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Seventeenth-Century Virgilian Translation

This case study examines two seventeenth-century translations of the works of Virgil: John Ogilby’s pioneering mid-century productions, first published in 1649 and subsequently expanded, rewritten, and embellished with annotations, illustrations, and a Latin edition in the years that followed; and John Dryden’s late-seventeenth-century version, first published in 1697, which incorporated enough of Ogilby’s distinctive paratextual features that it promised to rival and supplant the earlier text as the foremost English poetic translation of Virgil. I argue that for all the similarities in their respective projects of translation, Ogilby and Dryden developed two very different visions of the way a translation of the Virgilian corpus might promote the English (or British) common weal. Ogilby, translating Virgil during and after the Commonwealth and Protectorate, capitalized on the notion that Virgil was a timeless poet. He developed a literary performance and a “Royal Folio” that might disseminate Stuart ideals of royal magnificence and splendor. Dryden, translating Virgil in the immediate wake of the 1688-89 Revolution, appealed to refined notions of poetic utility and gradual historical change that had emerged during the battles between the Ancients and the Moderns. Adapting Virgil’s poetry to the needs of a limited monarchy, he imagined the wealth of the nation in a much broader sense than Ogilby did and invited the interests of his audience to merge in a productive tension with the interests of the British monarch.

In pursuing this line of investigation, I have two linked aims. For one thing, a study of Virgil’s reception necessarily reveals a great deal about seventeenth-century notions of poetry’s civic influence. Virgil’s poetry was more widely and explicitly analyzed with respect to precisely this issue than any other poet, ancient or modern. Early in the eighteenth century, Joseph Addison would later accord a similar treatment to Milton’s Paradise Lost, but even then, Addison stopped short of explaining what

Milton’s “Moral” was—that is, his notion of what the poem was intended to teach its readers about civic life. Seventeenth-century critics were, on the whole, more explicit in their analyses of Virgil’s utility than they were of living poets. One can therefore learn a lot from these discussions about how poets and critics of the period were conceiving poetry’s civic utility in general. From very early on in Virgil’s seventeenth-century reception (indeed, in his sixteenth-century reception, if not before), one can see that poets’ civic influence—particularly that of epic poets or “Heroick” poets—was very often being conceived as a capacity of affecting “the manners” (Lat. mores, Fr. moeurs), a civic category that loosely correlates with our modern idea of culture.

This avenue also provides a useful means of recovering an earlier way of conceiving the relationship between what we would describe today as “original” works and more imitative modes of poetic production. The advent of “Translation Studies” as a distinct field in recent years has drawn increasing attention to the ways seventeenth- and eighteenth-century practices of translation defy modern assumptions about the

comparative value of original and derivative poetry in the earlier period.42 I am both drawing on and extending that work in pointing out that this distinction begins to fall

42 _{Cf. Stuart Gillespie and David Hopkins, eds., The Oxford History of Literary Translation in English, vol.}

2, 1660-1790 (Oxford and NY: Oxford UP, 2005), which demonstrates the advancement of this scholarly subfield.

away if one conceives the earlier performances as performances of commitment to the common weal. During the seventeenth century, the translator had a civic role as a kind of cultural gatekeeper—a writer who assisted in the dissemination of both dangerous and potentially useful ideas, cultural models, and forms of knowledge within the

commonwealth. In prefaces and dedications, English translators rationalized the introduction of something foreign into the commonwealth or the extension of access within the commonwealth to a classical body of writing to which those lacking an elite education did not typically have access (women, gentry on the rise, commoners of all kinds). As such, the translator had license to mediate the transmission of the parent text to accommodate the perceived needs of the readers for whom he or she translated, whether by providing prefatory comments and annotations, selecting out particular sections for translation (and omission), embellishing the original sense at the level of the line, or otherwise producing a text that promised to increase knowledge, provide

amusement, or improve the manners of its new readers.

