ed men, what ill is this ye suffer? In night are swathed
your heads, your faces, your knees; and the voice of wailing is
kindled, and cheeks are wet with tears, and with blood drip the walls,
and the fair main beams of the roof, and the porch is full of shadows,
and full is the courtyard, of ghosts that hasten hellward below the
darkness, and the sun has perished out of heaven, and an evil mist
sweeps up over all."

So much for Homer. The first attempt at metric translation here given is
meant to be in the manner of Pope:

"Caitiffs!" he cried, "what heaven-directed blight
Involves each countenance with clouds of night!
What pearly drop the ashen cheek bedews!
Why do the walls with gouts ensanguined ooze?
The court is thronged with ghosts that 'neath the gloom
Seek Pluto's realm, and Dis's awful doom;
In ebon curtains Phoebus hides his head,
And sable mist creeps upward from the dead."

This appears pretty bad, and nearly as un-Homeric as a translation could
possibly be. But Pope, aided by Broome and Fenton, managed to be much
less Homeric, much more absurd, and infinitely more "classical" in the
sense in which Pope is classical:

"O race to death devote! with Stygian shade
Each destined peer impending fates invade;
With tears your wan distorted cheeks are drowned;
With sanguine drops the walls are rubied round:
Thick swarms the spacious hall with howling ghosts,
To people Orcus and the burning coasts!
Nor gives the sun his golden orb to roll,
But universal night usurps the pole."

Who could have conjectured that even Pope would wander away so far from
his matchless original? "Wretches!" cries Theoclymenus, the seer; and
that becomes, "O race to death devote!" "Your heads are swathed in
night," turns into "With Stygian shade each destined peer" (peer is
good!) "impending fates invade," where Homer says nothing about Styx nor
peers. The Latin Orcus takes the place of Erebus, and "the burning
coasts" are derived from modern popular theology. The very grammar
detains or defies the reader; is it the sun that does not give his golden
orb to roll, or who, or what?

The only place where the latter-day Broome or Fenton can flatter himself
that he rivals Pope at his own game is--

"What pearly drop the ashen cheek bedews!"

This is, if possible, _more_ classical than Pope's own--

"With tears your wan distorted cheeks are drowned."

Bu