Virgil and His Translators Susanna

Braund
Visit to download the full and correct content document:
https://ebookmass.com/product/virgil-and-his-translators-susanna-braund/
 CLASSICAL PRESENCES

General Editors
LORNA HARDWICK JAMES I. PORTER
 CLASSICAL PRESENCES

Attempts to receive the texts, images, and material culture of ancient Greece and
Rome inevitably run the risk of appropriating the past in order to authenticate the
present. Exploring the ways in which the classical past has been mapped over the
centuries allows us to trace the avowal and disavowal of values and identities, old
and new. Classical Presences brings the latest scholarship to bear on the contexts,
theory, and practice of such use, and abuse, of the classical past.
Virgil and His
Translators

EDITED BY

Susanna Braund and

Zara Martirosova Torlone

1
 3
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP,
United Kingdom
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford.
It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship,
and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of
Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries
© Susanna Braund, Zara Martirosova Torlone, and OUP 2018
The moral rights of the authors have been asserted
First Edition published in 2018
Impression: 1
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in
a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the
prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted
by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics
rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the
above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the
address above
You must not circulate this work in any other form
and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer
Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press
198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Data available
Library of Congress Control Number: 2018945290
ISBN 978–0–19–881081–0
Printed and bound by
CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY
Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and
for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials
contained in any third party website referenced in this work.
Acknowledgements

The editors wish to thank numerous scholars and friends for their assistance in
bringing this volume into being. The genesis of the volume lay in three workshops
and conferences, held in Vancouver (2012), in Paris (2014), and at Cuma near Naples
(2014). All three were inspiring events and we express our deep gratitude to all the
participants, many of whose papers appear in this book. Our co-organizers, Craig
Kallendorf at Naples and Siobhán McElduff at Paris, were crucial collaborators and
interlocutors to whom we owe a special debt of gratitude.
Two key scholars at the Vancouver event who are not present in the volume were
Stuart Gillespie and Stephen Harrison: we thank them profoundly for their insights
and encouragement. The level of discourse at all three events was exceptional and
exemplary; we recommend strongly the model we adopted, of precirculating the
papers, and we thank all participants for honouring our desire to maximize engaged
discussion at the events.
The conferences that generated this volume would not have been possible without
funding from several sources. The award, to Susanna Braund, of a Standard Research
Grant by SSHRC, the Social Sciences Research Council of Canada, funded the
Vancouver conference. The Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies at the University
of British Columbia supported the Wall Colloquium Abroad at the Institut d’Études
Avancées in Paris with a generous award; we acknowledge with gratitude the warm
hospitality of the Institut and its director. The Villa Vergiliana and the Vergilian Society
provided Zara Torlone with the venue for the Naples/Cuma conference. The final stages
of editorial work on the volume have been funded by Susanna Braund’s Canada
Research Chair funds, which happily were finally released to her by the University of
British Columbia.
Translations from French and Italian were undertaken by Liza Bolen, Gillian
Glass, and Jelena Todorovic; we thank Marco Romani Mistretta for additional help
with Italian idioms. We thank Einaudi for permission to print an English translation
of pages from the introduction to Alessandro Fo’s Italian translation of the Aeneid.
Some additional acknowledgements of permissions to reproduce selected material
follow below:
• Josephine Balmer’s ‘Lost’ and ‘Let Go’ have been reproduced from her collection
Letting Go: Thirty Mourning Sonnets and Two Poems (Agenda Editions,
Mayfield, 2017), and ‘Creusa’ has been reproduced from her collection Chasing
Catullus: Poems, Translations and Transgressions (Bloodaxe Books, Newcastle-
upon-Tyne, 2004) by kind permission of the author.
vi ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

• Excerpts in Chapter 27 from The Georgics of Virgil by Peter Fallon have been
reproduced with kind permission of the author and The Gallery Press
(www.gallerypress.com).
• Excerpts in Chapter 27 from Seamus Heaney’s Preoccupations: Selected Prose
1968–1978 (Faber & Faber, London, 1980), The Cure at Troy (Faber & Faber,
London, 2002), and ‘Virgil: Eclogue IX’ and ‘Bann Valley Eclogue’ from Electric
Light (Faber & Faber, London, 2001) have been reproduced with kind permis-
sion of Faber & Faber Ltd.
• The lines from ‘The Great Hunger’ and the poem ‘Epic’ by Patrick Kavanagh in
Chapter 27 are reprinted from Collected Poems, edited by Antoinette Quinn
(Allen Lane, London, 2004), by kind permission of the Trustees of the Estate of
the late Katherine B. Kavanagh, through the Jonathan Williams Literary Agency.
For their dedicated hard work we thank Jake Beard for editorial assistance, Emma
Hilliard for devising the index, and Graham Butler for completing it. Brian North
worked wonders with a challenging set of proofs and we are most grateful. We
especially thank the general editors of the series and the readers for their extremely
thoughtful and constructive criticisms and guidance on the shape of the volume. No
volume of collected essays is perfect, but we believe that, thanks to the support we
have received, we have produced a balanced and polished book, which will stimulate
many future conversations on the important topic of the translations of Virgil.
Finally, we thank our immediate support networks, who provided calmness and
sanity when the volume was threatening to become unruly: Susanna thanks her
wonderful husband Adam Morton and her many old dogs; Zara thanks her husband
Mark Torlone, her two daughters Christina and Francesca, and her parents,
Dr Sergey Martirosov and Samvelina Pogosova, for their love and support. We
have both loved this collaboration with each other: we are always, it seems, on the
same page, and that has been affirming and encouraging throughout the project.
Susanna Braund and Zara Martirosova Torlone

The publisher and the editors apologize for any errors or omissions in the above list.
If contacted they will be pleased to rectify these at the earliest opportunity.
Contents

Introduction: The Translation History of Virgil: The Elevator Version 1

Susanna Braund and Zara Martirosova Torlone

Part 1. Virgil Translation as Cultural and Ideological Capital

1. Successes and Failures in Virgilian Translation 23
Craig Kallendorf
2. Dante’s Influence on Virgil: Italian volgarizzamenti and Enrique de
Villena’s Eneida of 1428 36
Richard H. Armstrong
3. Epic and the Lexicon of Violence: Gregorio Hernández de Velasco’s
Translation of Aeneid 2 and Cervantes’s Numancia 51
Stephen Rupp
4. Love and War: Translations of Aeneid 7 into English
(from Caxton until Today) 63
Alison Keith
5. The Passion of Dido: Aeneid 4 in English Translation to 1700 80
Gordon Braden
6. An Amazon in the Renaissance: Marie de Gournay’s
Translation of Aeneid 2 97
Fiona Cox
7. Virgil after Vietnam 107
Susanna Braund
8. Translations of Virgil into Esperanto 124
Geoffrey Greatrex
9. Translations of Virgil into Ancient Greek 136
Michael Paschalis
10. Sing It Like Homer: Eugenios Voulgaris’s Translation of the Aeneid 151
Sophia Papaioannou
11. Farming for the Few: Jožef Šubic’s Georgics and the Early Slovenian
Reception of Virgil 166
Marko Marinčič
viii CONTENTS

12. Reviving Virgil in Turkish 183

Ekin Öyken and Çiğdem Dürüşken
13. Finding a Pastoral Idiom: Norwegian Translations of Virgil’s Eclogues
and the Politics of Language 195
Mathilde Skoie
14. The Aeneid and ‘Les Belles Lettres’: Virgil’s Epic in French between
Fiction and Philology, from Veyne back to Perret 209
Séverine Clément-Tarantino
15. Virgil in Chinese 224
Jinyu Liu

Part 2. Poets as Translators of Virgil: Cultural Competition,

Appropriation, and Identification
16. Domesticating Aesthetic Effects: Virgilian Case Studies 239
Richard F. Thomas
17. Du Bellay’s L’Énéide: Rewriting as Poetic Reinvention? 260
Hélène Gautier
18. Aesthetic and Political Concerns in Dryden’s Æneis 275
Stephen Scully
19. Translation Theory into Practice: Jacques Delille’s Géorgiques
de Virgile 289
Marco Romani Mistretta
20. ‘Only a Poet Can Translate True Poetry’: The Translation of Aeneid 2
by Giacomo Leopardi 305
Giampiero Scafoglio
21. Wordsworth’s Translation of Aeneid 1–3 and the Earlier Tradition
of English Translations of Virgil 318
Philip Hardie
22. Epic Failures: Vasilii Zhukovskii’s ‘Destruction of Troy’ and Russian
Translations of the Aeneid 331
Zara Martirosova Torlone
23. Virgílio Brasileiro: A Brazilian Virgil in the Nineteenth Century 345
Paulo Sérgio de Vasconcellos
24. Between Voß and Schröder: German Translations of Virgil’s Aeneid 355
Ulrich Eigler
 CONTENTS ix

25. Reflections on Two Verse Translations of the Eclogues in the

Twentieth Century: Paul Valéry and Marcel Pagnol 368
Jacqueline Fabre-Serris
26. Come tradurre? Pier Paolo Pasolini and the Tradition of Italian
Translations of Virgil’s Aeneid 385
Ulrich Eigler
27. Irish Versions of Virgil’s Eclogues and Georgics 399
Cillian O’Hogan
28. Limiting Our Losses: A Translator’s Journey through the Aeneid 412
Alessandro Fo
Afterword: Let Go Fear: Future Virgils 422
Josephine Balmer

Bibliography 431
Notes on Contributors 473
Index Locorum 481
General Index 496
 Introduction: The Translation
History of Virgil
The Elevator Version

Susanna Braund and Zara Martirosova Torlone

Virgil’s poems, especially the Aeneid, have been translated many times since long
before the advent of printing; and they continue to be translated to the present day.
As early as the mid-first century CE, Polybius, Seneca’s freedman, is said to have
translated Virgil into Greek. The Middle Irish Imtheachta Aeniasa (Wanderings of
Aeneas), written between the tenth century and the twelfth, can lay claim to being the
first extant vernacular translation, yet is best regarded as an adaptation, because of
how it recasts the Latin poem into the Irish tradition of heroic prose narrative.
Likewise, the mid-twelfth century Old French Roman d’Énéas is an important text,
but it, too, rejigs the material to reflect contemporary concerns. Italy produced
fourteenth-century prose translations of the Aeneid, while the first verse translation
is that of Tommaso Cambiatore (1430). At the same time, in Spain, Enrique de
Villena was writing in Castilian prose his own version, divided into 366 chapters.
The earliest printed Aeneid ‘translation’ (really a loose adaptation in the medieval
mode) appeared in Italian in 1476¹ and was subsequently translated into French in
1483 and into English in 1490, by William Caxton, as The Eneydos of Vyrgyl. More
rigorous translations quickly followed, as Renaissance humanism took off: into
French in 1500 (Octovien de Saint-Gelais, published in 1509), into mid-Scots in 1513
(Gavin Douglas, published 1553), into German in 1515 (Thomas Murner), into Italian
1534 (Niccolò Liburnio), into English in the 1540s (Henry Howard, Books 2 and 4,
published in 1554 and 1557) and into Spanish in 1555 (Gregorio Hernández de
Velasco). The first complete Aeneid in English is that of Thomas Phaer and Thomas
Twyne, published over the period 1558–84. Candidates for the major European Aeneid
translations include those of Joachim du Bellay (Books 4 and 6) in 1562 and 1560,
Annibale Caro in 1581, and John Dryden in 1697. Production of Aeneid translations

¹ Just eight years after the editio princeps of the Latin text, which appeared in 1469.
 SUSANNA BRAUND AND ZARA MARTIROSOVA TORLONE

continues apace; and similar (though not identical) narratives apply to the Eclogues
and the Georgics, which, because of their subject matter, move in and out of favour
more dramatically.
The history of the translation of Virgil’s Aeneid in particular is closely bound up
with the emerging phenomenon of nationalism from the Renaissance onwards,
whether or not it is avant la lettre to call it that. As nations sought to establish and
develop their own national literatures and to articulate their sovereign or imperialist
agendas, they turned to translating the poem that was at the apex of European culture
and that had been at the centre of the school curriculum since it was first published,
in 19 BCE. They did this deliberately, seeking to yoke the language and the heroic
patriotic story to their own histories, helped in no small degree by claims made by the
aristocratic families of descent from Aeneas’s Trojans.² The process continued in
countries and cultures further from the seat of Renaissance humanism, like ripples
expanding from a pebble dropped into a pond. Thus Russia’s first Aeneid translation
does not emerge until the reign of Catherine the Great, while the first attempt in
Hebrew dates from the nineteenth century. The process continues into the twentieth
century, as demonstrated by the case of Esperanto, which boasts three Aeneid trans-
lations since the language was invented in 1887.
Translations, just like other interpretations, are always framed and freighted ideo-
logically. Theodore Ziolkowski’s (1993) book Virgil and the Moderns did an exemplary
job of identifying the malleability of Virgil’s poems during the years 1914 to 1945, when
American and European interpreters found in Virgil mirrors of their own very different
concerns, whether to do with populism or elitism, fascism or democracy, commitment
or escapism. This ideological hermeneutics is readily extrapolated and applied to trans-
lations just as much as to adaptations and to the other forms of reception discussed by
Ziolkowski. That is what makes our volume important.

