Essays of John Dryden (ed. W. P. Ker): the Preface to Ovid's Epistles (1680) and the Dedication of the Aeneis (1697)
What it is about
The two volumes collect Dryden's critical prefaces. Two of them are on translation. In the Preface to Ovid's Epistles (vol. 1), Dryden reduces all translation to three heads. Metaphrase turns an author "word by word, and line by line", like Jonson's Horace. Paraphrase is "translation with latitude": the author is kept in view and his sense followed rather than his words, and the sense may be "amplified, but not altered", like Waller's Virgil. Imitation leaves both words and sense and takes only hints, like Cowley's Pindar. Metaphrase, he says, is dancing on ropes with fettered legs: Latin says in one word what English cannot, and wit hangs on expressions that die in transfer. Imitation is the creation of another hand, allowed only for a poet as dark and wild as Pindar. Paraphrase is the right way. His example of loss: Horace contracted the first three lines of the Odyssey into two and dropped Ulysses' sufferings. In the Dedication of the Aeneis (vol. 2) he steers between paraphrase and literal translation. He keeps the figurative words that will still shine in English and gives up the rest, since English heroic verse holds one figure a line where Virgil has two. He tries to make Virgil speak the English he would have spoken if born in England in this present age.
Ideas
- I1. Dryden's three heads as measurable operating points of the translator. Metaphrase is the pair-trained word-by-word table, paraphrase is the meta-world with an author delta, imitation is generation from the world level. Place each Bible on the axis by a literalness score: the share of a verse's meta tokens anchored by the longest common subsequence against MACULA's glosses. The four Bibles then get one number each to compare their deltas by.
- I2. "Amplified but not altered" as a check on inserts. Split every insert in the reader residual into an expansion and an alteration. An expansion is a new dependent (amod, advmod, appos) of a concept that is already there. An alteration is a new event or entity at the world level. A paraphrasing author should show many expansions and few alterations; an author with many alterations is imitating.
- I3. A length budget per author. Dryden's line holds one figure where Virgil's holds two. For each author, count output tokens per meta token by concept class, and flag outputs far below the author's budget as likely omissions, like Horace's lost "sufferings". This turns the dropped class into something the encoder can predict.
- I4. Figurative expressions as a test set. Hebrew idioms have a literal rendering and a sense rendering: lifted up his eyes and saw, found grace in the eyes of, his nose burned / his anger was kindled, to the mouth of the sword. Collect 30–50 of them with verse references. Record which of the four Bibles keeps each one literally, and test whether the author delta reproduces each author's choice. This measures what Dryden says is lost first: the figurative words.
- I5. Dryden's "as he would have spoken, born here and now" is the modern standard plus the author's delta, in the target's own era. Keep a modern standard (open problem 6) for that mode, distinct from a "literal" mode that keeps the source's figures.
For Mova
Dryden's triad gives names for what tools/translate already compares: the word-by-word table, the meta-world and the world level. I2 and I3 refine the reader's insert and drop classes in measure.rs. I4 is a small, verse-referenced test set for hebrew.rs and for the deltas in profile.rs.
Cite
@book{dryden1900essays,
title = {{Essays of John Dryden (ed. W. P. Ker): the Preface to Ovid's Epistles (1680) and the Dedication of the Aeneis (1697)}},
author = {Dryden, John and Ker, W. P.},
year = {1900},
url = {https://archive.org/details/essaysofjohndryd01dryduoft}
}References
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- RIGAL, Alexandre Hardy et le Theatre francais a la fin du xvif et au commencement du xviie Siecle. 1889. RYMER, The Tragedies of the Last Age Considered and Examined by the Practice of the Ancients. 1678. A Short View of Tragedy. 1693. find
- SAINT-EVREMOND, (Euvres, ed. Des Maizeaux. 1705. SAINTSBURY, Dryden [' English Men of Letters ']. 1881. SARASIN, Discours de la Trage'die. 1639. SCALIGER, J. C., Poetices libri septem. 1561. find
- SCOTT, 1808. Life of Dryden, in his edition of Dryden's Works. SCUDERY, Preface to Ibrahim ou Fillustre Bassa. 1641. Preface to Alaric. 1654. SETTLE, Notes and Observations on the Empress of Morocco revised. 1674. find
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