Upon a Peak in Darien

This essay opens with one of English Romantic literature's best-known anecdotes. It describes a meeting in October of 1821 between a young Cockney poet, a medical apprentice with great literary ambitions, and Charles Cowden Clarke, a former classmate and the son of one of his teachers. Clarke was well connected in London's literary world, and often acted as a mentor to our young poet. The young poet in question was John Keats and he was twenty-one years old (which means he had five more years left to live). Clarke had ignited Keats's imagination by giving him Spenser to read a few months earlier, and on that October night he brought the young poet an old, almost legendary translation of Homer: the version made by the Elizabethan playwright George Chapman in the early seventeenth century. In Keats's time, the readily available translations of Homer were John Dryden's, which dated from the Restoration, and Alexander Pope's, written in the often pompous (and frankly not very Homeric) neoclassical conventions of the Augustan Age of Reason.

During the course of that meeting, Clarke read various passages of the Homeric epic poems to Keats, who reacted by "shouting with delight as some passage of especial energy struck his imagination." The young poet returned home at daybreak and penned one of his most famous sonnets, "On First Looking Into Chapman's Homer." He wrote it as quickly as he could and sent it to his friend's home; Clarke found it on his breakfast table at ten in the morning. The sonnet reads:

Much have I travell'd in the realms of gold,And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;Round many western islands have I beenWhich bards in fealty to Apollo hold.Oft of one wide expanse had I been toldThat deep-brow'd Homer ruled as his demesne;Yet did I never breathe its pure sereneTill I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:Then felt I like some watcher of the skiesWhen a new planet swims into his ken; Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyesHe star'd at the Pacific—and all his menLook'd at each other with a wild surmise—Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

It is a magnificent poem for many reasons, primarily for the metaphor of exploration that serves as its axis. Few texts have so clearly represented literature's ability to transport us, with its "goodly states" and those islands "which bards in fealty to Apollo hold." However, one of the reasons I find it so fascinating is because it directly addresses the subject of translation. "Yet did I never breathe its pure serene"—writes Keats, who couldn't read Greek—"Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold." Not Homer: Chapman. This is the finest poem ever written in praise of a translation.

How is it possible, a contemporary reader may ask, that the discovery of an old translation of Homer could arouse such passion in Keats? The answer lies in the fact that, between the Renaissance and the end of the nineteenth century, translations were very different than they are now. Up until the nineteenth century, literary translators—who were, in 99 percent of the cases, also writers themselves—did not "respect" the original texts the way we do today. Generally, those poet-translators considered themselves modern writers, tasked with improving authors from other periods and correcting their mistakes. They assumed that their own style of expression was the best and, as such, the translated texts should conform to it. They weren't terribly concerned with the historical elements, and had no problem with translating from languages they barely knew, or from other translations. As a result, they not only adapted the texts to the conventions and tastes of their own period, but each translator also added in whatever he liked from his own bag of tricks.

The debate about faithfulness in translation has always existed. Yet the option of so-called literalness was fairly circumscribed to religious and...