* * *
There are literally thousands of translations of the works of Virgil, complete or
selective, in dozens of languages.³ And yet there is no book dedicated to the study
of translations of Virgil as a national and transnational cultural phenomenon.
There are of course books, instigated especially by Charles Martindale,⁴ that investigate
the reception of Virgil; and there are studies of specific aspects of that reception,
whether by time period,⁵ by location,⁶ by genre,⁷ by interpretation,⁸ or by combinations

² See Waswo 1995, Federico 2003, some of the essays in Shepard and Powell 2004, and Hardie 2014.
³ Kallendorf 2012 is an absolutely essential resource for anyone interested in this topic.
⁴ In Martindale 1984 and Martindale 1997, the latter of which deliberately starts with reception. Three
notable recent contributions are Ziolkowski and Putnam 2008, Farrell and Putnam 2010, and Hardie 2014.
⁵ For example, Wilson-Okamura 2010, Ziolkowski 1993, and Atherton 2006.
⁶ For example, Kallendorf 1989, 1999, and Torlone 2014.
⁷ For example, Patterson 1987a.
⁸ For example, Thomas 2001b and Kallendorf 2007a (on ‘pessimistic’ readings).
 THE TRANSLATION HISTORY OF VIRGIL 

of those categories.⁹ In understanding translation as a special case of reception, the work

of Lorna Hardwick and Stuart Gillespie has been key, especially the latter’s English
Translation and Classical Reception: Towards a New Literary Theory (Gillespie 2011).
There are a few studies that specifically discuss Virgil’s English translation history,
but these are limited chronologically or unable to delve deep: the two important articles
by Tony Harrison,¹⁰ Colin Burrow’s essay in The Cambridge Companion to Virgil,¹¹
Tanya Caldwell’s (2008) Virgil Made English: The Decline of Classical Authority, Robin
Sowerby’s (2010) Early Augustan Virgil: Translations by Denham, Godolphin, and
Waller, and Sheldon Brammall’s (2015) The English Aeneid: Translations of Virgil,
1555–1646. But there is nothing yet that attempts to open up the truly big picture. One
of the editors, Susanna Braund, is at work on a major study, titled A Cultural History
of Translations of Virgil: From the Twelfth Century to the Present, which will attempt
a synthetic vision. In the meantime, this volume is designed to get the conversation
moving.
In this introduction we first describe the broad landscape of Virgilian translation
from both the theoretical and the practical perspectives. We then explain the genesis
of the volume and indicate how the individual chapters, each of which is summarized,
illuminate the complex tapestry of Virgilian translation activity through the centuries
and across the world. We then indicate points of connection between the chapters, in
order to render the whole greater than the sum of its parts. We are acutely aware that
a project such as this could look like a (rather large) collection of case studies;
therefore we understand the importance of extrapolating larger phenomena from
the specifics presented here.¹² We conclude by suggesting ways in which other
scholars can build on this material.
This volume, then, is intended as a landmark publication devoted to the complex
role that translations of Virgil’s poetry have played in world literature and culture
from the early modern period down to the present day. The majority of the chapters
collected here focus, perhaps inevitably, on European translations of the Aeneid.
‘Perhaps inevitably’, we say, because the Aeneid provided a paradigm for what was
called in medieval times translatio imperii et studii (‘the transmission of power and
learning’).¹³ The significance of Virgil to our collective literary tradition can scarcely
be overemphasized: there is not a single Western poetic tradition unaffected by
his poetry. His influence extends beyond the literary sphere into public discourse,
education, morality, kingship theory, and imperial justifications. Beyond Europe,
his work is still gaining ground, and there is growing interest in translating Virgil
in non-European traditions—including into Asian languages and, so it is said, into

⁹ For example, Cox 1999. ¹⁰ Harrison 1967 and 1969. ¹¹ Burrow 1997.
¹² We acknowledge with gratitude the stimulating seminar ‘Beyond the Case Study: Theorizing Classical
Reception’, organized by Rosa Andujar and Konstantinos Nikoloutsos at the Society for Classical Studies
meeting in January 2016.
¹³ Explored eloquently by Waswo in his essential 1997 book.
 SUSANNA BRAUND AND ZARA MARTIROSOVA TORLONE

Arabic. Although most of the essays in this book relate to the dominant cultures of
Renaissance and modern-day Europe, we are delighted to be able to include studies
from more ‘peripheral’ cultures as well as non-European traditions, including Brazilian
Portuguese, Norwegian, Russian, Slovenian, Turkish, and Chinese, alongside
Esperanto. All of these give important glimpses of what Virgil translation might
look like in its infancy, instead of groaning under the weight of a tradition five
centuries long. Of course we could not achieve comprehensiveness in our scope,
but this volume does address a broad spectrum of theories that defined Virgilian
translations across time and space. Our contribution will by no means be the last
word. Rather, it will be the (we hope) highly significant first word in a discussion that
is long overdue.

* * *
The field of translation studies has been growing now for several decades and
occupies a privileged space between comparative literature, reception studies, her-
meneutics, cultural studies, book history, creative writing, and, to some degree, even
philosophy. Because of the complicated interdisciplinary nature of translation stud-
ies, any theoretical concept proposed in analysis of a specific translation practice
has to take into account the disciplinary background from which that analysis arose.
At the same time, there is clearly a tension between the case study approach and
overarching theoretical approaches. Top-down and bottom-up: we propose that both
types of approach are essential to understanding a canonical author such as Virgil
and that ideally a dialogue between them can be achieved.
The influence of Michel Foucault and the New Historicists is more or less ubiquitous
in this volume:¹⁴ the significance of translations extends beyond the aesthetic sphere
into the social, political, moral, and even economic spheres. Collectively the essays
here make a major contribution to illuminating the cultural and ideological work
done by translations of the poetry of the most esteemed Latin poet. Likewise, the
influence of the ideas of Walter Benjamin is pervasive, if unacknowledged; the focus
of many of the contributions here is upon ‘that element in a translation which does
not lend itself to translation’.¹⁵
The language of translation theory generally works in binaries. It distinguishes
the ‘source’ text from the ‘target’ language. It constructs dichotomies between
‘literal’ and ‘free’, ‘formalist’ and ‘functionalist’, ‘domesticating’ and ‘foreignizing’
translation strategies.¹⁶ It analyses the role of the translator in terms of ‘visibility’ or

¹⁴ Most obviously, Foucault 1991; for further bibliography, see Chapter 1, n. 1.

¹⁵ Benjamin 1968, p. 75.
¹⁶ Venuti’s brief overview ‘What Is a Translation Theory?’ (Venuti 2000, pp. 4–6) is a good starting-
point. His articulation of the domestication/foreignization binary is of course a development of Schleier-
macher’s early nineteenth-century construct of the translator as either moving the reader towards the
author or vice versa.
 THE TRANSLATION HISTORY OF VIRGIL 

‘invisibility’.¹⁷ It distinguishes between use of the language of translation in the

‘instrumental’ or the ‘hermeneutic’ senses,¹⁸ in which the ‘instrumental’ approach
privileges the idea of language as communication, while the hermeneutic approach
privileges the idea of language as interpretation and thus sanctions variations in
form and effects from the source text.¹⁹ As we write, these ‘simple’ binaries are
increasingly being problematized by translation studies scholars. Likewise, the
common metaphors deployed as rhetorical strategies to describe translation, such
as appropriation, recovery, conversion, and transplantation, all emphasize the gap
between the original and the translation, at a moment when translation studies
scholars are expressing unhappiness with the concept of ‘gaps’ and with the idea of
‘bridging’ gaps, and are applying Homi Bhabha’s concept of the ‘third space’ to
translation studies.²⁰ Whether such a postcolonial sociolinguistic theory will be
productive for the study of the Urtext of European colonialism remains to be seen;
however, thinking of translation as an activity that produces hybrids and oscilla-
tions between worlds does strike us as valuable.²¹
Among the approaches mentioned above, the metaphor of domestication/foreign-
ization is particularly useful in the case of Virgil: the vast majority of translators set
out to ‘domesticate’ his poems, appropriating them to their own national literary
conventions for a mixture of aesthetic, moral, ideological, and patriotic reasons and
often obscuring the quintessentially Roman features of the original. A few translators,
preferring the foreignizing approach, have been brave enough to make their trans-
lations difficult in order to remind readers that they are engaging with literature
produced by an alien culture; but, for the majority, the cultural capital gained from
appropriating Virgil outweighs any such considerations, as this volume will repeat-
edly demonstrate.

* * *
The chapters in this volume were mostly produced for three colloquia on translations
of Virgil held during the years 2012 and 2014; a few more were commissioned for
the volume, to achieve balance and breadth. The first event took place in Vancouver,
in September 2012; the second in Paris, at the Institut d’Études Avancées, in June
2014; and the third at the Symposium Cumanum at the Villa Vergiliana, near Naples,
also in June 2014, with funding primarily from the University of British Columbia
(UBC), the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and Miami
University, Ohio. Funding from the Canada Council to support Susanna Braund’s
Canada Research Chair, formerly withheld by UBC but finally passed along, has

¹⁷ See Venuti 1995. ¹⁸ See Kelly 1979, ch. 1.

¹⁹ The theory of ‘compensation’ developed by du Bellay in his 1549 Deffence et illustration de la langue
Françoyse is a prime example of this approach, whereby literalistic translation is eschewed in favour of
techniques that reproduce the effects of the original, but not necessarily in the same sequence or form.
²⁰ Bhabha 2004. ²¹ See Ette 2016. Thanks to Patricia Milewski for this reference.
 SUSANNA BRAUND AND ZARA MARTIROSOVA TORLONE

made it possible to bring the editorial work to completion. The two co-editors were
the co-organizers of these three colloquia, alongside Siobhán McElduff (Paris) and
Craig Kallendorf (Naples), to whom we extend our deep thanks for their vision
and collaboration. The contributors include scholars at all stages of their careers—
retired and veteran full professors, mid-career scholars, postdoctoral and graduate
students—from Athens, Boston, Brazil, Cambridge, Crete, Exeter, Harvard, Houston,
Istanbul, Lille, Ljubljana, Nice, Ohio, Oslo, Ottawa, Paris Sorbonne, Shanghai, Siena,
Texas A&M, Toronto, Virginia, Zurich, and UBC; one contribution—that of Fo
(Chapter 28)—is by a recent translator of the Aeneid. Their combined expertise
embraces Castilian, Chinese, English, Esperanto, French, German, (Homeric) Greek,
Hiberno-English, Italian, Norwegian, (Brazilian) Portuguese, Russian, Slovenian, and
Turkish translation traditions. We were lucky enough to persuade the poet Josephine
Balmer, who has recently turned her hand to translating Virgil, to write an Afterword
that looks forward to future translations of Virgil.
In terms of historical scope, the volume extends from the period of transition between
the Middle Ages and the Renaissance in fourteenth-century Italy and fifteenth-century
Spain all the way down to twenty-first-century translations in English, French, and
Italian. Some of the translation traditions discussed stretch across many centuries, for
example the English, the French, and the Italian ones, while other traditions, such as the
Norwegian, Slovenian, Esperanto, Turkish, and Chinese, are relatively young and allow
us a glimpse into the sometimes highly contingent factors that affect the development of
a translation tradition.

