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
how 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.
I
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
R ic h a rd Jenkyns -
D ryd e n 's T r a n s la t io n o f the E c l o g u e s in a Com parative L ig h t
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 p r o c e e d i n g s o f t h e V irgil S o c ie t y V o lu m 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 a t 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:
A ren’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 inbetween 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.
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.
78
R ic h a rd Jenkyns -
D ryd e n 's T r a n s la t io n o f the E c l o g u e s in a Com parative L ig h t
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 renaissance
commonplace; it is in Sidney’s Defence o f 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 Georgics, 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 Aeneid. He chooses the same metre
for both works. That may seem the obvious thing to do as Virgil, of course, uses the hexameter for
79
T he P r o c e e d i n g s o f t h e V irgil S o c ie t y V o lu m e xxvi 2 0 0 8
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 dancingmaster 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 o f English Poetry (1586) a specimen
rendering of the first two Eclogues into accentual hexameters, 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.
80
R ic h a rd Jenkyns -
D ryd e n 's T r a n s la t io n o f the E c l o g u e s in a Com parative L ig h t
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 Lucretius 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 pastorals 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.
‘ThouTityr slug in shade’ is conspicuously unappealing, and the jingle ‘s h r ill. Amaryll’ I take
to be an accident - and not attractive. But the later version is not consistently moregraceless
81
T he P r o c e e d i n g s o f t h e V irgil S o c ie t y V o lu m e xxvi 2 0 0 8
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 fin is... 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 sevenline 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:
82
R ic h a rd Jenkyns -
D ryd e n 's T r a n s la t io n o f the E c l o g u e s in a Com parative L ig h t
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’.
83
T he p r o c e e d i n g s o f t h e V irgil S o c ie t y V o lu m e xxvi 2 0 0 8
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... T ityre.). 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 Ovid, 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):
84
R ic h a rd Jenkyns -
D ryd e n 's T r a n s la t io n o f the E c l o g u e s in a Com parative L ig h t
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.
M arlowe’s couplet is lovely because the natural spoken rhythm of the sentence putsthe weight
where it ought to be, on ‘pleasures’. The rhyme follows like a gentle control (andoffers 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 fa to 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 ‘w ho’, 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 D ryden’s translation are forced upon him; or that he has known
85
T he P r o c e e d i n g s o f t h e V irgil S o c ie t y V o lu m e xxvi 2 0 0 8
how to get them absolutely right. The force of this paragraph comes partly from a discreet use
of alliteration, not exaggerated: ‘forced by Fate’, ‘h a u g h ty . hate’, ‘expelled and exile’, ‘long
labours’, ‘w a r . w on’, ‘restored to rites’, ‘settled sure succession’. (Compare Virgil: fa to ...
profugus, Lavina... litora, L atio... 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 tow n’ 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 D ryden’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
R ic h a rd Jenkyns -
D ryd e n 's T r a n s la t io n o f the E c l o g u e s in a Com parative L ig h t
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!]
87
T he P r o c e e d i n g s o f t h e V irgil S o c ie t y V o lu m e xxvi 2 0 0 8
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 John Dryden, 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 o f 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.
88