Translating difference: The example of "Dryden's last parting of Hector and Andromache"

Studies in the Literary Imagination, Fall 2000 by Clingham, Greg

all is translation

And every bit of us is lost in it

(Or found--...)1

For it is in and through the process of translation that a language is made eminently self-aware.2

It is one of the ironies of the recent phase of eighteenth-century studies that, within a discipline that has responded so interestingly to new theoretical and new historical ways of reading, emphasizing the discursiveness of institutions and the materiality of historical experiences, the practice of translation-so pervasive a discourse in the period 1660-1800-still remains to be theorized and fully historicized. For most of the eighteenth century, Dryden's and Pope's translations were regarded as major works; for example, Johnson's lives of Dryden and Pope, while registering the particular shape and temper of each poet's output, also develop an underlying argument as to the preeminent place of translations in their respective poetic oeuvres and in the construction of a national literature.3

Substantial scholarly work has been done on the trope and the genre of translation in the years 1660-1800, from H. A. Mason's To Homer Through Pope (1972) to Howard Weinbrot's Britannia's Issue: The Rise of British Literature from Dryden to Ossian (1993), yet recent theoretical developments and skepticism of the philosophical and cultural claims of the Enlightenment (and of the concurrent scholarship) seem to have eclipsed the idea of translation as a serious form of writing in the eighteenth century. It is easy to see why this might be so. When Dryden claims in his various acts of translation to be representing "the spirit which animates the whole" of the original,4 the suggestion for many is of a privileged and transparent correspondence between the contemporary text and the Classical or other pre-existent authority, embodying (supposedly) an essential and universal claim to cultural authority that is anathema to the discursive and material emphases of postmodernism and new historicism.5 For John Bender, the sign of such essentialist and universalist qualities in the Enlightenment is an unreflexiveness, a philosophical innocence with regard to the function of language that he sees as recapitulated (until very recently) in criticism of eighteenth-- century literature.6 Their frame of reference, according to Bender, was based in the supposition that reason, nature, and truth were accessible to the enlightened individual, thereby assuming an unproblematic and accessible relation between literature and reality, such as Pope might be supposed to reveal when in the "Essay on Criticism" he writes how he discovered Homer and Nature to be the same (lines 68-140).

If "new," theoretically oriented eighteenth-century scholarship-such as was inaugurated by Felicity Nussbaum and Laura Brown's New Eighteenth Century (1987)-is based on an inextricable interconnectedness between the very categories of politics (including the politics of gender), history, and literature, and if postmodern theories emphasize the function of narrative forms and cultural contexts to question and (indeed) to create the "truths" that were habitually ascribed to the representation of history by eighteenth-century writers, then I wish to suggest that the discourse of translation signifies for the eighteenth century a pure yet paradoxically self-reflexive and liminal form of literary and historical representation. Gerald MacLean explains that "For political, social and cultural historians, the Restoration constitutes a complex intersection of changing practices and ideas that are central to our understanding of early-modern Britain, and what was to pass for civility in much of the modern world" (5), yet the volume of essays to which this comment is an introduction has no room for translation as a cultural form of great popularity within which a complex, differential notion of historical and material experience is developed as part of eighteenth-century knowledge and civility.7 By way of investigating the proposition that translation is central to eighteenth-century historiography, that is, to eighteenth-century ways of conceptualizing and rendering history, I shall consider Dryden's pronouncements about translation, concentrating on his version of a passage from the Iliad Bk.VI, "The Last Parting of Hector and Andromache," from Examen Poeticum (1693), the third part of Miscellany Poems published by Jacob Tonson.8 I also draw on Pope's and Johnson's versions of the same passage, and briefly place these eighteenth-century translations in the context of our present concerns about language, legitimacy, authority, and history.

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Dryden's purity is, of course, engagingly and distinctively hybrid-a deliberate and strategic textuality that points towards the liminality of Augustan thinking about the world even while it claims for itself cultural centrality and authority. During the period 1660-1740, translation was a mode of writing par excellence that generated its knowledge through a structural, historical, and philosophical difference in which language (as language per se) was understood as both essential and inessential for the intended effect. The critical discussion of translation in the seventeenth century (from Jonson to Cowley, Denham, Oldham, Behn, and Rochester), employed neo-Aristotelian, neoclassical ideas of representation to position the translated text between two basically different kinds of relation to the original and in relation to language.9 These types of translation were what, in the 1680 Preface to Ovid's Epistles, Dryden called metaphrase and imitation. According to Dryden, Ben Jonson's "Ars Poetica" exemplified the first while Cowley's Pindaric Odes the second form.10 For Dryden, however, both of these methods were unsatisfactory (notwithstanding his great admiration for the poetry of both Cowley and Jonson) because they forced the translator to make an impossible choice between what one might call language or form and spirit or content. Recent commentators on translation (including George Steiner, Jacques Derrida, and Douglas Robinson) have remarked on the sterility of the traditional dichotomy in translation studies between language and spirit. For Steiner, "Fidelity is not literalism or any technical device for rendering 'spirit'. The whole formulation, as we have found it over and over again in discussions of translation, is hopelessly vague."11 But for Steiner (echoing the rather dogged older versions of Dryden's neoclassical "moderation"), Dryden could not have had his kind of insight. In Steiner's view, "The whole of Dryden's literary thought aims for the middle ground of common sense.... In regard to translation he sought to trace a via media between the word-for-word approach demanded by purists among divines and grammarians, and the wild idiosyncracies displayed in Cowley's Pindarique Odes of 1656.... No less than the classic poet, the modern translator must stand at the clear, urbane centre" (253-54).12