* * *
In organizing these twenty-eight essays we could have adopted a geographical
formula or a strictly chronological sequence. We rejected those approaches in favour
of creating two broad categories: one uses the rubric of Virgilian translation as
cultural capital, which permits some useful juxtapositions, and the other groups
together the numerous translations written by poets, sometimes preeminent ones
in their own cultures. That said, the two parts of the volume are closely interwoven
and contain numerous overlaps, both cultural and theoretical. We use this introduc-
tion to indicate valuable cross-fertilizations within the volume; and we have inserted
footnotes in the chapters themselves, to direct readers to comparable or dialogic
material elsewhere in the volume. After our summaries of the chapters we will make
specific connections between individual papers, so that readers can pursue their
particular interests most easily.
We also want to explain that we have developed a novel form of interlinear
translation for this project that we have applied as consistently as possible throughout
the volume. We insert this interlinear translation in the translations from Esperanto,
French, German and so on in order to indicate the word order and syntax used by each
translator. We use hyphens to reflect where a single word in the receiving language
should be translated by more than one word in English; for example, we represent
 THE TRANSLATION HISTORY OF VIRGIL 

French du and Spanish del by ‘of-the’. We have followed OUP conventions in using
[ ] to indicate matter added and < > to indicate matter excluded. These interlinear
translations often look very clunky in English, but we hope that they will facilitate
greater understanding of the translations discussed in the volume.
The volume is accordingly divided into two parts—‘Virgil Translation as Cultural
and Ideological Capital’, comprising Chapters 1–15, and ‘Poets as Translators of
Virgil: Cultural Competition, Appropriation, and Identification’, comprising the
remaining thirteen chapters (16–28)—followed by an Afterword. Part 1 explicitly
examines the role of Virgilian translations in a range of different national cultures.
In organizing the essays for this section we took into account the broader theoretical
issues that often drive the translation of classical texts with canonical status; and we
have juxtaposed essays that raise specific questions. The resulting sequence follows
broadly, but not exactly, a chronological progression. Several chapters offer dia-
chronic perspectives on numerous Virgil translations within one particular culture,
for example Chapter 1 on French translations, Chapters 4 and 5 on English transla-
tions, and Chapter 7 on American translations. Others make fruitful cross-cultural
connections, for example the study of the influence of Italian vernacular literature on
Spanish translation (Chapter 2), or that of the eighteenth-century Homeric Greek
translation of the Aeneid in its Russian context (Chapter 10). Chapters 3 and 6 each
spotlight one particular translator and his/her context, while Chapter 8 throws light
on the recent phenomenon of Virgil’s translation in Esperanto and Chapter 9 tracks
the much older phenomenon of Greek translations of Virgil. Other chapters explore
territory that is less familiar to anglophone readers: they analyse the theory and
practice of Virgil translation at or beyond the periphery of our conventional Euro-
pean scope. Thus Chapter 11 is devoted to Slovenian translations, Chapter 12 to
Turkish, Chapter 13 to Norwegian, and Chapter 15 to the relatively recent Chinese
translations. Chapters 1 and 14 take pairs of translations from French culture
to offer contrastive insights into the range of theory and practice that can inform
translation activity. These very varied essays raise issues central to and familiar
from wider translation theory—for example claims to authority and legitimacy within
and beyond Europe, the process of developing a literary vernacular by means of
translation, and the significance of understanding the political, social, and linguistic
discourses of the moment. All of these essays to some degree challenge any literary
complacency when it comes to translation practice in general; specifically in the case
of Virgil, they offer a kaleidoscope of patterns, some of which recur while others
are unique.
There was no contest for initial position in this volume. Craig Kallendorf ’s
wide-ranging discussion entitled ‘Successes and Failures in Virgilian Translation’
(Chapter 1) starts with essential statistics that represent the fruit of several decades
of painstaking research. It is a sobering thought to realize that ‘Virgil’s poetry . . .
was translated into French 732 times, Italian 494 times, English 419 times, and
German 188 times. There are 75 Spanish translations and 55 Dutch ones,
 SUSANNA BRAUND AND ZARA MARTIROSOVA TORLONE

the other European languages being represented 35 or fewer times’ (p. 25).
Kallendorf ’s figures relate to printed translations from incunabula down to 1850;
translations that never made it into print and translations published since 1850 take
those figures much higher, of course. Against this backdrop, Kallendorf proceeds to
select three pairs of pre-1850 Virgilian translations into French, which represent
the Aeneid, the Georgics, and the Eclogues, under the rubric of successes and
failures in Virgilian translation. He thus brings back from obscurity the translations of
Perrin and Le Plat, Delille and Cynyngham (whose translation of the Georgics was never
published), Marot and Gresset and, without offering any aesthetic judgements, considers
the immediate and subsequent career success of these translators. Explicitly using a New
Historicist framework, he identifies political and religious ideologies as crucial
factors in the sometimes surprising outcomes and emphasizes that translations can
never be ranked only in terms of failure or success, because each one has elements of
both and contributes to future translation attempts. In this way Kallendorf provides
an important historical framework for the different directions of Virgilian translations
in Europe and beyond.
Richard Armstrong’s ‘Dante’s Influence on Virgil: Italian volgarizzamenti and
Enrique de Villena’s Eneida of 1428’ (Chapter 2) uses a similar approach to raise
a complementary set of fundamental questions about the role of translation as
reception in vernacular literatures. He uses another little-known translation as his
focus. According to Armstrong, the Eneida of Enrique de Villena (1384–1434),
in Castilian prose, is arguably ‘the first full scholarly translation of Virgil’s Aeneid
into a modern language’ (p. 38). It can be seen as a transitional point between
medieval and modern translational practices and as marking the beginning of
the ‘vernacularization’ of translation, which was designed to make it more
accessible to the target audience. He argues for ‘Dante’s influence on Virgil’ in that
the Divine Comedy’s configuration of Virgil as a figure of authority in effect ‘“author-
izes” the epic genre even in the vernacular’ (p. 50). In his analysis, Armstrong
contemplates the philological conscience of the translator who ‘chose to present
a prosaic, dissected, logocentric Virgil’ (p. 50) rather than a Dantesque Virgil in
terza rima.
We stay with early Spanish translations of the Aeneid in Stephen Rupp’s ‘Epic
and the Lexicon of Violence: Gregorio Hernández de Velasco’s Translation of Aeneid 2
and Cervantes’s Numancia’ (Chapter 3). Rupp’s discussion of the Eneyda de Virgilio
traducida en verso castellano (1555) provides an understanding of the role that
translations of ancient epics played in the Renaissance. Writing poetry about war
raised ethical questions about the justification of wars of conquest and expansion, as
weighed against individual emotions. In that context, the translation of Virgil moves
beyond literary relevance and into the realm of philosophical inquiry. For Velasco,
his translation of the Aeneid serves as a means of moral instruction, because he
casts Aeneas as an exemplar of Stoic virtue and examines the importance of control
over intense emotional states.
 THE TRANSLATION HISTORY OF VIRGIL 

Next comes a pair of essays that examine the English Aeneid with a tighter focus
on particular books: the much studied Book 4 and the much less studied Book 7.
These two essays focus upon the representations of Dido and Lavinia. Alison
Keith’s ‘Love and War: Translations of Aeneid 7 into English (From Caxton until
Today)’ (Chapter 4), which follows on neatly from Rupp’s analysis of the represen-
tation of warfare in translation, looks at English renditions of Aeneid 7 that appear
in translations of the complete poem. She explores the relationship drawn by Virgil’s
English translators between ‘arms’ and a ‘woman’ and shows how these representations
help us to understand how the translators shaped Virgil’s Italian war narrative—
beginning with Thomas Phaer’s 1558 translation and ending with Sarah Ruden’s
(2008) and Patricia A. Johnston’s (2012).
In contrast with the chronological breadth of Keith’s chapter, which runs from
Caxton in 1490 to the twenty-first century, Gordon Braden’s ‘The Passion of Dido:
Aeneid 4 in English Translation to 1700’ (Chapter 5) puts an intense spotlight on
translations of Book 4 during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a period when
England and the English language were becoming prominent on the European and
global scene. He highlights the consistent self-consciousness of this effort to use
Virgil both as a vehicle for translatio imperii and as a medium in the search for an
English metre and idiom that could adequately convey the gravity of ancient epic
poetry. Braden resists the teleological reading of Aeneid translations of this era as
mere precursors to the achievement of Dryden in 1697 and instead analyses the
handling of three key passages from Book 4 by translators across the two centuries.
We now turn from women as the object of translation to discussion of one of
the few women translators featured in this volume in Fiona Cox’s ‘An Amazon in
the Renaissance: Marie de Gournay’s Translation of Aeneid 2’ (Chapter 6).
Cox observes that, while de Gournay’s 1626 translation is marked by imprecisions,
it also conveys a sense of pride in breaching the stronghold of men, as she places
herself in the lineage of French translators of Virgil. De Gournay uses her transla-
tion as part of her struggle for sexual equality, a struggle intensified by her
loneliness and sense of alienation from her own times.
The isolation of the female translator is also addressed by Susanna Braund in ‘Virgil
after Vietnam’ (Chapter 7), a discussion of the major American verse translations
published in the last fifty years. These translations were inevitably framed by Virgil’s
attitude to empire, since that resonated with each translator’s stance in relation to the
war in Vietnam. Braund situates Mandelbaum’s, Fitzgerald’s, Lombardo’s, Fagles’s,
and Ruden’s translations in the larger context of American classical scholarship and
previous translations of Virgil’s epic. Furthermore, she offers a provocative gender
perspective by juxtaposing the male translators, who as professors were all influenced
by the scholarly debates, with Sarah Ruden, who as a woman and as a professional
translator carries out her task away from the margins of academic controversies
and hence provides the reader with an altogether different and more distanced
perspective.
 SUSANNA BRAUND AND ZARA MARTIROSOVA TORLONE

