A NEW HERODOTUS

New Zealand Listener, Volume 22, Issue 555, 10 February 1950, Page 16

A NEW HERODOTUS

HERODOTUS, trenslated by J. Enoch Powell; Geoffrey Cumberlege; Oxford basco Press, 2 vols. English price, ‘21/HERODOTUS has long been naselihed as an innovating genius, the father of history, and a writer so brilliant that his legends, chronicles and geographical descrintions-brought together in a nartrative which marches with masculine stride towards the crisis of the Persian War-may still be reed with excitement. Mcreover, the excitement survives int translation; and, indeed, it is only throngh interpreting minds that most of us can feel the original power. J. Enoch Powell, who has produced a new version, the work of many years, deals rather trenchently with sore of his predecessors. He is severe with Rawlinson, whore translation is pesheps the one most used by present-day readers. "In translating Herodotus," he writes, "it is inappropriate and misleeding completely to modernise language or thought; to modernise them partially is fatal. and this Rawlinson has done." Poyell has found his own model in the English of the Authorised Vers‘on of the Bible. "I believe that the simple and flowing lenguage of Herodotus needs least remoulding for modern Engli-h eers. if presented in the style 2nd c2cences rentered familiar ty the Bile. and that ai certain quaintness 2nd

archaism thereby imparted make an impression not dissimilar from that which the Ionic original must have made upon Attic readers in the twenties of the fifth century, B.C." These are sound principles, Nevertheless, they may have been adapted imperfectly, for in spite of the careful scholarship the book seems to be without the vitality and movement of the Rawlinson translation. A possible explanation is that Powell's diction is not as simple and Biblical as he wanted it to be. Even in the Preface, where he states his ¢ase in the passage quoted above, the use of "rendered" d of "made" is an indication of what is to come. In many passages he that somebody has "deceased," when he means that the man has died. His characters do not speak to one another; they "enter into converse." An image is not "set up" in the proper place, but is "established." ‘ Judgments are "propounded" instead of "given." A house becomes a "habitation." There is even "the same" instead of "it"’-a lapse in which an archaism is cancelled by commercial usagé. The excessive use of’ Latin derivations, oddly mixed with "howbeits" and "albeits," takes us a long way from the language of the Authorised Version. We cannot avoid using Latin words: they are in the texture of our language, and many of them are indispensable in abstract writing. But in a translation of Herodotus the preference should surely be given, where choice is possible, to Anglo-Saxon words which help to create a’ direct and concrete

style.

M.H.

H.