TO THE EARL OF ROSCOMMON, ON HIS EXCELLENT ESSAY ON TRANSLATED VERSE [An Essay on Translated Verse, by Wentworth Dillon, Earl of Roscommon, was first published in 1684; a second edition, "corrected and enlarged," appeared the next year. Dryden's poem is prefixed to both editions; in the second it is slightly revised. Dryden several times refers to Roscommon with warm admiration: see his Preface to Ovid's Epistles (p. 90, above), his Preface to Sylva (pp. 176, 178, 179, below), and his Dedication of the Eneïs (p. 514, below). In 1683 Roscommon prefixed a complimentary poem to the third issue of Religio Laici. The present text follows the second edition.] WHETHER the fruitful Nile, or Tyrian shore, The seeds of arts and infant science bore, "T is sure the noble plant, translated first, Advanc'd its head in Grecian gardens nurs'd. The Grecians added verse; their tuneful tongue Made nature first and nature's God their O early ripe! to thy abundant store It might (what nature never gives the Have taught the numbers of thy native tongue. But satire needs not those, and wit will Thro' the harsh cadence of a rugged line: Thy generous fruits, tho' gather'd ere their prime, Still shew'd a quickness; and maturing time 20 But mellows what we write to the dull sweets of rhyme. Once more, hail and farewell; farewell, thou young, But ah too short, Marcellus of our tongue; Thy brows with ivy, and with laurels bound; But fate and gloomy night encompass thee around. POEMS INCLUDED IN SYLVE (THE SECOND [Encouraged by the success of Miscellany Poems, 1684, Tonson and Dryden undertook a second volume of similar character, which was published in 1685 with a title reading, Sylva, or The Second Part of Poetical Miscellanies; and with the motto: This book is generally referred to as the Second Miscellany. Second, third, and fourth editions followed in the same years as those of its predecessor: 1692, 1702, and 1716. The third edition adds to the title the words, Publish'd by Mr. Dryden; the title of the fourth edition reads, The Second Part of Miscellany Poems. Publish'd by Mr. Dryden. On the Sylva a passage in a letter from Dryden to Tonson, dated by Malone (I, 2, 21) in August or September, 1684, is of much interest: "Your opinion of the Miscellanyes is likewise mine: I will for once lay by the Religio Laici till another time. But I must also add, that since we are to have nothing but new, I am resolv'd we will have nothing but good, whomever we disoblige. You will have of mine, four Odes of Horace, which I have already translated; another small translation of forty lines from Lucretius; the whole story of Nisus and Eurialus, both in the fifth and the ninth of Virgil's Eneids: and I care not who translates them beside me, for let him be friend or foe, I will please myself, and not give off in consideration of any man. There will be forty lines more of Virgil in another place, to answer those of Lucretius: I meane those very lines which Montagne has compar'd in those two poets; and Homer shall sleep on for me, I will not now meddle with him." Evidently Tonson proposed that no reprinted work be included in the new volume, and Dryden followed his suggestion. After Dryden's preface, the Sylva opens with his translations from Virgil, Lucretius, Theocritus, and Horace. Other translations, mainly anonymous, with a few original poems, make up the rest of the volume. Among the contributions is a Latin poem, Horti Arlingtoniani, ad Clarissimum Dominum, Henricum, Comitem Arlingtonia, &c., by Charles Dryden, eldest son of the poet. In the contents of the third and fourth editions of the Sylva, as of its predecessor, Tonson, or an editor, made important changes. When Dryden made his complete translation of Virgil, he rewrote thoroughly the episodes from the Eneid included in the Sylva. His earlier texts are omitted at the present point, but are given in Appendix II, pp. 921-928, below.] PREFACE For this last half-year I have been troubled with the disease (as I may call it) of translation. The cold prose fits of it, which are always the most tedious with me, were spent in the History of the League; the hot, which succeeded them, in this volume of verse miscellanies. The truth is, I fancied to myself a kind of ease in the change of the paroxysm; never suspecting but the humor would have wasted itself in two or three pastorals of Theocritus, and as many odes of Horace. But finding, or at least thinking I found, some thing that was more pleasing in them than my ordinary productions, I encourag'd myself to renew my old acquaintance with Lucretius and Virgil; and immediately fix'd upon some parts of them, which had most affected me in the reading. These were my natural impulses for the undertaking; but there was an accidental motive which was full as forcible, and God forgive him who was the occasion of it. It was my Lord Roscommon's Essay on Translated Verse; which made me uneasy till I tried whether or no I was capable of following his rules, and of reducing the speculation into practice. For many a fair precept in poetry is like a seeming demonstration in the mathematics, very specious in the