Richard Thomas Dryden's "Perfect Hero"/Long's "Little Paris" Virgil's Aeneid and Horizons of Translation

     "No man can admire Virgil who can't understand him, nor can any man who understands him be pleased with Mr. D.'s translation."  So Luke Milbourne's reaction to Dryden's great translation of the Aeneid (Notes on Dryden's Virgil [London 1698] 30), a work also described by Pope as "the most noble and spirited translation I know in any language" (Complete Poetical Works, ed. H. W. Boynton [Boston and New York 1903] 259), although Pope elsewhere averred that "the Aeneid was evidently a party piece, as much as Absalom and Architophel.  Virgil was as slavish a writer as any of the gazetteers" (as quoted by his friend Joseph Spence).  Two centuries later, in 1880, John Davis Long, later to become US Secretary of the Navy under President McKinley, and at the time Speaker of the Massachusetts House of Representatives, used his leisure hours to produce a translation of the same poem in blank verse.

    Dryden and Long, the latter rendered a stranger to fame by the precipitant and flamboyant action of his subordinate Theodore Roosevelt at the outset of the Spanish-American War, had very different views of Virgil, of Aeneas, of Turnus, of Dido, as emerges at every turn in the works of the two.  In each case we can see translation as a manifestation of contemporary political, ethical, moral and cultural point of view.  The misogynistic Dryden's Dido, looking for all the world like a combination of Nell Gwyn and Tisiphone, plays furious courtesan against the sympathetic and agonized heroine of Long, a supporter of women's suffrage before the cause became politically popular, who dedicated his translation to "my wife and two little girls, so often the companions of my work."  Dryden used the Delphine edition with all its "emendations" designed to render Virgil a suitable text for the instruction of the French prince, while Long wrote his translation, while lawyering and politicking in Boston, in oblivion of the political uses to which Virgil had been put since  Gavin Douglas's translation set out to "correct" the romance tradition's sympathy for Dido and vilification of Aeneas.  Unlike Dryden, but perhaps no less true to the Mantuan, Long is a reader with a Jaussian horizon low and naive, as emerges in powerful (and Virgilian!) ways throughout, as he invites us to renew, "as I after twenty-five years have done, not only the kindly acquaintance of this Roman story-teller, but the happy morning of the school-boy's shining face and eager heart" (Long, preface).  This paper, then, will study the diversions of the Virgilian text at the hands of two very different characters, creatures of very different ages and producers of very different Virgils.