Pope’s Horatian Voice

Abstract

There is a reassuring motive for choosing to translate a famous author in that you are servant to the master voice, relaying as innocently and accurately as you can past sentiments and tropes. In the wake of this irreproachable impulse, on the other hand, one might discover less obedient traces, not quite graffiti, but — because not announced — perhaps more insidious projections of the self; the ‘strong’ authors need to be misprized in order that their complex literariness might survive, but also that the imitator is no plagiarist. Interpretation has to intervene and not only at the micro level, but also in constructing the wider perspective, where the source text does not fit and, issuing from that dissonance, a cross-cultural dialogue emerges. In Wolfgang Iser’s phrase, ‘translatability is motivated by the need to cope with a crisis that can no longer be alleviated by the mere assimilation or appropriation of other cultures’. This gesture could be a form of ‘therapy for a growing awareness of cultural pathology’.¹ The spectrum of cross-cultural adherence embraces imitation as well as academic translation, and the effect of ‘coping’ and negotiating is only a difference of degree. Pope’s Imitations of Horace offer us some material for reassurance in that the ethics of retirement and its apparently apolitical consequences are very much part of what is overt about the very form of the literary choice: the inclusion of the Horace text interleaved with Pope’s own and the adoption of Horace’s own conversational register.