Charlemagne said, ‘To have another language is to possess a second soul’. In this ambitious work G. juggles several languages, looking at what happens when English poets translate Greek and Latin literary texts, from the Elizabethan period to the present day. But G.'s work is not simply a collection of essays on aspects of classical translation. It also makes the more fundamental argument that without such a translation culture, the English literary canon could never have forged its own soul. Without a fuller appreciation of the interaction in translation between classical past and vernacular present, G. reflects, we cannot fully understand our own English literary history. G. largely succeeds in making that argument in this important book.
Two introductory chapters (‘Making the Classics Belong: a Historical Introduction’; ‘Creative Translation’) set the scene with a historical outline of the history of translation in England and a consideration of typical translation issues: imitation and originality, foreignising and domesticating approaches to translation, the role of translation not simply to ‘revive’ old life but also to confer new. Lamenting the occlusion of translation from standard literary histories, G. sets English translation – a more haphazard affair than the academic and/or patronage oriented efforts leading the way in continental Europe – at the heart of English cultural life, moving from a first wave of Elizabethan over-reachers who colonise the classics, through the new Golden Age of translation, the Augustan era (and above all the towering figures of Dryden and Pope), and into the Romantic, Victorian and Modernist eras, before ending up in the perhaps unexpectedly fertile ground of the twentieth century. Re-examining this historical narrative from a synchronic perspective, G. argues that from Christopher Marlowe to Ezra Pound and the experimental translators of the twentieth century, translation is a form of literary invention which does not just recover a new past for the English literary tradition, but also serves as a decisive factor in making ‘home-grown’ literary culture possible.
Thereafter G. combines, in chronological order, a series of chapters which mix periodic overview with single-poet studies, in both cases supported by a rich range of close readings. ‘English Renaissance Poets and the Translating Tradition’ (Chapter 3) emphasises the importance of translation to English early modern culture – not only at the individual level (Shakespeare's first contact with poetry was translation of Ovid), but also in more far-reaching ways (the expansion of the English language itself; the creation of an alternative past for English letters – one tied not to Medieval English but Rome and Greece). Chapter 7, ‘Classical Translation and the Formation of the English Literary Canon’, contributes further to the global picture, correcting embedded value-judgements modern readers might have about the prestige of translation versus original poetry. Instead, G. shows via concentration on Dryden and Pope in particular how the practice of translation reshapes the canon itself, providing retrospective ‘precedents’ for contemporary work not previously available in the English tradition. And in Chapter 8, ‘Evidence for an Alternative History: Manuscript Translations of the Long Eighteenth Century’, G. strikes out into the largely undiscovered country of unpublished classical translation. Here G. succeeds not only in challenging assumptions about the quality and purpose of unpublished versus published translation but also in establishing that the outstanding, ‘singular’ translations of the canonical giants are in fact simply the visible surface of much deeper-set changing trends in literary taste.
Other chapters think through evolving (and recurring) issues of translation via attentive close reading of single authors. The challenge of Greek translation by the Greek-less is tackled with case studies centred on Shakespeare and Ted Hughes. In Chapter 4, ‘Two-Way Reception: Shakespeare's Influence on Plutarch’, G. accounts for Shakespeare's impossibly ‘Greek’ tragedy by the phenomenon of reverse-reception (we have already read Greek tragedy through the Shakespearian lens: therefore Shakespearian tragedy ‘feels’ Greek). But he also attributes a striking development in Shakespeare's conceptualisation of drama – the privileging of character over plot, which first starts in the Roman plays – to the influence of Plutarch (translated by Sir Thomas North in 1579). Returning to similar issues in the twentieth century in Chapter 11, ‘“Oddity and struggling dumbness”: Ted Hughes’ Homer', G. examines Hughes' perhaps least well-known translation, a rendering of the sea-storm of Odyssey 5 (vv. 382–493) which was printed in the Collected Poems (2003) for the first time after its original 1960 reading on the BBC's Third Programme. Via comparison with Robert Fitzgerald's still popular 1961 verse translation, G. reads Hughes' violent Odyssey as expression of man's ‘existential plight’, situating Hughes' professed allegiance to the translation doctrine of ‘literalness’ against Fitzgerald's domesticating approach, and concluding – against the grain of general critical consensus – that it is Fitzgerald, not Hughes, who has made Homer in his own image here.
G. also grapples with the issues of ‘fidelity’, ‘dialogue’ and ‘imitation’, as well as the relationship between ‘scholarly’ and creative reception. In Chapter 5, ‘Transformative Translation: Dryden's Horatian Ode’, G. examines various attempts to capture the meaning of Odes 3.29, paying special attention to the influence of Dryden's transformation/embodiment of Horace's lyric. And in Chapter 10, ‘The Persistence of Translations: Lucretius in the Nineteenth Century’, G. returns to the influence of Dryden, revealing a less comfortable relationship with later translators Wordsworth and Matthew Arnold, who seem to produce – despite their own critical tastes and creative efforts – translations of Virgil (Wordsworth) and Lucretius (Arnold) that are inevitably Drydenian, a literary determinism and intertextual influence that seeps into the influential academic edition of H.A.J. Munro.
Metempsychosis is an ancient figure for poetic tradition, and the ‘transfusion’ of translator and translated recurs in various ways in this volume. To take two examples: in Chapter 6, ‘Statius and the Aesthetics of Eighteenth-Century Poetry’, G. traces the reception history of Statius' Thebaid and Achilleid, focusing on the ancient poet's recasting as an ‘Augustan poet’ by Pope, who excises ‘unsuitable’ material like the ‘unmannerly … fistycuffs’ between Polyneices and Tydeus in Thebaid 1. The aesthetic choice to remake Statius as an ‘Augustan’ finds its reverse in the career of the poet Wordsworth, the subject of Chapter 9, ‘Receiving Wordsworth, Receiving Juvenal: Wordsworth's Suppressed Eighth Satire’. There, Wordsworth's status as figurehead for Romanticism comes under revisionary pressure with consideration of his near-finished imitation of Juvenal's Eighth Satire. Written in 1795–7, jointly with Francis Wrangham, but only published properly (in its fullest form possible, roughly 300 final/near-final verses) in 1997, this piece was self-consciously modelled on Johnson's 1749 translation of Juvenal's Tenth Satire. And though Wordsworth himself attempted to disown his eighth satire, G. – reminding us of W.'s often undervalued translation of three books of the Aeneid in the 1820s – provocatively wonders what effect this more ‘neoclassical’ Wordsworth might have on the established narrative of literary history.
In a book of such scope, there are inevitable costs at the level of depth – this reader would have liked more attention to have been paid to the Caroline/Civil War period, for example – and not every critical reading G. provides will command assent. Yet it is not the job of this volume to offer a fully realised revisionary English literary history, and G. is never less than rich and thought-provoking. This work will open up exciting avenues of further research for students of both Classics and English Literature alike.