Many of the central issues of cultural capital and of the cultural agendas involved
in translating Virgil are instantiated in Geoffrey Greatrex’s ‘Translations of Virgil
into Esperanto’ (Chapter 8). In some respects this contribution might seem to stand
apart, since it discusses the translations of Virgil into an artificial language—the
international language invented in 1887 in Poland by Ludwig Zamenhof. Yet the
translators of Virgil into Esperanto replicate the widespread phenomenon of trans-
lation of Virgil as a means of gaining cultural capital: they insist on the importance
of producing translations of great works of world literature to give legitimacy to
this new international language. Greatrex’s essay looks at three verse translations
into Esperanto, deploying examples from Book 4 and discussing metrical choices.
He suggests that these translations may have stimulated the production of original
Esperanto epics in the following years, which, again, is a phenomenon paralleled in
the national languages of Europe. However, these translations were—and remain—
isolated from the translations of Virgil into other languages.
Cultural capital is also a key concept in the next two essays, which address what
may look like a surprising phenomenon: the translation of Virgil into ancient Greek.
First, Michael Paschalis’s ‘Translations of Virgil into Ancient Greek’ (Chapter 9)
supplies a panoramic overview of translations of Virgil’s poems into ancient Greek
down to the nineteenth century. Although he discusses the Georgics and Aeneid too,
his main focus is on translations of the Eclogues, where translators have been moved
to attempt renderings in the Doric dialect, in a nod towards Theocritus, the origin-
ator of the pastoral genre. Interest in translating the Eclogues into ancient Greek
manifests in the early seventeenth century, when Scaliger and Heinsius perform this
task not once but twice. Paschalis documents Eugenios Voulgaris’s archaizing trans-
lations of the Georgics (in 1786) and Aeneid (in 1791–2) into epic Greek with notes in
Attic Greek. Voulgaris, who was invited by Catherine the Great of Russia to serve as
archbishop of Cherson and Slaviansk, wrote his translations as part of Catherine’s
social and political programme; and his translations, though they failed in their
purpose of helping to teach Latin to Greco-Russian youth, did exercise an influence
on subsequent Russian translators. In the next century translators—including Chris-
tophoros Philitas and Philippos Ioannou, both of them professors at Athens—
continued to use ancient Greek; only later on did modern Greek take over.
The second essay on ancient Greek translations of Virgil is Sophia Papaioannou’s
‘Sing It like Homer: Eugenios Voulgaris’s Translation of the Aeneid’ (Chapter 10).
Papaioannou’s focus is Voulgaris’s rendition of the Aeneid (1791–2) at the behest of
the Russian tsarina. This peculiar translation had a pronounced pedagogical mission
for an intended audience that was not Russian but belonged to the Greek diaspora.
Furthermore, Voulgaris’s strange undertaking was closely aligned with Catherine’s
complex agenda in her so-called ‘Greek Project’, which aimed at creating an image of
Russia as a Western military power and as heir to Greek Orthodoxy. Papaioannou
justifies study of this perhaps bizarre phenomenon noting that it belonged to the
same era as the first translations of Homer and Virgil in Russia, which she describes
 THE TRANSLATION HISTORY OF VIRGIL 

as ‘a project tightly entwined with Catherine’s political and cultural aspirations to

project Russia at once as a Western military power in the footsteps of Rome and the
heir to Greek Orthodox Byzantium’ (p. 152). In other words, Papaioannou demon-
strates clearly how translation was used for cultural ideology. This essay is profitably
read alongside Torlone’s discussion of nineteenth-century Russian translations
of Virgil.
The subject of Marko Marinčič’s ‘Farming for the Few: Jožef Šubic’s Georgics
and the Early Slovenian Reception of Virgil’ (Chapter 11) is the early Slovenian
translation history of Virgil, which, while still within the confines of the European
school of translation, is nonetheless poorly explored, even in Slovenian scholarship.
Marinčič analyses a little known 1863 translation of Virgil’s Georgics, which offers an
important background to the Slovenian school of translation of Greek and Latin texts.
Written in a hybrid metrical pattern, Šubic’s version is by no means a literary
masterpiece; but it is a groundbreaking work, which stays surprisingly faithful to the
original, revealing to its reader how Slovenian literary consciousness formed itself in
relation to the ancient classics.
The exploration of the twentieth-century translations starts with a contribution by
Ekin Öyken and Çiğdem Dürüşken entitled ‘Reviving Virgil in Turkish’ (Chapter 12),
which presents an interdisciplinary approach informed by literary history, reception
studies, and translation history; the last one of course has a strong tradition in
Turkey. Öyken and Dürüşken examine the complexity of translating Virgil at a
point of knowledge transmission between Asia and Europe and ask how these
translations have been deployed for different political agendas. They contrast the
limited knowledge of Virgil in the Ottoman era with the state of full acquaintance-
ship in modern-day Turkey, suggesting that the Christianizing reading of Virgil may
have delayed recognition of his work in Turkey as a result of the Islamic aspect of the
Ottoman literary tradition. Öyken and Dürüşken contrast the 1928 prose translations
of the Eclogues and Georgics by Ruşen Eşref with the archaizing 1935–6 prose version
of the Aeneid by Ahmed Reşit. That said, both translators, in their different ways, can
be seen to deploy Virgil as a foundational text.
Mathilde Skoie’s ‘Finding a Pastoral Idiom: Norwegian Translations of Virgil’s
Eclogues and the Politics of Language’ (Chapter 13) introduces yet another European
‘repossession’ of Virgil that generally remains outside the scope of most volumes on
translation and reception. This discussion is profitably read in dialogue with Cillian
O’Hogan’s paper on Irish Virgils (Chapter 27). Skoie focuses on three Norwegian
translations of Virgil’s Eclogues published in 1950, 1975, and 2016 and analyses the
way they exhibit tendencies of domestication and foreignization as the language of
translation becomes politicized and engaged in debates about Norwegian identity.
With a particular focus on Eclogue 4, Skoie explores the juxtaposition of rural and
urban voices in the context of language politics.
Séverine Clément-Tarantino performs a similar comparison in ‘The Aeneid and
“Les Belles Lettres”: Virgil’s Epic in French between Fiction and Philology, from
 SUSANNA BRAUND AND ZARA MARTIROSOVA TORLONE

Veyne back to Perret’ (Chapter 14). She walks us back all the way between two
French translations published in the same Belles Lettres series, from Paul Veyne in
2012 to Jacques Perret in 1959. She emphasizes that Veyne’s fluid and vivacious
translation rekindled interest in Virgil in the French reading public, then proceeds to
analyse the principles behind Perret’s translation of the Aeneid in the context of his
1947 work Latin et culture. In this work, elaborating on the ‘art of translation’, Perret
presented attention to the philological and prosodic intricacies of a source text as the
main goal of the ‘ideal translator’; yet he decided to translate the Aeneid in prose. For
Perret, translation had to serve the goal of facilitating the reading of Virgil in Latin;
by contrast, Veyne distanced himself from philological scrutiny, offering instead a
renewed pleasure in reading Virgil in French.
We conclude Part 1 with Jinyu Liu’s ‘Virgil in Chinese’ (Chapter 15). This essay
takes us firmly into the realm of ‘other’ Virgils, a realm that is neither conditioned
nor influenced by the concerns of European renditions of the Roman poet. Liu offers
a fascinating study of the perception of Virgil in twentieth-century China: while
Chinese engagement with Virgil is limited, it nonetheless sheds light on how a non-
European culture might engage with this text, which was completely foreign to
Chinese literary culture in all its aspects, from genre and metre to plot and aesthetics.
Looking at the handful of Chinese translations of the Eclogues from 1957 and of the
Aeneid from 1930 and 1984 (as the Georgics is still awaiting its first complete Chinese
version), Liu tackles the important question of Virgil’s ‘translatability’ and signifi-
cance in non-Western contexts. She finds that Chinese translations of the Aeneid
embrace the ‘pessimistic’ reading of the Aeneid and eschew the theme of imperialism
in favour of sorrow, anxiety, and disillusion.
Part 2 addresses the important phenomenon of poets who have turned to Virgil in
search of inspiration or legitimization of their national literary canons (or both).
Many of the chapters gathered here reflect closely the challenges encountered by
translators in their effort to convey the meaning of the source text to their audiences
while retaining the formal features of the Virgilian original. Again, we have organized
this section broadly in chronological order, and the poets discussed include Du
Bellay, Dryden, Delille, Voß, Leopardi, Wordsworth, Zhukovskii, Mendes, Schröder,
Valéry, Pasolini, Fallon, and Heaney. While this part of the volume is mainly
concerned with specific case studies, it draws on broader theoretical frameworks,
such as the domestication of the foreign in translation (Thomas, Torlone, Eigler,
Fabre-Serris, Eigler again, and O’Hogan). Several chapters address the matter of
Bloom’s ‘anxiety of influence’, which emerges in poets’ feelings of inadequacy at
translating Virgil or, by contrast, in a confidence that amounts to a cultural challenge
to, and even identification with, Virgil (Gautier, Scully, Romani Mistretta, Scafoglio,
Hardie, and Vasconcellos). Part 2 concludes with insights from Alessandro Fo, a
contemporary Italian poet and translator, about how to find a place within one of the
longest continuous traditions of Virgil translation. The volume closes with a pro-
vocative outline of future possibilities in Virgil translation by Josephine Balmer.
 THE TRANSLATION HISTORY OF VIRGIL 

We have placed Richard F. Thomas’s ‘Domesticating Aesthetic Effects: Virgilian

Case Studies’ (Chapter 16) in initial position because it ranges so widely across
the Eclogues, the Georgics, and the Aeneid; because it discusses poet-translators
such as Dryden, Day-Lewis, Lee, and Ferry; and because it identifies some central
issues in the analysis of equivalence against the backdrop of Venuti’s foreignization–
domestication framework. Thomas explores domestication by examining closely
aesthetic, linguistic, and metre-specific effects. Using many examples, he raises the
question of whether or not it is possible to translate language-specific idioms into the
target language without losing the poignancy of the source text.
We move back to sixteenth-century France for Hélène Gautier’s ‘Du Bellay’s
L’Aeneid: Rewriting as Poetic Reinvention?’ (Chapter 17). Gautier expands the
discussion on Virgilian translations into French by focusing on Books 4 and 6 of
Joachim Du Bellay’s translations of the Aeneid, written in the 1550s. She places Du
Bellay’s translation in the context of Renaissance translations and of the evolution of
French language and poetics. Furthermore, she contemplates how Du Bellay’s trans-
lations of Virgil made a mark on his own original poetry, and vice versa: Du Bellay
not only assimilates the imagery and rhythm of Virgilian epic but through Virgil
ponders upon his own poetic voice.
Stephen Scully’s ‘Aesthetic and Political Concerns in Dryden’s Æneis’ (Chapter 18)
addresses the most influential translation of the Aeneid into English. Scully proposes
that Dryden’s 1697 translation of Virgil reflected Dryden’s own time, because the
poem resonated with the political turmoil in England. Although, by Dryden’s own
admission, Virgil’s restrained mien was at odds with his poetics, he strove to bring
the voice of Virgil into British culture, retaining at the same time the Latin poet’s
lexical range and multifaceted textual fabric and conveying the poem’s force in
asserting the cause of nationhood. Scully offers a close reading of passages from
the Aeneid, which are sometimes contrasted with Dryden’s translation of Iliad 1. This
chapter looks back to many of the issues raised in Part 1.
In ‘Translation Theory into Practice: Jacques Delille’s Géorgiques de Virgile’
(Chapter 19), Marco Romani Mistretta shows that, for Delille, Virgil was more
than a poetic influence: he was rather the fons and origo of poetry itself. With
the rising interest in agricultural treatises during the Enlightenment, Delille’s
1770 translation of the Georgics acquired a wide appeal. His lifelong work on his
Géorgiques displays Delille’s aspiration to emulate the Virgilian text and to appro-
priate Virgil’s poetics by intertwining in his own poetry the physical, the aesthetic,
and the moral worlds. In that quest Delille’s Virgil becomes not only the herald of
agricultural wisdom but also a master of poetic harmony. Delille blurs the lines
between ‘translation’ and ‘commentary’ as he contextualizes antiquity within the
cultural framing and cultural cravings of his own epoch. This chapter raises many of
the same big picture questions as does Richard Thomas’s.
Many of the same issues arise again in Giampiero Scafoglio’s ‘ “Only a poet
can translate true poetry”: The Translation of Aeneid 2 by Giacomo Leopardi’
 SUSANNA BRAUND AND ZARA MARTIROSOVA TORLONE

