Proceedings o f the Society 26 (2008) Copyright 2008

Dryden’s Translation of the 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 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 , Dryden himself declared that Virgil could have written sharper satires than either 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 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 (7-9), which in his rendering become five: parcius ista viris tamen obicienda memento. novimus et qui te transversa tuentibus hircis et quo (sed faciles Nymphae risere) sacello.

Good words, young catamite, at least to men. We know who did your business, how, and when; And in what chapel too you played your prize, And what the goats observed with leering eyes; The nymphs were kind, and laughed; and there your safety lies.

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There are two places in this sentence where Dryden adds to the original. The second of these comes at the end: his last clause corresponds to nothing in the Latin. Throughout his translation, he uses the two standard ways of varying the heroic couplet: by having a triplet instead of a couplet rhyme, and by adding a couple of syllables to the usual ten-syllable line. At the end of this passage he combines both these variations to produce a line of light elegance. In other words, it seems to be a concern for shape and euphony that has provoked this addition. The other addition is different: the words ‘young catamite’. Why has he done this? Let us again compare the two twentieth century translators. First Ferry: Watch out what you say, Menalcas, because I know What you were doing in that cave and who You were doing it with, while the goats looked on, Rolling their eyes, and the laughing Nymphs were watching. No hint of homosexuality there, and viris is not translated at all. The goats and the nymphs seem to be sharing the same reaction, one of cheerful merriment at the sight of what any reader is bound to take as straightforward slap and tickle. This is Day Lewis: Watch it! What right have you to lecture a chap? We all know What you did - even the he-goats looked shocked - and in a shrine too (But the nymphs are easy-going, they only smiled at it.) Well, I say: the Greyfriars School patois of the first line must surely have struck quite the wrong note even in 1963. That is apart from the fact that Day Lewis has clearly misunderstood the line (which is indeed tricky) and got the force of viris wrong. That apart, there is hardly any more clue here than in Ferry’s version as to what Damoetas is actually saying. What Dryden has taken account of is that qui is a key word, because it is masculine: the sting is in that seemingly colourless and innocuous syllable. But English does not distinguish between the genders in the case of the relative pronoun. Dryden has therefore added ‘young catamite’, so that the meaning gets through. This suggests first, that though he is often a rather free translator, he is also a conscientious translator, who wants to ensure that the essential meaning is conveyed. Second, he wants the coarse and satiric element in the Eclogues to be felt. Bowdlerising the homosexuality out of the classics can often be hard work. Here, nothing could be easier; indeed a little care is needed to keep it in. Dryden takes that care. Coarseness and satire are not the qualities that are likely to occur most readily to the modern reader when he thinks about the Eclogues, but the idea would not have surprised a reader in the sixteenth century. Then the belief was widespread that pastoral was properly rude and rustical. Spenser took Virgil for his model in The Shepherd’s Calendar, which is designedly rough, shaggy, harsh and allegorical. The idea that pastoral was the lowliest of genres was a commonplace; it is in Sidney’s Defence of Poetry, for example, or to take a slightly earlier work read across Europe, in J. C. Scaliger’s Poetice. It goes back to the idea, voiced by Donatus as early as the fourth century, that Virgil had followed the perfect pattern of the poetic career, beginning with the humblest genre, proceeding to the middle kind in the , and culminating in the loftiest of poetic forms, the epic. From that idea sprang another: that the styles of each genre were properly different. So pastoral should take the forms of rustic speech, as epic should adopt an elevated diction. Now Dryden clearly does not take that view: though he is alert to the satiric element in the Eclogues - a pretty small element, to be frank - his manner in translating them is essentially as smooth and elegant as it is when he translates the . He chooses the same for both works. That may seem the obvious thing to do as Virgil, of course, uses the for

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all his verse. But if we set Dryden in his historical context, it is perhaps not quite so obvious. One might add that the hexameter is a flexible metre, and Virgil’s use of it is astonishingly various. In such matters as enjambment, metrical Grecisms, elision, and treatment of the caesura, the Eclogues can feel quite a long way from the later epic. The heroic couplet is incapable of that degree of variety. So it would not be unreasonable to think that different metres might be appropriate for the different parts of Virgil’s oeuvre.

