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

As this passage suggests, the cultural and poetic authority of Homer and Virgil is, for Dryden and for Pope, partly found and partly invented by their various acts of poetic translation: Pope "added much to what he found" and "he therefore made him [Homer] graceful."29 Of his Aeneid translation, Dryden says, "some things too I have omitted, and sometimes have added of my own. Yet the omissions, I hope, are but of circumstances, and such as would have no grace in English; and the additions, I also hope, are easily deduced from Virgil's sense."30 One deduction from these observations by Johnson on Pope and Dryden on Virgil is that, while the "original" text may be the occasion for translation, it is not originary in any essential and final way, and the event of translation encompasses and surpasses its origin. Not only does the original, as Derrida argues, reach forward to be translated and form a new language with the later version,31 but the original is itself, at the same time, created by the translation. Although Dryden and Pope (and other eighteenth-century translators and Classical scholars) are more or less schooled in Greek,32 in a sense Homer only exists for them through various acts of memory. But, this retrospective act of invention that is memory is no mere metalepsis; it is a recollection that mediates and therefore historicizes the relationship between the original and the competing and interlinked versions.33

sec

The instance of such historicization on which I would like to focus is the episode of the last parting of Hector and Andromache from the sixth book (lines 391-503 in the Greek) of the Iliad as rendered by Dryden in Examen Poeticum (1693), the third part of Tonson's Miscellany Poems.34 This famous episode in the Iliad comes at a strategic, dramatic, and formal moment in the poem, and also represents Homer's deep human understanding.35 Unlike Achilles, Hector is defined by a web of communal relations rather than by an identity that realizes itself in solitude and defiance of social norms. In the poem, Homer has been at pains to establish Hector as a sympathetic individual, and his behavior in Bk.VI involves encounters with his mother, his brother (Paris), his sister-in-law (Helen), his wife (Andromache), and their child (Astyanax). It also comes at a crucial, pivotal moment in the action and reaches both backwards and forwards in the poem, recalling the origins of the Trojan war and looking forward to the death of Hector and the fall of Troy.

In the scene itself, Hector meets Andromache accidentally, as they rush to seek each other before his returning to battle. The setting anticipates their conversation, which turns on the paradox that Hector cannot stay at home precisely because he values his home so highly. Like Hecuba and Helen, Andromache wants to keep Hector from fighting, and her attempt at restraining him gains poignancy from the fact that Hector is all she has left in the world-her father and brothers have been killed by Achilles, and her mother, captured and ransomed, died shortly afterwards (VI.429-30 in the Greek).36 The history of Andromache sets up the expectations that Achilles, who deprived her of everything else, will also deprive her of Hector. Hector's response to Andromache's plea, far from allaying her fears, actually confirms them, for his reply assumes that Troy will fall (VI.447-49 in the Greek). Nonetheless, he must fight, not only to avoid the reproaches of the Trojans but also to live up to the commands of his "self": "since I have learned to be valiant and always to fight among the foremost ranks of the Trojans, winning great glory for my own self, and for my father" (VI.444-- 46 in the Greek). Hector's clairvoyance is full of poignant feeling and regret, manifesting itself in the vision of the enslaved Andromache that closes his speech. This is Dryden's version of that speech: