Alexander Pope is a famous translator of Homer's works, an English prose writer and poet who worked in the 18th century.
Adolescence
A native of a fairly wealthy family, Alexander Pope was born in 1688, May 21. The future writer spent his childhood and youth in Binfield, located in the Windsor Forest, to which his family replaced the bustling 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 to the epic works of Homer, Milton, Virgil, filled with heroic themes.
The beginning of the literary path
Like Virgil, Alexander Pope entered literature with Pastorals (1709), and in 1711 presented the poem Experience of Criticism to the readers, in which, defending the writers of antiquity, he appealed to critics of modernity with an appeal for leniency tolerance and gentleness. This work has become a kind of manifesto of British classicism of the Renaissance.
From 1712 to 1714, Alexander Pope, who had a thirst for epics and an innate inclination for satire, worked on the heroic-comic poem “The Rape of the Curl”, in which the modern secular community showed with a great sense of humor. The work tells of two families who quarreled greatly due to the fact that the young lord jokingly cut the lock of his lover's hair. By the way, the satellites of the planet Uranus: Umbriel, Ariel and Belinda were named after the heroes of the poem.
Translations by Alexander Pope
The translation of the Iliad into English by Alexander Pope was prompted by his enthusiasm for Homer's work, as well as the persistence of close friends. The lack of knowledge of the ancient Greek language, the lack of higher education was more than compensated by the author’s enormous capacity for work. The translation in 6 volumes in the artistic sense turned out to be very powerful and vibrant. The painstaking work dragged on for several years, from 1715 to 1726, and was carried out by the pentameter iamba, which had not been used before, otherwise - the “heroic couplet”, which was an innovation for English literature.
During the Jacobite unrest of 1715, the Catholic Alexander Pope, who came under suspicion, was heavily criticized by Whig writers for communicating with D. Arbuthnot, J. Swift, and others. Pope was forced in 1716 to relocate with his family in Chiswick (near London), where a year later he buried his father. Then, with his mother, he moved to Twiknem, settled in a house on the banks of the Thames and lived there until the end of his days.
On the defense of satire
From 1722 to 1726, Pope also translated the Odyssey into English, and then enthusiastically embarked on Shakespeare's work, trying to rid his translations of the vulgarisms inherent in the original. In 1733, several significant works were released, including Imitations of Horace, which defended satire and sharply criticized corrupt politicians. Alexander Pope, a poet of the 18th century, believed that satire had the right to freely express what he considered necessary. Therefore, behind-the-scenes furious fights of politicians, unpresentable discord in the royal family, which swept all the mania of stock games, he tried to heal with ridicule. The most famous of the "Imitations" is the poem "Message to Dr. Arbuthnot," written in 1734.
By the age of 56, the already poor health of the English poet throughout his life was undermined by asthma and an exacerbation of the inflammatory process in the kidneys. Died Alexander Pope, whose poems made a huge contribution to the development of English literature and became its invaluable legacy, May 30, 1744.