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Fascinating essay by Lawrence Venuti at
http://www.wordswithoutborders.org/article.php?lab=HowTo
The opening pars -
Among the many pronouncements that have shaped our understanding of literary
translation, perhaps none is more often echoed than John Drydenıs preface to
his version of the Aeneid . ³I have endeavoured to make Virgil speak such
English,² asserted Dryden, ³as he would himself have spoken, if he had been
born in England, and in this present Age.² No doubt Drydenıs achievement is
to have made many of his contemporaries believe that he had impersonated the
Latin poet. But this is merely a poetic sleight of hand. Drydenıs Virgil
abandons the unrhymed verse of the Latin poem for English couplets while
cribbing lines from a previous translator, the poet Sir John Denham. A
skeptic might well wonder why Virgil should come back as Dryden instead of
an epic poet who lived in the same period and wrote his epic without rhyme:
John Milton. Should we not expect an English Virgil to be more attracted to
the grand style of Paradise Lost ?
The answer has less to do with a fancied reincarnation than with the fact
that literary taste changes. And when it does change, a corresponding style
of translation falls into disuse or is pre-empted, never to be adopted by
leading translators (especially when, like Dryden, they happen to be Poet
Laureate). By the end of the seventeenth century, the blank verse of
Shakespeare and Milton had lost cultural capital to the couplet, so that a
poet as talented and celebrated as Dryden could make the latter seem to be
the most natural vehicle for a Latin poem written in a completely different
verse form. The translator is no stand-in or ventriloquist for the foreign
author, but a resourceful imitator who rewrites the original to appeal to
another audience in a different language and culture, often in a different
period. This audience ultimately takes priority, insuring that the verbal
clothing the translator cuts for the foreign work never fits exactly.
Best
A
Alison Croggon
Blog: http://theatrenotes.blogspot.com
Editor, Masthead: http://masthead.net.au
Home page: http://alisoncroggon.com
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