(Chapter 20). Here Scafoglio tackles one of the most debated dilemmas in translation
practice: whether or not one has to be a poet in order to translate poetry. Leopardi
was not only a great poet but also a passionate lover of classical texts, as well as a
rigorous and fine scholar of Greek and Latin language and literature. In 1816, at the
age of eighteen, he translated Book 2 of Virgil’s Aeneid, in a fusion of his philological
and scholarly interests with his aesthetic and creative ambitions. Scafoglio shows that
Leopardi came into his own poetic vocation as his translation progressed and that the
translation, which combined literary faithfulness to the original with the expressive
musicality of Italian, effectively laid the groundwork for Leopardi’s outstanding
poetic activity that followed.
The title ‘Wordsworth’s Translation of Aeneid 1–3 and the Earlier Tradition of
English Translations of Virgil’ (Chapter 21) indicates the focus of Philip Hardie’s
contribution to this volume. As a major translation project by a major English poet,
this work of Wordsworth, which engaged him during the years 1823–31, can be
compared with the Æneis of Dryden, with whom he competes, and with Pope’s Iliad.
Hardie considers Wordsworth’s undertaking not only within the longer history of
English translations of the Aeneid, but also within the history of English poetry.
He explores how Wordsworth, in anxious competition with Dryden, chooses the
rhyming couplet for his translation to show how a different verse movement and
vocabulary can produce another version of the classic English Aeneid.
Zara Torlone’s ‘Epic Failures: Vasilii Zhukovskii’s “Destruction of Troy” and
Russian Translations of the Aeneid’ (Chapter 22) addresses the lack of canonical
translations of the Aeneid into Russian. While Homer found his widely accepted
rendition in Nikolai Gnedich’s Iliad and Vasilii Zhukovskii’s Odyssey translations,
Virgil has had no such luck. Torlone argues that Zhukovskii, a major Russian
Romantic poet, in his 1823 rendition of Aeneid 2 (later titled ‘The Destruction of
Troy’), succeeded where later translators such as Fet (1888) and Briusov (1933), who
were greater poets than Zhukovskii, failed: it achieved the goal of ‘demystifying’ the
foreign text and of conveying ‘in its own language the foreignness of the foreign text’
without alienating the reader. The chapter is usefully read alongside Papaioannou’s
discussion of Russia in the preceding century; and it shares with those of Kallendorf
and Vasconcellos the theme of success and failure.
Paulo Sérgio de Vasconcellos’s discussion of Virgil translations in Brazil in the
nineteenth century takes this volume once more outside of the European context.
Specifically, in ‘Virgílio Brasileiro: A Brazilian Virgil in the Nineteenth Century’
(Chapter 23), Vasconcellos analyses the intriguing nature of the complete poetic
translation of Virgil’s work by the poet Manuel Odorico Mendes, which exercised a
direct influence on modern Brazilian literature and remains popular in Brazil.
Vasconcellos raises crucial questions about poetic identity in translation: ‘Is its
author Virgil? But what are we to do with the “Brazilian” in the title? Or do we
need to register Odorico Mendes as its author?’ He argues that the title encapsulates
the project of an emulator who maintains himself in a dialectical relation with the
 THE TRANSLATION HISTORY OF VIRGIL 

original and who signals his authorship in a way that unites source and target texts
inextricably. There is thus a great synergy between this contribution and those of
Romani Mistretta and Scafoglio.
In ‘Between Voß and Schröder: German Translations of Virgil’s Aeneid’ (Chapter 24),
Ulrich Eigler discusses the German tradition of translations of Virgil with a specific
focus on those by Johann Heinrich Voß (1789–99) and Rudolf Alexander Schröder
(1924–30). He frames his essay by referring to Sarah Ruden’s recent translation,
which has been acclaimed as ‘a great English poem in itself ’, and uses it to assess
his chosen translations. Eigler shows how Voß, influenced by modern ideas that
emanated from Göttingen and from the community of pre-Romantic poets, juxta-
poses his translation with the poetical experiments of Schiller’s translations of Books
2 and 4 of the Aeneid. Schröder, on the other hand, in his translation of the whole of
the Virgilian corpus, adhered to a meticulous imitation of Virgilian prosody. These
two translations could not have been more different, but by setting them against each
other Eigler builds a comprehensive picture of the history of German translations
of the Aeneid.
From twentieth-century Germany we move now to twentieth-century France, with
Jacqueline Fabre-Serris’s ‘Reflections on Two Verse Translations of the Eclogues in
the Twentieth Century’ (Chapter 25)—namely by the poet Paul Valéry (1956) and
by the playwright and novelist Marcel Pagnol (1958). Jacqueline Fabre-Serris
offers a comparison of these two translations because they differ drastically in the
choice of poetic form and in their theoretical positions on the precise purpose of
translation. Furthermore Fabre-Serris compares these two translations with that
of Eugène de Saint-Denis, whose 1942 prose translation of the Eclogues she con-
siders more successful.
Ulrich Eigler’s second chapter in the volume, ‘Come tradurre? Pier Paolo Pasolini
and the Tradition of Italian Translations of Virgil’s Aeneid’ (Chapter 26), takes us
into the twentyfirst century. Eigler contextualizes the translation of Virgil in Italian
within the complex social, political, and linguistic history of Italy in ways that
connect fruitfully with Alessandro Fo’s experience as a translator at the end of this
volume. Eigler addresses twentieth- and twenty-first-century translations paying
special attention to the poet and director Pier Paolo Pasolini’s 1959 version of the
opening of the Aeneid, which he contrasts with the 2007 traditional modern Italian
translation of Vittorio Sermonti: Pasolini’s translation rejects the conventional lin-
guistic, semantic, and cultural unities, while Sermonti aims at continuity between the
classical author and the Italian readers of today.
Next is Cillian O’Hogan’s ‘Irish Versions of Virgil’s Eclogues and Georgics’
(Chapter 27). These versions serve as another salient example of how culture and
nationhood define themselves through Virgil. In his essay O’Hogan explores how
Virgil has provided a way of navigating Irish identity and looks at the language
choices in Irish translations that lead away from British classically infused literature
and towards an alternative classical tradition. This chapter complements closely
 SUSANNA BRAUND AND ZARA MARTIROSOVA TORLONE

Chapter 13 on Norwegian versions of Virgilian pastoral. Examining Seamus Heaney’s

2001 translation of Eclogue 9 and Peter Fallon’s 2006 translation of the Georgics,
O’Hogan argues that both enact aspects of Virgilian ‘repossession’: poets relocate
Virgilian poems into their familiar Irish landscape replete with the grim realities of
rural life; and they make use of Hiberno-English, the everyday version of English
used in Ireland.
Part 2 concludes with a chapter by a contemporary translator of the Aeneid, the
poet and academic Alessandro Fo, whose own Eneide was published in 2012.
This piece, titled ‘Limiting Our Losses: A Translator’s Journey through the Aeneid’
(Chapter 28), is translated from Italian and published here with the kind permission
of the author and the publishing house Einaudi. Here the arduous path of the
challenges faced by a translator of Virgil is mapped out. What is most striking
about Fo’s reflections on the difficulty of translating Virgil is how personal the
relationship with the Roman poet has become for the translator. Moreover, today’s
translators face an issue never experienced by the first translators of Virgil: they need
to justify the preparation of a new translation. This chapter, perhaps more than any
other, explores the actual nuts and bolts of the translation process. It is an excellent
reminder that, whatever theoretical framework a translator may lay claim to, when
faced with the moment of choice, s/he may throw theory out of the window in search
of a particular effect.
The editors were delighted to recruit the English poet Josephine Balmer to write an
Afterword to the volume. Her fascinating, personal ‘Let Go Fear: Future Virgils’
serves as a perfect conclusion to this multifaceted and complicated volume. Evoking
the work of Alice Oswald and Anne Carson on Homer and Catullus respectively,
Balmer looks towards ‘future Virgils’, reimagined and adapted to contemporary contexts,
where women translators will not be an oddity and where Virgil’s stories of victories
and defeats will inspire a creativity readily understood by contemporary audiences.

* * *
The chapters of this volume deal with the era of print culture, and thus start at the
moment of transition from the medieval world to the humanist theories and practices
of translation that have remained by and large stable up to the present day. The arc
of the volume is initiated by Armstrong’s discussion of the transition from medi-
evalism to humanism, and proceeds through Braden’s assertion of translators’ self-
consciousness in their use of Virgil as a vehicle for the translatio imperii to Greatrex’s
demonstration that the new culture of Esperanto replicates the familiar phenomenon
whereby national literatures seek dignity, authority, and legitimacy by crafting
an elevated poetic language through translating Virgil. The essays by Öyken and
Dürüşken, and Liu, on Virgil in Turkish and Chinese respectively, depict two
different collisions between Europe and Asia that will continue to reverberate.
The majority of the essays deal with verse translations of the Aeneid, which reflects
the poem’s cultural significance as a marker of prestige and as a means to gain
 THE TRANSLATION HISTORY OF VIRGIL 

authority. But there is also discussion of prose versions in Castilian (Armstrong),

Turkish (Öyken and Dürüşken), and French (Clément-Tarantino and Fabre-Serris),
while translations of Eclogues feature in the essays on French (Kallendorf), ancient
Greek (Paschalis), Norwegian (Skoie), English (Thomas), Chinese (Liu), and
Hiberno-English (O’Hogan) translations. Of the major Virgilian works, the Georgics
is represented in the volume in French (Kallendorf and Romani Mistretta), ancient
Greek (Paschalis), Slovenian (Marinčič), English (Thomas), and Hiberno-English
(O’Hogan). Methods adopted by contributors include closely observed comparisons
between translators, often in pairs—thus Kallendorf ’s three pairs of French transla-
tions of the Aeneid, Georgics, and Eclogues; Fabre-Serris on the Eclogues; Clément-
Tarantino on prose Aeneids; Eigler on Voß and Schröder and again on Pasolini
and Sermonti. Other contributors deploy a greater number of comparisons: Keith
and Braden on English translations of the Aeneid; Braund on five post-Vietnam
American translations; Greatrex on Esperanto and Skoie on Norwegian translations;
Thomas on domesticating translations; and Torlone on Zhukovskii’s Aeneid as
measured against those of his successors. Other chapters have a single focus,
for example Cox on de Gournay, Marinčič on Šubic, Gautier on Du Bellay,
Scully on Dryden, Romani Mistretta on Delille, Scafoglio on Leopardi, Hardie
on Wordsworth, Vasconcellos on Mendes, and O’Hogan on Heaney’s Eclogues and
Fallon’s Georgics.
Most of the contributors deploy, more or less explicitly, a New Historicist
approach, which is well articulated by Kallendorf in the opening paper. The chapters
demonstrate repeatedly that translations are embedded in their own cultures:
Kallendorf on the fates of less familiar French translations, Scully on Dryden, Eigler
on German Aeneids, and Braund on post-Vietnam American translators. Armstrong
illuminates the intellectual traffic between Italy and Spain, and Gautier shows
how translating played a role in forging a national idiom in France. Papaioannou
throws light on Voulgaris’s cultural–political–pedagogical programme at the court
of Catherine the Great in eighteenth-century Russia, and Öyken and Dürüşken ask
why in Turkey Virgil has served diverse political agendas so well through the years
when encounters with Virgil take place through the prism of European culture. Skoie
illuminates the intricacies of language politics in Norway, which are manifested in
debates about city and country in relation to translations of the Eclogues. Philosoph-
ical and ethical dimensions to translating Virgil are raised with respect to Spanish
and French translations: Rupp connects Velasco’s translation of the Aeneid with
contemporary questions about war, and Romani Mistretta shows how the Enlight-
enment interest in agricultural treatises informs Delille’s Georgics.
All the essays carry assumptions about whether the language of translation is
used in the ‘instrumental’ or in the ‘hermeneutic’ sense. Many of the translators
discussed in the volume are keenly concerned with issues of aesthetic equivalence:
in Castilian (Armstrong), English (Thomas), German (Eigler), French (Fabre-Serris)
and Slovenian (Marinčič). This is a central concern for the poets Wordsworth
 SUSANNA BRAUND AND ZARA MARTIROSOVA TORLONE

