"One should indeed read Pope with his notes available, in the Twickenham edition possibly, to see what a vast amount he did understand about Homer"
About this Quote
Fitzgerald’s line is a polite-looking scalpel aimed at a long-running literary prejudice: the reflex to treat Alexander Pope’s Homer as a glamorous betrayal rather than a serious act of comprehension. The sentence performs its argument through manners. “One should indeed” sounds like a tutorial tip, but it’s really a rebuke to readers who dismiss Pope on hearsay. Fitzgerald doesn’t say “Pope was right”; he says, read him properly - with “notes available,” in the “Twickenham edition possibly” - the apparatus of scholarship invoked like courtroom evidence.
The subtext is about what counts as understanding. Pope famously didn’t read Homer in the modern philological way; he filtered him through Augustan taste, heroic couplets, and a culture that prized rhetorical force. Fitzgerald, himself a major translator, is quietly shifting the goalposts: fidelity isn’t only word-for-word accuracy, it’s grasping the engine of a work - its pacing, its register, its moral weather. The “vast amount” phrasing is strategic understatement, a nudge that Pope’s alleged sins (ornament, domestication, swagger) might actually be signs of intelligence about epic storytelling.
Context matters: by the mid-20th century, translation debates were increasingly professionalized, with new Homers (including Fitzgerald’s own) sold on immediacy and “authentic” plainness. Fitzgerald’s comment reads like a defense of older virtuosity against modern pieties. He’s asking readers to stop treating translation history as a straight line of improvements and start seeing it as a record of choices - choices that reveal what an era thought Homer was for.
The subtext is about what counts as understanding. Pope famously didn’t read Homer in the modern philological way; he filtered him through Augustan taste, heroic couplets, and a culture that prized rhetorical force. Fitzgerald, himself a major translator, is quietly shifting the goalposts: fidelity isn’t only word-for-word accuracy, it’s grasping the engine of a work - its pacing, its register, its moral weather. The “vast amount” phrasing is strategic understatement, a nudge that Pope’s alleged sins (ornament, domestication, swagger) might actually be signs of intelligence about epic storytelling.
Context matters: by the mid-20th century, translation debates were increasingly professionalized, with new Homers (including Fitzgerald’s own) sold on immediacy and “authentic” plainness. Fitzgerald’s comment reads like a defense of older virtuosity against modern pieties. He’s asking readers to stop treating translation history as a straight line of improvements and start seeing it as a record of choices - choices that reveal what an era thought Homer was for.
Quote Details
| Topic | Poetry |
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