ABSTRACT
Percy Bysshe Shelley’s version of the Homeric Hymn to Hermes is a striking poetic success which exhibits many of his characteristics and is distinguished by enviable wit, ease and fluency. Shelley translated into rhyming couplets a group of shorter Hymns in early 1818 before he left for Italy; in July 1820 he rendered into ottava rima the Hymn to Hermes, which was much longer, more anecdotal and different in tone and spirit. An important influence on many of Shelley’s translations from Greek, including ‘Symposium’, ‘Cyclops’ and the ‘Hymn to Mercury’, was the fact of living in Italy. Perhaps the most important feature of the Pompeian expedition was that Shelley explicitly translated his Italian experience into Greek: The scene was what the Greeks beheld. In his version of the Hymn to Hermes, Shelley emphasizes the characteristics which set the gods apart from ordinary mortals.
