The earliest translators of these texts, such as Pope and Dryden, valued good poetry over literal accuracy. In the nineteenth century, academic philologists took over the field and tipped the balance toward painful literal accuracy and against the pleasures of poetry. Due to the sentimentality about Augustan Rome, translation of the Aeneid and other texts also suffered from avoidance of literal accuracy whenever it cast Rome in a bad light—so rape became romance, slaves became servants.
Sunday, June 27, 2021
Tackling a classic …
… Aeneid Wars - Athenaeum Review. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
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It occurs to me that much of Dryden and Pope's readership would have been through the Aeneid a number of times in the course of their schooling, and could always refer back to the Latin for the finer points.
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