Chapman : George (1559?-1634), English dramatist & poet, translated Iliad & Odyssey.
... variations on that average poetically answering change of mood, shift of scene, the necessity to clear-cut or grade off a picture or an idea. And this is precisely what Chapman often does. It may surprise some to hear that Chapman wrote ballad-poetry, but, as he never distributes a word between the fourth foot and the fifth, the fourteener couplets as handled by him divide naturally into lines... not rhyme with the third and so his frequent prolongation of the sense up to the fourteenth syllable is not interrupted by any marked sound-clinch at the eighth. Hence it has compass enough: what Chapman lacks is the epic grand style of narration, because, even when he is without tortured and extravagant conceits, his power is rough rather than harmonious. His muscular vigour, his strong nervous rhythm... the soaring yet mountain-secure intensity to which Dante shaped his compulsive vision, the smiling certainty of vast wing-stroke which upbears Milton through all the revelatory detours of his mind. Chapman at his best rushes, dazzles, distracts: he has compass without full harmonious sweep, brilliance without elevated control, imaginative passion without an assured ease of forceful sight. Take any ...
... that is, showing a balanced mastery in his inspiration. Line 8, on the other hand, gives us Chapman to perfection. Keats did not intend a contrast, rather thought of equating Homer and Chapman; he did not realise that Homer's energy is unlike Chapman's vehemence and vigour, it is never "loud and bold". Chapman strikes strong chords out of the jolty four-line ballad-metre converted into a striding, coupleted... Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold. Oft of one wide expanse had I been told That deep-browed Homer ruled as his demesne, Yet did I never breathe its pure serene Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold. Then felt I like some watcher of the skies When a new planet swims into his ken; Or like stout Cortez, when with eagle eyes He stared at the Pacific —... realised the difference, but some unconscious intuition brought into the three lines where he speaks of Homer something of the very accent of the Greek poet, while in the one line where he talks of Chapman we have precisely that Elizabethan's manner. The lines about the sky-watcher and Page 78 the new planet have a combination of facility and felicity which has made them, either as ...
... Virgil and the classic hexameter are perilous and reveal the yawning gulf between the two movements. As to the line of fourteen syllables, Chapman often overcomes its difficulties but the jog-trot constantly comes out. It may be that all that can be surmounted, but Chapman and Chesterton do not surmount it—whatever their heights of diction or imagination, the metre interferes with their maintenance, even... noble. "Muscular vigour, strong nervous rhythm" are forceful, not noble. Everywhere in your remarks you seem to confuse nobility and forcefulness, but there is between the two a gulf of difference. Chapman is certainly forceful, next to Marlowe, I suppose, the most forceful poet among the Elizabethans. Among the lines you quote from him to prove your thesis, there is only one that approaches nobility:... in and takes possession with an assured gait, by its own right. It would seem to me that one has only to put the work of these greater poets side by side with Chapman's best to feel the difference. Chapman no doubt lifts rocks and makes mountains suddenly to rise—in that sense he has elevation or rather elevations; but in doing it he gesticulates, wrestles, succeeds finally with a shout of triumph; that ...
... have translated St. John Perse in such a way as to make a shining contribution to the art of translation." Surely Chapman or Pope or Dryden, in their remarkably successful compositions, cannot be considered truly "faithful" to their models and yet they have achieved genuine poetry. Chapman in particular has come in for praise. But an Elizabethan rhythmist like him of explosive and complicated splendour... your versions into true poems is a true marvel! Usually faithful translations are flat and those which are good poetry transform the original into something else as Fitzgerald did with Omar or Chapman with Homer." A further statement of Sri Aurobindo's may be quoted. Looking at Roy's version of two stanzas of Shelley - "I can give not what men call love", etc. - he pointed out how the translation ...
... heavy and uninspired, the work of a robustly conscientious craftsman rather than a creative artist" (The Future Poetry, p. 68, fn.). Page 65 that are themselves too artificial. Chapman yields place only to Marlowe in sheer force, but his vital gusto seizes on his intellect for ingenious effects that are Romantic poetry gone astray or berserk. For instance, he forgets Homer's nobility... even Tennyson's translation of the same passage: the immeasurable heavens Break open to their heights, and all the stars Shine... Perhaps the jog-trot ballad metre disguised by Chapman as a fourteener makes it difficult to achieve more than a quick sudden canter instead of the epic roll and rise. But something in the very nature of the Romantic life-soul has a risky penchant ... air and fire... (It is to be noted that the first line's rhythmic effect demands the first and the third syllables to be accented in "translunary", not the second as in present practice.) Chapman has now and then a phrase striking with an exceptionally vivid vehemence at the imagination, like the one about Zeus who, favouring the Trojan Hector and looking wrathfully at the Greek galleys afar ...
