The Road to Sligo
Tom Paulin
- Poetry and Metamorphosis by Charles Tomlinson
Cambridge, 97 pp, £9.95, March 1983, ISBN 0 521 24848 5
- Translations by Charles Tomlinson
Oxford, 120 pp, £7.95, October 1983, ISBN 0 19 211958 3
- Conversation with the Prince by Tadeusz Rozewicz, translated by Adam Czerniawski
Anvil, 206 pp, £4.95, March 1982, ISBN 0 85646 079 6
- Passions and Impressions by Pablo Neruda, translated by Margaret Sayers Peden
Farrar, Straus/Faber, 396 pp, £16.50, October 1983, ISBN 0 571 12054 7
- An Empty Room by Leopold Staff, translated by Adam Czerniawski
Bloodaxe, 64 pp, £3.25, March 1983, ISBN 0 906427 52 5
Perhaps all verse translation must begin and end with a version of the Aeneid, or with an essentially Virgilian concept of art’s relation to society? In these islands, the first translator of Virgil was Gavin Douglas, whose Eneados was completed in 1513. Although my Concise Oxford Dictionary of English Literature appropriates Douglas as the earliest translator of the classics ‘into English’, his version was of course written in Scots and is an ennobling monument to Scotland’s separate cultural identity. For Douglas, Virgil is a holy, original and perfect figure, a divine lawgiver who inspires his readers with the pure form and essence of culture. He is end and beginning, both cedar tree and ‘A per se’. And as James Kinsley suggests, Virgil’s best translators acquire something of his luminous stature: ‘the ancient author becomes culturally effective, and the translator a “noble collateral” with him.’
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[*] Czerniawski has also translated some of his own poems into English. Modern Poetry in Translation 1983 (edited by Daniel Weissbort, with an introduction by Ted Hughes, Carcanet, 214 pp., £6.95, 5 May 1983, 0 85635 481 3) contains three fine auto-translations.
[†] The poem appears in Why Brownlee left (Faber, 1980).
Letters
Vol. 6 No. 10 · 7 June 1984
From Donald Davie
SIR: Tom Paulin (LRB, Vol. 6, No 9) begins a review with paragraphs of potted lit. hist. about translators of the Aeneid: Gavin Douglas, Surrey, Dryden, Day Lewis – the usual list. Is Paulin, then, winding up to a review of a book about translating Virgil? Not at all: the book he has before him, Charles Tomlinson’s Poetry and Metamorphosis, is about translating (and imitating, adapting, assimilating) not Virgil, but Ovid. Ah, but that’s just the point: Tomlinson should have been talking about Virgil. And why? Because Ovid’s theme – metamorphosis – explores the interconnections, inter-dependencies and intertraffic between human life and other forms of sentient life; whereas – thus a sudden ukase from Commissar Paulin – the only acceptable themes for poetry are those that explore the relations between some human lives and other human lives, and the public aspect of such relations, that’s to say politics. To read the Metamorphoses with interest is – so Paulin manages to deduce, by a logic inaccessible to the rest of us – to show insufficient concern for the plight of the unemployed. Ovid seems to have been bored by politics, so is Tomlinson much of the time, so am I. Paulin can huff and puff as much as he likes, but he can’t deny us our right to be bored, and to say so. Meanwhile Ovid has been a classic of Western literature for 2000 years; it’s a bit late to try to eliminate him from the curriculum.
Moreover, Tomlinson shouldn’t say that Dryden as translator, and Pound, are two of a kind. Why not? Because Dryden, when he translated Virgil, is declared to have written as a flag-wagging English-man, whereas Pound when he translated Li Po obviously didn’t. Of course in the 1690s English was the tongue of one island nation, whereas by 1915 it was a thoroughly international tongue, as it is (only more so) for Tomlinson and Paulin and me. As a response to Tomlinson’s wonderfully eloquent lectures, Little Englandism (for that matter, Little Irelandism) seems more than usually irrelevant and offensive.
Donald Davie
Silverton, near Exeter
From Charles Martindale
SIR: Tom Paulin, in his interesting if rather churlish review of Charles Tomlinson’s admirable Poetry and Metamorphosis, at times resorts to just that species of urbane cultural waffle of which he seems to accuse Tomlinson. I do not know what it means to say that Dryden’s Virgil is more important than his Ovid because he wrote it for his country’s ‘honour’, or because, ‘perhaps, all verse translation must begin and end with a version of the Aeneid.’ I do know that the Ovid translations are at once truer images of their original and more alive as English verse. It is hard to find in the Virgil a passage to match the imaginative energies of the englishing of (say) the Flood or Daphne’s metamorphosis into laurel. The reason is not far to seek: however much Dryden may have aspired to be the English Virgil, he was anima naturaliter Ovidiana – the glittering surfaces of the Metamorphoses were closer to him than the numinous opacities of Virgil could ever be. Moreover, Ovid had been a far more pervasive presence in English letters, from Chaucer to Milton, than Virgil, who, as R. M. Ogilvie has remarked, is perhaps too religious for the majority of Englishmen and too little Humanist. (Significantly, it was the Anglo-Catholic T.S. Eliot who, in a potent piece of myth-making, re-asserted the claim for Virgil’s ‘adequacy’ and cultural centrality.) It is partly for its recovery of a fuller sense of Ovid that Poetry and Metamorphosis deserves respect.
Charles Martindale
School of European Studies, University of Sussex
