# Odyssey (George Chapman translation)

Homer's Odysses is an English translation of Homer's Odyssey by writer George Chapman. It was published around 1614 to 1615. It is widely known as the first complete translation of the poem into the English language.
Chapman spent twenty-six years translating works traditionally attributed to Homer. His complete Iliad was released in 1611, written in rhyming fourteeners. For Odyssey, he changed the blank verse and dactylic hexameter of the original Homeric Greek to rhyming couplets of iambic pentameter, establishing a new standard for translations of Greek and Latin hexameter.
Chapman said he was inspired by the ghost of Homer. His translation is discussed within the historical context of the Elizabethan era and is seen to characterise Odysseus as a Christian hero.

## Background

George Chapman worked on his translations— of the Iliad, the Odyssey, the Homeric Hymns and the Batrachomyomachia, all classically attributed to Homer—for twenty-six years from 1598 to 1624. He was the first person to translate the Homeric Hymns into English. Chapman said he was visited and inspired by the ghost of Homer. According to critic George de Lord, Chapman believed he had "unique insight" into the poet. The translation is dedicated to Robert Carr, 1st Earl of Somerset, Chapman's patron.
Although Chapman composed his Iliad in rhyming fourteeners, he changed the metre to iambic pentameter for Odyssey. He rejected translating word-for-word, describing it as "forced" and shameful, and added many phrases and sentiments not present in the original. He wrote that this, alongside close paraphrasing, was required to maintain the new metre, and expressed that some features of the English language—like its many monosyllabic words—made the project easier. He had previously used pentameter in a translation of the eighteenth book of the Iliad published under the title Achilles Shield.
Renaissance scholar Jessica Wolfe states that the prefaces written by Chapman for his Iliad and Odyssey translations are generally described as "arrogant, defensive, and prone to pessimistic rants", echoing an earlier critique by Alexander Pope. He also expressed loathing for an "envious Windfucker" who spread rumours that Chapman based his translation on an existing Latin translation instead of the original Greek. Chapman did, in fact, draw extensively from earlier sources, chiefly a translation by Henri Spondanus, the annotations of Poliziano, and the work of French printer and translator Henri Estienne.

## Publication

Chapman published Seauen Books of the Iliades in 1598, which translated books 1, 2, and 7–11 of the Iliad. These are generally regarded by scholars as being a significant influence on William Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida (1602). Books 1–12 were published for the first time in 1609, with the other books following in a 1611 edition.
The copyright was entered on November 2, 1614, and the works were probably published around 1614 to 1615, possibly in two parts. With the first publication, Chapman became the first person to complete a full translation of Homer's epic poem into English verse. He and the work quickly became widely celebrated.

### Frontispiece

The composition of the translation's frontispiece shows Homer in the midst of a company of laurel-crowned spirits, whose ethereal forms are expressed in stipple, with legends which together read: "Solus ſapit hic homo, Reliqui vero Umbræ mouentur"; or in English: "This man alone has wisdom, the others are mere shadows that flit around." Above, the title is supported by two cupids, and below are seated figures of Athena and Odysseus with his dog, Argos. The frontispiece is unsigned. The central depiction of Homer with the spirits is a reference to Circe's description of Tiresias in the story: "Even in death, Persephone granted to him alone the use of his wisdom, but the others are shadows that flit around".
The engraving is often ascribed to William Hole, who had previously engraved Chapman's Iliad, although Henry Watson Kent described this claim as "without any very good reason" due to it seeming "hardly probable that his awkward hand could have drawn the title".

## Reception

Chapman's translations received "widespread attention" from writers and scholars. It has received attention both as a translation and as an English epic poem in its own right. Modern reception to Chapman's Odyssey is divided. Critics regularly discuss the poem's use of allegory, an idea advanced prominently by critic George de Lord. By 1687, Gerrard Winstanley said Chapman's had been supplanted as the pre-eminent translation by John Ogilby. Ezra Pound, meanwhile, described Chapman as "the best English Homer", but noted the work was "marred by excess of added argument" and "rather more marred by parentheses and inversion". Chapman's Odyssey contributed to iambic pentameter becoming the meter of choice for English translations of Greek and Latin hexameter.
John Keats was famously moved by Chapman's Iliad and Odyssey, and especially admired the beauty of one of Chapman's metaphors: "The sea has soakt has heart through". Keats wrote "On First Looking into Chapman's Homer" (1816) at 20. Chapman's translation appealed to Keats because it presented the Homeric text very differently than Alexander Pope's widely read translation. Pope himself commented on Chapman's arrogant preface but delighted in Chapman's clear devotion to poetry. He said "there is scarce any Paraphrase more loose and rambling". Thomas Wilson compared Chapman's Odyssey positively compared to his Iliad.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge said Chapman's version was as original as Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene (1590) but provides readers with a "small idea of Homer". He compared its Homeric qualities favourably to Pope's translation, and derided William Cowper's as "anti-Miltonish". Coleridge highlighted it within an English historical context, saying Chapman's version was Homer if "he lived in England in the reign of Queen Elizabeth". Scholar Emily Wilson writes that Chapman transforms Odysseus into a "a true soldier and a gentleman, a proto-Christian and a proto-Stoic, whose greatest virtue is his ability to endure suffering". Wilson writes that John Milton's Paradise Lost rejected this interpretation, providing the same characteristics to Paradise Lost's antihero, Satan.