‘NOR IS THE GLORY OF TRANSLATION LESS’

Abstract

The Augustan Art of Poetry: Augustan Translation of the Classics. By Robin Sowerby. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006; £50. There's a threefold boldness about the title of Robin Sowerby's new book: The Augustan (no inverted commas, insisting on the relevance of an unfashionable term), Art (as against ‘race, gender, politics, commercialization’) of Poetry (as against ‘the rise of the novel’ and the like). All three emphases run against current trends. Take ‘Augustan’ first. The label no longer sticks as it used to. Those portentous scare quotes in Howard Weinbrot's Augustus Caesar in ‘Augustan’ England (1978), and, five years later, Michael Stapleton dismissing ‘Augustan’ as ‘a rather silly term … it would be better if the term were not used at all’ – these catch the spirit of the prevailing feeling, that to depict Augustan Rome and ‘Augustan’ London as politically, culturally, and aesthetically commensurable serves other interests than that of the truth. And yet: to be properly sceptical about the term ‘Augustan’ might require scepticism about our own capacity for attending to stylistic nuances common to both Augustan periods. For most readers now, such nuances in the original Augustans – Virgil and Horace, Propertius and Ovid – are no longer available to be felt. Not that we lack new translations (Englished Ovids are especially marketable), but that the subtleties of the Latin now lie outside most readers' experience, so that even the artistic aspect of the analogy – the aspect of ‘Augustanism’ least open to challenge – has lost much of its force.