Well, there speaks a Dryden specialist and an obvious partisan. I would
never say that Dryden's translation is difficult to read; I know well
enough what Dryden is getting at when he says "refulgent"; but I maintain
that it's an adjective lacking in pungency for English speakers. I'm not
sure I'd be willing to concede that "refulgent" had more pungency 300
years ago; I might go so far as to say that Dryden's translation was
filling a need for monolingual Englishmen at that time (for not everyone
would have been willing to deal with the Scots dialect of Gavin Douglas,
though his translation is actually very interesting); but today we have
many translations to choose from, and the question is which one best
communicates the essence of Virgil to today's anglophone reader.
Especially, I wonder about the monolingual anglophone reader who (unlike
myself) does not have Virgil's Latin echoing in his mind and supplying
vividness to latinate terms like "refulgent"; I thought that was the
question we were dealing with.
There must be a big difference in how Virgil-in-English is received
by those who are limited to English, and those who, mindful of the Latin
original, judge translations by that yardstick. The latter will read
Dryden's "refulgent" and be reminded of Virgil's "refulgens"; the former
will read Dryden's "refulgent" and probably not get much of a vivid
impression from it at all. I am trying to put myself in the shoes of the
former. But, from my own point of view, I prefer "refulgens" over
"refulgent"--i.e., the Latin original over an excessively latinate
translation.
I also agree with what David said about Dryden's tidy couplets. For
the same reason, I don't much care for Pope's translation of Homer.
Randi Eldevik
On Fri, 16 Oct 1998, Colin Burrow wrote:
> I would disagree with Randi here on a number of grounds, and would share all
> of Simon Cauchi's preferences. I think Dryden is by far the greatest English
> translator of the Aeneid, both at the level of minute lexical choices and
> the higher level of imaginative affinity with his subject. My chief reasons
> for the preference are spelt out in The Cambridge Companion to Virgil: the
> nub of my argument there is that as a Catholic in the aftermath of the
> Glorious Revolution Dryden needed the imperial structure of the Aeneid as no
> other translator before or since.
>
> True the language is not easy; but it seems to me the particular example
> Randi chooses is not a good one. Translators do and should let the resources
> of the source language seep into their own: think of Shakespeare's Sonnet
> 60: 'in _sequent_ toil all forwards do contend' which takes its cue from
> Ovid's 'dum sequuntur' in a poem very much indebted to Met 15. A slight
> awkwardness at operating between languages is something which the best
> translators and imitators can and should exploit (and which, say, C. Day
> Lewis with his relentless anglicisation of Virgil signally fails to do). It
> says to readers: 'think through and behind my language here; there are older
> words behind it.'
>
> Refulgent is actually not a particularly inkhorny term (it is not very
> widely used at the height of the inkhorn controversy in the 1580s). OED
> first cites it from Hawes in 1509. It was fairly well naturalised by the
> 1690s. What I think Dryden does with Latinisms in his translations is often
> to re-estrange them. That is, a word with a rich English history such as
> 'refulgent' can be made to feel Latin again, and a reader can be made to
> recognise that the passage from one poem to another is not a simple or
> transpicuous one. He often makes one sense the Latin roots of an English
> word, and one is made to feel English as a language with a history. I think
> that way of signalling to readers their Roman roots is something infinitely
> more valuable than anything that is offered in any other translation of
> Virgil. Though yes, it makes reading it a bit harder that reading some of
> the other versions. But reading should not necessarily be easy.
>
> So there!
>
> Colin Burrow, Fellow and Tutor, Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge CB1
> 4AR
> tel: 01223 332483
> web: http://www.english.cam.ac.uk
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> On Behalf Of RANDI C ELDEVIK
> Sent: 16 October 1998 15:35
> To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
> Subject: Re: VIRGIL: Translations in English
>
> I can't agree with the recommendation of Dryden. Anyone who would
> translate Latin "refulgens" by the English inkhorn term "refulgent" is not
> doing his job conscientiously. "Refulgent" does not have the same
> descriptive force for English readers that "refulgens" had for ancient
> Romans. That's just a single example, but it is symptomatic of the
> general deficiencies in Dryden's translation.
> Randi Eldevik
>
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