This takes us to the question of metre in general, and the associated question of rhyme. Pope will translate the Iliad into heroic couplets, as Dryden had so translated the Aeneid. But Pope’s decision has recurrently been called into question, and was from the start. Bentley’s famous comment - ‘a very pretty poem, but you must not call it Homer’ - is as likely to apply to the metrical form as to the language. Much later in the eighteenth century, Cowper translated the Iliad into unrhymed blank verse (1791). In his introduction to this work, he took a French print of a Homeric scene in which ‘Agamemnon addresses Achilles exactly in the attitude of a dancing- master turning miss in a minuet’ and contrasted it with an English picture which represented Homer in a more manly fashion. That, he said, was the difference between Pope’s translation and his own. He affected plainness: some of his lines, he agreed, had ‘an ugly hitch in their gait, ungraceful in itself’ but they were ‘made such with a willful intention’. After Cowper, Keats wrote his sonnet On First Looking on Chapman’s Homer, a title which mutters beneath its breath, ‘On first getting away from Pope’. Thanks to Chapman, Keats at last hears Homer speak out loud and bold: Chapman’s exuberant metre and language have the right fire and energy. Matthew Arnold, in his lectures ‘On Translating Homer’ (1860-1), finds Chapman inadequate in turn - as he does Pope, for sure. For Arnold Homer is pre-eminently grand, rapid and direct; Chapman’s clogged metre and diction will not do.

But supposing, for the sake of argument, that we accept this case, what does it tell us about Virgil? He has his own form of that grand style which Arnold thought so important, but he is not rapid or direct. In mere terms of metre, his movement is very different from Homer’s - Homer being so predominantly dactylic, and Virgil not. His language is not direct but oblique, and he loads every rift with ore. So might the Aeneid and the Homeric epics be appropriately rendered by different English metres? One can imagine a case being made that while the heroic couplet might be inadequate for Homer, its civility was suited to the ‘civilised poetry’ of Virgil’s epic. But if one then considers the notion of different metres for different parts of Virgil’s oeuvre, another thought may suggest itself. Perhaps it is not after all the heroic poem to which the heroic couplet is best suited; may its even flow not be more answerable to the cool balance and symmetry of the Eclogues, and their avoidance of the tragic note, than to the asymmetries and the variations in pace and tone which Virgil cultivated in the Aeneid?

I suspect that many readers today would readily answer yes to that question. But the earliest English translators take a very different line. Three Englishmen translated the Eclogues, in part or in whole, before 1600. William Webbe included in his Discourse of English Poetry (1586) a specimen rendering of the first two Eclogues into accentual , and Abraham Fraunce published a translation of the second Eclogue, also in hexameters, in 1591. These clumsy experiments are little more than curiosities. In any case, the hexameter is notoriously hard to bring off in English. The two most notable English works in this metre are Clough’s The Bothy o f Tober-na-Vuolich and Amours de Voyage, both works conveying a sense of conversation and ordinary modernity and, in the latter case, a strong element of satire.

