Translation Of Aeneid Research Articles

Vergil ‘disrobed’: John Vicars’ ‘home-spun English gray-coat plain’ Aeneid (1632)

Abstract This article puts the spotlight upon the neglected 1632 translation of the entire Aeneid by the poet, puritan, and parliamentarian John Vicars, which, as the first complete translation of the Aeneid by an Englishman, should be more prominent in literary history. The article’s central argument is that the neglect of Vicars’ translation was, both at the time and thereafter, a manifestation of the class warfare that has long pervaded English society. This argument complements the view expressed by other scholars that the dismissal of Vicars was grounded in his radical puritanism and anti-Catholicism. The article analyses the paratextual materials that introduce the translation, including the dedicatory epistle, the address to the reader, and the poems of endorsement, as well as the poem itself, for signs of class struggle. By offering a close textual analysis, it argues that it is far from obvious that the quality of Vicars’ version is inferior. It concludes that the patent early hostility towards Vicars is more closely related to the person of the translator than the qualities of the translation; specifically, it attributes the failure of Vicars’ translation to dislike for the translator’s extremely humble origins, alongside his unfashionable religious and political views.

Hindsight as Foresight: Virgilian Retrospective Prophecy in Coopers Hill and The Destruction of Troy

This article discusses how the Virgilian intertexts of the stag hunt in the 1642 edition of Coopers Hill support the interpretation of the passage as a commentary on the trial and execution of the Earl of Strafford, and how they allow Denham to criticize Charles I’s involvement in Strafford’s death. Despite this criticism, other texts, including Denham’s revised (1653/5) edition of the poem, subsequently adapted the stag-hunt episode to commemorate Charles’s own trial and execution. The false presentation of the 1653/5 Coopers Hill as an edition that prints an original, authentic version of the poem from 1640 draws on the Virgilian technique of retrospective prophecy to make its status as a commentary on Charles’s execution more explicit. Denham repeated this technique in The Destruction of Troy (1656), which heavily revised an excerpt from his 1630s manuscript translation of Aeneid II–VI, and asserts the composition date of this earlier version in order to ‘foretell’ Charles’s execution. Analysing these Virgilian post eventum prophecies shows how both texts simultaneously censure and mourn Charles I, and also identifies increasingly self-recriminatory elements to Denham’s own royalism.

Christopher D'Addario, Exile and Journey in Seventeenth-Century LiteratureExile and Journey in Seventeenth-Century Literature. ChristopherD'Addario. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Pp. v+199.

<i>Christopher D'Addario,</i> Exile and Journey in Seventeenth-Century Literature<i>Exile and Journey in Seventeenth-Century Literature</i>. ChristopherD'Addario. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Pp. v+199.

Historicizing Vergil: Translation and Exegesis in Enrique de Villena's Eneida

Enrique de Villena's relationship to the intellectual movement known broadly as humanism has been the subject of much debate in recent years. This article makes an intervention in that debate through an analysis of the Prohemio to Villena's vernacular translation of Vergil's Aeneid. Roughly modeled on the medieval accessus ad auctor, the Prohemio provides an introduction to both Virgil and his work. In the context of the debate over Villena's standing as a humanist, two aspects of this introductory material stand out: the particular use that Villena makes of Vergil's biography and his engagement with the question of translation. With regard to the first of these, Villena offers an anachronistic depiction of Vergil as the official chronicler of Augustus which he then uses to measure the deficiencies in the historical chronicles of his own age. The interest in historiography may be said to confirm Villena's humanist sympathies while his inability to posit a remedy for this narrative of medieval decline suggests the implicit limitations of these humanist tendencies. Similarly, the very fact of Villena's translation of the Aeneid into the vernacular places Villena at the heart of one of the defining debates of Renaissance humanism, while his inability to conceive of his work as anything more than a extensive "explication" of Vergil's text reveals the extent to which he cannot shake off certain medieval habits of exegesis that inhibit a more self-conscious rewriting of the poem of the kind that would mark later encounters with Renaissance imitatio.

Wordsworth's Aeneid

A T THE HEIGHT of his creative power, in 1805, Wordsworth wrote to Walter Scott: has neither a nor a sense of moral dignity; where his language is poetically impassioned, is mostly upon unpleasing subjects; such as follies, vices, and crimes of classes of men or of individuals. That his cannot be language of imagination must have necessarily followed from this, that there is not a single image from Nature in whole body of his works; and in his translations from Vergil, whenever Vergil can be fairly said to have his eye upon his object, Dryden always spoils passage.' Wordsworth's criticism of his neo-Augustan predecessors, and his resentment of their translations from classics (e.g., in a later letter to Scott he remarks that it will require yet half a century completely to carry off poison of Pope's Homer),2 offer considerable evidence for what W. J. Bate has termed the burden of past, and Harold Bloom the anxiety of poetic influence. Readers have long felt temperamental affinities of Wordsworth with Virgil, his similar appreciation of a universal sorrow which touches and colors all mortal affairs, and his own tender heart and lofty sense of moral dignity. But Wordsworth's admiration for Virgil and his attempt to pay homage to master in a translation of Aeneid in 1823-24 have received little critical attention.3 The three books of Virgil which Words-

Gavin Douglas's Latin Vocabulary

ALMOST SINCE IT WAS FIRST WRITTEN (in 1512-13) and first printed (in 1553) Gavin Douglas's version of the Aeneid in Scottis verse has been both extravagantly praised' and severely criticized.2 In spite of this interest among critics, however, the whole poem has only been printed five times (1553, 1710, 1839, 1874, and in the 1950's by the Scottish Text Society) and none of these editions is now in print. The reason for this neglect undoubtedly lies in the peculiarities of his vocabulary, a strange mixture of Scots dialect, Chaucerian English, and French and Latin derivatives no longer in use, compounded by archaic spellings and letters and grammar. But to those who take the trouble to master this language there are rich rewards in new and more vivid insights into Virgil's meaning. In my view it remains, all in all, the best, as it was the first, translation of Aeneid into our language. In all the criticism of Douglas's work there has been no comprehensive study of its accuracy as a translation of Virgil. As a first step to remedy such a lack this paper will deal only with Douglas's knowledge of Latin words; it will not touch on how well or ill he captures the spirit and passions of the original, with his verbosity as a contrast to Virgil's tightly packed sentences, or with his lack of appreciation of the metrical effects of the Latin. It is, of course, only one and a relatively minor aspect of accuracy to analyse individual words, but this is of some interest also as reflecting the standards of verbal accuracy possible in the early sixteenth century and the occasional difficulties that even well-educated scholars faced.