The Englishing of Juvenal: computational stylistics and translated texts

The Englishing of Juvenal: Computational Stylistics and Translated Texts1 Introduction Comparisons between translations and their originals often shed light on cultural differences, large and small. At one level of meaning, such inter-language comparisons draw our attention to elusive connotations and ultimate untranslatability of conceptual words like anima and natura or, again, of words like amor, caritas, and amicitia.At another, we find small Saussurian mismatches like those between sword and gladius or between otiose and otium. But comparisons among several English versions of any much translated text give a sharper focus to many suggestive points of style. Such intra-language comparisons are likely to be of special interest when translators themselves are authors of distinction. Consider opening lines of Juvenal's Tenth Satire, poem upon which present paper concentrates: Omnibus in terris, quae sunt a Gadibus usque Auroram et Gangen, pauci dinoscere possum uera bona atque illis multum diuersa, remota erroris nebula. quid enim ratione timemus aut cupimus? (1-5) In his literal prose version of 1852, Lewis Evans renders these lines as follows: In all regions which extend from Gades even to farthest east and Ganges, there are but few that can discriminate between real blessings and those that are widely different, all mist of error being removed. For what is there that we either fear or wish for, as reason would direct? (p. 102) John Dryden's rendering (1693) is brief and vigorous: Look round Habitable World, how few Know their own Good; or knowing it, pursue. How void of Reason are our Hopes and Fears! (I-3) The best known English version of poem is Samuel Johnson's imitation, The Vanity ofHuman Wishes (1749). It is only about two-thirds as long as Dryden's version, chiefly because Johnson reduces Juvenal's satirical illustrations to terse, ironic apophthegms. But, at beginning, Johnson launches expansively and moves forward at a stately pace: Let Observation with extensive View, Survey Mankind, from China to Peru; Remark each anxious Toil, each eager Strife, And watch busy Scenes of crouded Life; Then say how Hope and Fear, Desire and Hate, O'erspread with Snares clouded Maze of Fate, Where wav'ring Man, betray'd by vent'rous Pride, To tread dreary Paths without a Guide; As in Mist delude, Shuns Ills, or chases Good. How rarely Reason guides stubborn Choice, Rules bold Hand, or prompts suppliant Voice The passage is less marked than most by resonant Latinisms in which Johnson customarily takes advantage of every pertinent connotation in either language (And restless Fire precipitates on Death (20, emphasis mine]). But, beyond typically Augustan compounds of epithet and noun or formal balancing of abstracts, Johnson declares his own particular hand in phrase after phrase. If the busy Scenes of crouded Life are those of London, his other imitation of Juvenal, prospect of tread[ing] dreary Paths without a Guide takes us to little elegy on Robert Levet. If fancied Ills and airy Good are at heart of Rasselas, somber view of life that underlies this passage is epitomized in Soame Jenyns review and pervades whole of Johnson's oeuvre. And whereas Reason, sovereign faculty, should guide, rule, and prompt our thoughts and actions, we are easily deluded by treach'rous Phantoms of Imagination. While Johnson shares these concepts with many of his contemporaries, metaphors that bear them are very much his own. Any devoted reader of Style is well equipped to refine on these few observations. The same may be said of anyone who benefited from a youthful acquaintance with Brower's The Fields of Light (1951) and other notable works of a time when our purpose as readers, we were taught, was rather to submit ourselves to text than to submit it to our predilections. …