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There were only two complete translations of the Eclogues in Queen Elizabeth’s reign, and both, oddly, were by the same man, Abraham Fleming. His first version, published in 1575, is made in rhymed fourteeners. In our own time one might think that this metre too was long ago obsolete as a vehicle for rendering the Latin hexameter - but one would be wrong: the new Penguin translation of by A. E. Stallings (2007) uses this form. And she has indeed, I believe, found a metre which conveys the vigour and energy and roughness of Lucretius, but also his use of a disciplined form with firm rules; and besides, she can make the verse sing and be eloquent when she needs to. But the manner of Lucretius is indeed a great distance from that of the Eclogues. Fleming means to be rough, it seems, and his second translation, published in 1589, is rougher. Though it was designed, at least in part, to help learners to understand Virgil’s Latin, it is still in fourteeners, but this time they are unrhymed. In a prefatory letter to the Archbishop of Canterbury, John Whitgift, Fleming notes that Virgil’s are written in a base style. The translation is not made into ‘foolish rhyme’, but is translated ‘into English verse, in a familiar phrase’; that is, into the language of every day. The matter may seem ‘too base’ for the Archbishop, but in fact it is ‘mere allegorical’ and deals with lofty issues in humble disguise: it is ‘even a pearl in a shell, divine wit in a homely style, shepherds and clowns representing great personages, and matters of great weight wrapped up in country talk...’ As far as style goes, then, a translation of the Eclogues ought to be base, homely and rustic. In those terms - though in no others - one might be able to claim that Fleming succeeded.

Let us then take the opening of the first Eclogue in each of Fleming’s versions. First, Virgil’s text: Tityre, tu patulae recubans sub tegmine fagi silvestrem tenui musam meditaris avena: nos patriae finis et dulcia linquimus arva; nos patriam fugimus: tu, Tityre, lentus in umbra formosam resonare doces Amaryllida silvas.

You, Tityrus, lie under the canopy of a spreading beech, wooing the woodland Muse on slender reed, but we are leaving our country’s bounds and sweet fields. We are outcasts from our country; you, Tityrus, at ease beneath the shade, teach the woods to re-echo ‘fair Amaryllis’. (Fairclough/Goold)

Now Fleming in 1575: Thou, Tityr, lying at thine ease, under the broad beech shade, A country song dost tune right well, in pipe of oat straw made; Our country borders we do leave and meadows sweet forsake, Our country soil we shun, but you in shade thine ease dost take Teaching the woods of Amaryll most fair a sound to make. And now 1589: O Tityrus thou lying under shade of spreading beech, Dost play a country song upon a slender oaten pipe, We do forsake our country bounds, and meadows sweet [which be] We do forsake our native soil, thou Tityr slug in shade Dost teach the woods to sound so shrill, thy love fair Amaryll.

‘Thou Tityr slug in shade’ is conspicuously unappealing, and the jingle ‘shrill. Amaryll’ I take to be an accident - and not attractive. But the later version is not consistently more graceless

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than the first. In the earlier version, ‘broad beech shade’ is pleasantly alliterative, and its spondaic rhythm, with an expansiveness suitable to the content, helps to break the monotony of what can be a remorselessly jolly metre; but otherwise, the first two lines flow more easily in the second version than in the first. In the third and fourth lines the 1575 version is faithful to the emphasis of Virgil’s anaphora (nos patriae finis... nos patriam fugimus), and the variation of ‘country ‘ and ‘country soil’ preserves something of the spirit of Virgil’s polyptoton, the figure of speech whereby a word is repeated in a different case or cases (patriae... patriam). In 1589, Fleming makes no attempt to render the anaphora of patria in English, but whereas Virgil takes care to vary the verb (linquimus, fugimus), Fleming repeats ‘We do forsake’. In each case, Fleming does seem concerned to render the balance between repetition and variation that Virgil cultivates.

When we turn from Fleming’s versions (and Webbe’s and Fraunce’s too, for that matter) to the seventeenth century translators, we seem to have entered a quite different world. In 1620, John Brinsley produced a literal prose translation; this was simply a crib for schoolboys, and need not concern us. The next verse translations were by William Lisle in 1628 and John Bidle in 1634. Lisle attempted a variety of stanza forms, and for the first Eclogue he chose rhyme royal: that is, a seven- line stanza, with the rhyme scheme ABABACC. In English, rhyme royal goes back to Chaucer, but Lisle differs from Troilus and Criseyde in expanding the last line of the stanza from five feet to six feet. This makes the stanza feel like an adaptation of the Spenserian form, and Spenser is indeed Lisle’s acknowledged model. Here is Lisle’s opening: Thou, in cool covert of this broad beech-tree, (Tityrus) at ease, doest meditating lie On small oat pipe, thy sylvan muse; but we Leave our fair fields, and our dear country flie: While thou lie’st shaded in security, Teaching the hollow woods, loud to proclaim, And echo, with the sound of Amaryllis’ name.

