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chapman252

…, &c. Graviter vociferans; as all most untruly translate it. As they do in the next verse these words … catuli leonis, no lion being here dreamed of, nor any vociferation. … signifying indignam, dissimilem, or horribilem vocem edens: but in what kind horribilem? Not for the gravity or greatness of her voice, but for the unworthy or disproportionable small whuling of it; she being in the vast frame of her body, as the very words … signify, monstrum ingens; whose disproportion and deformity is too poetically (and therein elegantly) ordered for fat and flat prosers to comprehend. Nor could they make the Poet’s words serve their comprehension; and therefore they add of their own, …, from whence … is derived, signifying crepo, or stridulè clamo. And …, is to be expounded, catuli nuper or recens nati, not leonis. But thus they botch and abuse the incomparable expressor, because they knew not how otherwise to be monstrous enough themselves to help out the monster. Imagining so huge a great body must needs have a voice as huge; and then would not our Homer have likened it to a lion’s whelp’s voice, but to the lion’s own; and all had been much too little to make a voice answerable to her hugeness. And therefore found our inimitable master a new way to express her monstrous disproportion; performing it so, as there can be nihil supra. And I would fain learn of my learned detractor, that will needs have me only translate out of the Latin, what Latin translation tells me this? Or what Grecian hath ever found this and a hundred other such? Which may be some poor instance, or proof, of my Grecian faculty, as far as old Homer goes in his two simple poems, but not a syllable further will my silly spirit presume.–CHAPMAN.