British Academy: The UK's National Academy for the Humanities and Social Sciences
Dryden in the 1690s: The Virgil and the Fables
Abstract
Dryden's Ovid, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and Aesthetic Translation
Professor Charles Martindale, University of Bristol
I have just completed a book in which I argue for the importance, for students of Latin poetry, of the aesthetic as theorised by Immanuel Kant and of aesthetic criticism as practised by Walter Pater (Latin Poetry and the Judgement of Taste: An Essay in Aesthetics, OUP 2005). The organisers of this conference have asked me to talk about the implications of the views developed there for translation in general, and for Dryden's Ovid in particular. Accordingly my paper will be theoretical rather than historical in character. Using the Ovid translations in Fables as my principal example, I shall reflect on what an aesthetic or 'art for art's sake' theory of translation might look like. The overriding principle is articulated by the poet-painter D. G. Rossetti in the Preface to The Early Italian Poets (1861): 'The only true motive for putting poetry into a fresh language must be to endow a fresh nation, as far as possible, with one more possession of beauty'. Since, on a Kantian view, beauty is not subject to rules, nor is there hierarchy within the aesthetic, the relationship between what we call 'original' and 'version' has to be differently figured from the hierarchical models often employed in talking about translation. In both theory and practice the aesthetic has no problem with the idea of translation, unlike many other approaches to literature; in general the aesthetic invites repetition, as a result of a desire to beget on beauty as described in Plato's Symposium. I shall also connect Dryden's concern with 'the maintaining the character of an author' (Preface to Sylvae) with Pater's idea of the 'virtue', the aesthetic quality of an artwork, 'the property each has of affecting one with a special, a unique, impression of pleasure' (Preface to The Renaissance), defining which is the principal object of aesthetic criticism. I shall end with some very brief reflections on two of the finest Ovidian versions in Fables, 'Baucis and Philemon' and 'Of the Pythagorean Philosophy'.
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