“Happy the Man” is not the only work of translation by Dryden—Homer, Juvenal, Lucretius, Ovid, Persius, Theocritus, and Virgil, in addition to Horace, are some of the major authors Dryden brought into the English. Scholars such as Charles Tomlinson (in “Why Dryden’s Translations Matter”) and David Hopkins (in “Dryden as Translator”) argue, however, that Dryden has not received due scholarly attention as a translator and that his translations deserve a closer analysis.
Both scholars, pointing out the lack of scholarly interest in Dryden the translator, argue that the translations are central to the understanding of Dryden as a whole. Tomlinson, for instance, asserts that Dryden’s translations both reveal new aspects of the original texts and reflect Dryden’s ambitions for the English language. As an example, he contends that Dryden’s rendition of the Aeneid champions the monosyllabic Anglo-Saxon language over the polysyllabic Greco-Latin, both celebrating the English language and “emphasiz[ing] the barbarism which stalks the classical text.” Tomlinson also posits that Dryden's translations influenced his original works as well; he argues that Dryden’s rendition of Ovid’s Metamorphosis, for example, informs his poetic understanding of the “metamorphosis of the universe” as “one unending act of translation.” Hopkins, on the other hand, argues that Dryden’s translations demonstrate his creativity in bringing classical texts into his own time: Dryden’s rendition of Lucretius in Sylvae, for instance, performs a clever modern application of Lucretius’s accusation of false Epicureans, as Dryden both implicitly positions it as a satire against Charles II and explicitly uses language evoking William Shakespeare’s Macbeth. “Dryden fuses a clear application to his own life and times, with a memorable and more widely applicable evocation of vain political striving,” observes Hopkins.
Perhaps Tomlinson’s and Hopkins’s studies will encourage you to read “Happy the Man” in a different light: What does it reveal about Horace’s original text? About Dryden’s creativity and craft as a poet? About his keenness as a reader? Hopkins concludes his article with the following observation: “Dryden’s openness to the authors he was rendering was, at one and the same time, a profound act of self-discovery, in which revelation of the ‘spirit’ of his originals was inseparable from the deepest acts of self-revelation.”
