Translation and transgression in William Morris's Aeneids of Vergil (1875)

Take a given work of literary art that has been widely panned. Does it seem to merit such dismissal and neglect – and precisely what circumstances would serve to mitigate this neglect? What would it take for you to see the value in an modern verse translation that unapologetically uses very antiquated language, sometimes even imagining what English would look like if our language’s history had been different, with a much less French and much more Viking flavour? How far can one go, in translating epic poetry from Greek and Latin originals, before one trespasses upon creative writing, before one becomes untethered to the source text, now more a poet in flight than a scholar on earth? What is the relationship of the activity of translation to scholarship – and what is its relationship to artistic creation?

Also – how should we react as critical readers, when works we esteem very highly seem so unworthy to so many? It happens to us all from time to time. Are we wrong to enjoy these works, which (it would seem) we are not allowed to love – or should we perhaps doubt such smug condescensions, which often seek to assure us of the supremacy of the wider opinion that there is much better literature that awaits us out there than this, and that we just don’t know what to like?

This doctoral dissertation attempts to answer these questions, in doing so addressing the following topics, just about in order: exactly what equipment it would take, in terms of artistic skill and breadth of reading, to translate “classic” works that have already been translated many times into English; what one does and does not need to know in order to translate a specifically ancient text, and how the fact of its being ancient can come to influence the craft of its translation; the relationship of visual to literary artworks in the context of certain Victorian aesthetic and cultural movements; the most effective and illuminating way to interpret translations of ancient works which have, frequently throughout history, evolved in popularity to such a degree that they can now be seen as canonical English literature; the ideal relationship between sound and sense in good poetry, and the extent to which a classical translation of quality and genius can exhibit the power of English verse (not Greek or Latin or French or whatever). The end will involve a close consideration of how important and elusive a quality is translatorly fidelity to original source text: what does it really mean to be faithful? Is it always possible? And do the stream of retranslations of ancient works tend to improve upon those translations that preceded them on the timeline? What would it mean if they did? How can we best understand how retranslations of the same source text “haunt” one another through time?

My conclusion is that a specific translation, William Morris’s translation of Vergil’s classical Latin epic The Aeneid, which was published in 1875, can be read today by a certain kind of reader with pleasure and edification, as a meaningful contribution to the craft of classical translation, and that one can see this if one looks at it on its own terms, rather than simply leaving the matter to those modernist experts on taste who would shush us for delighting in rhyming, metrical versecraft in the grand old English tradition of rhyming, metrical versecraft.