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  • Through the Looking Glas and Back With Agatha Christie
  • Cushing Strout
Andrew Eames , The 8:55 to Baghdad: From London to Iraq on the Trail of Agatha Christie and the Orient Express. Overlook Press, 2006. 404 pages. $14.95 pb.

Those of us in a position to advise graduate students about choosing dissertation topics often urge them to choose authors they love, in the hope that affection and enthusiasm will help to sustain scholarly labour. By that standard, Robin Sowerby's performance is exemplary: his belief in the validity of an English Augustan aesthetic, and in the excellence of its best products, shines forth on every page of this earnest study.Dr Sowerby's views are old-fashioned, as he forthrightly acknowledges in the introduction: 'At a time when most new studies of the period are concerned with issues to do with race, gender, politics, commercialization, and the rise of the novel, the term "Augustan" has very largely fallen out of fashion.' A glance at the conference programmes of British and American societies for eighteenth-century studies will confirm the accuracy of this overview: not only has the term 'Augustan' fallen out of fashion, but the kinds of knowledge necessary for responsibly confirming or attacking that term – working knowledge of Greek and Latin, wide reading in Renaissance poetry, sensitivity to poetic metre and decorum – are woefully lacking among many ofthose who now proclaim the arrival of a 'new Eighteenth Century'. A corrective study reminding us of the deep respect some seventeenth- and eighteenth-century poets had for their classical forbears would be a helpful intervention at this moment. But Sowerby, who brings to his task solid training in classical and English poetry, weakens the impact of his study by focusing too narrowly on the aesthetics of translation, as if questions of syntax, metre, and diction could be decisively separated [End Page 98] from the cultural moments in which the works he treats were composed.

In describing his enterprise, Sowerby claims that 'there is as yet no full length comparative study of the interrelation between the Roman Augustan aesthetic and its English counterpart, particularly as it is manifested in and through translation, which always plays a central role in larger processes of cultural transmission'. We are evidently meant to understand 'comparative' here as pointing to the range of authors discussed, which includes Vida, Surrey, Stanyhurst, Campion, Marlowe, Donne, Jonson, Beaumont, Waller, Denham, Dryden, Rowe, and Pope. By placing Dryden's Virgil and Pope's Homer in a richly described literary context, Sowerby has an opportunity to extend our understanding of their accomplishments. Yet some of his own most important predecessors, such as William Frost and Judith Sloman, go entirely uncited; and while Paul Hammond's highly original recent book, Dryden and the Traces of Classical Rome, is duly listed in the bibliography, Sowerby does not take its arguments into account. In Hammond's challenging reading, Dryden 'writes as the heir to the Romans partly to avoid … the burden of being heir to the Jacobeans', but in Sowerby's account, earlier English writers pose no threat to Dryden, who appears as the culmination of a century of steady improvement in translation. For Hammond's Dryden, translation is 'the inescapable condition of the world, the shifting ground on which forms of singleness and stability could be fashioned'; the task of the translator requires confronting uncertainty and ambiguity. For Sowerby's Dryden, by contrast, the task of the translator appears to be largely a matter of smoothness: he praises Dryden for giving us 'nothing … to impede the understanding or to halt the flow of the verse which in its style and expression is entirely self-consistent and constitutes a seamless whole'.

In this narrative, the journey toward Dryden and Pope begins with the neo-Latin De Arte Poetica of Marco Girolamo Vida (1527), which Sowerby links to the English Augustans by quoting it not only from the Latin original but from the English couplet translation by Pope's protégé Christopher Pitt (1725). Despite an excellent modern edition by Ralph G. Williams, Vida's influential treatise has not been much noticed by recent scholars, though W. K. Wimsatt warmly praised it. Sowerby sets out...

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