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

The fatal Day draws on, when I must fall;

And Universal Ruine cover all.

Not Troy itself, tho' built by Hands Divine,

Nor Priam, nor his People, nor his Line,

My Mother, nor my Brothers of Renown,

Whose Valour yet defends th' unhappy Town,

Not these, nor all their Fates which I foresee,

Are half of that concern I have for thee.

I see, I see thee in that fatal Hour,

Subjected to the Victor's cruel Pow'r:

Led hence a Slave to some insulting Sword:

Forlorn and trembling at a Foreign Lord.

A spectacle in Argos, at the Loom,

Gracing with Trojan Fights, a Grecian Room;

Or from deep Wells, the living Stream to take,

And on thy weary Shoulders bring it back.

While, groaning under this laborious Life,

They insolently call thee Hector's Wife;

Upbraid thy Bondage with thy Husband's name;

And from my Glory propagate thy Shame.

This when they say, thy Sorrows will encrease

With anxious thoughts of former Happiness;

That he is dead who cou'd thy wrongs redress.

But I opprest with Iron Sleep before,

Shall hear thy unavailing Cries no more.

("Last Parting" lines 116-40)

From this devastating image of the actual (but as yet unrealized) future, Hector turns to the present moment and indulges in the wish of an imagined (but very real) future for his son. Father-son relationships are important though usually fractured in the Iliad, but this one between Hector and Astyanax takes the form of a domestic idyll and is, as Martin Mueller notes (40), a powerful instance of the clash between the heroic and the domestic that pervades Bk.VI. There is both pathos and irony here: not only does the child's fear of the father's helmet join husband and wife in a moment of gentle laughter, but the father's conventional prayer for heroic succession is obviously vain, since it receives no response from any of the gods and, since we know, from our point of historical retrospection, that Astyanax will in fact die soon after the fall of Troy.37 But in words of the purest factualness, designed to comfort Andromache, Hector leaves for battle committed to whatever will happen:

Think not it lies in any Grecian's Pow'r,

To take my Life before the fatal Hour.

When that arrives, nor good nor bad can fly

Th' irrevocable Doom of Destiny.

("Last Parting" lines 179-182)

Dryden's lines convey something of the double sense in the Greek of constraint and freedom. The Greek (lines 487-9) registers the knowledge of what will happen-because the gods have already decreed it-as well as the uncertain human drama in which Hector faces the unknown with vulnerability. John Alvis observes that "Hector is a victim of a delusion inasmuch as he cannot know he has been set a fixed term of grace by Zeus.... Nevertheless, Hector's fate also proceeds from his free decisions. These decisions cooperate with Zeus's plan, but they are not inspired by the god, who in respect to Hector works just as he acts with respect to Achilles and Patroclus, in accord with character" (53). Dryden's lines absorb into the consciousness of Hector this sense in the Greek of the simultaneity of the personally willed and the divinely inevitable. As Felicity Rosslyn remarks, when describing Pope's version of Hector, the "rules of conduct"