The Translator’s Invisibility

Thus Priam fell: and shar’d one common Fate
With Troy in Ashes, and his ruin’d State:
He, who the Scepter of all Asia sway’d,
Whom monarchs like domestick Slaves obey’d.
On the bleak Shoar now lies th’abandon’d King,
A headless Carcass, and a nameless thing.

(Dryden 1958:ll. 758–763)

Dryden’s dedicatory essay makes clear his advocacy of Denham’s free translation method, which he similarly asserts with nationalistic pronouncements (“I will boldly own, that this English Translation has more of Virgil’s Spirit in it, than either the French, or the Italian” (ibid.:1051)) while finally confessing its likeness to French models:

I may presume to say, and I hope with as much reason as the French Translator, that taking all the Materials of this divine Author, I have endeavour’d to make Virgil speak such English, as he wou’d himself have spoken, if he had been born in England, and in this present Age. I acknowledge, with Segrais, that I have not succeeded in this attempt, according to my desire: yet I shall not be wholly without praise, if in some sort I may be allow’d to have copied the Clearness, the Purity, the Easiness and the Magnificence of his Stile.

(ibid.:1055)

As with Denham, the domestication of Dryden’s translation method is so complete that fluency is seen to be a feature of Virgil’s poetry instead of the discursive strategy implemented by the translator to make the heroic couplet seem transparent, indistinguishable from “the Clearness, the Purity, the Easiness and the Magnificence of his Stile.” And, much more explicitly than Denham, Dryden links his fluent, domesticating translation to aristocratic culture. Thus, he explains his avoidance of specialized terminology in his version of the Aeneid—“the {65} proper terms of Navigation, Land-Service, or […] the Cant of any Profession”—by arguing that

Virgil has avoided those proprieties, because he Writ not to Mariners, Souldiers, Astronomers, Gardners, Peasants, but to all in general, and in particular to Men and Ladies of the first Quality: who have been better Bred than to be too nicely knowing in the Terms. In such cases, ’tis enough for a Poet to write so plainly, that he may be understood by his Readers.

(ibid.:1061)

Dryden’s remark is a reminder that the free translation method was modelled on poetry, that Denham was using translation to distinguish a literary elite from “them who deal in matters of Fact, or matters of Faith” (Denham 1656:A3r), and that this valorization of the literary contributed to the concealment of the cultural and social conditions of translation, including Dryden’s own. For, as Steven Zwicker has shown, Dryden also designed his Virgil to intervene into a specific political struggle: it “is a meditation on the language and culture of Virgil’s poetry, but it is also a set of reflections on English politics in the aftermath of the Glorious Revolution,” argued Zwicker, “a time when William III’s reign was not fixed with the certainty it assumed late in the decade, a time when Stuart restoration might still be contemplated, and not wholly as fantasy” (Zwicker 1984:177). The triumph of the heroic couplet in late seventeenth-century poetic discourse depends to some extent on the triumph of a neoclassical translation method in aristocratic literary culture, a method whose greatest triumph is perhaps the discursive sleight of hand that masks the political interests it serves.

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