| By 1600 the Humanist revival of classical translation was over, and the agenda of earlier translators, which was to show how the classics could solve contemporary problems, had changed. The new scholars saw the classics as pedagogical instruments, to form and educate an intellectual elite. George Chapman's translations of Homeric poetry bridge this date, incorporating the older tradition that regarded Homer and other classical authors as providing a vision that could shape England's bid to become European power, and the emerging view that classical authors could confer wisdom on selected individuals. He was attempting to become a tutor to the Prince of Wales, and his objectives included presenting a heroic ideal to this aristocratic audience, advancing what he saw as moral instruction. He promoted veneration of the classical texts because idealizing the ancient world was a dominant ideology of his day.;The formal considerations that shape his verse support these broader objectives: his determination to translate from Greek, his commitment to use vernacular English, the long verse line that he adopted, and his ornamental style. Although he was constrained by his limited knowledge of Greek, he had acquired a text that included a Latin parallel-column translation of Homer. Chapman's decisions about translating from the original text and his use of vernacular English became part of every translator's subsequent efforts to render a foreign text into English. Traditionally, critics have reviewed these formal considerations to the exclusion of others that dictated the direction his translation was to take. His style and tone are not so much the result of a meticulous application of these rules for making verse as they are an attempt to take advantage of the propitious climate for promoting himself, shaping a ruler, and providing the iconographic paraphernalia that the king desired. The objective of this dissertation is to analyze and evaluate his effort to recover an alien territory by considering how perception of a later age alters the vision of an ancient author and how Chapman attempts to bridge this distance, providing what he believes to be not only a linguistic equivalent but a persuasive recreation. |