Virgil constituted something of a special case. To translate Virgil—and, at that, the entire Virgilian corpus—was to perform a very particular act of commitment to reforming and improving English culture. The Latin term “translatio,” indicating a transferal or a bearing “across,” imagines a westward movement of culture and arms from Greece to Rome and beyond, in a symbolic manifestation of Aeneas’s foundational journey from Troy to Italy westward and northward to Britain: translatio studii et imperii, a translocation of culture, knowledge, and imperial or political authority that, in a literary context, “typically involves the borrowing from, adaptation, and reinvention of ideas, beliefs and authority from an older culture into a new one, as symbolized by the founding

of a city or nation.”43 Virgil himself had developed his Aeneid on the “design” of Homer’s epics, as seventeenth-century critics understood them: the first six books corresponded roughly to the plot of The Odyssey and the last six books to the plot of The Iliad, albeit with a new hero, a retelling of the story of the Trojan War, and a new

narrative of national foundation, borne forward from the ashes of a more Asiatic clime, that suited the mores, cultural disposition, and leaders of his own age. And this mode of appropriation had been used by numerous subsequent epic poets—most famously, Dante, but also ancient poets such as Statius and modern poets such as Tasso, Spenser, and, later, Milton and Richard Blackmore. In this context, a translation of The Aeneid—even a relatively literal one—carried unusual force as an act of mediation between ancient and modern civilizations.

As such, there is no reason to presume that even the most reverent, faithful Virgilian translators saw themselves as duty-bound to present their modern audiences with every possible nuance of the Virgilian original in the way we would understand it today or even in the ways that the most scrupulous, Latin-literate contemporary readers might have understood the text then. In our own era, an attitude of respect and reverence toward a translated text might readily lead to an interpretive effort to render the text with relative literalness, in a manner that provides access to the author’s original meaning; however, this was not necessarily the case for early-modern translators. By the mid eighteenth century, Samuel Johnson was still describing translation in essentially utilitarian terms as the product of the peculiar conditions and perceived needs of an advanced state of civilization in a community with a clear sense of itself as a group of

43 _{Cf. Kimberly K. Bell, “‘Translatio’ and the Constructs of a Roman Nation in Virgil’s ‘Aeneid,’ Rocky} Mountain Review 62.1 (Spring 2008): 13-14.

native speakers—the expected consequence of commerce with “distant nations,” the result of “curiosity sent abroad in quest of improvement,” and the byproduct of a culture with the leisure time and the desire to promote, within its borders, a knowledge of history, a knowledge of medicine, and a love of the arts.44 Johnson’s analysis turns on a notion of translation as a response to civic need and a notion of the development of civilization in which basic needs are met (physical health, political stability, etc.) before the arts can flourish.45 Thus, even amid the rise of a scrupulous historicism in the

reception of the classics that is harmonious with a more modern idea of the civic function of translations (most famously, Richard Bentley’s philological interpretation of the Epistles of Philaris), theorists of the period did not necessarily advocate, as a philosophical goal of translation, reverence to the foreign author for its own sake. Rather, the philosophical goal of translation—at least as articulated by Johnson—was national improvement. By extension, the translation of Virgil was an act of mediation between Rome and England, Latin and modern English, that promised to improve the national culture.

One of the benefits of examining Dryden and Ogilby side by side, with these ideas of cultural transmission and reformation in view, is that such an examination offers a means of revisiting—and developing an enhanced understanding of—one of the most

44_{Idler 68-69 (August 1759), in The Yale Edition of the Works of Samuel Johnson (New Haven: Yale UP,}

1963).

