Metaglossia: The Translation World

Dryden shows his enjoyment of translating Horace, 'paraphrasing' his verse with brilliant wordplay...

"For this last half-year I have been troubled with the disease (as I may call it) of translation … " Thus John Dryden begins the preface to his volume, Sylvae, or the Second Part of Poetical Miscellanies (1685). It marks his emergence, relatively late in life, as a translator, containing work by various Greek and Latin authors: Theocritus, Lucretius, Horace, Ovid among them. Despite that "disease", encompassing a nagging "un-ease" about the fidelity of his method, Dryden enjoyed translating Horace – and it shows. See, for example, the magnificent Ode 29 from Book Three presented by Dryden as his own imitation of "Pindarique Verse". Its famous eighth stanza ("Happy the man, and happy he alone, / He who can call today his own … ") is treasured by readers still – as poetry and as advice on living. For this week's poem, however, I've picked a smaller jewel: the wonderfully elegant version of Ode Nine, Book One.

Dryden described his method as paraphrase. The original author's words were not as "strictly followed as his sense". The sense could be amplified, and even altered. This was a practical and, in some ways, obvious technique. Horace's word-order, for example, has to be altered to make sense in a non-inflected language. In taking further liberties, the justification is that the translator is himself making a poem. Dryden tried to create a work the author could have produced "if he were living and an Englishman". He sets the standard for poetry translation as fidelity to the receiving language, and sets a further standard: he is honest with the reader about his strategies.