Keats reads Chapman's Homer through the night

Some men finish their work and never live to learn what it was for. The translator labours forty years over a Greek the English tongue has not yet been built to hold; he dies; his folio passes out of fashion; it is shelved, then forgotten, then lent. The decisive hour for such a man is not the hour of his pen. It comes long after, in another room, in another century, when a stranger opens the book at the right page on the right night and feels the floor tilt.

THE TRANSLATOR

George Chapman was born about 1559, somewhere near Hitchin in Hertfordshire, and went down into London to make his living from words. He wrote for the stage with Jonson and Marston; he was jailed for his share of Eastward Ho!; he served Prince Henry as sewer-in-ordinary, and lost his patron when the prince died at eighteen. Through every change of fortune the work he meant to be remembered for was the same work. He was Englishing Homer. He began the Iliad in the 1590s, completed it in 1611, and finished the Odyssey in 1614. The title page of the folio said what he believed of it: The Iliads of Homer Prince of Poets. Never before in any languag truely translated. He wrote in the long fourteener line, a galloping seven-stress measure that the Augustan century would find barbarous. By the time he died in 1634 the taste for him was already going. Pope's smooth couplets buried him for a hundred years. The folio survived in private libraries, an heirloom passed down without being read, the way a sword is passed down without being drawn.

THE BORROWED FOLIO

One copy of it sat on the shelves of the Cowden Clarke family at Enfield, where John Clarke had kept a school and his son Charles had befriended a small, dark, fierce pupil from the livery-stables at Moorgate. The pupil was now twenty, apprenticed to the dressers at Guy's Hospital across the river, lodging in Dean Street in the Borough, walking the wards by day and reading by candle at night. He had been raised on Pope's Homer at the Academy. He knew the story of Achilles the way a surgeon's apprentice knows anatomy, by the names of its parts. On an evening in October 1816 Charles Cowden Clarke carried the folio down to his first-floor lodgings at 8 Clerkenwell Green, two doors from the church of St James, and set it on the table beside two chairs. The candles were lit at ten. The young man from Dean Street came up the stair.

THE NIGHT

What happens in such a room cannot be reconstructed by the hour. It can only be reconstructed by what comes out of it. They opened the first book. Cowden Clarke read aloud; the apprentice followed; then the apprentice read. Chapman's line is not Pope's line. Pope smooths the Greek into a drawing-room voice. Chapman drives it with the shoulder, the way a smith drives a hammer. The verbs land on the body. Wounds open in particular places. The sea is wine-dark because Chapman trusts the adjective. Somewhere in the Catalogue of Ships, somewhere in the parting of Hector from Andromache at the Scaean Gate, the apprentice from Guy's stopped following with the trained mind and began listening with the other one. He had read Homer all his life. He had never heard him. The shock was the shock of recognising that the Greek had a body in it, and that an English poet, dead nearly two hundred years, had felt the body and put it into syllables that could still strike. He thought, without yet having the word for it, that this was what verse was for. They read on. The candles wanted trimming. Two o'clock went by; Cowden Clarke later wrote that they shouted at the lines they liked best. They were reading the way men read who have just been given back something they did not know they had lost. At six in the morning the apprentice rose, said what was said, and went out into the street.

THE WALK HOME

From Clerkenwell Green to Dean Street is about two and a half miles. He took it by Holborn and Newgate, past St Paul's still grey in the river light, down Ludgate Hill, along the Strand, over London Bridge into the Borough. The city was waking around him. He was not composing; he was being composed. By the time he reached his desk he had the sonnet already in his head, and he wrote it down across forty minutes the way a man takes dictation. Fourteen lines, Petrarchan, octave and sestet. Much have I travell'd in the realms of gold. The octave set the reading life he had had; the volta turned on the night just past; the sestet reached, for its image of arrival, to a watcher of the skies when a new planet swims into his ken, and then, in the closing tercet, to stout Cortez on his peak in Darien, staring at the Pacific, Silent, upon a peak in Darien. The historical Cortés was on the wrong peak; Balboa saw that ocean. The slip was Keats's and the slip stayed. What he had seen was not a place on a map. It was a register of English that he had not known was permitted, and the man who had permitted it had been dead for one hundred and eighty-two years.

THE EXAMINER OFFICE

He folded the sheet, sealed it, sent it back to Clerkenwell by the morning post. Cowden Clarke carried it the same week up the hill to the Vale of Health at Hampstead, where Leigh Hunt kept the Examiner. Hunt read it once and set it for the paper. It ran on Sunday 1 December 1816, signed only with the initials. The notice that introduced the new poet was small. Hunt printed many sonnets; he was not given to prophecy. But in the small column of that Sunday's paper the announcement that mattered had been made: the language had a new instrument in it, and the instrument had been tuned the night a borrowed Jacobean folio was read out loud in a Clerkenwell parlour. Hunt would gather Keats into the circle at Hampstead within the month. The four years began.

THE LONG AFTERLIFE

Of those four years much has been said. Keats wrote the odes, wrote Hyperion, wrote The Eve of St Agnes, coughed blood on the staircase at Wentworth Place, sailed for Italy, died in the lodgings above the Spanish Steps on 23 February 1821, aged twenty-five. He was buried in the Protestant Cemetery in Rome under a stone that did not bear his name. The Chapman folio went back to the Cowden Clarke shelves and is now held at Keats House in Hampstead, the page-edges still soft where two readers turned them at speed. Of George Chapman, the labouring translator of Hitchin and London, there is a grave in the churchyard of St Giles in the Fields, the monument long defaced. He had finished his Homer in 1614 and gone to his rest believing the work was the work. He could not have known, and would not have minded not knowing, that the decisive hour of his forty years' labour was an October night two centuries off, in a room he never entered, in the hearing of a boy from a livery-stable who had four years left to live and was about to use them.

THE PEAK IN DARIEN

A translator's life is the life of a man who lends his voice and hopes someone, somewhere, will speak with it. Most lend in vain. The hour, when it comes, comes to them sideways, through another mouth, and asks no permission. Chapman's hour was Keats's hour, and the two of them, the dead man and the dying boy, share the line that they made between them: a wild surmise, and then the silence, and then a peak that no one had ever stood on before.