The itch to translate

Dryden once said he was “troubled by the disease (as I may call it) of translation” (Preface to Sylvae). And he’d have to be, I think, in order to English (wonderful verb), not just the venerable works of the Greek, Latin, French, or Italian languages, but also those of English. It takes an itch to translate, in other words, in order for an English poet like Dryden to translate Chaucer or Milton.

Of course, in either case it’s pretty unjust to seriously consider Dryden’s attempts as translations of English. The language of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, some of which Dryden included in his Fables, Ancient and Modern (1700), was foreign enough for many readers. And in Milton’s case the foreignness was most immediately felt in Paradise Lost’s blank verse (though the diction wasn't really English either), which Dryden smoothed and evened out into heroic couplets in his unpublished drama The State of Innocence (1674). But I want to insist on the intensity of Dryden’s “paroxysm” (as he called it, again in the "Preface") in considering these “adaptations” or “modernizations” (as they are often called) and not just to connect efforts quite distant in time and purpose. Dryden eventually weighed the particular cast of English society itself in terms of translation, saying that

the genius of our countrymen in general [is] rather to improve an invention than to invent themselves, as is evident not only in our poetry but in many of our manufactures.

We have to remember that the same genius is also a “fit” (a paroxysm, a disease) to grasp the true ambivalence of this comment about improvement--usually taken as a straightforward progressivist, modern (not ancient and modern) ideology (though as such it doesn’t quite merit the name, ideology never being straightforward).