The Spenser who is Lisle’s pattern here is not the rustic Spenser of The Shepherd’s Calendar, his Anglicisation of the Eclogues, but the ‘golden’ Spenser of The Faery Queen and Virgil’s Gnat (his translation of the pseudo-Virgilian Culex, believed in the renaissance to be authentic). In his preface, Lisle claims that whereas many Latin authors, both in prose and verse, have been successfully translated into English, Virgil, despite his great reputation, has not. The reason, he suggests, is Virgil’s Gnat: this led other people to suppose that Spenser would go on to translate more of Virgil, and deterred potential translators from attempting a work which Spenser would then carry out much better. This is an odd claim: many earlier translators of the Aeneid are blandly ignored - Douglas, Surrey, Phaer, Stanyhurst - as well, of course, as Fleming’s two versions of the Eclogues themselves. And Virgil’s Gnat is unusually sugared and ‘golden’ for an Elizabethan translation. Lisle himself uses the metaphor of golden sweetness to characterise what he calls ‘these dainty Aeclogues’: ‘Some can be very well content to delight their tastes with the pleasant juice, as their eye with the outward rind of these golden Pastorals.’ This statement retains the Elizabethan belief in the allegorical significations of the Eclogues, but without the old sense of their moral urgency. Allegory is now the juice of a delicious fruit and the superficial meaning of the poem its golden skin.

We have moved from hearty jogtrot to lyric fluidity as the answerable style for translating the Eclogues, with nothing in between. But of course the Eclogues are neither jogtrot nor lyric. With Bidle we finally reach the heroic couplet:

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Thou, Tityrus, in shroud of beech, dost play On slender oaten-pipe a sylvan lay; Our native confines we abandon: we Our pleasant granges, and our country flee: Thou, Tityrus, i’th’ shade reposing still, Learn’st the woods to resound fair Amaryll. Metrically, this is more dutiful than sensitive. The last of these lines has the right number of syllables, but I cannot get it to sound like a five-foot line. And (if we may suppose that the printer has obeyed his wishes) his conscientious zeal to count the syllables has led him in the previous line to elide the vowel in ‘the’, whereas unelided the line reads better with a perfectly acceptable eleven syllables and an anapaest in the third foot. Together with the Eclogues Bidle published a translation of the first two satires of Juvenal. The coupling of Virgilian pastoral and Juvenal is perhaps a sign of the lingering influence of the moralising interpretation of the Eclogues, and more particularly of the influence of Mantuan, the fifteenth century neo-Latin poet whose Eclogues combine Virgilian pastiche with severe moralising, and who was much read in English schools (by Shakespeare, among others). But Bidle no longer sees the Eclogues as harsh and rough. Apologising to his readers for providing only two of Juvenal’s poems, he explains, ‘I was loath to cloy your appetites at the first, knowing... that men’s queasy and squeamish stomachs relish better the poignant suckets of a love-sonnet, or the juleps of a frothy epigram, than a homely (though wholesome) dish of satirical stuff...’ Here, as with Lisle, is the metaphor of sugary food and drink. It is now satire that is ‘homely’ and ‘wholesome’, terms that half a century earlier would have been commonly applied to the Eclogues; the implication is that the pastoral muse is sweeter and more appealing. And certainly Bidle’s version brings Virgil closer to the manner of William Browne, Drayton and the pastoralists of the Jacobean and Caroline age. This survey suggests that by the middle of the seventeenth century the heroic couplet had emerged as one possible form for translating the Eclogues; but it was not the only nor necessarily the obvious form. It also suggests that well before Dryden the harsh reading of the Eclogues had gradually given way to a more arcadian interpretation, though as we have seen, Dryden remains more sensitive to the harsher elements in Virgil than many readers after him have been. He may have owed that to the reception of the Eclogues in the century and a half that preceded him. Let us now turn to his own version of the opening, and add those two twentieth-century versions as well: Beneath the shade which beechen boughs diffuse You, Tityrus, entertain your silvan muse. Round the wide world in banishment we roam, Forced from our pleasing fields and native home; While, stretched at ease, you sing your happy loves, And Amaryllis fills the shady groves. Day Lewis: Tityrus, here you loll, your slim reed-pipe serenading The woodland spirit beneath a spread of sheltering beech, While I must leave my home place, the fields so dear to me. I’m driven from my home place: but you can take it easy In shade and teach the woods to repeat ‘Fair Amaryllis’.

