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Dryden's Translation of the Eclogues in a Comparative Light

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Dryden's Translation of the Eclogues in a Comparative Light Proceedings o f the Virgil Society 26 (2008) Copyright 2008 Dryden’s Translation of the Eclogues in a Comparative Light A paper given to the Virgil Society on 21 January 2006 n this paper I shall sample some passages from Dryden’s version of Virgil’s Eclogues and compare them with the renderings of other translators, both earlier and later. One of my purposes is to consider Ihow Dryden and others conceived Virgil: for example, the styles of sixteenth and seventeenth century translations of the Eclogues indicate with some clarity how the dominant idea of pastoral changed in this period. But my aim is also to study how Dryden faced the problems of translating a poet especially admired for his verbal art, partly by considering his own discussion of the matter and partly by examination of the translations themselves. Matthew Arnold declared that the heroic couplet could not adequately represent Homer; a nicer question is how well it can represent Virgil. In the ‘Discourse concerning the Original and Progress of Satire’ which he placed as a preface to his translation of Juvenal, Dryden himself declared that Virgil could have written sharper satires than either Horace or Juvenal if he had chosen to employ his talent that way.1 The lines that he took to support this contention are from the Eclogues (3.26-7): non tu in triviis, indocte, solebas, stridenti, miserum, stipula, disperdere, carmen? In the Loeb edition - by H. Rushton Fairclough, revised by G. P. Goold - the lines are rendered thus: ‘Wasn’t it you, you dunce, that at the crossroads used to murder a sorry tune on a scrannel pipe?’ ‘Scrannel’ is not part of modern vocabulary; this departure from the usual practice of the Loeb Classical Library is a matter to which I shall return. The distinctive punctuation of the Latin lines as they appear on the page here, with a comma after seven successive words, is Dryden’s own, designed to show that Virgil, as he puts it, ‘has given almost as many lashes, as he has written syllables’. This quotation from Virgil, and Dryden’s comments upon it, raise some interesting issues. I have long been in two minds about Dryden’s remark as a piece of criticism. It exhibits what I shall call a classical approach to the poetic art. Dryden’s argument, in effect, seems to be that Virgil could 76 Richard Jenkyns - Dryden's Translation of the E c l o g u e s in a Comparative Light have been the greatest Roman satirist because he had the finest technique. Juvenal himself, whom I would suppose Dryden had more in mind than anyone else when he wrote Absalom andAchitophel, took a different view. Facit indignatio versum (‘Indignation makes my verse’), he wrote (1. 79). This is the romantic idea of poetic composition - the idea that for it to be effective, it needs to come from the heart. And thus Juvenal represents himself as driven to the topics about which he writes: he describes a world in which the abundance of vices and follies is greater than it has ever been, and depicts himself out in the street overwhelmed by a mass of impressions that compel his words. What he is driven to write may not be the best kind of matter for a poet - facit indignatio versum qualemcumque potest, quales ego et Cluvienus. - poor stuff, perhaps, the kind of thing Cluvienus writes, but the only possible response to circumstance. Similarly, Juvenal’s great contemporary Tacitus represents his own work as narrow and inglorious (Ann. 4. 32). Earlier historians (he explains) were able to write about noble battles, the storming of cities, the extending of empire, but his own work may put readers off, glutting them by the dour monotony of its subject. Now it is arguable that each of these authors is somewhat disingenuous. I am also confident that Tacitus at least implicates us in a kind of game. He is knows that he is disingenuous; and we know that he knows; and he knows that we know that he knows. Juvenal’s case is not so sure. But for my present purpose, I do not need to be concerned with whether the attitude expressed is sincerely expressed, but only with the attitude itself. The romantic view would hold, against Dryden, that Virgil would have needed more than top technique to become the top satirist: he would have needed the appropriate temperament. Some kind of indignatio is surely needed. In this connection I think of Horace’s seventh Epode, an invective for which no motive is supplied and where no cause of offence is given. It reads like a literary exercise, a demonstration