Why Dryden's Translations Matter

Abstract

'Dryden', as Dr Johnson famously says in his life of the poet, 'may be properly considered as the father of English criticism'.1 It would be gratifyingly symmetrical, but a slight exaggeration, if one could go on to claim him as 'the father of English translation' translation of poetry, that is. Dryden is rather the most brilliant heir to that legacy of creative effort, initiated by Ben Jonson and continued throughout the seventeenth century by such poets as Fanshawe, Cowley, and Oldham, to make new the classics Horace, Virgil, Juvenal, Lucretius as part of the live current of English poetry. 4Make it new', in twentieth-century modernism, has often meant a violent break with the past, of the sort inaugurated by cubism and surrealism. What the seventeenth-century poets sought to achieve was a break with merely literal translation from the classics, and with that timid habit of reducing texts to moralistic tags, a mode beloved of seventeenth-century schoolmasters. English poets set out to recover as translators the kind of energies which reappeared in France, out of a vivid awareness of Martial and Horace, in the poetry of Boileau, admired by Dryden and by his own heir, Alexander Pope. Dryden appeared on the scene just as the English part of the undertaking was gathering momentum, and the artistic impetus that his own presence guaranteed 'made it new', not only for himself, but for a succeeding generation of poet-translators. As a practitioner, his prose formulations about translation carry the conviction of authority, as when in the Preface to Sylvae (1685) he tells us: