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 translation of Homer
Dr Penelope Wilson, University of Durham
Dryden’s translations from Homer, long over-shadowed by Pope's version and
noticed mainly as one of Pope's sources, have more recently been the
subject of a good deal of critical and scholarly investigation in their own
right. In this paper I shall move from an overview of some of the most
significant of these contributions, through a more detailed account of
colloquialism and other aspects of the language of Dryden's translation of 'The First Book of Homer’s Ilias', to a consideration of the nature of its
classicism and its contemporaneity.
Relevant publications
'Classical Poetry and the Eighteenth Century Reader', in Isabel Rivers (ed.), Books and their Readers in Eighteenth-Century England (Leicester, 1982), pp. 69-96.
'Homer and English Epic', in Robert Fowler (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Homer (Cambridge, 2004), pp. 272-86
Contributions on the publishing and readership of translation, on the
'Augustan' school of poetic translation, and on translations of classical
lyric, pastoral and other forms, for Stuart Gillespie and David Hopkins
(edd.), The Oxford History of Literary Translation in English, Volume 3
(1660-1730), forthcoming from Oxford University Press.