e of his country with, if not two rightly
representative, yet too justifiable Translations.

Dryden's defence of the manner in which Pindar has been made to speak
English by Cowley, cannot be sustained. A translator must give the meaning
of his author so as that they who are scholars in the vernacular only--for
to the unread and uncultivated he does not address himself--may be as
nearly as possible so impressed and affected as scholars in the original
tongue are by the author; or, soaring a little more ambitiously, as nearly
as may be as they were affected to whom the original work was native. To
Anglicize Pindar is not the adventure. It is to Hellenize an English
reader. Homer is not dyed in Grecism as Pindar is. The profound,
universal, overpowering humanity of Homer makes him of the soil
everywhere. The boundaries of nations, and of races, fade out and vanish.
He and we are of the family--of the brotherhood--Man. That is all that we
feel and know. The manners are a little gone by. That is all the
difference. We read an ancestral chronicle, rather than the diary of
to-day. But Pindar is all Greek--Greek to the backbone. There the stately
and splendid mythology stands in its own power--not allied to us by
infused human blood--but estranged from us in a dazling, divine glory. The
great theological poet of Greece, the hymnist of her deities, remembers,
in celebrating athlete and charioteer, his grave and superior function. To
hear Pindar in English, you must open your wings, and away to the field of
Elis, or the Isthmian strand. Under the canopying smoke of London or
Edinburgh, even amongst the beautiful fields of England or Scotland, there
is nothing to be made of him. You must be a Greek among Greeks.

Therefore, in the Translator, no condescension to our ignorance at least.
And no ignoble dread of our ignorant prejudices. The difficult connexion
of the thoughts which Dryden duly allows to the foreign and ancient poet,
a commentary might clear, where it does as much for the reader of the
Greek; or sometimes, possibly, a word interpolated might help. But the
difficulty of translating Pindar is quite distinct from his obscurity. For
it is his light. It is the super-terrestrial splendour of the lyrical
phraseology which satisfied the Greek imagination, lifted into transport
by the ardour, joy, and triumph, of those Panhellenic Games. It is the
simple, yet dignified strength of the short, pithy, sage Sentences. It is
the r