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Ferry: Tityrus, there you lie in the beech-tree shade, Brooding over your music for the Muse, While we must leave our native place, our homes, The fields we love, and go elsewhere; meanwhile, You teach the woods to echo ‘Amaryllis’. Day Lewis’s rendering shifts uncertainly in tone between the literary and the colloquial, with one or two awkward phrases which no real person has ever used. Ferry, like Tityrus, seems much more at ease: in tone and lucidity, his version is admirable, though in turning five lines of Latin into the same number of shorter English lines he has lost some adjectives: the spreading beech, the woodland Muse, the slender reed, and Tityrus relaxed. Virgil is evoking a complex mood in these first phrases, a mixture of modest deprecation and comfortable sprawl, and without the epithets much of this disappears. In that light, let us return to Dryden. The manner is of course superbly accomplished. The dactyl of ‘Tityre’ is easily incorporated into a line which happily permits an anapaest in the second foot. The trochaic inversions at the start of the third and fourth lines add both vigour and variety. The euphony and the hints of alliteration, not overdone, make these lines feel freer from constraint and more like original composition than any other version. Most significant nouns have their amplifying adjective attached to them in a manner that is highly Virgilian. In some broad sense, Dryden’s feels more Virgilian than any other version. But when one looks closer, some doubts begin to creep in. Though Dryden, turning five lines into six, has found room for most of what Ferry leaves out, he too has dropped the slender reed, that famous symbol of the pastoral mode. We do need that. And he does nothing to convey the repetitions in the original (n o s . nos,patriae... patriam, Tityre... Tityre.). Here, in fact, Bidle does better, and with his ‘we abandon; we’ he preserves a strong emphasis in the original through a quite different placing in the line. The use of rhyme has one distinct advantage: it conveys the sense of a fairly exigent metrical form which in English is not easily conveyed by other means. But it gives Dryden some difficulty. Do boughs ‘diffuse’ shade? ‘Roam’ is not quite the word wanted. The shortage of rhymes for ‘love’ is notoriously a problem for the English poet; ‘love’ and ‘grove’ seems rather tamely conventional, and I suspect would have seemed so already in the 1690s. Let me add a word more about Dryden and rhyme. One of his most famous moments has been censured for its poor use of rhyme (Absalom andAchitophel 163-4): Great wits are sure to madness near allied, And thin partitions do their bounds divide. Rhyme apart, there is a recurrent risk with the couplet form in general when the poet is in epigrammatic mood. The danger is that he will make his point in the first line, and the second line, with nothing much to do, will merely vary the first, often less effectively. It is a common problem in , and it is a problem here. (In a different medium, one might also contemplate the second sentence of Pride and Prejudice, though Jane Austen did succeed, I believe, in solving the problem of how to follow what was to become the most famous opening in English prose fiction.) Rhyme adds to Dryden’s discomfort: in the second line of the couplet, the emphasis should be on the thinness, but the rhyme puts it on the division. Form and content have come apart: the form stresses division, the content says that it barely exists at all. Even without the rhyme, the other emphasis is on ‘partition’, though again it is the virtual lack of partition that ought to be stressed. Here Pope was the finer craftsman (The Rape o f the Lock 3. 7-8):

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Here thou, great Anna! whom three realms obey, Dost sometimes counsel take - and sometimes tea.

