THE TECHNIQUE OF TRANSLATING
not trust to his own judgment of his own work; he may be misled by individual caprices. Let him ask how his work affects those who both know Greek and can appreciate poetry; whether to read it gives the Provost of Eton, or Professor Thompson at Cambridge, or Professor Jowett here in Oxford, at all the same feeling which to read the original gives them.
It is difficult to imagine any method of translation better calculated to distort if not destroy the spirit of the original than this advice of Matthew Arnold's. Whatever impression the Iliad made upon the ancient Greeks, it is safe to assume that it was as far removed as possible from the impression that it makes to-day upon the typical middle-aged professor of dead languages, profoundly versed in archæology and syntax. It is very much as though he were to say to the contemporary translator of Flaubert or Maupas-
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