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  • Neither Safe Nor Dull
  • Rhodri Lewis (bio)
Translation and the Poet’s Life: The Ethics of Translating in English Culture, 1646–1726 by Paul Davis. Oxford University Press. 2008. £50. ISBN 978 0 19 929783 2

In the first chapter of his Arte of English Poesie (1589), George Puttenham distinguishes between the characteristics of the poet and those of the translator, to the disadvantage of the latter. The ‘poet makes and contrives out of his own brain both the verse and the matter of his poem, and not by any foreign copy or example, as doth the translator, who therefore may well be said a versifier, but not a poet’.1 The translator, in other words, may have the linguistic and technical skills required to make poetry, but he lacks the furor poeticus that endows true poetry with its prophetic, quasi-divine, qualities. While the poet is a vates with the ability to see beyond the realm of his own experiences and to transform this vision accordingly, the translator is a slave to the literary materials in front of him. Yet, as Puttenham’s Arte makes quite clear, the dividing lines between the tasks of the poet and the translator were, in reality, a good deal more opaque than Neoplatonic grandstanding about ‘inspiration’ would suggest. After all, the rhetorical mode of education espoused by humanist pedagogues favoured imitatio above all else: one became an early modern English orator or poet by studying [End Page 84] the examples of Demosthenes, Cicero, Homer, and Virgil. Such imitation connoted virtue, and this virtue bore the stamp both of style and subject matter, verba and res. On this model, modern writers carried over to their own times the best of ancient Athens and Rome. Take the Greek metaphora, so called because it denotes the literary technique in which one term carries the meaning of another; the Latin equivalent is translatio and rests on the same etymological root. For the early moderns, the practices of imitation fashioned a kind of cultural translation, in which ancient literary forms and topics became a metaphor through which to dignify Elizabethan England, the France of the Pléiade, and many other national or cultural traditions.

These two models of poetic endeavour – one based on inspiration, the other on imitation – sat in uneasy though generally fruitful symbiosis. Yet by the middle of the English seventeenth century they had been pulled apart, a separation that would be confirmed decisively in the years after the Restoration in 1660. This was because the visionary quality of the furor poeticus was by definition irrational, and easily contaminated by the threat of ‘enthusiasm’; as there was Restoration consensus that the civil wars had been the product of enthusiastic speech and writing, this contamination was fatal. Consequently, the imitative model of poetics – and with it, translation – came to have a new prestige and cultural importance as an antidote to such anxieties: in constraining the poet’s freedom to err, it was seen as doing important meta-literary work, and conferred an intrinsic mutuality on the literary enterprise. (By definition, the translator could not produce his work alone.) A good marker of this shift is that, as early as 1680, Dryden could rank imitation as one of the three subdivisions of translation, rather than as a discrete and often extra-poetic set of intellectual practices. One generation later, an even more vivid index of the cultural capital that had accrued to translating is that Pope was able to make himself a name and a fortune ‘translating’ works whose original language he could not read. Richard Bentley’s famous jibe that ‘It is a pretty poem, Mr Pope, but you must not call it Homer’ captures something both of Pope’s technical shortcomings in construing ancient Greek, and of why Pope did not have to be greatly troubled by them.

Paul Davis’s thoughtful and fine-grained new study, Translation and the Poet’s Life, examines the emergence and evolution of this new literary model from the mid-seventeenth century to the publication of Pope’s Odyssey. In so doing, it tracks the differing strategies adopted by translators as they sought recognition as poets – whether in the public...

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