British Academy: The UK's National Academy for the Humanities and Social Sciences
Dryden in the 1690s: The Virgil and the Fables
Saturday 1 October 2005
The British Academy, 10 Carlton House Terrace, London SW1Y 5AH
Symposium organisers
Professor Paul Hammond FBA and Professor David Hopkins
The last decade of Dryden's life, between the Revolution of 1688-9 and his death in 1700, was one of acute personal and political difficulty, yet it was also one of extraordinary poetic achievement. After the installation of the new government of William III he was deprived of his offices as Poet Laureate and Historiographer Royal, and as a supporter of the exiled James II he was one of a disappointed and suspect political minority. And as a Catholic he was additionally disadvantaged. Yet during these years Dryden turned to translation to produce two late masterpieces: his complete version of Virgil (1697) and his Fables Ancient and Modern (1700) which comprises translations of Homer, Ovid, Chaucer, and Boccaccio. Both are routinely acknowledged to be major achievements, yet neither work has attracted the attention which it deserves, partly because scholars are still hesitant about discussing translations.
The publication (scheduled for May 2005) of the final volume of The Poems of John Dryden, edited by Paul Hammond and David Hopkins (5 vols, 1995-2005), each volume of which has been supported by research grants from the Academy, provides a good opportunity to reflect on the achievement of Dryden’s final decade, as the last volume of the project consists principally of a heavily-annotated edition of Fables.
The symposium will be a one-day event addressing both The Works of Virgil and Fables Ancient and Modern. Contributors will be invited to reflect on the ways in which Dryden used translation to fashion a response to the world of the 1690s - to its political, moral, and religious tensions - and to address the practical and methodological problems of reading translated texts.
The symposium should appeal not only to Dryden scholars, but to those interested in literary translation and to historians of the period.
Bursaries are available to encourage undergraduate and postgraduate students to attend. An application form is available online or, for more details, please contact:
Professor David Hopkins
Department of English
University of Bristol
3-5 Woodland Road
Bristol BS8 1TB
E-mail: david.hopkins@bristol.ac.uk
For further information contact:
Meetings Department,
The British Academy, 10 Carlton House Terrace, London SW1
Telephone: 020 7969 5264;
Email: events@britac.ac.uk