diagram, but failing in the mechanic operation. I think I have generally observ'd his instructions; I am sure my reason is sufficiently convinc'd both of their truth and usefulness; which, in other words, is to confess no less a vanity, than to pretend that I have at least in some places made examples to his rules. Yet, withal, I must acknowledge that I have many times exceeded my commission; for I have both added and omitted, and even sometimes very boldly made such expositions of my authors, as no Dutch commentator will forgive me. Perhaps, in such particular passages, I have thought that I discover'd some beauty yet undiscover'd by those pedants, which none but a poet could have found. Where I have taken away some of their expressions, and cut them shorter, it may possibly be on this consideration, that what was beautiful in the Greek or Latin, would not appear so shining in the English; and where I have enlarg'd them, I desire the false critics would not always think that those thoughts are wholly mine, but that either they are secretly in the poet, or may be fairly dedue'd from him; or at least, if both those considerations should fail, that my own is of a piece with his, and that if he were living, and an Englishman, they are such as he would probably have written. For, after all, a translator is to make his author appear as charming as possibly he can, provided he maintains his character, and makes him not unlike himself. Translation is a kind of drawing after the life, where everyone will acknowledge there is a double sort of likeness, a good one and a bad. 'Tis one thing to draw the outlines true, the features like, the proportions exact, the coloring itself perhaps tolerable; and another thing to make all these graceful, by the posture, the shadowings, and chiefly by the spirit which animates the whole. I cannot, without some indignation, look on an ill copy of an excellent original. Much less can I behold with patience Virgil, Homer, and some others, whose beauties I have been en deavoring all my life to imitate, so abus'd, as I may say, to their faces, by a botching interpreter. What English readers, unacquainted with Greek or Latin, will believe me, or any other man, when we commend those authors, and confess we derive all that is pardonable in us from their fountains, if they take those to be the same poets, whom our Oglebys have translated? But I dare assure them that a` good poet is no more like himself, in a dull translation, than his carcass would be to his living body. There are many who understand Greek and Latin, and yet are ignorant of their mother tongue. The proprieties and delicacies of the English are known to few: 't is impossible even for a good wit to understand and practice them, without the help of a liberal education, long reading, and digesting of those few good authors we have amongst us, the knowledge of men and manners, the freedom of habitudes and conversation with the best company of both sexes; and, in short, without wearing off the rust which he contracted, while he was laying in a stock of learning. Thus difficult it is to understand the purity of English, and critically to discern not only good writers from bad, and a proper style from a corrupt, but also to distinguish that which is pure in a good author, from that which is vicious and corrupt in him. And for want of all these requisites, or the greatest part of them, most of our ingenious young men take up some cried-up English poet for their model, adore him, and imitate him, as they think, without knowing wherein he is defective, where he is boyish and trifling, wherein either his thoughts are improper to his subject, or his expressions unworthy of his thoughts, or the turn of both is unharmonious. Thus it appears necessary that a man should be a nice critic in his mother tongue, before he attempts to translate a foreign language. Neither is it sufficient that he be able to judge of words and style, but he must be a master of them too; he must perfectly understand his author's tongue, and absolutely command his own. So that, to be a thorough translator, he must be a thorough poet. Neither is it enough to give his author's sense in good English, in poetical expressions, and in musical numbers; for, tho' all these are exceeding difficult to perform, there yet remains a harder task; and 't is a secret of which few translators have sufficiently thought. I have already hinted a word or two concerning it; that is, the maintaining the character of an author, which distinguishes him from all others, and makes him appear that individual poet whom you would interpret. For example, not only the thoughts, but the style and versification of Virgil and Ovid, are very different: yet I see, even in our best poets who have translated some parts of them, that they have confounded their several talents; and, by endeavoring only at the sweetness and harmony of numbers, have made them both so much alike, that if I did not know the originals, I should never be able to judge by the copies, which was Virgil, and which was Ovid. It was objected against a late noble painter, that he drew