It is not that there has to be a thump on the rhyme:

Come live with me and be my love And we will all the pleasures prove.

Marlowe’s couplet is lovely because the natural spoken rhythm of the sentence puts the weight where it ought to be, on ‘pleasures’. The rhyme follows like a gentle control (and offers a more original pairing for ‘love’).

In general, my impression is that Dryden’s translations do not use rhyme with particular skill or force, but I am aware of at least one exception. So I turn for a moment from the Eclogues to the very beginning of the Aeneid:

Arma virumque cano, Troiae qui primus ab oris Italiam fato profugus Lavinaque venit litora - multum ille et terris iactatus et alto vi superum, saevae memorem Iunonis ob iram, multa quoque et bello passus, dum conderet urbem inferretque deos Latio; genus unde Latinum Albanique patres atque altae moenia Romae.

Arms, and the man I sing, who, forced by Fate, And haughty Juno’s unrelenting hate, Expelled and exiled, left the Trojan shore. Long labours, both by sea and land, he bore, And in the doubtful war, before he won The Latian realm, and built the destined town; His banished gods restored to rites divine; And settled sure succession on his line, From whence the race of Alban fathers come, And the long glories of majestic Rome.

This powerful period culminates in Rome, as does Virgil’s original. But rhyme gives Dryden the chance for an extra sense of climax and closure. And there is something especially romantic, resonant and authoritative about the grand monosyllable ‘Rome’, an advantage which English, French and German have, ironically enough, over Latin and Italian themselves. We might also recall that it was Dryden himself who defined the ‘golden’ line as two nouns and two adjectives with a poor verb between them to keep the peace. Virgil liked to use the golden line or some variant upon it to round off a period or a paragraph, especially in the Georgics. ‘And the long glories of majestic Rome’ feels like the English equivalent of a golden line - two nouns, two epithets, and a certain majestic self-containment. The line has a Virgilian sense of closure, even though the golden line is not what Virgil writes in this particular place.

‘Arms and the man I sing’ - that must be the canonical translation, unimprovable. It entails a separation of the antecedent ‘man’ from the relative ‘who’, not wholly natural in English but a price which has to be paid for conveying what Virgil’s Arma virumque conveys. One might say that the first seven syllables of Dryden’s translation are forced upon him; or that he has known

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how to get them absolutely right. The force of this paragraph comes partly from a discreet use of alliteration, not exaggerated: ‘forced by Fate’, ‘haughty. hate’, ‘expelled and exile’, ‘long labours’, ‘w ar. won’, ‘restored to rites’, ‘settled sure succession’. (Compare Virgil: fato... profugus, Lavina... litora, Latio... Latinum.) In the first couplet, ‘Fate’ and ‘hate’ place the emphasis exactly where it should be, setting against each other the two forces which will impel Aeneas through the twelve books of his story. We can notice too each noun supported by its adjective. That is thoroughly Virgilian: for example, ‘haughty Juno’s unrelenting hate’ gives the quality of saevae memorem Iunonis ob iram admirably, one’s only reservation being that ‘haughty’ understates saevae. Actually, Dryden is here more Virgilian than Virgil, who does not attach as many adjectives to nouns as does his translator. Virgil outclasses him - as he does everyone else - in the flexibility of his style and tone. Dum conderet urbem, for example, has a simplicity and universality in expressing the human need for rootedness in place and society which ‘built the destined town’ has not preserved.

