"Bringing Virgil over into Britain": John Dryden Refigures Aeneid 1-5

"Bringing Virgil over into Britain": John Dryden Refigures Aeneid 1-51 RICHARD MORTON I John Dryden is one of England's greatest translators from Latin poetry and as a critic wrote voluminously on translation, but his peculiar genius in the art proves hard to define. Modem translation theory, in essence a commentary on Walter Benjamin's celebrated essay, "Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers,"2 is not very helpful. It does not focus on versions of the familiar schoolroom classics, but rather on translations that make accessible to members of a new language group high-art texts written in a language unknown to them. The consequent "power" of literary translators is regularly stressed. André Lefevere characterizes them: "Since they are at home in two cultures and two literatures, they have the power to construct the image of one literature for consumption by the readers of another."3 Evidently this power must depend on the new consumers' ignorance of the original language. But translators of classical texts in Dryden's day could not have such power— traditional schooling in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries imposed (at least on boys) a basic reading knowledge of the ancient languages. Twentiethcentury translators from languages unknown to their readers recognize that making an original literary work available involves complex emotional, rhetorical and social issues; the definitions of access and availability are central problems. They question whether the rhetorical features—even the plain sense—of the original can be shaped to fit the cultural assumptions of a new readership so as to make the sensibilities of the original seem familiar, or 147 148 / MORTON whether the new readership must be made always aware that what they read is foreign, "other," to them. But eighteenth-century readers could access the other directly in the original classical language—there was no call to mimic it in a vernacular translation. And yet, as the native speakers of Latin or classical Greek were long dead, there was no practical way in which anyone could access the originals with full understanding—or feel "at home" in these cultures and literatures; no way to be, as we say of modem linguists, fluently bilingual. Dryden and his contemporaries could not be as intimately familiar with the classical world as we sometime enviously tend to assume from our position of modem illiteracy . Today's bilingual and bicultural translators, consciously preserving the foreignness of a twentieth-century text, can do so because they are specially qualified to understand the semantic environment of their original. But while available to Vergil was a capacious literature and a sturdy living language , translators from the classics can only access the surviving sub-set of literary discourse that he and his fellow poets selected, together with some shards, tatters and ruins of a dead language-scape. Dryden's basic qualifications as a translator could not be based on a native competence in his source language. His knowledge of and sensitivity to the originals were no doubt sharper than most (he had trained under the ferocious and revered Dr. Busby of Westminster School and was, after all, a great poet), but his ability to gloss—to find the plain surface meaning of the ancient texts—was no different from, and no more privileged than that of his first English readers.4 They, too, would have worked through these texts from childhood (at least the Latin ones—Greek was always rarer). Dryden says as much in his letter to Lord Clifford: "You have read [Vergil] with pleasure, and I dare say, with Admiration in the Latine, of which you are a Master."5 While some boys, like Sir Roger de Coverley, were not sent to Westminster, because they were blockheads , and the Squire Westerns up and down the country were doubtless too obsessed with foxes and too befuddled with port to spend much time at their classical studies, they probably were not part of Dryden's intended audience in English either. A translation that tries to be "at home" in the original Latin or ancient Greek can only do so by guess-work or optimistic intuition, and will be futile —likely to read, as Cowley imagined a literal version of Pindar, as if "one...