many graceful pictures, but few of them were like. And this happen'd to him, because he always studied himself, more than those who sate to him. In such translators I can easily distinguish the hand which perform'd the work, but I cannot distinguish their poet from another. Suppose two authors are equally sweet, yet there is a great distinction to be made in sweetness, as in that of sugar, and that of honey. I can make the difference more plain, by giving you (if it be worth knowing) my own method of proceeding, in my translations out of four several poets in this volume: Virgil, Theocritus, Lucretius, and Horace. In each of these, before I undertook them, I consider'd the genius and distinguishing character of my author. I look'd on Virgil as a succinct, and grave majestic writer; one who weigh'd not only every thought, but every word and syllable: who was still aiming to crowd his sense into as narrow a compass as possibly he could; for which reason he is so very figurative, that he requires (I may almost say) a grammar apart to construe him. His verse is everywhere sounding the very thing in your ears, whose sense it bears; yet the numbers are perpetually varied, to increase the delight of the reader; so that the same sounds are never repeated twice together. On the contrary, Ovid and Claudian, tho' they write in styles differing from each other, yet have each of them but one sort of music in their verses. All the versification and little variety of Claudian is included within the compass of four or five lines, and then he begins again in the same tenor; perpetually closing his sense at the end of a verse, and that verse commonly which they call golden, or two substantives and two adjectives, with a verb betwixt them to keep the peace. Ovid, with all his sweetness, has as little variety of numbers and sound as he; he is always, as it were, upon the handgallop, and his verse runs upon carpet-ground. He avoids, like the other, all synalephas, or cutting off one vowel when it comes before another in the following word; so that, minding only smoothness, he wants both variety and majesty. But to return to Virgil: tho' he is smooth where smoothness is requir'd, yet he is so far from affecting it, that he seems rather to disdain it; frequently makes use of synalephas, and concludes his sense in the middle of his verse. He is everywhere above conceits of epi grammatic wit, and gross hyperboles; he maintains majesty in the midst of plainness; he shines, but glares not; and is stately without ambition, which is the vice of Lucan. I drew my definition of poetical wit from my particular consideration of him: for propriety of thoughts and words are only to be found in him; and, where they are proper, they will be delightful. Pleasure follows of necessity, as the effect does the cause; and therefore is not to be put into the definition. This exact propriety of Virgil I particularly regarded, as a great part of his character; but must confess, to my shame, that I have not been able to translate any part of him so well, as to make him appear wholly like himself. For where the original is close, no version can reach it in the same compass. Hannibal Caro's, in the Italian, is the nearest, the most poetical, and the most sonorous of any translation of the Eneids: yet, tho' he takes the advantage of blank verse, he commonly allows two lines for one of Virgil, and does not always hit his sense. Tasso tells us, in his letters, that Sperone Speroni, a great Italian wit, who was his contemporary, observ'd of Virgil and Tully, that the Latin orator endeavor'd to imitate the copiousness of Homer, the Greek poet; and that the Latin poet made it his business to reach the conciseness of Demosthenes, the Greek orator. Virgil, therefore, being so very sparing of his words, and leaving so much to be imagin'd by the reader, can never be translated as he ought in any modern tongue. To make him copious, is to alter his character; and to translate him line for line is impossible, because the Latin is naturally a more succinct language than either the Italian, Spanish, French, or even than the English, which, by reason of its monosyllables, is far the most compendious of them. Virgil is much the closest of any Roman poet, and the Latin hexameter has more feet than the English heroic. : Besides all this, an author has the choice of his own thoughts and words, which a translator has not; he is confin'd by the sense of the inventor to those expressions which are the nearest to it so that Virgil, studying brevity, and having the command of his own language, could bring those words into a narrow compass, which a translator cannot render without circumlocutions. In short, they who have call'd him the torture of grammarians, might also have call'd him the plague of translators; for he seems to have studied not to be translated. I own that, endeavoring to turn his Nisus and Euryalus as close as I was able, I have perform'd that episode too literally; that, giving more scope to Mezentius and Lausus, that version, which has more of the majesty of Virgil, has less of his conciseness; and all that I can |