WHY HOMER NEVER SOUNDS RIGHT IN HEXAMETER.

At least once in every generation, some clever classicist decides that Homer or Virgil ought to be translated into English in his own meter: namely the dactylic hexameter adopted by all the Greek and Latin epic poets. It seems such an obviously reasonable decision: why should we be false to the original intent of the poet and set our translation in some barbaric meter he would not even have recognized? Who could argue against it?

You, the reader, already know the answer to that question. Dr. Boli could argue against it, and he will, in one of those periodic essays that will send most of you off to Instagram to look at pictures of birds.

There is a fundamental difference between Greek or Latin versification on the one hand and English versification on the other. The rhythm of English poetry is based on accent; there is no such thing as “quantity” in English. Like almost any definite statement about almost any human language, this one must be qualified at once. In ordinary speech, different syllables have different durations: it takes much longer to say “snakes” than it does to say “at,” though the dictionary will tell you they are both words of one syllable. But there is no regular pattern to these differences, no mathematical formula that would create a rhythm and make them a suitable basis of meter in English.

In Greek or Latin poetry, on the other hand, quantity rules. Accent is irrelevant to the meter. The rhythm is made with long and short syllables; and the rule of the grammarians, in which they doubtless followed the longstanding practice of the bards, was that a long syllable was equal to two short syllables.

The basic unit of dactylic hexameter is the dactyl—a long syllable followed by two short syllables. Since a long syllable is twice the length of a short one, that gives us a “foot” of four beats, taking a short syllable as one beat. Other kinds of feet will appear in a line of epic poetry: the spondee, for example, which is two long syllables. But here again the foot is four beats: each of the two long syllables is equivalent to two short syllables.

Taking into account the cæsura, which is a pause in the middle of the line, and another pause at the end of the line, a classical epic marches along in stately 4/4 time. A good poet can do wonderful things to speed up or slow down that meter, to make it as ponderous as death or as light as children playing on the beach. But the dominant effect is serious and dignified.

But what happens when we try to haul that meter into English? We mark the lines the same way: macron, breve, breve. But now the marks indicate accented and unaccented syllables, not long and short ones. As music—and epic poetry is meant to be sung by a bard smitin’ ’is bloomin’ lyre—it is a completely different thing. We may call it dactylic hexmeter, but the dactyls are not the same dactyls. Where the Greek and Latin poems marched in stately 4/4 time, our English hexameters skip along in triplets. And that is an effect that in English suggests lightness and frivolity. An English-speaker who hears verse bouncing along in triplets immediately thinks, “There was a young man from Nantucket…”

To Dr. Boli’s ear, the only successful work in dactylic hexameter in English is Long­fellow’s Evan­geline, which is successful precisely because Long­fellow applied a great deal of poetic ingenuity to the problem of not letting his hexameters skip along like limericks.

This is why the successful translators of Homer into En­glish have always chosen iambic feet as the basis of their meter(1)—just as our native English-speaking poets have always done when the subject is a serious one. Most of them reach for iambic pentameter, the meter of the Canterbury Tales and Hamlet and Paradise Lost—though perhaps the greatest En­glish translator of Homer, George Chap­man, set his translation of the Iliad in heptameter, or what an Eliza­bethan would have straightforwardly called fourteeners. The fourteeners, counting a pause at the end of the line, restore the 4/4 rhythm of the original, and perhaps that is the secret of Chap­man’s miraculous effect: he seems to have written the Iliad himself rather than translated it.

So now you understand why dactylic hexameter can never satisfy us as an English epic meter, and why translators who are real poets—Emily Wil­son, Alexan­der Pope, George Chap­man—have always chosen iambs. The next time you translate Homer or Virgil, you will do the same.

If you would like to spend an afternoon comparing translations, we have extensive pages for Homer and Virgil in the Eclectic Library.

Footnotes