(Hardie), Leopardi (Scafoglio), and Du Bellay (Gautier), who develops his theory
of compensation precisely to address this issue, while the contemporary Italian
translator Alessandro Fo lays bare how he wrestled with it. Other chapters address
the moral and ethical ramifications inherent in translations that view the source text
as a way to educate or improve the readers in the target audience, for example
Voulgaris, whose project was utterly wrongheaded, according to Paschalis.
Venuti’s development of Schleiermacher’s ideas into the spectrum of foreignizing
and domesticating translations provides a framework, implicit or otherwise, for many
essays in this volume. Torlone’s discussion of Zhukovskii’s ‘demystifying’ Russian
Aeneid is the one most explicitly theorized in this respect. Degrees of domestication
map closely onto degrees of vernacularization, a topic that recurs throughout. Arm-
strong depicts Villena as a pioneer in his Castilian Aeneid, whereas for Paschalis and
Papaioannou Voulgaris’s Homeric Greek translation is an archaizing throwback,
as is the earliest Turkish Aeneid translation for Öyken and Dürüşken. The translators’
search for an echt localized idiom permeates the material—in English (Braden,
Thomas, Scully, Braund), French (Gautier, Fabre-Serris, and Clément-Tarantino,
especially on Veyne’s novelistic Aeneid), and Italian (Eigler, Fo). This debate is
particularly visible in the Esperanto versions (Greatrex).
It is productive to juxtapose the concept of the ideal translator, a topic addressed
by Clément-Tarantino and Fo, for example, with Scully’s problematization of
Dryden’s attitude to his achievement in his 1697 Aeneid: Dryden claims that his
1700 Iliad was much more congenial and authentic. Several chapters on poet-
translators argue that translation is a two-way process that profoundly affects the
original poetry of a translator: thus the discussions of Du Bellay (Gautier), Delille
(Romani Mistretta), Leopardi (Scafoglio), Mendes (Vasconcellos), and Fo.
The tools of literary history are deployed to trace sequences of translations
that influence one another within the national traditions of France (Kallendorf),
England (Scully and Hardie), and Germany (Eigler), while Armstrong makes a telling
connection across the national traditions of Italy and Spain. Imagery of lineage or
heredity, or echoes of a Bloomian ‘anxiety of influence’, occur in chapters about the
French (Cox, Clément-Tarantino), English (Thomas, Hardie, Braund), Russian
(Torlone), Esperanto (Greatrex), Turkish (Öyken and Dürüşken), and Italian (Fo)
traditions. By contrast, while many of the chapters depict the ongoing dialogue
between translators, Cox spotlights the lonely (female) translator and Liu highlights
the alienness of Virgil for Chinese translators and their audiences. At least two
chapters explicitly depict translation as a form of resistance: Eigler on Pasolini’s
Aeneid fragment and O’Hogan on the Irish poets’ attempts to renegotiate power
relationships.
Gender and feminist readings play a small role in this volume, partly perhaps
because so few women have published translations of Virgil. Several chapters
examine the handling of gender and militarism, either singly or as a nexus (Rupp,
Keith, Braden, and Braund). Both Cox and Braund problematize the role of the
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
 John Kepler, for this was the name of that famous mathematician,
was born at Wiel, in the duchy of Wirtemberg, in the year 1571; and
the Abbé Delaporte says, his family was illustrious. He died at
Ratisbon, in 1630. W. B.

A20. The true invention of the telescope cannot be carried back to

an earlier date than the beginning of the seventeenth century.
Johannes Baptista Porta, a Neapolitan, in his Natural Magic, which
was published in the year 1589, says, “Si utramque (lentem
concavam et convexam) recté componere noveris, et longinqua et
proxima majora et clara videbis:” and he is said to have made a
telescope, accordingly, about the year 1594. But Porta is
represented as having made this discovery such as it was, by
accident; and, as not well understanding the proper use of his own
invention.

According to Baron Bielfeld,[A20a] however, telescopes were first

constructed a long time after, in Holland; some say, by John
Lippersheim, a spectacle-maker at Middelbourg in Zealand; others,
by James Metius, brother to the celebrated professor Adrian Metius,
of Franeker. Although the invention of this instrument, of
indispensable use in astronomy, is sometimes attributed to the great
Galileo, he has himself acknowledged, in his treatise, entitled
Nuncius Siderius, that he took the hint from a report of a German
having invented an instrument, by means of which, and with the
assistance of certain glasses, distant objects might be distinguished
as clearly as those that were near. This is precisely what Porta had
mentioned in his book, in 1589; and therefore, if Galileo had not
referred to a German, he might be supposed to have had in his view
the Neapolitan’s conception of a telescope, announced long before
such an instrument was properly constructed.

Whatever may have been the merit of Porta’s discovery, or the

pretensions of Lippersheim, the spectacle-maker, and Metius, Peter
Borel (in his treatise De vero Telescopii Inventore) is of the opinion
that Zachariah Johnson, who, like Lippersheim, was a spectacle-
maker, and in the same city, made this discovery by chance, about
the year 1500; that Lippersheim imitated him, after making numerous
experiments; and that he instructed Metius. There are others, who
have been considered as having had some sort of claim to this
important invention; among whom were a Mr. Digges, of England,
and a M. Hardy, of France, both towards the commencement of the
seventeenth century.

It is certain, however, that Galileo in Italy, (who died in 1642, aged

seventy-eight years,) and, according to Bielfeld, Simon Marius in
Germany, were the first that applied the telescope to the
contemplation of celestial objects. W. B.
A20a. Elem. of Univ. Erud. b. i. ch. 49.

A21. In treating of the astronomy of the Greeks, Lalande contents

himself with barely introducing the name of Aristotle, among their
philosophers; seeming to consider him as one who had done very
little for astronomical science. This philosopher (who died in the
sixty-third year of his age, and only 322 years B. C.) among his other
doctrines, not only maintained the eternity of the world; but, that
Providence did not extend itself to sublunary beings: and as to the
immortality of the soul, it is uncertain whether he believed it or not.
Bayle calls his logic and his natural philosophy, “the weakest of his
works:” and says, further; “It will be an everlasting subject of wonder
to persons who know what philosophy is, to find that Aristotle’s
authority was so much respected in the schools, for several ages,
that, when a disputant quoted a passage from this philosopher, he
who maintained the thesis durst not say, Transeat; but must either
deny the passage or explain it in his own way.” W. B.

A22. This discovery was made on the 8th of January, 1610. It was,
as Mr. Vince observes, a very important one in its consequences; as
it furnished a ready method of finding the longitude of places, by
means of their eclipses. W. B.

A23. Although both Geography and Navigation have been

wonderfully improved by the important discoveries made by the
moderns in astronomy, they have nevertheless, derived the most
essential aid from the application of the Compass to their purposes.

The invention of this instrument, which is of indispensible utility, is

almost universally ascribed to Flavio Gioia, a native of Amalfi in the
kingdom of Naples. He is called, by some writers, Flavio de Melfi, (by
which is meant, Flavio of Amalfi, this town being the place of his
nativity;) and his invention of the Compass is placed in the year
1302. But it is affirmed by others, that Paulus Venetus brought the
Compass first into Italy from China, in the year 1260. The Chinese
Compass, however, whatever may be its antiquity, appears to have
been a very imperfect instrument, compared with the modern
Mariner’s Compass; and, more especially, with the Azimuth
Compass, as improved by Dr. Knight and Mr. Smeaton. The Chinese
Compass, now used, is represented as being nothing more than a
magnetic needle kept floating, by means of a piece of cork, on the
surface of water, in a white china ware vessel, divided at bottom into
twenty-four points.

It is worthy of observation, that the French have laid claim to the

invention of the Compass, upon no better foundation than the
circumstance of a fleur de lys being always placed at the north point
of the chard; although it is known, that Gioia decorated the north end
of the needle with that flower in compliment to his own sovereign,
who bore it in his arms, as being descended from the royal house of
France. “It hath been often,” says Dr. Robertson,[A23a] “the fate of
those illustrious benefactors of mankind, who have enriched science
and improved the arts by their inventions, to derive more reputation
than benefit from the happy efforts of their genius. But,” continues
this eminent historian, “the lot of Gioia has been still more cruel;
through the inattention or ignorance of contemporary historians, he
has been defrauded even of the fame to which he had such a just
title. We receive from them no information with respect to his
profession, his character, the precise time when he made this
important discovery, and the accidents and enquiries which led to it:
the knowledge of this event, though productive of greater effects
than any recorded in the annals of the human race, is transmitted to
us without any of those circumstances which can gratify the curiosity
that it naturally awakens.” W. B.
A23a. Hist. of America, vol. i, b. i.

A24. Galileo Galilei was a strenuous defender of the system of

Copernicus; for which he was condemned by the inquisition, in the
year 1635, under Pope Urban VIII. This extraordinary man was a
native of Florence, and born in 1564. He died in 1642, aged seventy-
eight years.

W. B.

A25. It has been since ascertained that Saturn has seven

satellites, as is more particularly mentioned in the subsequent note.
W. B.

A26. It was about six years after the delivery of this oration, (viz.
on the 13th of March, 1781,) that Herschel discovered the Georgium
Sidus. And nearly eight years and an half after this first discovery, he
made two others: on the 28th of August, 1789, he was enabled to
ascertain, by means of his telescope of forty feet focal length, that
Saturn has a sixth satellite; and, on the 17th of September following,
he found that he has a seventh. The same celebrated astronomer
has since made several important discoveries. Thus, under the
liberal patronage of his sovereign, has the great Herschel
succeeded, by his extraordinary skill and industry in the making of
very large specula, in constructing telescopes, which, in the words of
the learned Mr. Vince, “have opened new views of the heavens, and
penetrated into the depths of the universe; unfolding scenes which
excite no less our wonder than our admiration.”

Many important discoveries (some of which are noticed in the

foregoing pages of these memoirs) have been made by other
eminent astronomers, since the date of Dr. Rittenhouse’s Oration;
some of them, indeed, since his decease; among which are the
discoveries of three new planets. W. B.
 A27. The celebrated Huygens, who, in his Latin works, is styled
Hugenius. W. B.

A28. Among the many eminent astronomers in the sixteenth and

seventeenth centuries, mentioned by Mr. Lalande, in his Astronomie,
with interesting particulars concerning most of them, the only notice
he there takes of his ingenious countryman, who endeavoured to
establish the theory of Vortices which he had projected, is in these
words: “Descartes (René,) né en Touraine en 1596, mort à
Stockholm en 1650. Sa vie a été écrite fort au long par Baillet, à
Paris, 1691, in 4o.” W. B.

A29. The philosophy of Aristotle retained terms so very obscure,

that it seems the Devil himself did not understand, or at least could
not explain them; otherwise we can hardly suppose, that, when the
good patriarch of Venice had summoned his attendance for this very
purpose, he would have been so rude as to put him off with an
answer not only unintelligible but inarticulate. See Bayle, in Art.
Barbaro.

A30. Alluding to the experiments made in France, for determining

the velocity of light; which, though unsuccessful, discovered a noble
philosophical spirit.

