awkward consciousness of a prisoner confined within the necessary limitations of human thought. We may judge, however, from these examples of the "epic" idea—the word "epos"[1] simply takes us back to the rise of poetical recitation without musical accompaniment, and suggests the Arab Reciter—the necessity of insisting on the relativity of literary growth to social evolution as opposed, on the one hand, to the treatment of literature as the mere imitation of arbitrary models; and, on the other hand, to à priori conceptions alike of the genus literature and of its species.
§ 14. We shall now seek the signs of literary relativity, not in the comparison of different species ofliterature, nor in the different characters of men and women in various stages of social life, but in that effort to transfer the thoughts expressed in the language of one social group into that of another, which we call translation. How far is accuracy of translation possible? It is clear that both in prose and verse there are difficulties in the way of the translator sometimes insurmountable. Even in prose translation objects such as animals or plants nameless in the translator's language, or customs and institutions unknown to his group, or ideas, political, religious, philosophic, similarly nameless, may present such obstacles. But in verse, besides these difficulties, there is the close connection between sounds and ideas which in every language is more or less recognisable. For example, in the Chinese drama Ho-han-
- ↑ "Epos" (root vep, cf. Latin vox) seems at an early period of Greek life to have been used especially of an oracular "saying." These "sayings" were given in verse (the development of metre and music being in early Greece, as elsewhere, partly in priestly hands), and so "epos" came to mean "a verse." When lyric songs set to music, "melê," as the Greeks called them, came to be distinguished from merely spoken verses, the "epos" or "recited poetry" was separated from the "melos" or "poetry of song." (Cf. the recurring invocation, ἔσπετε μοι, Μουσαι, "recite for me, ye Muses," and the root σεπ-.)
