Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Prologue
- Introduction: the critical landscape
- 1 Virgil and Augustus
- 2 Virgil and the poets: Horace, Ovid and Lucan
- 3 Other voices in Servius: schooldust of the ages
- 4 Dryden's Virgil and the politics of translation
- 5 Dido and her translators
- 6 Philology and textual cleansing
- 7 Virgil in a cold climate: fascist reception
- 8 Beyond the borders of Eboli: anti-fascist reception
- 9 Critical end games
- Bibliography
- Index
4 - Dryden's Virgil and the politics of translation
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 07 December 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Acknowledgements
- Prologue
- Introduction: the critical landscape
- 1 Virgil and Augustus
- 2 Virgil and the poets: Horace, Ovid and Lucan
- 3 Other voices in Servius: schooldust of the ages
- 4 Dryden's Virgil and the politics of translation
- 5 Dido and her translators
- 6 Philology and textual cleansing
- 7 Virgil in a cold climate: fascist reception
- 8 Beyond the borders of Eboli: anti-fascist reception
- 9 Critical end games
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
the most noble and spirited translation I know in any language.
ALEXANDER POPE on Dryden's Virgilthe Aeneid was evidently a party piece, as much as Absalom and Achitophel. Virgil was as slavish a writer as any of the gazetteers.
ALEXANDER POPE, quoted by his friend Joseph Spence.“May execration pursue his memory”: Virgil in the eighteenth century
In 1685, even more than a decade before Dryden published his translation of the Aeneid, Matthew Prior could write in A Satyr on the modern Translators:
If VIRGIL labour'd not to be translated,
Why suffers he the only thing he hated?
Had he foreseen some ill officious Tongue,
Would in unequal Strains blaspheme his Song;
Nor Prayers, nor Force, nor Fame should e'er prevent
The just Performance of his wise intent:
Smiling he'd seen his martyr'd Work expire,
Nor live to feed more cruel Foes than Fire.
(151–8)Dryden himself, by this time translator of Ovid's Heroides (1680), is one of the objects of the satire (23 “In the head of this Gang too John Dryden appears”), and it is fair to say that when the 1697 Virgil translation came out, at the end of a century that had seen around thirty partial or complete translations, largely Royalist, of the Aeneid alone, it drove all from the field. So much so that Prior could later write, now in satire against the lack of learning of his age:
Hang HOMER and VIRGIL; their meaning to seek,
A Man must have pok'd in the Latin and Greek;
Those who Love their own Tongue, we have Reason to Hope,
Have read them Translated by DRYDEN and POPE.
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- Information
- Virgil and the Augustan Reception , pp. 122 - 153Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2001
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