By JOHN TALBOT [New Criterion] – In the 1820s, Wordsworth Englished a fraction of the Aeneid, but aside from that abortive attempt, what major Romantic or Victorian poet can show a great translation to set beside Dryden’s Virgil or Chapman’s Homer? I can’t think of a single example of a major poet translating a Classical author in that high creative mode that Keats so admired in Chapman. The poets of the nineteenth century let that tradition slide.

Into the breach stepped a different breed of translator, producing a very different kind of translation. “The time appears to have gone by,” reported an Oxford classicist in 1861, “when men of great original gifts could find satisfaction in reproducing the thoughts and words of others, and the work, if done at all, must now be done by writers of inferior pretension.” That was John Conington, the most famous of Victorian translators, whose Virgil and Horace were the standard versions of his time. By “writers of inferior pretension” he meant people like himself, scholars most often but also amateurs, whose aim ceased to be to produce translations as works of art. Instead the new goal was accuracy. Not the accuracy of feeling, tone, structure and nuance that art requires, but the accuracy of the schoolmaster. One of this new breed, an Oxford scholar who in 1854 had translated Virgil, stressed the importance of preserving “the strictest grammatical accuracy in the translation of Classical poets.” And, in 1883, a certain A. H. Palmer, in a preface, felt bound to apologize for his father’s lovely versions of Virgil’s Eclogues as having “no pretension to the scholarly accuracy of the present day.”

That revolution in our notion of a translator’s work has altered both the course of English literature and the place of the Classics in our culture.

Continued at New Criterion | More Chronicle & Notices.