Quote of the Day (Alexander Pope, Uniquely Translating the Circe Episode in Homer’s ‘The Odyssey’)

“The goddess, rising, asks her guests to stay,
Who blindly follow where she leads the way.
Eurylochus alone of all the band,
Suspecting fraud, more prudently remain’d.
On thrones around with downy coverings graced,
With semblance fair, the unhappy men she placed.
Milk newly press’d, the sacred flour of wheat,
And honey fresh, and Pramnian wines the treat:
But venom’d was the bread, and mix’d the bowl,
With drugs of force to darken all the soul:
Soon in the luscious feast themselves they lost,
And drank oblivion of their native coast.
Instant her circling wand the goddess waves,
To hogs transforms them, and the sty receives.
No more was seen the human form divine;
Head, face, and members, bristle into swine:
Still cursed with sense, their minds remain alone,
And their own voice affrights them when they groan.
Meanwhile the goddess in disdain bestows
The mast and acorn, brutal food! and strows
The fruits and cornel, as their feast, around;
Now prone and grovelling on unsavoury ground.”—English poet Alexander Pope (1688-1744), translation of Homer’s The Odyssey (1726)
 
I’ve had one inquiry so far about whether I’ve seen Christopher Nolan’s adaptation of The Odyssey and if so, what I thought of it. So, here goes:
 
Yes, I saw it over the weekend and don’t regret doing so. On a scale of 1 to 10 with 10 the highest, I gave it 7 1/2 to 8 stars. The visuals and special effects were superb, as was much of the acting.
 
But at least 30 minutes could have been cut, and much of the dialogue was muffled by the ambient noise in the environment around the characters. Maureen Dowd’s column on Sunday was correct about all its deviations from the original.
 
Still, Hollywood has done far worse in adapting classics, and it wasn’t as painful for me to experience as Richmond Lattimore’s translations of The Iliad and The Odyssey in my college Literary Humanities course. (Achilles in his tent didn’t pout half so much as I at the prospect of enduring Homer’s endless repetitions, rendered by Lattimore with teeth-gnashing fidelity.)
 
With Hollywood’s latest attempt at Homer, the 2017 translation of The Odyssey by Emily Wilson has attracted the lion's share of attention, with retrospective respect given previous ones by Robert Fitzgerald and Robert Fagles.
 
Virtually nobody has talked about Alexander Pope’s, published in five volumes in 1725 and 1726 (with the help of two collaborators), though it was celebrated as a literary masterpiece, and an improvement on prior translations) in its time. With the poet’s characteristic rhyming couplets, the cliché is that it’s far more Pope than Homer.
 
Though Lattimore’s translation is supposed to be extremely faithful to the original Greek, with its hexameter meter and repeated use of epithets, I found the passage from Pope of one of the most famous episodes from the book (and one of the most memorable scenes from the Nolan film) powerful—perhaps because the couplets exert tremendous compact force. 

It’s difficult to top, for instance, these lines about the sorceress Circe: “Instant her circling wand the goddess waves,/To hogs transforms them, and the sty receives.”
 
Pope’s Homer translations were not covered in the English Restoration literature class I took in college, nor in the university’s Literary Humanities curriculum. But based on the passage above, at least, they can still be read with great pleasure.
 
(The image accompanying this post shows Samantha Morton as Circe in Christopher Nolan’s film.)

Spiritual Quote of the Day (Alexander Pope, on ‘Virtue’s Prize’)

“What nothing earthly gives or can destroy,
The soul's calm sunshine and the heartfelt joy,
Is Virtue's prize. A better would you fix?
Then give humility a coach and six,
Justice a conqueror's sword, or truth a gown,
Or public spirit its great cure, a crown.
Weak, foolish man! will Heav'n reward us there
With the same trash mad mortals wish for here?”—English poet Alexander Pope (1688-1744), “An Essay on Man” (1733)

Spiritual Quote of the Day (Alexander Pope, on God’s Absolution and ‘This Eternal Sleep’)

“All is calm in this eternal sleep;
Here grief forgets to groan, and love to weep,
Ev’n superstition loses ev’ry fear:
For God, not man, absolves our frailties here.”— English poet Alexander Pope (1688-1744), “Eloisa to Abelard” (1717)

Quote of the Day (Alexander Pope, on the Obliviousness of Fools)

“Out with it, Dunciad: let the secret pass—
That secret to each fool—that he's an ass.
The truth once told (and whereby should we lie?),
The queen of Midas slept, and so may I.
You think this cruel? Take it for a rule,
No creature smarts so little as a fool.”—English poet Alexander Pope (1688-1744), An Epistle from Mr. Pope, to Dr. Arbuthnot (1735)

Spiritual Quote of the Day (Alexander Pope, on Man’s Purposes and God’s)

“In human works, though labour'd on with pain, 
A thousand movements scarce one purpose gain; 
In God's, one single can its end produce; 
Yet serves to second too some other use. 
So man, who here seems principal alone, 
Perhaps acts second to some sphere unknown, 
Touches some wheel, or verges to some goal; 
'Tis but a part we see, and not a whole.”—English poet Alexander Pope (1688-1744), “An Essay on Man” (1734)

Quote of the Day (Alexander Pope, on Why ‘Strength of Mind is Exercise’)

“In lazy apathy let Stoics boast

Their virtue fix'd, 'tis fix'd as in a frost;

Contracted all, retiring to the breast;

But strength of mind is exercise, not rest:

The rising tempest puts in act the soul,

Parts it may ravage, but preserves the whole.”—English poet Alexander Pope (1688-1744), “An Essay on Man: Epistle II” (1733)

Quote of the Day (Alexander Pope, on Authors and Aging)

“It is the rust we value, not the gold;

Authors, like coins, grow dear, as they grow old.” —English poet Alexander Pope (1688-1744), Satires, Epistles, and Odes of Horace (1733-1738)

Quote of the Day (Alexander Pope, on the Reign of Chaos and Division)

“Joy to great Chaos! Let Division reign:

Chromatic tortures soon shall drive them hence,

Break all their nerves, and fritter all their sense:

One Trill shall harmonize joy, grief, and rage,

Wake the dull church, and lull the ranting stage;

To the same notes thy sons shall hum, or snore,

And all thy yawning daughters cry, encore.” —English poet Alexander Pope (1688-1744), The Dunciad (1728)

Pope wrote his mock epic (one of my favorite long poems) about the baleful consequences of incompetence in the arts. 

But today, “chaos” and “division” describe a wider landscape—beginning in the "ranting stage" of the electronic culture, a vast black hole of inventive, hatred, and untruths, with its now-dimmed light bouncing toward the world of politics, which in turn reflects it back toward that hole, with the light growing ever fainter as it ricochets. 

Pope’s apocalyptic finale is of Creation reversed, and so it feels at times today, as the wider understanding heralded by God-given reason is gradually obscured by opportunists through polarizing propaganda.

Quote of the Day (Alexander Pope, on Old Friends)

“Content with little, I can piddle here 

On brocoli and mutton round the year; 

But ancient friends (tho’ poor, or out of play) 

That touch my bell, I cannot turn away.” —English poet Alexander Pope (1688–1744), Satires, Epistles, and Odes of Horace Imitated: The Second Satire of the Second Book of Horace