And in other ways this noble paragraph is imperfect. The seventh and eighth lines slacken a little. Again, rhyme is a problem. ‘Rites divine’ - what other rites might the gods expect? Line 8 is Dryden’s own expansion, and one feels the effect of that: it seems to have little of interest to say. Just a little of the formidable compression of Virgil’s first seven lines has been lost, or so the modern reader may think. But perhaps we should consider another possibility. If, as has been maintained, Dryden’s Aeneid is a political act, here we may have the first political intrusion. What the Glorious Revolution had done was to destroy the sure succession of a line, and Dryden makes his Jacobite protest. On this account, he is to be criticised (or approved) in other terms: for placing the translator’s duty to his original below the duty to bear political witness.

It is time to return to the Eclogues. I began with their harsher side, and I shall end with two places where, by contrast, especial elegance and euphony are required of the translator. I have chosen the first of these because it enables me to bring Dryden into comparison with another major poet. For a space, the miniature drama of the first Eclogue, sometimes tense and bitter, yields to the pleasure of pure surface and mellifluous onomatopoeia (53-8):

hinc tibi, quae semper, vicino ab limite saepes Hyblaeis apibus florem depasta salicti saepe levi somnum suadebit inire susurro; hinc alta sub rupe canet frondator ad auras: nec tamen interea raucae, tua cura, palumbes, nec gemere aeria cessabit turtur ab ulmo.

Here, as ever, the hedge at your neighbour’s boundary where the bees of Hybla feed full on the willow blossom will often by its gentle humming invite sleep to come; and there the woodman below the high rock will waft his song to the breezes, nor meanwhile will the hoarse wood-doves, your delight, nor the turtle-dove cease to moan from the lofty elm.

Three of these lines inspired Tennyson’s superlative imitatio in The Princess (7.205-7):

Myriads of rivulets hurrying thro’ the lawn, The moan of doves in immemorial elms, And murmuring of innumerable bees.

86 Richard Jenkyns - Dryden's Translation of the E c l o g u e s in a Comparative Light

Here is Dryden’s version:

Behold! Yon bordering fence of sallow-trees Is fraught with flowers; the flowers are fraught with bees: The busy bees, with a soft murmuring strain, Invite to gentle sleep the labouring swain. While from the neighbouring rock, with rural songs, The pruner’s voice the pleasing dream prolongs, Stock doves and turtles tell their amorous pain, And, from the lofty elms, of love complain.

And here is Ferry:

Often beside the hedge of willows that marks This edge of what you own, the humming of bees That visit the willow flowers will make you sleepy; And over there, at the other edge of your land, Under the ledge of that high outcropping of rock, The song of a woodman pruning the trees can be heard; And always you can hear your pigeons throating And the moaning of the doves high in the elm tree.

With tua cura Virgil reproduces the sound of doves more closely than one might have supposed possible in real words. If there is no onomatopoeia in the translation of those last two lines, their nature and function are not shown. Ferry does pretty well: ‘throating’ may be a little stilted, but the sound and the flow are good. Dryden is further from the Latin, but superbly assured: it is hard not to imagine Mr Handel setting these lines to music, anachronistic though the fancy may be. Earlier in the passage, Dryden enlivens the verse with chiasmus and epanalepsis: ‘fraught with flow ers. flowers are fraught’, ‘with bees; The busy b e e s. ’ This corresponds to nothing in the Latin. But Dryden conceives that the translator’s duty (or so we may suppose) is to produce something that reads as though it might have been first conceived in English. If he sees an opportunity for elegances of his own, he will take it.

