ABSTRACT
John Keats, in describing his impressions of the English translation of Homer in his ‘On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer’, compared his discovery of a new, unfamiliar world through translation to the conquest of the New World. The poem centres on the appropriation of foreign lands, moving from travels in “realms of gold” and “goodly states and kingdoms” to the acquisition of cultural treasures, represented in Chapman’s “loud and bold” voice as he reveals the true world of Homer. Rafael suggests that conquest is “the dominant approach to translation in the Western world, as well as in many other places colonized by the West”. Claims of complete untranslatability, however, are the exception rather than the rule. In most cases translation remains necessary for conquest to take place at all. At the same time, the very possibility of translation, notwithstanding the risk of appropriation and erasure, may hold the potential for resistance, and even counter-appropriation, through various forms of textual conquest.