45 _{See esp. pp. 212-13. Among the Romans, he argues, translation was not a priority. “Every man who in}

Rome aspired to the praise of literature, thought it necessary to learn Greek, and had no need of versions when they could study the originals,” and indeed “it does not appear that any man grew eminent by interpreting another.” The “first nation who felt the ardour of translation” was the Arab state that, in subduing part of the Greek empire “found their captives wiser than themselves.” In a quest for speedy improvements, and having “discovered that many might grow wise by the labour of a few,” they sought out works of medicine and philosophy and translated them into Arabic. “Whether they attempted the poets is not known,” Johnson observes. “[T]heir literary zeal was vehement, but it was short, and probably expired before they had time to add the arts of elegance to those of necessity.”

famous insults in English “Augustan” literature. Thanks to Dryden’s Mac Flecknoe (pub. 1682), Ogilby has been immortalized to posterity as “Uncle Ogleby,” whose “mangled” works line the way for the procession of the dunces amid the urban excesses of human excrement (or “Shadwell”):

No Persian Carpets spread th’ Imperial way, But scatter’d Limbs of mangled Poets lay: From dusty shops neglected Authors come, Martyrs of Pies, and Reliques of the Bum. Much Heywood, Shirly, Ogleby there lay, But loads of Sh—— almost choakt the way.46

Dryden’s satire capitalizes on a double irony. Ogilby had himself been instrumental in planning Charles II’s coronation procession—an appointment that may well have

reflected Ogilby’s ambition to be honored by Charles in a formal laureate position. (The office was eventually created for Dryden in 1668.) In tandem, the imagining of Ogilby’s works as so much toilet paper enacts a very precise diminution of the lavish form of bookmaking with which Ogilby had made his name as a printer. His Virgilian

publications, like his printed memorial of the coronation procession, and like most of the maps and texts that Ogilby published during the Protectorate and Restoration, had been printed as “Royal Folios,” volumes distinct for their grand scale, their extravagant illustrations, and their publication on the finest paper that was then available.

My hypothesis here is therefore that in Mac Flecknoe, as in the later project of translation, Dryden was not merely ridiculing Ogilby for bad poetry, as we would understand that phrase today, but for what we might identify today as a cultural judgment: his love of court ceremony, his participation in court masques, his role as a supplier of pomp and circumstance for Charles, his rigid adherence to ideals of divine

46_{The Works of John Dryden, ed. H. T. Swedenberg, Jr., vol. 2, Poems 1681-1684 (Berkeley and LA: U}

right—in short, his comparatively servile, reverent commitment to traditional

monarchical ideals. Dryden in contrast, even while serving as England’s official Poet Laureate and Royal Historiographer, had distanced himself from the court, had reveled in public disputations, and had advocated “Wit” over “Dulness.” Rather than assuming that an English poet could affect the nation most nobly and efficiently by winning the ear of the monarch and his or her court—the assumption that had guided the earlier laureate work of Ben Jonson and Sir William D’Avenant—Dryden had adopted the role of

propagandist, professional dramatist, and professional translator, effectively asserting that an English poet could best serve the nation by mediating between the monarch and “the people,” symbolically if not also practically.47 It is probably not surprising that a poet who approached the laureateship this way would have waited until after he was no longer Laureate to undertake a major translation of the Virgilian corpus—a configuration

somewhat at odds with Virgil’s own civic role as it had been conceived up to this point. In accordance with both this guiding hypothesis and what I take to be the civic stakes of both translations, this case study examines a category of civic influence much broader than the category typically associated with “poetry” in modern treatments of the subject. I will not merely focus on striking turns of phrase at the level of the line; instead, I seek to explain how Ogilby, Dryden, and other Virgilian translators of this period

address their work to the “manners” of their readers. As noted in the Introduction, this category encompassed a broad range of social and cultural norms relevant to the life of

47 _{The outline of this way of seeing Dryden’s career is suggested by Edmund Kemper Broadus, The} Laureateship: A Study of the Office of Poet Laureate in England (Freeport, NY: Books for Libraries Press, 1966), esp. chaps 5-6; however, Broadus himself assumes that Dryden supports monarchical absolutism. Also see Richard Helgerson, Self-Crowned Laureates: Spenser, Jonson, Milton, and the Literary System