A31. This prodigious velocity of light can be no argument against

its materiality, as will appear from the following considerations. The
greatest velocity which we can communicate to any body, is that of a
cannon-ball, impelled by gun-powder; this may be at the rate of
about 20 miles in a minute of time. The planet Saturn moves about
360 miles in a minute, that is 18 times swifter than a cannon-ball;
and the comet of 1680, in its perihelion, moved near 56.66 times
swifter than Saturn, or 990.5 times swifter than a cannon-ball. Now
these are material bodies, moving with very various, and all of them
exceedingly great velocities; and no reason appears why the last
mentioned velocity should be the utmost limit, beyond which nature
cannot proceed; or that some other body may not move 7 or 8
hundred times swifter than a comet, as light is found to do.
 That the different refrangibility of the rays of light, on which their
colours depend, arises from their different velocities, seems so
natural a conjecture, that it has perhaps occurred to every one who
has thought on this subject. To this there are three principal
objections. The first is, that, according to this hypothesis, when the
satellites of Jupiter are eclipsed, their colour ought to change, first to
a green and then to a blue, before their light becomes extinct; which
is contrary to experience. But this objection appears to me of no
weight; for we do not lose sight of the satellite because there is no
light coming from thence to the eye, but because there is not light
enough to render it visible. Therefore at the time a satellite
disappears, there is still light of all colours arriving at the eye: and
though the blue light should predominate on account of its slower
progress, yet the red may predominate on another account; for along
the edge of Jupiter’s shadow, as it passes over the satellite, a
greater proportion of red light, than of blue, will be thrown by the
refraction of Jupiter’s atmosphere. The second objection is, that
since the velocity of the earth in its orbit, causes an aberration of
about 20 seconds in the place of a star, if the different colours of light
depended on different velocities, the aberration of blue light ought
proportionably to exceed that of red light, which would give such an
oblong form to a fixed star as might be discovered with a good
telescope. This objection is of no more force than the former. The
effect ought indeed to follow, but not in a sensible quantity; for at the
altitude of 70 degrees, the apparent place of a fixed star is likewise
removed 20 seconds by refraction, and the very same separation of
the rays must take place; yet this I think is not discoverable with the
best telescope. Perhaps by uniting these two equal causes, which
may be readily done, and thereby doubling the effect, it may become
sensible.

The third objection arises from that curious discovery of Dollond,

by which we are enabled so greatly to improve refracting telescopes.
And this objection I shall for the present leave in its full force; as well
against the above hypothesis, as against every other which I have
seen for the same purpose.
 A32. Mars appears to be surrounded by a very great and dense
atmosphere.

A33. Dr. Herschel discovered, in the year 1789, (fourteen years

after the delivery of this Oration,) two other satellites of Saturn.
These are the innermost of his (now) seven secondary planets.

W. B.

A34. In 745, Virgilus, bishop of Saltzburg, having publicly asserted

in some of his sermons, that there were antipodes, he was charged
with heresy, by Boniface, bishop of Mentz, and cited to appear
before the Pope, who recommended the hearing of the cause to
Utilo, King of Bohemia, and at the same time wrote to him in favour
of Boniface. The event was, the bishop of Saltzburg lost his cause,
and was condemned for heresy.

A35. It has been shewn, in a preceding note, how much the

means of communicating between distant regions, separated by
seas, ware facilitated by the discovery and use of the Compass: but
those means have been still further and very greatly improved, since
the introduction of the use of the Quadrant at sea, especially that
called Hadley’s Quadrant.

The true inventor of the reflecting Quadrant was Dr. Robert Hook,
a very ingenious English mathematician and philosopher, who died
in the year 1702, at the age of sixty-seven years. This instrument,
now commonly styled Hadley’s, was afterwards rendered much more
complete than Dr. Hook’s invention had made it, by Sir Isaac
Newton: but our modern artists, more skilful than those of former
times, as Mr. Lalande has observed, have profited of the ideas of the
great Newton himself, on the subject; and among the later improvers
of the Sea Quadrant, or Octant, is Mr. Hadley, whose name the
instrument usually bears.

It would, however, be doing an act of injustice to the memory of an

American who possessed an extraordinary genius, to omit, in the
course of these memoirs, some notice of his merits in relation to this
matter. Mr. Thomas Godfrey, a native of Pennsylvania, is said to
have turned his attention to this subject, so early as the year 1730;
and in the Transactions of the Royal Society of London, No. 435, will
be found, an “Account of Mr. Thomas Godfrey’s Improvement of
Davis’s Quadrant transferred to the Mariner’s Bow,” drawn up by
James Logan, Esq. formerly of Philadelphia, a gentleman of
extensive learning, and a very eminent mathematician, Mr. Godfrey
is stated to have “sent the instrument (which he had constructed) to
be tried at sea by an acquaintance of his, an ingenious navigator, in
a voyage to Jamaica, who shewed it to a captain of a ship there, just
going for England; by which means, it came to the knowledge of Mr.
Hadley, though perhaps without his being told the name of the real
inventor.” [See The American Magazine, for July 1758.] In a letter,
dated at Philadelphia the 25th of May, 1732, Mr. Logan, who very
ably as well as meritoriously patronized Godfrey, communicated to
the celebrated Dr. Edmund Halley a detailed account and description
of the improved Sea-Quadrant constructed by that ingenious citizen
of America, of which his patron confidently believed him to be the
original inventor. On the 28th of June, 1734, a further account of
Godfrey’s invention was drawn up by Mr. Logan, and subscribed with
his name; which, it is presumed, was also communicated to the
Royal Society: and on the 9th of November, in the same year, Mr.
Godfrey transmitted an account of it, draughted and signed by
himself, to the same learned body. The whole of these interesting
letters, with some accompanying observations on the subject, are
published in the valuable Magazine just referred to, and in the one
for the succeeding month.

In the Transactions of the Royal Society, for the months of

October, November and December, 1731, No. 421, is contained a
Proposal, by Dr. Edmund Halley, for finding the longitude at sea,
within a degree or twenty leagues, &c. In the conclusion of this
paper, Dr, Halley, in speaking of John Hadley, Esq. VP.R.S, (“to
whom,” as he observes, “we are highly obliged for his having
perfected and brought into common use the reflecting telescope,”)
says—He “has been pleased to communicate his most ingenious
instrument for taking the angles by reflection,” (referring, here, to the
Philos. Trans. No. 420;) “it is more than probable that the same may
be applied to taking angles at sea, with the desired accuracy.”

In Mr. Logan’s account of Mr. Godfrey’s invention, dated June 28,

1734, he says: “Tis now four years since Thomas Godfrey hit on this
improvement; for, his account of it, laid before the (Royal) Society
last winter, in which he mentioned two years, was wrote in 1732; and
in the same year, 1730, after he was satisfied in this, he applied
himself to think of the other, viz. the reflecting instrument, by
speculums for a help in the case of longitude, though ’tis also useful
in taking altitudes: and one of these, as has been abundantly proved
by the maker, and those who had it with them, was taken to sea and
there used in observing the latitudes the winter of that year, and
brought back again to Philadelphia before the end of February 1730–
1, and was in my keeping some months immediately after.”

In Mr, Logan’s prior letter to Dr. Halley (dated May 25, 1732,) he
says, that about eighteen months before, Godfrey told him, “he had
for some time before been thinking of an instrument for taking the
distances of stars by reflecting speculums, which he believed might
be of service “at sea;” and that, soon after, Godfrey shewed him an
instrument, which he had procured to be made, for the purpose.
Thus, the time to which Mr. Logan refers Godfrey’s communication of
his improvement to him, would make its date to be about the month
of November, 1730.

In the Rev. Mr. Vince’s great work, entitled, A Complete System of

Astronomy, (and contained in “A Treatise on Practical Astronomy,” at
the end of the second volume of that work,) is an entire chapter on
“Hadley’s Quadrant;” giving a particular description of the instrument,
with rules for the computations from the observations and
illustrations of them by examples. In this Treatise, the author says,
that the instrument took its name from the “inventor,” John Hadley,
Esq. and observes, that not only the science of navigation is greatly
indebted, to this “incomparable instrument,” but such are its various
uses in astronomy, that it may not improperly be called “a portable
observatory.” Mr. Vince further observes, that in the year 1742, about
ten years after Mr. Hadley’s invention (for so he styles it) was
published, a paper in Sir Issac Newton’s own hand-writing was found
among Dr. Halley’s papers, after the Doctor’s death, containing a
figure and description of an instrument (referring to Philos.
Transactions, No. 465,) not much different in its principle from this of
Hadley. He adds, that as Dr. Halley was alive when Mr. Hadley’s
instrument was shewn to the Royal Society, and he took no notice of
this paper of Sir Isaac Newton, it is probable he did not know there
was such an one. In another part of his work (under the head of The
History of Astronomy, vol. ii. p. 280.) Mr. Vince asserts, that the first
person who formed the idea of making a Quadrant to take angles by
reflection, was Robert Hook; and he was born in 1635. On the whole,
however, the learned author draws this conclusion:—“Both Sir Isaac
Newton and Mr. Hadley therefore seem entitled to this invention.”

Mr. Lalande, speaking of this instrument, says: “Le Quartier de

Reflexion, exécuté en 1731 par Hadley, a donné un moyen facile de
mesurer les distances sur mer, à une minute pris, aussi bien
determiner le lieu de la Lune en mer.” See his Astronomie, vol. iii. p.
654.

From these facts, and a careful examination of the papers

themselves, here quoted and referred to, the scientific reader will be
enabled to decide upon the true merits of the controversy that has so
long subsisted, concerning the respective claims of Godfrey and of
Hadley, to the invention of the instrument that bears the name of the
latter.

Before this subject is dismissed, however, it will not be deemed

improper to add, that the late Dr. John Ewing communicated to the
Am. Philosophical Society an account of an Improvement in the
construction of (what he terms) “Godfrey’s double reflecting
Quadrant,” which he had discovered in the spring or summer of the
year 1767: this will be found in the first volume of the Society’s
Transactions. In the conclusion of this communication, Dr. Ewing
says:—“This improvement of an instrument, which was first invented
and constructed by Mr. Godfrey of this city, and which I do not
hesitate to call the most useful of all astronomical instruments that
the world ever knew, I hope will make it still more serviceable to
mankind.”

This communication to the Society by Dr. Ewing, was made in the

year 1770. In one concerning the comet of that year, and made by
Dr. Rittenhouse about the same time, the instrument to which Dr.
Ewing’s improvement applies, is called Hadley’s Quadrant: but
perhaps Dr. Rittenhouse so named it, in conformity to common
usage.

A36. This I know has been pretended to. But it is easy to make
geometrical conclusions come out as we would have them, when the
data they are founded on, are so uncertain that we may chuse them
as suits our purpose.

A37. This circumstance tends gradually to lessen the variety of the

seasons.

A38. This was Tobias Mayer, who was born at Marbach in the
principality of Wurtemberg, in the year 1723: he rendered himself
celebrated in astronomy, by having calculated the best tables of the
moon, and by an excellent catalogue of stars. He died at Gottingen
in 1762, at the age of thirty-nine years. W. B.

A39. It may happen that any of the planets, about the time they
become stationary, shall describe a loop about some small fixed star,
in such manner as might be easily mistaken for the star making part
of a revolution about the planet. This I suspected to have been the
case with the above observation of Montaigne. But the times set
down do not confirm the suspicion.

A40. See page 320 of the foregoing Memoirs.

A41. See page 154 of the foregoing Memoirs.

A42. Mr. T. T. proceeding on a different supposition, has computed

twenty-seven billions of years necessary for that purpose.
 A43. “The main-wheel, which is fixed on the barrel on which the
cat-gut runs.” Mr. Voight.

