“NO GREAT SHAKES”

Evening Star, Issue 21319, 25 January 1933, Page 5

“NO GREAT SHAKES”

SHAW ON HOMER HiS NEW TRANSLATION NO SEED OF GREATNESS Shaw seems to think Homer “no great shakes.” Yet ho has spent the leisure of four years making a new translation of the ‘ Odyssey,’ in spite of his twenty-seven predecessors at the same job. This is not George Bernard, but “ T. E. Shaw ” —the man who vainly tries to hide under this name the identity of Lawrence of Arabia.

The “first novel of Europe” can hardly have escaped translation into any literary language. Miss Edith Hamilton writes in ‘ Roman Way ’ that “ the earliest piece of (Latin) literature we know about is a translation of the ‘ Odyssey ’ made at the end of the First Punic War ” —live hundred years after the founding of Rome. Mr Shaw—wo must give him a name, though it is one of his eccentricities to leave it off the title page—has paid •somewhat dubious respects to Ids author in his preface. “ Wardour Street Greek ” is what he calls the original. “ Highly disrespectful,” according to Mr Gilbert Murray, in the ‘ Saturday Review of Literature,’ “ that being the street in London famous for the sale of faked antique furniture.” Shaw’s defence is that “ Wardour Street Greek, like the ‘ Odyssey's,' defies honest rendering,” and he gives the famous old romance some sound cuffing. NOT GREAT ART. “ Crafty, exquisite, homogeneous—whatever groat art may be, these are not its attributes. In this tale every big situation is burked and the writing is soft. The shattered ‘ Iliad ’ yet makes a masterpiece; while the ‘ Odyssey ’ by its ease and interest remains the oldest book worth reading for its story and the first novel of Europe. Gay, fine, and vivid it is; never huge or terrible. Book XI., the underworld, verges toward ‘ terribilita ’ —yet runs instead to the seed of pathos, that feeblest mode of writing. The author misses his every chance of greatness, as must all his faithful translators.” “ In four years of living with this novel,” says Shaw again in his preface, “ 1 have tried to deduce the author from his self-betrayal in the work. “ I found a bookworm, no longer young, living from home, a mainlander, city-bred and domestic. Married but not exclusively, a dog lover, often hungry and thirsty, dark-haired. • Fond of poetry, a great if uncritical reader of the ‘ Iliad,’ with limited sensuous range, but an exact eyesight which gave him all his pictures. A lover of old bric-a-brac, though as muddled an antiquary as Walter Scott. “ It is fun to compare his infuriating male condescension toward inglorious woman with his tender charity of head and heart for serving men. Though a stickler for the prides of poets and a man who never misses a chance to cocker up their standing, yet be must be (like writers two thousand years after him) the associate of menials, making himself their friend and defender by understanding.” THE LOTOS EATERS. But let us get a taste of the new prose version, quoting from the,famous episode of the Lotos-eaters:— “ On the tenth day we made the land of the Lotos-eaters, men who browse on a food of flowers. We landed there to fill our water butts, while my crews snatched a meal on the shore, beside their likely vessels. “ As soon as the first hunger for food and drink had passed, I chose out two follows, and added to them a third, as runner, that they might go inland to spy out and inquire what were the human beings there existing. “.Off then went at once, and met, a party of those Lotos-eaters, who had no notion of slaying ray emissaries; instead, they gave them n dish of their Lotos-flower. .And so it was ■ that, as each tasted of this honey-sweet plant, the wish to bring,news or return grew faint in him; rather he preferred _to dwell for over with the Lotos-eating men, feeding upon Lotos and letting fade from his mind all memory of home. “ I had to seek them and drag them back on board. They wept; yet into the ships we brought them perforce and chained them beneath the thwarts, deep in the. well, while I constrained the . rest of my adherents , to hurry aboard, lest perhaps more of them might eat Lotos and lose their longing for home.” This version of the ‘ Odyssey ’ is having great success with reviewers, and readers have already made necessary a third or fourth printing. Shaw's preface is discounted here and there. Lewis Gannett, of the Xcw York ‘Herald-Tribune,’ suggests that he “ wrote with his bitter tongue in his cheek.” and when he calls Penelope “ a sly, cattish wife,” Professor Murray suspects he is “disguising his love in one of the accepted post-war methods.” A STRANGE MAN. A strange man is Lawrence, who renounced all his war honours, even his name, and after helping lead the Arab revolt became a mechanic in the Royal Air Force under th ename of T. E. Shaw. Ho is not English, according to his friend, Robert Graves, who wrote ‘ Lawrence and the Arabian Adventure,’ but “ Irish. Hebridean, Spanish, and \orso “ mixed blood lias meant for Lawrence a natural gift for learning foreign languages.” In bis personal sketch, Mr Graves thus sets forth Lawrence:—

“ He is short (live feet five and ahalf inches), with bis body long, 1 should judge, in proportion to his legs, for be is more impressive seated than standing. He lias a big head of a Norse type, rising steeply at the back. His hair is fair, not blonde, and rather fine; bis complexion is fair, and he could go unshaven longer than most men without showing it. The upper part of his face is kindly, almost maternal; the lower part is severe, almost cruel. His eyes are bine-grey and constantly in motion. His hands and feet are small. He is, or was. of great physical strength; he has been scon to raise up a rifle at arm’s length, holding it by the barrel end. until it was parallel with the ground—yet no one would suspect him ot being more than tough. “ In Arabia be won the respect of the desert fighters by bis feats of strength and agility ns much as by bis other qualities. The pass-test of the highest order of fighters was the feat of springing off a trotting camel and leaping on again with one hand on the saddle and a rifle in the other. It is said that Lawrence passed the test.

“ ilo has a trick of holding bis hands loosely folded below his breast, the elbows to his sides, and curries his head a little tilted, the eyes on the ground. Re can sit or stand for hoars at a stretch without moving a muscle. He talks in short sentences, deliberately and quietly without accenting his words strongly. He grins a lot and laughs seldom.”