Between the Civil War and the early decades of the 18th century, English poets of the first rank devoted more of their time and creative energies to translating than they had ever done before or have ever done since. This book studies this golden age of poetic translation in England, and has as its organising principle and object of inquiry the significances of translating itself as a distinctive mode of imaginative conduct. The book is composed of case studies of the five principal poet-translators of the period: John Denham, Henry Vaughan, Abraham Cowley, John Dryden, and Alexander Pope. Its ... More

Between the Civil War and the early decades of the 18th century, English poets of the first rank devoted more of their time and creative energies to translating than they had ever done before or have ever done since. This book studies this golden age of poetic translation in England, and has as its organising principle and object of inquiry the significances of translating itself as a distinctive mode of imaginative conduct. The book is composed of case studies of the five principal poet-translators of the period: John Denham, Henry Vaughan, Abraham Cowley, John Dryden, and Alexander Pope. Its argumentative method is metaphorical. Each chapter traces the influence on the theory and practice of the poet at issue exerted by a metaphor or group of metaphors broadly current in contemporary translation discourse: in particular, figurations of the translator as an exile, as a child, as a disseminator of secrets, and as a slave; and comparisons of translation to friendship, sexual congress, metamorphosis, and trade. These figurations challenged Denham, Vaughan, Cowley, Dryden, and Pope to find new answers to questions integral to their understandings of themselves and the standing of the poet in their culture: questions about vocation and career, fame and happiness, responsibility and freedom. Translating changed the direction of the lives of five of the major poets of the period in English literary history which witnessed the transition between early-modern and modern estimations of ‘the poet's life’.