kendal, ed., George Chapman: Homer’s Odyssey," Spenser Review 48.2.15 (Spring-Summer 2018). Accessed March 28th, 2024.
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