'Latinising' Milton: Paradise Lost, Latinitas and the Long Eighteenth Century

This chapter traces the trajectory of Latin translations of Milton’s vernacular verse most capably encapsulated by Latin verse paraphrases of Paradise Lost by a certain J.C. (1686), William Hog (1690), Thomas Power (1691) and by such eighteenth-century renderings as that of William Dobson (1753). Situating its analysis in relation to early modern pedagogical practices, including the double translation system, and informed by current translational theory, the analysis considers the multifunctional aims and consequences of Latinising Milton: the elaboration and elucidation of a vernacular original via Latin exegesis and paraphrase; recourse to Latin as a means of facilitating a wider European readership. Integral to the discussion is an alertness to the contemporary and later reception of Milton’s work, and an assessment of ways in which Latinitas enabled the invocation of classical intertexts which in themselves offer a nuanced reading of Miltonic verse.

'Translated Verse': Milton's Latin Poetry in the Long Eighteenth Century

This chapter assesses ways in which the emergence in the long eighteenth century of a cluster of verse translations of Milton’s Poemata engendered an intellectual discourse and debate on translation itself, not dissimilar to the magazine warfare of the day. It argues that poetical renderings of Milton’s Latin verse, and the biographical and literary contexts in which they appeared, facilitated the interrogation of key issues that are still being debated by modern translation theorists: the nature and function of translation; the viability of rendering a source text in a target language that is also in this instance a poetic language; the potential ‘fetters’ which, in Drydenesque terms, might constrain ‘the verbal copier’; or by contrast the quasi-liberating fluency, the ‘fluent strategy’, attendant upon recourse to verse as translational medium; canonicity, amplification and omission; the much-debated issue of authorial equivalence, evinced here, it is suggested, by the editorial showcasing of the translator; and not least, the perennial question of translation as reading and critical interpretation. In short, verse renderings of Milton’s Latin poetry and the debates that they engendered assume a not inconsequential place in the history of translation theory, which, as Venuti notes, is forever concerned with ‘the changing relationships between the relative autonomy of the translated text and two other categories: equivalence and function.’

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