This approach, free but essentially faithful, may also be seen in his treatment of the refrain of the second song in the eighth Eclogue. In Virgil’s Latin, this is repeated identically time after time; Dryden varies the wording as the refrain reappears, and he also binds the refrain (as Virgil does not) into the syntax of the preceding line. Such elegant variatio is thoroughly Virgilian in character, though it happens not to be what Virgil does in these particular places. The same Eclogue will also provide me with my final sampling. I take the lines which Macaulay thought the most beautiful in all Latin poetry, and which Professor Kenney in our own time has compared to Le GrandMeaulnes as an evocation of the lost idyll of childhood.3 The passage is a severe challenge to any translator (8. 37-41):

saepibus in nostris parvam te roscida mala (dux ego vester eram) vidi cum matre legentem. alter ab undecimo tum me iam acceperat annus, iam fragilis poteram a terra contingere ramos: ut vidi, ut perii, ut me malus abstulit error!

[I saw you as a little girl in our enclosure (I was your guide) gathering dewy apples with your mother. At that time I had just reached my twelfth year, I could just reach the brittle branches from the ground. When I saw, how I died, how wretched delusion carried me away!]

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Dryden: I viewed thee first (how fatal was the view!) And led thee where the ruddy wildings grew, High on the hedge, and wet with morning dew. Then scarce the bending branches I could win; The callow down began to clothe my chin. I saw; I perished; yet indulged my pain. Ferry: I saw you, when you were a little child. Your mother was with you. I led you to the place In our garden where there was the apple tree, With dewy apples growing on the boughs. I was just going on twelve, just tall enough To reach up to the branches to pick the apples. I saw, I saw, and I was lost forever. These are two intelligent and sensitive versions. True, Dryden’s very last phrase is a touch too comfortable, the gouty gentleman sinking into his fauteuil; here Ferry is not only more accurate but cuts more keenly. Ferry handles this passage with a simple, luminous clarity, and he has managed to keep pretty close to Virgil’s original. Some things have been lost. Virgil’s tiny parenthesis - ‘(I was your guide)’ - has a shy urgency which has gone from the translation; Dryden has felt the need to preserve this syntactical shape, though he has put a different sense, drawn from a few lines later, into his own parenthesis. Virgil’s branches were ‘fragile’, a perfect epithet enhancing the eggshell delicacy of the scene; neither translator has kept that. And the Latin also contains the idea of enclosure, hinting at the mother’s protective care and the idea of the garden as a symbol of innocence and virginity; again, neither translator quite catches that, though Dryden has the word ‘hedge’. Dryden is freer: he is prepared to replace the boy’s age with the picture of the down on his chin - which is not in Virgil at all. Ferry’s ‘I saw, I saw’ is an ineffectual repetition which loses the change of verb in the Latin, and seems to misunderstand the syntax: a fancy elegance uses ut first in one sense, then in another: ‘When I saw, how I perished.’ Dryden’s ‘I saw, I perished’ is simple but unbeatable. At moments, Ferry’s rhythms are slightly flabby (try the third and fifth of those lines), as indeed his syntax can be (too much ‘was’ and ‘were’); Dryden is almost always sinewy. And here - since I must have some sort of a conclusion - is one of Dryden’s most signal virtues as a translator: that he does not seem cramped or embarrassed by the original. The firmness, flow and naturalness of his Virgil make it seem that these are English poems, fitted to the genius of the English language. No other translator of Virgil quite achieves that.4

Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford RICHARD JENKYNS

NOTES 1 The Poems o f , ed. J. Kinsley (Oxford, 1958) ii, 650. 2 The Eclogues, Georgics and Aeneid o f Virgil, tr. C. Day Lewis (Oxford, 1966) (the translation of the Eclogues had earlier been published separately, London, 1963); The Eclogues o f Virgil, tr. David Ferry (New York, 1999). 3 The Letters of Thomas Babington Macaulay, ed T. Pinney (Cambridge, 1976) iii, 62; E. J. Kenney, ICS 8 (1983) 44-59, at 53. 4 This paper was first written for a colloquium on ‘Dryden in the 1690s’ held at the British Academy and later read to the Virgil Society. I am grateful to both audiences for their comments.

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