A44. “A perpetual rochet is a spring lying between the main-wheel,

and a plate which is so high in diameter as to be nearly of a height
with the bottom of the main-wheel teeth, and is cut with fine teeth all
round, in the shape of a fine saw. A click on an axis is fixed between
the two frame-plates, with a weak spring that forces this click into the
fine saw-teeth, which keeps the plate from moving backwards when
the clock is winding up. This fine rochet-wheel is fixed on the barrel-
arbour or axis, the same as the main-wheel. The barrel-rochet
comes close against the plate of the fine rocket, which has a click
screwed on the front, corresponding with the barrel-rochet, and a
spring above that rochet’s click, which forces that click into the
barrel-rochet’s teeth: it is this that makes the clattering noise, which
is heard when a clock is winding up: There is a middling strong
spring placed between two arms of the cross of the main-wheel, bent
like the space of the two arms between which it acts; and this spring
is as broad as the thickness of the cross-arms. One end of that
spring is fastened to the inside of the fine rochet-plate: the other end
lies on the other cross-arm, and acts on that like a gun-lock
mainspring on the cock-tumbler. When the clock or time is set a
going, and the maintaining power or weight of the fusee or barrel,
this power will raise that spring so far as to resist the maintaining
power, and becomes stationary as long as the time-piece is going;
and when it is wound up, this spring in the main-wheel cross will
expand itself, press on the cross-arm, and force that wheel forward,
with nearly the same power as the maintaining power would give: the
click for the fine-teethed rochet falls into one of those fine teeth, and
keeps that rochet steady, without having the least motion, as long as
the winding-up of the clock continues; and by this means a time-
piece can lose no time in winding up: hence it is called a perpetual
rochet; which requires the most accurate workmanship, in its
construction.” Mr. Voight.

A45. This description is drawn up from two separate accounts of

the instrument, with which the Writer of these Memoirs was
obligingly furnished, in writing, by Robert Patterson and the late
David Rittenhouse Waters, Esquires, of Philadelphia. Mr. Patterson
mentions, that he recollects his having seen the Hygrometer so
described, in Dr. Rittenhouse’s Observatory, about thirty years ago.

A46. The second volume of the Transactions of the American

Philosophical Society contains a letter, written on the 13th of
November, 1780, by Dr. Benjamin Franklin, then in France, to Mr.
Nairne, of London: but it was not communicated to the Society, until
January, 1786.

In that letter, Dr. Franklin suggests to Mr. Nairne (an eminent

optician, and mathematical instrument maker,) the idea of an
Hygrometer made of wood; in preference to metalline instruments,
for the purpose of discovering “the different degrees of humidity in
the air of different countries;”—an idea which occurred to the Doctor,
in consequence of a casual circumstance, mentioned in his letter.

Dr. Franklin supposed “a quick sensibility of the instrument, to be

rather a disadvantage” to it; “since,” says he, “to draw the desired
conclusions from it, a constant and frequent observation day and
night, in each country—when the design is, to discover the different
degrees of humidity in the air of different countries—will be
necessary for a year or years, and the mean of each different set of
observations is to be found and determined.”—“For these reasons,”
continues the Doctor, “I apprehend that a substance which, though
capable of being distended by moisture and contracted by dryness,
is so slow in receiving and parting with its humidity that the frequent
changes in the atmosphere affect it sensibly, and which therefore
should, gradually, take nearly the medium of all those changes and
preserve it constantly, would be the most proper substance, of which
to make an Hygrometer:”—and he believes good mahogany wood to
be that substance. In the concluding part of this letter, Dr. Franklin
says to his correspondent: “I would beg leave to recommend to you
—that you would take a number of pieces of the closest and finest
grained mahogany that you can meet with; plane them to the
thinness of about a line, and the width of about two inches across
the grain, and fix each of the pieces in some instrument that you can
contrive, which will permit them to contract and dilate, and will shew,
in sensible degrees, by a moveable hand upon a marked scale, the
otherwise less sensible quantities of such contraction and dilatation.”

Hence it appears, that Franklin and Rittenhouse conceived an idea

of the same kind, nearly at the same time: but that the latter carried
his invention into practice, three or four years before the theory of
the former, founded on similar principles, had been announced to the
American public, or, as it is believed, was made known to any other
person than Mr. Nairne. W. B.

A47. In a table (in the 2d vol. of Lalande’s Astronomie,) entitled,

“Passages de Mercure sur le Soleil, calculés pour trois siècles par
les nouvelles Tables,” the transit of that planet, above referred to, is
thus set down by Lalande, at Paris; viz.

Year. Conjunct. Mean Geocentric Mid. Semi- Short.

Time. Long. Mean dura. dist.
Time
1776. Nov. 2. 9h10′7″. 7.11°3′36″. 9h49′53″. 0h36′42″. 15′43″.A
W. B.

A48. The calculations are here wanting, in Dr. Smith’s MSS.

A49. Here Dr. Rittenhouse’s ends: The remainder of the

versification is continued by another hand.

A50. He never professed the business of making watches: the first

mechanical occupation he assumed was that of a clock maker, an
employment he pursued many years, in the earlier part of his life. W.
B.

A51. Having, in the preceding note, adverted to the unimportant

error in the text, wherein our Philosopher is stated to have pursued
the employment of a watch-maker, instead of that of a clock-maker; it
becomes necessary to notice, in this place, another mistake, though
likewise an inconsiderable one, into which the liberal and candid
writer of the article, above quoted, has been led. Dr. Rittenhouse’s
Observatory, at Norriton—the place of his original residence and the
seat of his farm-house—was erected prior to the celebrated
“Astronomical Observations” made by him, in the year 1769; which
were those relating to the Transit of Venus over the Sun’s disk, on
the 3d of June in that year. W. B.

A52. The time above referred to, is supposed to have been in the
year 1790 or 1791; though perhaps it may have been somewhat
earlier. Dr. Sproat died in the autumn of 1793. W. B.

A53. An uncle of Copernicus was Bishop of Warmia, (in Ermeland,

a little province of Poland,) and gave him a canonry in his cathedral
of Frawenberg, a city in ducal Prussia, situated on the Frische Haff,
at the mouth of the Vistula: it was there he began to devote himself
to astronomy, at the age of twenty-eight years. His great work, De
Revolutionibus Orbium Cœlestium, was completed about the year
1530: but his apprehensions of meeting with persecution from the
bigotted ignorance of the age, in consequence of the system he
therein promulgated, deterred him from publishing it until thirteen
years after that period; and it is supposed that the agitation of his
mind, occasioned by its appearance in the world, produced the
sudden effusion of blood, which terminated his life on the 24th day of
May, in the year 1543. W. B.
 Transcriber’s Note
In the main sections of the text there are many
numbered textual notes, many quite lengthy, which the
writer chose to keep as close as possible to their
references in the text. In the printed book, this resulted in
many pages containing only two lines of the main text.
The writer acknowledges this in the Preface, but points
out the need to keep the notes as close to their
references as possible. Many of these notes have
footnotes of their own, denoted with the traditional *, †, ‡
symbols.

Notes in the Introduction and Appendix also employ

those traditional symbols, which have been resequenced
for the sake of uniqueness. The three notes in the
Introduction become I1, I2, I3, and those in the Appendix
become A1, A2, A3, ... An. If a note is itself footnoted,
that note is indicated as ‘Ana’, etc.

The main text employs 386 numeric notes which

started with ‘1’ for each section. These have been
resequenced across the entire text, again for the sake of
uniqueness. Many notes had footnotes of their own,
denoted with those traditional symbols. These have have
been resequenced as ‘na’, ‘nb’, ‘nc’, etc., where ‘n’ is the
note number. Those notes are placed following the note.

Any internal references to the notes, of course, were

modified to employ the new sequence.

In this version, footnotes have been collected at the

end of the text, and are linked for ease of reference.

Given the publication date (1813), spelling remained

somewhat fluid. So, especially in quoted text, the text
mostly remains as printed unless it is very obviously a
typo (e.g. ‘celebratrd’, or ‘inhahitants’), or where there is
a great preponderance of another variant of a word
elsewhere. There were two instances of a missing ‘of’
which may have been in error.

131.31 The making [of] good Sic

mathematical instruments
145.11 on the fourth day [of] July, Sic
1760.

A quoted translation in note 38 ends abruptly with ‘and

spreads her light:’ (lvi.29) without a closing quotation
mark. This has been amended as ‘spreads her light[.”]’

On two pages (pp. 134, 135), ‘Galileo’ is printed as

‘Gallileo’ (134.33, 134.37 and 135.3), which we take to
be a printer’s lapse.

On p. 182, The ’Rudolphine’ Tables are misspelled two

ways (182.27, 182.29). Both are corrected.

On pp. 327-329, the symbol for Uranus (♅) as printed

is not quite the same as the symbol available to us. In
the text, the small circle is on the top.

Other errors, deemed most likely to be the printer’s,

have been corrected, and are noted here. The
references are to the page and line in the original.

xii.15 not be deemed Replaced.

pre[p/s]umptuous
xxxii.28 the [sun] stood still in See Note
the centre
xxxix.16 Pyth[oga/ago]ras Transposed.
xlvii.4 of his Physics.[”]) Removed.
li.9 Pronaque cum spectent Replaced.
an[a/i]malia
lii.3 he may be enabled Replaced.
t[e/o] know himself
lvii.12 Hyberni[./,] vel quæ Replaced.
tardis
lxii.9 and [security] of See Note
navigation
lxxii.1 wa[n/s] Johannes de Replaced.
Sacro-Bosco
lxxiv.17 for its truth than novelty; Replaced.
[”]
91.11 purer morality and Replaced.
sounder [s/p]olicy.
104.22 to his friend[s]’s little Removed.
library
105.7 personally acquain[t]ed Inserted.
with him
107.1 [in]asmuch as the Restored.
instruments
107.7 [“]It is observable Removed.
110.18 so long distinguis[n/h]ed Replaced.
122.13 Astronomer’s innate Replaced.
ge[u/n]ius
140.12 A descript[t/i]on of Replaced.
148.35 with our guns.[’/”] Replaced.
149.10 as f[o/a]r as the Replaced.
barracks
164.10 and these,[”] Added.
177.30 la mesure du temps.[’/”] Replaced.
184.1 by William Sm[ti/it]h Transposed.
185.3 one-hundredth part of[ Removed.
of] the whole
192.15 See Laland[e]’s Astron. Inserted.
198.16 it has never been done. Removed.
 [”]
198.17 [“]I send you a Added.
description
207.7 good quality and Inserted.
wor[k]manship
207.24 the gl[s/a]ss-works have Replaced.
not
219.25 three [hun]hundred Removed.
pounds
220.25 reached this country[;/,] Replaced.
226.25 History of the Inverted.
America[u/n] Revolution
249.22 the repeated Removed.
occas[s]ions
251.16 Pennsyl[e/v]ania would Replaced.
not yield
254.1 in the ex[u/e]cution of Replaced.
his trust
260.13 of this Anti-Newtonian Replaced.
essayist[:/.]
261.4 Those of anoth[o/e]r Replaced.
cast
262.2 at one of your Transposed.
brothers[,’/’,]
269.7 most embar[r]assing Inserted.
circumstances
303.10 26th of January, 1[726- Replaced
7/627]
344.8 dated “Philadelphia, Oct. Added.
14, 1787[”]
360.20 The agency of Replaced.
i[m/n]formation
367.10 annexed to that statio[n.] Added.
372.30 to the Linn[e/æ]an Replaced.
 system
375.24 that Linn[e/æ]us Replaced.
pronounced him
388.18 on such occa[r/s]ions Replaced.
400.22 precisely the reverse.[”] Removed.
420.22 Mr. Ceracchi became Removed.
embarr[r]assed
455.34 Professor of Eng[g]lish Removed.
458.13 Mr. Ritten[ten]house Removed.
was not himself
477.19 [“]Observations on a Removed.
Comet
495.20 classical learning,[”] Added.
498.2 different systems of Removed.
theology.[”]
508.17 will be annihilated[:/.] Replaced.
512.12 of the human mind.[”] Removed.
513.24 the inha[h/b]itants of the Replaced.
British colonies
519.1 that Dr. Ritten[ten]house Removed.
533.23 the language of Dr. Added.
Reid, [“]fruitful
534.5 [“/‘]In God we live, and Replaced.
move,
534.6 and have our being.[’]” Inserted.
548.8 Venus a[u/n]d Mercury Inverted.
551.22 which jug[g]ling Inserted.
impostors
557.25 in the year 1260[,/.] Replaced.
558.42 by other e[n/m]inent Replaced.
astro[t/n]omers
564.18 their phases f[o/r]om full Replaced.
to new