(Berkeley: U California P, 1983). It is significant that Dryden composed no masques to speak of during his tenure as Laureate; The Secular Masque (1700), written just before his death, was his most notable

the polity—a range much broader than prior investigations of the relationship between “poetry” and “politics” in these performances have tended to allow, insofar as it encompassed not only “political history,” but also such aspects of culture as codes of tolerance, cultures of debate, gender roles, and attitudes toward authority. And this was precisely the sphere of influence that Dryden imagined when he disparaged Ogilby as a “dull” translator in the Preface to Sylvae (1685):

What English Readers unacquainted with Greek or Latin will believe me or any other Man, when we commend those Authors [Virgil, Homer, et al.], and confess we derive all that is pardonable in us from their Fountains, if they take those to be the same Poets, whom our Ogleby’s have translated? But I dare assure them, that a good Poet is no more like himself, in a dull Translation, than his Carcass would be to his living Body. There are many who understand Greek and Latin, and yet are ignorant of their Mother Tongue. The properties and delicacies of the English

are known to few; ’tis impossible even for a good Wit, to understand and practice them without the help of a liberal Education, long Reading, and digesting of those few good Authors we have amongst us, the knowledge of Men and Manners, the freedom of habitudes and conversation with the best company of both Sexes; and, in short, without wearing off the rust which he contracted while he was laying in a stock of Learning. … Thus it appears necessary that a Man should be a nice Critick in his Mother Tongue before he attempts to Translate a foreign Language. Neither is it sufficient that he be able to Judge of Words and Stile; but he must be a Master of them too: He must perfectly understand his Author’s Tongue, and absolutely command his own. So that to be a thorow Translatour, he must be a thorow Poet.48

Dryden’s critique of Ogilby as a translator does not rest on Ogilby’s ignorance of Latin, his misconstrual of the basic sense of Virgil’s poetry, or even his command of English syntax at the level of the line. Dryden does not suggest that Ogilby does not grasp “English”; he suggests that Ogilby does not sufficiently know “the English”: their “few good Authors,” their “Manners,” their “habitudes,” and their habitual modes of

48_{The Works of John Dryden, ed. Earl Miner, vol. 3, 4.29-5.26. Dryden impugns Ogilby again later on in}

his discussion, which is affixed to some of his earliest published translations of Virgil: “[A]ll that I can promise for my self, is only that I have done both [i.e., rendered Virgil’s ‘Majesty’ and ‘conciseness’], better than Ogleby, and perhaps as well as Caro [Hanibal Caro, the Italian translator]” (8.18-21). Dryden refrains from disparaging Ogilby so explicitly in the prefatory matter of his own full translation of The Works of Virgil.

“conversation,” as gleaned from “the best company of both Sexes.” For Dryden, the “thorow Translatour” must be a “thorow Poet,” and the “thorow Poet” is, above all, a student of culture. The “Poet,” for Dryden, is not distinguished by expressive power per se (e.g., superior diction, superior craftsmanship as a stylist), but by a superior knowledge and understanding of the community in which his or her “Mother Tongue” takes shape. Language, for Dryden, is not an entity to be considered apart from questions of

community. From Dryden’s perspective, Ogilby’s shortcoming as a translator is not his failure to produce a verse translation that is pleasing to the ear, but his failure to diagnose and respond to the needs and “habitudes” of his nation.

I therefore follow Laura Rosenthal in attempting to read the work of Restoration poets “for their representations of family, community, and nation” rather than for their representations of “the identities of individual characters, as well as the social forces that those characters engage, confront, and represent.” Rosenthal has shown that, in

Restoration sex comedies, marriage is “neither the expression of authoritarian

organization nor a contractual response to personal inclination but instead the foundation

for familial and national strength and stability.”49 I argue in the following chapters that the manners to which Ogilby and Dryden appeal in their respective translations of Virgil are seen as the foundation for national strength and stability: obedience, humility, and self-submission in the case of Ogilby’s translation, and skepticism, politely-contained envy, and congenial self-assertion in the case of Dryden’s.

I am not a classicist by training, and my discussion inevitably bears the marks of