John Dryden (1631-1700) was the greatest English poet of the late seventeenth century.
He was also its
principal and most influential translator and its leading commentator on the art of translation. His most
celebrated translations were of verse (though he also translated a number of prose works), and most (though,
as we shall see, not all) of them were translations of ancient Greek and Roman poetry. Dryden is sometimes
described as a ‘theorist’ of translation. But such a classification is potentially misleading if it suggests that he
was the author of an original, comprehensive, and static body of doctrine on the subject which was
determined in advance and consistently implemented in his later practice. Dryden’s writings on translation
are more properly thought of as a constantlyevolving set of programmatic statements and reflections, often
developing the work of predecessors, composed over the course of two decades as a working translator, and
deriving their authority as much from the poet’s practice as from their cogency in the abstract. Dryden’s
major statements on translation all occur in prefaces or dedications attached to particular works or
collections.
Dryden’s first, and most famous, discussion of translation was published before any of his major
achievements in the medium itself. In the Preface to Ovid’s Epistles (1680) the poet proposed his celebrated
tripartite division of translation into ‘metaphrase’ (‘or turning an author word for word, and line by line, from
one language into another’), ‘paraphrase’ (‘or translation with latitude, where the author is kept in view by
the translator so as never to be lost, but his words are not so strictly followed as his sense, and that, too, is
admitted to be amplified but not altered’) and ‘imitation’ (‘where the translator – if he has not lost that name
– assumes the liberty not only to vary from the words and sense, but to forsake them both as he sees
occasion; and taking only some general hints from the original, to run division on the ground-work, as he
pleases’). ‘Metaphrase’ and ‘imitation’ are both rejected, the former on the grounds (already established by
Sir John Denham in his influential Preface to The Destruction of Troy (1656)) that it produces renderings
which are both unidiomatic and obscure, and which thus altogether fail to convey the ‘spirit’ of 5 © David
Hopkins, 2013 their originals, the latter because it allows the translator so much freedom that the results are
more properly thought of as original compositions than translations. ‘Paraphrase’, the chosen method of
Dryden and his fellowcontributors to Ovid’s Epistles, is offered as an ideal via media between the two
unacceptable extremes. Dryden to be sure, was broadly to adhere to the ‘paraphrastic’ style of translation for
the rest of his translating career. But he was increasingly prepared to incorporate into his translations, at the
local level, elements of ‘metaphrase’ and ‘imitation’ if he felt they were called for by the particular task at
hand. In his translation of Lucretius, for example, he rendered, in metaphrastic fashion, Lucretius’s vitae
pausa – the Roman poet’s phrase for the lacuna that exists when the structure of atoms composing an
individual human being are dissolved in death – as ‘pause of life’. And in his translations of Juvenal’s satires
and Ovid’s Art of Love, he sometimes, as we shall see, ‘updated’ references in the original, pointing up their
application to the modern world with momentary allusions to contemporary London life – while basically
leaving the poems in their original Roman settings.
