Translation, theory and art of

Translation, theory and art of. After some translation of Christian texts in the Old English period, the first major English literary practitioner is Chaucer. But his versions of individual French and Latin works are of less aesthetic interest than his transformations of e.g. Boccaccio, Virgil, and Ovid, involving translation in a broader sense. Medieval English translations were predominantly of devotional works, fashionable French literature, and occasionally Latin classics. To the Renaissance period of extensive experiment, dedicated primarily to the enhancement of the vernacular languages and literatures, belong the names of G. Chapman, Marlowe, A. Golding, and Jonson. It saw the arrival of Greek literature in English; the rise of the specialist translator; the ‘conquest’ (as Holland revealingly puts it) of almost the whole Latin canon; and greatly increased attention to European languages such as Italian and Spanish.

Translation was central to the Augustan programme to classicize English literary culture. As translators Dryden and Pope are best known for their complete Virgil (1697) and Homer (1715–26) respectively. These are dialogues with, not copies of, the originals, and represent a full creative commitment. Questions about the boundaries between translation and imitation, also an increasingly popular form, are raised by Dryden, who in 1689 proposes a tripartite classification of translations as ‘metaphrase’ (literal), ‘paraphrase’ (‘with latitude’), or ‘imitation’. Such questions are differently answered at the end of this period in Alexander Tytler's Essay on the Principles of Translation (1791), a systematic discussion favouring close translation.

An expanding theoretical literature in the 19th cent., owing much to the German Romantics, focuses debate on the necessity of ‘foreignizing’, of retaining features specific to the foreign text even and especially when not assimilable to the norms of the target language and literature. In Britain such issues came to a head over M. Arnold's On Translating Homer (1861). For Arnold, Homer was most faithfully represented by modern English hexameters and in contemporary language, but for his ‘foreignizing’ opponents only antiquated poetic forms and obsolete words gave the true flavour. A rash of Homeric translations on one principle or the other ensued. Arnold's view of translation is strongly echoed in the 20th cent. by Pound, the most influential and eclectic of modern translators. But for much of the 20th cent. translation became too exclusively the province of the scholar; purely functional work, often by academics, proliferated. However, translation is re-establishing itself as a normal part of the creative output of English poets and dramatists: T. Hughes, Heaney, Mahon, T. Harrison, and Longley are examples.