... severity and serenity behind the outer form are absent. However, we must take care to set apart the Shakespearean spirit of overflow from that of a poet like Chapman. Both have the Romantic passion and not the Classic self-possession; but, while Chapman in his best lines like those in his translation or rather transposition of Homer – When the unmeasured firmament bursts to disclose her light ...
... verging on the mystical domain—is worth inclusion: Christina Rossetti. Perhaps something on Gerard Manly Hopkins wouldn't be uninteresting, too. Among non-mystical poets there are some omissions also: Chapman, for instance—and in the recent group, William Watson, Thomas Hardy, A.E. Housman and Robert Bridges. Page 413 I did not deal with all these poets because it was not in the scope of my... expression and substance. Chesterton however exceeds his ghosts—he has something of the racer in him and not merely of the prancing cart-horses they were. If Chesterton is noble, grand style, epic (Chapman also)—it becomes difficult to deny these epithets to many others also. Even Kipling and Macaulay can put in a claim. What then is the difference between them and Homer, Milton etc.? Only that Homer ...
... Writers Would you please tell me where in Homer the "descent of Apollo" occurs? 1 It is in the first fifty or a hundred lines of the first book of the Iliad. 2 I don't suppose Chapman or Pope have rendered it adequately. Of course not—nobody could translate that—they have surely made a mess of it. Homer's passage translated into English would sound perfectly ordinary. He ...
... me Rs. 1,000 for the work. Nevertheless I tried my best to give his beautiful Bengali lines as excellent a shape of English poetry as I could manage. The poet Page 346 and littérateur Chapman condemned my work because I had made it too English, written too much in a manner imitative of traditional English poetry and had failed to make it Bengali in its character so as to keep its native ...
... for the extravagant and the contorted which were very much in vogue in Shakespeare's day and which Shakespeare himself often dange-rously skirted — things like that outrageous distortion of Homer by Chapman in his translation of the Iliad: And such a stormy day shall come, in mind and soul I know, Page 184 When sacred Troy shall shed her towers for tears of over-throw. The second ...
... movement and another. There can be, technically, alter-native scansisons. But I believe there is always one scansion which is of true help to the significance and the feeling of a line. The critic Chapman has instanced the opening of Sarojini Naidu's Flute-player of Vrindavan as posing us a small problem in scansion. Technically both the following lines — Why didst thou play thy matchless flute ...
... Elizabeth’s reign became England’s Golden Age. It was the age of the playwrights Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare and Ben Jonson; of the poets John Donne, Edmund Spenser, Philip Sidney, Georges Chapman; of the musicians Thomas Tallis and William Byrd; of the seafarers and explorers Francis Drake, Walter Raleigh, Martin Frobisher, John Davies and John Hawkins; of the philosopher Francis Bacon; of ...
... Brahma-muhurta 253 Brihadaranyaka Upanishad 302 brhat 302 Browning, Elizabeth 60,161 C Celtic fire and ether 197 ChadwickJohnA. 266 Chandidas 126 Chapman 189 Chattopadhyaya, Harindranath 36,42 Chit-Tapas 247 Coleridge 42,197,234 consciousness depths of 99 developing through Savitri 286 Divine 167,174 Divine Presence ...
... Historical Event (Warwickshire: P. Drinkwater, 1982), pp. 53-54. 214. J. L. McKenzie, Dictionary of the Bible (Bangalore: The Asian Trading Corporation, 1984, with permission of Geoffrey Chapman, London), pp. 337, col. 2 and 536, col. 1. 215. 77 k? Concise Oxford Dictionary (Clarendon Press, 1964), p. 1364, col. 2. 216. Ibid. 217. The Jerusalem Bible, The New Testament ...
... (Bangalore: Indian Edition by Asian Trading Corporation, 1984), p. 162, col. 1. 2. Ibid., p. 110, col. 2. 3. Raymond E. Brown, Biblical Exegesis and Christian Doctrine (London: Geoffrey Chapman, 1985), p. 154. 4. Ibid., pp. 154-55. Page 80 ...
... Pondicherry offered me Rs. 1,000 for the work. Nevertheless I tried my best to give his beautiful Bengali lines as excellent a shape of English poetry as I could manage. The poet and litterateur Chapman condemned my work because I had made it too English, written too much in a manner imitative of traditional English poetry and had failed to make it Bengali in its character so as to keep its native ...
... power and glory. We can see the difference in the above quoted sonnet of Keats, on reading Chapman's Homer. Keats first wrote: Yet could I never judge what men could mean Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold; but then he changed the first line to Yet did I never breathe its pure serene. Page 244 And we can see the vividness and freshness ...
