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

Pope applies "illustrious" to Hector himself (1.594).

Cf. Erskine-Hill's reading of the significance of the child in the last parting:

Dryden's `Last Parting' may have been a trial run for a later project in the translation of ancient epic, but probably also, as Robin Sowerby has suggested, an allusion to James II, his Queen, Mary of Modena, and their male heir the infant Prince James. Two momentous partings seem likely to have been in Dryden's mind: the first when, as James faced the incoming forces of William, he secretly sent his wife and son ahead of him as refugees to France; the second when, leaving Mary and James behind, he set off from France on his initially successful Irish expedition against William. It must be allowed that Dryden would have been hard-pressed to find another episode from ancient epic which so peculiarly recalled recent history. (Poetry of Opposition and Revolution 59-60).

17 Mason (150-52) points out the similarity between this passage and Pope's earlier episode of Sarpedon from Bk.XII (1709). See also Erskine-Hill, The Poetry of Opposition and Revolution, who emphasizes the themes of "doomed resistance, exile, and return," within a Jacobite context, of these passages of Homeric translation by Dryden and Pope (60-3).

11 Johnson, "Translation of part of the Dialogue between Hector and Andromache; from the Sixth Book of Homer's Iliad (VI, 390-502)," Complete English Poems 31.

" See, e.g., note to 1.595, TE 8: 355-56.

11 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.

I 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.

So See Mueller 64-76.

11 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 1: 458.

52 See Anderson 11-12.

11 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 sis 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.