Wills also examines Chapman’s “fine touch” in translating “the warm and human sense of comedy” in the Odyssey. Garry Wills’s preface to the Odyssey explores how Chapman’s less strained meter lets him achieve more delicate poetic effects as compared to the Iliad. The editor, Allardyce Nicoll, provides an introduction, textual notes, a glossary, and a commentary. Chapman is far nearer Homer than any modern translator in any modern language.” This volume presents the original text of Chapman’s translation of the Odyssey (1614-15), making only a small number of modifications to punctuation and wording where they might confuse the modern reader. Keats immortalized the work of the Renaissance dramatist and poet in the sonnet “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer.” Swinburne praised the translations for their “romantic and sometimes barbaric grandeur,” their “freshness, strength, and inextinguishable fire.” The great critic George Saintsbury (1845-1933) wrote: “For more than two centuries they were the resort of all who, unable to read Greek, wished to know what Greek was.
George Chapman’s translations of Homer are among the most famous in the English language.
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