George Chapman was a famous poet in Elizabethan England. So famous, he heads a shortlist of candidates suspected of being the writer who gave Shakespeare an inferiority complex, as expressed in Sonnet 86: “Was it the proud full sail of his great verse...?”
But Chapman is now best remembered, if at all, for being name-checked in another sonnet, of a later era, that praised his work as a translator.
In fact, this year features a happy coincidence, because his combined translations of the Iliad and Odyssey were published exactly four centuries ago, in 1616. Meanwhile, next month, it will be 200 years since John Keats wrote the 14-line tribute, On First Looking Into Chapman's Homer.
In crude terms, Keats’s point is that he had never really “got” Homer until he read Chapman’s version, which brought the text alive so much that, according to one witness, he shouted with excitement at one passage.
He was more restrained in the sonnet, although not by much. In the oft-quoted closing lines, he compares Chapman’s work with the view greeting the first explorers to cross Central America: “Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes/He star’d at the Pacific – and all his men/Look’d at each other with a wild surmise/Silent, upon a peak in Darien”.
Darien, in case you didn’t know, is in Panama. And somewhat embarrassingly for literature, Keats had the wrong man.
It was Balboa who first crossed the Panamanian isthmus, not Cortez. But Romantic poetry is not an open-source encyclopaedia – you can’t just log in and correct it. So as PG Wodehouse said when he echoed the line once and upset a pedant: “If Cortez was good enough for Keats, he is good enough for me.”
The sonnet’s lofty words still inspire humorists. A recent example is from US sports enthusiast Ted Davis, who spotted their adaptability as a eulogy for baseball.
Hence his ingenious insertion in the title of a comma: “On First, Looking Into Chapman’s Homer”. And later, it’s the prolific (and chunky) hitter of home runs, Mickey Mantle, who deputises for Cortez: “Or like stout Mantle, when with eagle eyes/He star’d out at the distant fence – and then/Watch’d his ball just rise and rise and rise – /Silent, above a park in Washington”.
There have been even more back-hand compliments to the poem closer to home. One was a long-running feature in this newspaper. Whenever Myles na Gopaleen had a particularly outrageous pun to unveil, he contracted the job out to two stock characters, Keats and Chapman.
Gentlemen of leisure, their adventures were often preposterous, such as the one in which Chapman became a self-proclaimed expert in dialectical materialism overnight. The whole point was the punchline, in this case Keats’s put-down: “Fools rush in where Engels feared to tread”.
But speaking of Myles again, readers may recall my recent appeal here about a planned publication of his letters – including letters he might have written pseudonymously, like the ones that, on predecessors of this page, launched his literary career.
Indeed, speaking of the Pacific, I was appealing on behalf of Maebh Long from the University of the South Pacific. She is now editing the collection – silent, on an academic peak in Fiji – and would welcome any additions via maebh.long@usp.ac.fj .
In the meantime, we have both been contacted by a reader in Brussels, one Walter Götz, on the subject of a very interesting woman named Angela Polsen-Emy. I have never met Angela, although she appears to live in Dublin 6. So we may well have passed occasionally on Rathmines Road.
Anyway, she is a prolific writer of letters to this and other newspapers, including the Financial Times, the (London) Times, and the Irish and British Independents. And her letters are typically pithy and erudite.
Some time ago, for example, I mentioned here that the old drinking song Cruiscín Lán (which, in Hiberno-English, inspired the title of Myles's Irish Times column) was incorporated somewhere in a Mozart mass. But I didn't know where, exactly, until Ms Polsen-Emy pointed out it was in "the Gloria of his Piccolomini Mass in C Major K258".
So well informed is she on Mylesiana that I now wonder if he could have been reincarnated in female form. It’s a fanciful idea. But can it really be a coincidence that, as Walter Götz notes – with eyes as eagle-like as Cortez – Angela Polsen-Emy is an anagram of Myles na Gopaleen?