Notes on Johnson's Latin Poetry

Abstract

In recent times Johnson's Latin poems have been ignored by most academic publishing houses. The Preface to the second Oxford edition tells of difficulties and delays; but in the end, with the help of H. W. Gar rod, the Press produced the best available text. Yet it was unrealistic to print a text without a translation in 1974 or indeed at any time since World War I. The Yale edition of Johnson's Latin and Greek verse (1964) made an attempt to deal with the problem, but the result was unsatisfactory. Its literal translations sometimes contained mistakes, other versions were sometimes too free to be helpful, and in the case of the epigrams the editors were content simply to print the Loeb version of the Greek. Barry Baldwin, in his edition The Latin and Greek Poems of Samuel Johnson (1995), deserves credit for offering straightforward literal versions throughout. In my review of Baldwin's work in Translation and Literature, 5 (1996), 127-32, 1 made some comments about the interpretation of these poems. Here I offer a few notes on the text, based on the three principal modern editions, as follows: