Dryden and the Tenth Satire of Juvenal

Abstract

Recent commentary on Dryden's translations of Juvenal can be broadly divided into four main categories. One group of scholars has devoted itself to assembling the range of materials which the poet had before him while composing his versions. As is now well established, Dryden did not simply work from plain texts of his originals, but drew on a remarkably wide variety of commentaries and earlier translations, continually incorporating, adapting, and combining interpretative glosses, phrasing, diction, rhymes, and end-words from these sources in his own rendering. Scholarship over the last fifty years has gone a long way towards establishing the particular editions and translations of Juvenal with which Dryden worked, and on whose phrasing and insights he drew when composing his own versions.2 A second body of commentators has discussed Dryden's Juvenal in the light of seventeenth-century debates about the nature of satire and about the theory and practice of translation. Such critics have frequently followed an agenda set by Dryden's own prose prefaces most notably the Preface to Ovid's Epistles (1680), with its famous tripartite division of translation into metaphrase, 'or turning an Authour word by word, and Line by Line, from one Language into another'; paraphrase, 'or Translation with Latitude, where the Authour is kept in view by the Translator, so as never to be lost, but his words are not so strictly follow'd as his sense, and that too is admitted to be amplyfied, but not alter'd'; and imitation, 'where the Translator (if now he has not lost that Name) assumes the liberty not only to vary from the words and sence, but to forsake them both as he sees occasion: and taking only some general hints from the Original, to run division on the ground-work, as he pleases' (Works, I, 114-15).3 The third category of commentary on Dryden's Juvenal comprises a single, extended item: the late H. A. Mason's celebrated article, 'Is Juvenal a Classic?'.4 Mason's essay stands apart from other studies of Dryden's Juvenal in the prominent use it makes of Dryden's translation as part of an attempt to define the distinctive poetic qualities of Juvenal