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Translating difference: The example of "Dryden's last parting of Hector and Andromache"
Studies in the Literary Imagination, Fall 2000 by Clingham, Greg
" Dryden's attitude to Homer changes significantly in the 1690s and in the Fables (1700); see Sowerby.
" Watson 2: 166-67. For Dryden on Homer in the Preface to Fables, see Watson 2: 166-67. For Dryden on Homer in the Preface to Fables, see Watson 2: 274-76: "[T]he Grecian [Homer] is more according to my genius than the Latin poet" (2: 274). For comment on Dryden's satiric treatment of Homer's "man-killers," see Reverand ch. 2. For Dryden's creative and perceptive engagement with Homer, see Sowerby, "Dryden and Homer"; and Hopkins, John Dryden ch. 6.
41 "Homer was ambitious enough of moving pity, for he has attempted twice on the same subject of Hector's death; first, when Priam and Hecuba beheld his corpse, which was dragged after the chari
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ot of Achilles; and then in the lamentation which was made over him, when his body was redeemed by Priam" (Watson 2: 167). Dryden also saw the Aeneid as a continuation of the Iliad, and the manners of Aeneas as being continuous with those of Hector; see "Preface to Fables," Watson 2: 274-5. "Congreve's translations from the Iliad are "Priam's Lamentation and Petition to Achilles, for the Body of His Son Hector" and "The Lamentation of Hector, Andromache, and Helen, over the Dead Body of Hector."
41 TE 7: 10, 349.
See Mason 149-56; Knight, "Translation: The Augustan Mode" 196-204; and Pope and the Heroic Tradition 23. Cf. Rosslyn, "`Awed by Reason'" 189-202; "Of Gods and Men"; and "The Making of Pope's Translation of the Iliad."
See, e.g., note to 1.595, TE 8: 355-56.
See Clingham, "Life and Literature in Johnson's Lives of the Poets," where I have written that Johnson's "portrait of Pope is recognized as being of a mind elevated to grandeur and dignity, and at the same time painfully unable to embody the knowledge for which it strives" (179). Cf. Rosslyn, Alexander Pope 63-70, who sees Pope's translation of Homer as bringing him into "secret correspondence" with the ancient poet, and "of discovering the original 'matter' of western literature-and of recognizing in the same instant how that 'matter' was still embodied in himself' (64)-a view that is broadly, yet differently, anticipated by Mason and Shankman.
11 TE 7: 357-58.
11 Dryden's version of Homer was, of course, only one of many intermediary versions used by Pope in the composition of his poem; see TE 7: cvii-clxiii.
See Mueller 64-76.
52 See, e.g., Reverand 12; TE 7: cxl; and Mason 163-73. In making a general statement on Dryden's sensibility Johnson remarks that "Dryden's was not one of the `gentle bosoms': ... He is therefore, with all his variety of excellence, not often pathetick; and had so little sensibility of the power of effusions purely natural that he did not esteem them in others. Simplicity gave him no pleasure"; "Life of Dryden," Lives I: 458.
See Anderson 11-12.
In writing of Dryden's version of Iliad Bk.I, Sowerby notes that "the style ... necessarily grew out of the style created for Dryden's 1697 Virgil translation. But the recasting of the passages of Homer into Virgilian form ... is not a feature of Dryden's Homer, which has its own decorum distinct from Virgil's" (43). This is true of Dryden's "Last Parting" which, of course, was written before the 1697 Virgil, and so asks to be examined as a possible source rather than as a derivative of the Virgil translation.
