Translating the Bible to Raise the Fallen: John Dennis’s Psalm 18

John Dennis, the influential literary critic of the early eighteenth century, is primarily read today as an important theorist of the sublime and a stock proponent of neoclassicism in poetics.¹ Throughout his critical oeuvre Dennis struggles to unite these two seemingly opposed forces through a theory of poetry which could be passionately sublime and simultaneously adhere to strict rules. As noted by numerous critics, the attempt to combine passion and rule causes Dennis considerable trouble.² What has not been noted before is that Dennis himself attempts to provide a solution to the contradictions in his theory: translation. Although he devotes considerable effort to the development of a theory of biblical translation in his two most influential essays, The Advancement and Reformation of Modern Poetry (1701) and The Grounds of Criticism in Poetry (1704), scholarship has paid little attention to the central role that translation plays in Dennis’s work. The contribution of this article will be to present a new outlook on Dennis—as a biblical translator. Through a reading of Dennis’s translation of Psalm 18 in The Grounds, the article will argue that the traditional reading of Dennis as a theorist of both the sublime and the neoclassical can best be understood through his attempt to harmonize these two (opposing) forces through the process of translation. The poetry that he reveals as truly sublime is based on biblical text but translated into English according to his version of neoclassical poetic rules in order to combine biblical passion with neoclassical reason and order. By means of translation, he attempts to unite contrary forces in order to return poetry to what he viewed as its original, harmonious state.

Dennis’s understanding of translation developed from the work of John Denham and John Dryden. Both Denham’s and later Dryden’s theories of translation, based on a reading of Horace, provided the model for eighteenth-century translation. In 1656, John Denham’s The Destruction of Troy argues for a free approach to translation. Similarly, Dryden’s 1680 preface to Ovid’s Epistles follows Denham’s lead in calling for a move away from literal translation.³ This understanding of translation as a process of domesticating imitation became the norm of translation throughout the eighteenth century.⁴ In The Translator’s Invisibility: The History of Translation Lawrence Venuti argues that eighteenth-century translations which focused on the free hand of the translator served to erase the signification of the foreign in translated texts, changing them in order to claim them as domestic works.⁵ In this narrative, the investment in free translation as a means of incorporating foreign texts continued unabated throughout the century, being taken up by both the Earl of Roscommon in his 1685 An Essay on Translated Verse and by Alexander Pope in his translation of Homer.⁶ Dennis was certainly greatly influenced by the work of Dryden and promotes domestication in translation in his critical work. In fact, Dennis goes so far as to claim that Virgil “is now, by Mr. Dryden’s Translation, to be reckon’d among our own Poets; and so comes within the compass of my Design.”⁷ By way of translation poetry can come into the English language, but also, in Dennis’s estimation, into the English tradition.

By turning away, however, from the focus on classical translation found in Denham, Dryden, and Roscommon, and towards the Bible, Dennis also promotes a more radical understanding of translation as a means of personal and communal redemption.⁸ Dennis’s psalm translation serves to radicalize the neoclassical notion of translation, investing it with the religious connotation of translation as the means of moving from earth to heaven.⁹ His writing reveals a passionate voice calling for the reform of literature and society through a process of biblical translation. Dennis’s theory of harmonizing translation is, thus, both firmly within the conventional Denham-Dryden-Pope trajectory of eighteenth-century translation history and opposed to it in key ways. While Dennis supports the notion of translation as the reclamation of a classical or biblical tradition...