‘As He Refined the Language’: Dryden's Task as a Translator

Abstract

This essay was runner‐up in the 2005 Literature Compass Graduate Essay Prize, Seventeenth Century Section. The essay surveys Dryden's prose works, and his career as translator from Westminster School to Fables Ancient and Modern, in order to show his conception of literary translation as a tool to elevate, enrich and refine the English language. Dryden had a heavy investment in the idea of translatio studii, the translation of the arts between successive cultures, from Ancient Greece to Restoration England, and perceived himself as a crucial agent in this historical progress. But accompanying the premise of England's inheritance of cultural eminence is a veneration for Latin which makes classicising via translation a crucial task for England's leading person of letters; especially as hopes of a British Academy under royal patronage faded. Dryden found ways to advance this aim under all his three theorised modes of translation: metaphrase (word‐for‐word), imitation (loose rewriting) and paraphrase (a middle path). Finally, at the end of his life, he discusses the English language as if his project had attained some success, and was an appropriate medium in which to set down Latin classics beside its own classics as peers.