Edward Fairfax and the Translation of Vernacular Epic

Abstract

Epic poetry occupies a special position in the history of translation in the Tudor period. The genre presents obvious difficulties: its simple length, for one thing, more of an issue for verse than for prose, and demanding a major commitment of time and ingenuity; and also its intimidating prestige, which promises to make a translator’s failures especially obvious and humiliating. That same prestige, however, makes the task an almost unignorable challenge for a developing vernacular literature in early modern times. To have full standing such a literature must have its epic mode, and in the writing of new epics and the translating of old ones the possibilities for that mode are variously worked out. This is one reason that during our period epic is — along with Holy Scripture — the prime site for multiple translations of the same text.¹ Between 1490 — the date of William Caxton’s Eneydos — and 1654 — the date of John Ogilby’s second Aeneid — six complete translations of Virgil’s epic are published in England; at least one other survives in manuscript. Partial translations of the same poem are a regular feature of publishers’ lists; a dozen versions of Book 4 on its own are printed. The narrative running through this record is not just of competitive attempts to get it right, but also of experiments in figuring out the right form for doing so; the various Aeneids are among other things a series of auditions to establish the dominant metre for English poetry as it negotiates the move from Chaucer’s language to ours: blank verse (apparently invented by Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, for the specific purpose of translating Virgil), fourteener couplets, quantitative hexameters, ottava rima, Spenserian stanzas, and — finally winning out in the seventeenth century — pentameter couplets.