... of Culture,” another the following year under the title “Mere Creation,” and a third one in 1999, “Science and Evidence for Design in the Universe.” In the published lectures of the latter, Bruce Chapman specifies the anti-materialistic objectives of the new movement: “Materialism is not limited in its implications to natural science. Materialism is a way of understanding day-to-day existence and ...
... make your versions into true poems is a true marvel as usually faithful translations are flat and those which are good poetry transform the original into something else—as Fitzgerald did with Omar or Chapman with Homer. Page 104 September 15,1931 A very charming lyric—but why J ā tismar 1 though it is a taking title? Yes, I thought " aus unserem Stall" meant "from ...
... intensity itself, but, as Sri Aurobindo would say, it is the intensity of a tremendous vital thrill which makes the poetry unrestrainedly romantic, though the absence of restraint is not explosive as in Chapman but finely Page 235 organised in its outbreaks. Sri Aurobindo has said that there is some essential "austerity" in the epic temper which emerges in the tone of voice. But we must ...
... prophesied the bitter controversy that has raged in later times as to whether he himself penned those 36 plays bearing his name or they were the work of either Francis Bacon, Christopher Marlowe, George Chapman or else Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford, he would have been upset enough to tear his hair! I am sure he was never given to any such "dreaming on things to come". So I can't understand why at 52 years ...
... itself, but, as Sri Aurobindo would say, it is the intensity of a tremendous vital thrill which makes the poetry unrestrainedly romantic, though the absence of restraint is not explosive as in Chapman but finely organised in its outbreaks. Sri Aurobindo has said that there is some essential "austerity" in the epic temper which emerges in the tone of voice. But we must remember that this "austerity" ...
... Milton's time. We have just to mark Milton's life-span - 1608-1674 - to realise how much poetic writing had gone before. Not only had Spenser, Marlowe, Shakespeare, Ben Jonson worked on English poetry; Chapman, Beaumont, Fletcher, Webster, Marston, Massinger, Shirley, Heywood, Donne, Herbert, Herrick, Campion - all these were born fairly before him. Abundant development had preceded him in prose also ...
... us on to the prominent wide-toned verb "Shine" in the next. I think a truer Homeric version is the result, especially as the whole tone is a controlled majesty and drive, than the version made by Chapman in Elizabeth's time: And the unmeasured firmament breaks to disclose its light. The expression is very fine, though a little more generalised than Tennyson's: what stamps it as inferior to ...
... Bowra, CM. From Virgil to Milton (Macmillan, London, 1945). Heroic Poetry (Macmillan, London, 1952). Brockington, A. Allen. Mysticism and Poetry on a Basis Of Experience (Chapman & Hall, London, 1934). Brooks, Cleanth, &. Robert Penn Warren. Understanding Poetry (Henry Holt, New York, 1955). Brough, John, Selections from Classical Sanskrit Literature ...
... stand-offishness. Here are Page 346 aspirations, the anxieties of the explorer, the regulated passion of the expert tennis player, the Keatsian joy on looking in Chapman's Homer. In this extended monologue with the Supreme, the aspirant mortal simply rejects sorrow in one clean sweep, for how can be sorrow present in the presence of the All-Beautiful Anandamaya ...
... impact is on what Sri Aurobindo calls the nerves of mental sensation prevails among the Elizabethans, ranging through styles that can be distinguished one from another — Marlowe's explosive energy, Chapman's violent impetuousness, Shakespeare's passionate sweep, Webster's quivering outbreak. But beside Milton, however, they all seem kin and offer a contrast to the no less powerful yet more purely reflective ...
... sheer. Something upstart also spoils a deal of Elizabethan poetry, as it does in another fashion much of modernist verse. Together with a certain explosiveness and want of control, it makes Chapman's translation of the Iliad not only inadequate Homer but even inadequate first-class inspiration of a non-Homeric species. I expect James Lloyd's The Poetry and Philosophy of the Iliad, which my ...
... the same poem Madeline is referred to as "silver shrine" by her lover Porphyro indicating that she is an icon of worship for him. A spontaneous response in the poem On first Looking into Chapman's Homer with "Much have I travelled in the realms of gold" captivates instantly the precious and permanent value of literature and how the poet finds his native region here. Unlike Milton ...
... experimental, and belonged to the early Baroda period. Sri Aurobindo's first taste of our two great epics must have given him the same feeling of excitement and exhilaration that the reading of Chapman's Homer gave to young Keats: Then felt I like some watcher of the skies When a new planet swims into his ken... The mind racing swiftly, the heart expansive and in a flutter of thrilled ...
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