of the invective mode exemplified in Archilochus and Hipponax; and a sense of emotion fabricated in tranquillity is fatal to the art of abuse. With this comparison in mind, it is interesting to note that the lines of Virgil which Dryden quotes are in a sense presented as an exercise: they are a piece of flyting within a contest in which two herdsmen vie to cap each other in smart abuse. Dryden is pointing to the density and economy of Virgil’s writing: every word - for when he says syllable, he means word - is working, laying on another lash, with no little auxiliary words to dilute the effect. That does indeed require high craftsmanship. But Dryden is also, in effect, pointing to something which is relevant to the issue of translation: he is marking a characteristic of the Latin language. Eight words in succession are either verb, noun or adjective; in this sequence there is not one preposition, pronoun, adverb or conjunction. English cannot manage that. If the translator wants to convey the original’s effect, he must look for some equivalent. So it is instructive to turn to Milton’s imitatio in Lycidas (123-4): their lean andflashy songs Grate on their scrannel pipes o f wretched straw. This is also highly economical, but Milton cannot avoid the little in-between words, ‘and’, ‘on’, ‘their’, ‘of’. He compensates by a more obvious use of sound effects, working notably with the alliteration of the letter r, and recurrently placing it after a velar or plosive consonant: ‘grate’, ‘scrannel’, ‘wretched’, ‘straw’. But Milton has picked up something that is already present in Virgil. The combination of letters str in ‘straw’ is already in Virgil’s stridenti, for which Milton substitutes ‘scrannel’; and indeed 77 T he proceedings o f th e V irgil S o ciety V o lum e xxvi 2 0 0 8 the combination scr will strike the English reader as especially expressive of the disagreeable: think of ‘scrape’, ‘scratch’, ‘screech’, ‘scrofula’. It is with s and especially s followed by a plosive that Virgil works: stridenti, miserum, stipula, disperdere. But he also exploits r, the littera canina or dog letter: stridenti, miserum disperdere carmen. Milton has, in fact, studied his Virgil very carefully. I now turn to the two twentieth century translations that I shall use for comparison with Dryden, by Cecil Day Lewis (1963) and David Ferry (1999), both of them significant poets in their own right.2 They in turn have been studying their Milton. Here is Day Lewis: You amateur, puffing a scrannel Tune on a squeaky straw at the crossroads is more your mark! That is a direct homage to Milton, and the skw sound in ‘squeaky’ is of course the Roy Jenkins version of scr. But Day Lewis does not match Virgil’s or Milton’s economy: apart from the ineffectualness of ‘you amateur’, the air goes out of the balloon, the invective loses its force and fizzles out into ‘is more your mark’. David Ferry, I take it, has also had Milton in his mind: Aren’t you the one Who used to murder some song, down by the crossroads, Screeching away through a whining pipe o f straw? This takes an extra line, which is less than ideal, and even so has lost Virgil’s indocte, which does not matter much. What does matter is that Ferry’s version is much more forceful, and it keeps its energy all through the last line, with ‘straw’, as in Milton, as the final word. In place of ‘scrannel’ we have ‘whining’ (good), but the scr appears elsewhere in ‘screeching’ (excellent). As we have seen, ‘scrannel’ finds its way even into the Loeb translation, although it will not help most modern readers to Virgil’s sense. It is the more striking then that Dryden’s own version should be so different: Dunce at the best! In streets but scarce allowed To tickle, on thy straw, the stupid crowd. Virgil has two words beginning with an s followed by a plosive: stridenti, stipula. In Dryden’s translation there are four: ‘streets’, ‘scarce’, ‘straw’, ‘stupid’. That apart, he does not try to copy Virgil’s particular effects, but to convey the general force by different means. ‘Dunce’ is good, better perhaps than the original’s indocte; placed at the start of the line, it acquires a new prominence, and the trochaic inversion adds punch. In the second line of the couplet, Dryden cannot avoid the in- between words, but each important word - ‘tickle’, ‘straw’, ‘stupid’, ‘crowd’ - adds its own lash in the way that Dryden commended in the original. This is not the only place that Dryden is sensitive to harshness or coarseness in the Latin text. Take his version of three lines earlier in the same Eclogue (7-9), which in his rendering become five: parcius ista viris tamen obicienda memento.
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