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

Restrain your sorrows, calm your troubled soul.

Your sighs are spent in vain; if fates withstand

Hector shall perish by no warriour's hand.

But if by their irrevocable doom

My death is now decreed my death will come.

The bravest hero and the fearfull'st slave

Shall sink alike into the gloomy grave. (lines 113-20)58

Dryden's Hector, by contrast, manages to retain the rhythms of the speaking voice, while at the same time giving the impression of an individual mind expanding to meet the facts of the moment charged with the significance of history. Hence, the appropriateness of Johnson's writing of Dryden's poetry in general that

[t]he power that predominated in his intellectual operations was rather strong reason than quick sensibility. Upon all occasions that were presented he studied rather than felt, and produced sentiments not such as Nature enforces, but meditation supplies. With the simple and elemental passions, as they spring separate in the mind, he seems not much acquainted, and seldom describes them but as they are complicated by the various relations of society and confused in the tumults and agitations of life. (Lives 1: 457)

In the case of Dryden's version of Iliad Bk.VI, I would suggest that the "elemental passions" and the "complications" mentioned by Johnson are inextricably mingled as Dryden remembers and re-envisions Homer's heroic world and explicitly conceptualizes its human drama within historical terms of interest to himself in 1693. For the vision of the universal doom of the fall of Troy signifies for Dryden the continuity-the after-life that every text seeks in translation-- represented by the founding of Augustan Rome, in a political epic, the Aeneid, that came to be the most important Classical text in English culture in the Restoration, and that underlies Dryden's (and other writers') conceptualization of a civilized politics in the 1690s.59

That future history, so to speak, is what Dryden anticipates in the "English palace"-in his poem addressed to the Earl of Roscommon-that English translators build out of the ruins of ancient Troy and Augustan Rome:

Roscommon, whom both Court and Camps commend,

True to his Prince, and faithful to his friend;

Roscommon first in Fields of Honour known,

First in the peaceful Triumphs of the Gown;

Who both Minerva's justly makes his own.

Now let the few belov'd by Jove, and they,

Whom infus'd Titan forma of better Clay,

On equal terms with ancient Wit ingage,

Nor mighty Homer fear, nor sacred Virgil's page:

Our English palace open wide in state;

And without stooping they may pass the Gate.

("To the Earl of Roscommon" lines 68-78 [pub. 1684])60

The imperial impulse, as David Kramer has demonstrated, is never far in Dryden from the human and the emotional: the theme of familial relationship in the Homer translation echoes Dryden's similar concerns in other poems of the period, particularly in those addressed to Oldham and to Congreve, whose version of the Iliad Bk.XXIV is cited by Dryden (in the Preface to Examen Poeticum) as a necessary complement to his own rendition of Bk.VI. It is as if the relationship between Congreve and Dryden envisaged in "To my Dear Friend Mr. Congreve" (1694) pertains obliquely to their respective translations of Homer in the Examen Poeticum of the year before.61