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

Johnson's "Life of Dryden" (1779)-and perhaps the entire Lives of the Poets (1779-81), itself (like Benjamin's essay and Derrida's grammatology) a kind of translation in its prefatory nature, relatedness, and nuanced and layered engagement with the absences and presences of memory-is structured by the knowledge that Dryden found the English language brick and, through translation, left it marble.67 Any suggestion that such translations and critical awareness are nothing more than unconscious rationalizations of the Enlightenment's preeminence in our system of knowledge might give us an illusory superiority over the past, but we thus effectively flatten out the eighteenth-century's inflected and liminal sense of its own historical knowledge, and reveal the relative inflexibility and unhistoricity of our own.

NOTES

This essay was completed before the publication of Paul Hammond's Dryden and the Traces of Classical Rome (Clarendon P, 1999), a book I would otherwise have wished to engage.

1 James Merrill, "Lost in Translation," quoted in Geertz 50.

Steiner, "Homer in English," No Passion Spent 94.

3 See Clingham, "Another and the Same"; see also Kramer ch. 3.

1 "Preface to Sylvae" (1684), Of Dramatic Poesy and Other Essays 2: 20. This edition subsequently cited as Watson.

s Clement Hawes writes of "a moment beginning in the later eighteenth century during which an emergent racializing process, fueled by the simultaneous projects of nation- and empire-building, began to lead to quite drastic rewritings of political and cultural history," an ideological and cultural process that came to underpin the increasingly racialized versions of European historiography in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and beyond which criticism of the eighteenth century has had dif

ficulty in penetrating. "Johnson and Imperialism" 115; see also Hawes, "Leading History by the Nose"; and Arendt 38-64.

6 Bender, "Eighteenth-Century Studies." Of the objectivity of knowledge supposedly provided by Enlightenment "reason," Bender writes: "until recent revisions of critical method by feminism, new historicism, and cultural materialism, Anglo-American investigation of eighteenth-century literature proceeded largely within deep-rooted postulates-within a frame of reference-that fundamentally reproduced Enlightenment assumptions themselves and therefore yielded recapitulation rather than the knowledge produced by critical analysis" (79). This proposition about eighteenth-century literature is variously challenged in Questioning History, ed. Clingham, and Making History, ed. Clingham.

7 Other recent, comprehensive studies of eighteenth-century culture also forget the central importance of translation; e.g., Brewer.

I For Dryden's association with the publisher Jacob Tonson in their joint ventures in translation, see Gillespie and Hopkins, "Dryden and The Garth-Tonson Metamorphoses."

' These ideas about translation, however, did not obviate the development of a significant tradition of poetic translation in England between the 1650s and 1680s and between the 1680s and the mideighteenth century, as in the case of John Oldham; see Hammond.