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Pre-Augustan - Lucretius - Lucy Hutchinson's - de Rerum Natura - (Arion - A Journal of Humanities and The Classics, Vol. 5, Issue 3) (1998)
Pre-Augustan - Lucretius - Lucy Hutchinson's - de Rerum Natura - (Arion - A Journal of Humanities and The Classics, Vol. 5, Issue 3) (1998)
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DAVID HOPKINS
edge of classical
literature. Hutchinson, the daughter of
enlightened believers inwomen's education, had been taught both
French and Latin from an early age, and her MS Commonplace
Book, also preserved in the Nottinghamshire archives, contains
lengthy transcriptions from Sir John Denham's and Sidney Godol
phin's translations of Virgil, as well as her own renderings of lines
from Ovid's Heroides. The most extensive product of her classical
studies, however, was a version of Lucretius' De Rerum
complete
Natura in iambic pentameter in a
couplets, preserved, partly
scribal hand and partly inHutchinson's holograph, in the British
Library as Additional Manuscript 19333. This translation?prob
ably the first complete rendering of Lucretius in English?has
been known to specialists for some time. But though short extracts
have appeared in anthologies, it has never before been printed in
its entirety.
Lucretius, and which would thus seem to imply that the transla
tion was made in the 1650s. De Quehen associates Hutchinson's
interest in Lucretius with the spread of Epicurean ideas by the
Newcastle Circle of royalist ?migr?s, and with the larger dissemi
nation of atomistic ideas inmid-seventeenth century England. But
the association is rather loosely established: Hutchinson's transla
tion is aligned with a set of ideas which were "in the air" at
(roughly) the same time, rather than being precisely located at a
specific moment in an exactly defined personal, intellectual, and
social context. Perhaps no further certainties are to be had on the
matter. Nevertheless, amore detailed and precise setting out of the
possibilities would have been welcome.
Whatever the exact circumstances of the translation's composi
tion, the question of Lucy Hutchinson's relation to her task
remains one
How, asks, could a translator
problematic. produce
such a "perceptive and imaginative" response to a text whose sen
posed her Lucretius} Should one suspect (with the Times Literary
Supplement reviewer of de Quehen's edition) that Hutchinson's
claim to have made her translation to "understand" De
merely
Rerum Natura, and with no sympathy whatever for the "impious
doctrines" which it contains, was made "perhaps disingenu
Was she, of her achievement, at
ously?" perhaps, secretly prouder
least as a feat of scholarship, than she dared to admit?
A possible parallel suggests itself between Hutchinson and a
later seventeenth-century translator of Lucretius, the Oxford