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

For Dryden, translation is the medium, above all, of language, and language the medium of history.16 Though Dryden might talk, in the Preface to Fables, of translation as the "transfusion" of one poet's spirit into another17--or in more religio-mythic terms, echoing Milton's "heavenly Muse" and "Spirit" (Paradise Lost I, 6-17), of the spirit from one poet into another-all of his translations, from the Ovidian and Horatian poems of the early 1680s to the complete Virgil and the Fables at the end of his career, explicitly and variously enact the intersections of language and history:18

[W]hat I have done, imperfect as it is for want of health and leisure to correct it, will be judged in after-ages, and possibly in the present, to be no dishonour to my native country, whose language and poetry would be more esteemed abroad, if they were better understood. Somewhat (give me leave to say) I have added to both of them in the choice of words, and harmony of numbers, which were wanting, especially the last, in all our poets, even in those who, being endued with genius, yet have not cultivated their mother-tongue with sufficient care; or, relying on the beauty of their thoughts, have judged the ornament of words, and sweetness of sound, unnecessary. (Watson 2: 258)

Compare this with the following from Milton's "The Reason of Church-Government Urg'd Against Prelaty":

I began thus fame to assent both to them [Italian academicians] and divers of my friends here at home, and not lesse to an inward prompting which now grew daily upon me, that by labour and intent study (which I take to be my portion in life) joyn'd with the strong propensity of nature, I might perhaps leave something so written to aftertimes, as they should not willingly let it die.... I apply'd my selfe to that resolution which Ariosto follow'd against the perswasions of Bembo, to fix all the industry and art I could unite to the adorning of my native tongue; not to make verbal curiosities the end, that were a toylsom vanity, but to be an interpreter & relater of the best and sagest things among mine own Citizens throughout this Iland in the mother dialect. (Prose Works 1: 810, 811-12)19

Dryden's understanding of "spirit," in the context of his thinking about translation as a poetic mode, is inseparable from his understanding of history, and his historical consciousness of language enables Dryden to conceptualize his relation to his originals as he does. Those relationships-as articulated in the prefaces to Ovid (1680), Sylvae (1685), Examen Poeticum (1693), the Aeneid (1697), and Fables (1700)-are all rendered as being at once material and spiritual; to wit: (1) Dryden feels an essential connection to the "character" (or the various "characters") of the original poet, as manifested in that poet's verse, and it is on the basis of this connection, as well as the attendant sense of some continuity between himself and the original, that Dryden is able to change his original; (2) Dryden feels penetrated by the character, energy, or fire (he uses various metaphors here) of the original, and it is this penetration that frees Dryden to write poetically and, at the same time, in the way his original poet would have done had he been alive now; (3) Dryden changes his original in order to keep him the same-represents him in what he calls a "double likeness"20--but at the same time to give him currency at this different, latter-day historical moment; and (4) the English language at this particular historical juncture requires the infusion of the original language in order to fulfill its teleology, its linguistic purpose and national identity, and to become the vehicle for the cultural, political, social, religious, and personal experience that Dryden makes it.