2024 Author: Leah Sherlock | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 05:25
Alexander Pope - the famous translator of Homer's works, English prose writer and poet, who worked in the 18th century.
Youth years
Native of a fairly we althy family, Alexander Pope was born in 1688, on May 21st. The future writer spent his childhood and youth in Binfield, located in Windsor Forest, to which his family changed to noisy London in 1700. The calm rural atmosphere contributed to the development of Alexander as a person.
At home, Alexander Pope received a decent education, which allowed him to begin to get involved in poetic lines early. To a greater extent, the future poet gravitated towards the epic works of Homer, Milton, Virgil, filled with heroic themes.
The beginning of the literary path
Like Virgil, Alexander Pope entered literature with The Pastorals (1709), and in 1711 he presented the readership with the poem An Essay on Criticism, in which, standing up for the writers of antiquity, he addressed critics modernity with a call for indulgence, tolerance andsoftness. This work has become a kind of manifesto of British classicism of the Renaissance period.
From 1712 to 1714, Alexander Pope, who from childhood had a craving for the epic and an innate penchant for satire, worked on the heroic-comic poem "The Rape of the Lock", in which he showed the modern secular community with a great sense of humor. The work tells about two families who quarreled greatly because the young lord jokingly cut off the lock of his beloved. By the way, the satellites of the planet Uranus were named after the heroes of the poem: Umbriel, Ariel and Belinda.
Alexander Pope translations
To translate the "Iliad" into English, Alexander Pope was prompted by his passion for the work of Homer, as well as the perseverance of close friends. The lack of knowledge of the ancient Greek language, the lack of higher education were more than offset by the author's enormous ability to work. The translation in 6 volumes in the artistic sense turned out to be very powerful and bright. The painstaking work dragged on for several years, from 1715 to 1726, and was carried out by the previously unused iambic pentameter, otherwise - the “heroic couplet”, which was an innovation for English literature.
During the Jacobite riots of 1715, the suspected Catholic Alexander Pope was heavily criticized by Whig writers for his association with D. Arbuthnot, J. Swift, and others. Pope was forced in 1716 to move with his family to Chiswick (near London), where a year later he buried his father. Then, together with his mother, he moved to Twicknam, settled in a house onbank of the Thames and lived there until the end of his days.
Defending satire
From 1722 to 1726, Pope also translated The Odyssey into English with help, and then enthusiastically set to work on Shakespeare's work, trying to rid his translations of the vulgarisms inherent in the original. In 1733, several significant works saw the light of day, including "Imitations of Horace" (Imitations of Horace), which defended satire and sharply criticized corrupt politicians. Alexander Pope, an 18th-century poet, believed that satire has the right to freely express what it considers necessary. Therefore, behind the scenes, furious battles of politicians, unpresentable strife in the royal family, which engulfed all the mania of stock games, he tried to heal with ridicule. The most famous of the "Imitations" is the poem "Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot", written in 1734.
By the age of 56, the already weak he alth of the English poet throughout his life was undermined by asthma and an exacerbation of the inflammatory process in the kidneys. Alexander Pope, whose poems made a huge contribution to the development of English literature and became its invaluable legacy, died on May 30, 1744.
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