The Eneados: Gavin Douglas's Translation of Virgil's Aeneid, Volume I: Introduction and Commentary. Edited by Priscilla Bawcutt with Ian C.Cunningham. The Scottish Text Society. 2020. 376pp. £60.00.
2020; Wiley; Volume: 106; Issue: 369 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1111/1468-229x.13082
ISSN1468-229X
Autores Tópico(s)Medieval Literature and History
ResumoWhen the Scottish bishop Gavin Douglas (c.1476–1522) translated Virgil's ancient Latin epic the Aeneid into his vernacular tongue in 1513, he produced a literary monument which would go on to be appreciated and praised for centuries. The translation marked the first time that a major classical poem had been faithfully and entirely carried over into English, and even today the work preserves the power to enchant its English readers, just as it had inspired near-contemporary poets in their own attempts at vernacularisation. Much later, the early twentieth century responded to it with notable excitement: Douglas was foremost among the poets W. H. Auden fell for when he first discovered the wonders of medieval verse, and Ezra Pound even claimed that the Eneados was better than the Aeneid itself. Despite such long-standing enthusiasm, however, scholarship seems to have struggled to get a firm handle on what Douglas's translation originally looked like. Accordingly, this is the task which Priscilla Bawcutt and Ian C. Cunningham have set themselves with their new critical edition. For decades now, the standard critical edition of the poem has been that curated by David Coldwell between 1957 and 1964, and it is reassuring to read even in the first sentence of this present book that it is based on Coldwell's work in an attempt by the Scottish Text Society to revise, update and expand it. The justifications for this approach are laid out clearly and compellingly. Coldwell's edition had the virtues of fidelity to the most reliable textual witness of Douglas's translation (the ‘Cambridge Manuscript’), as well as sound editorial practice. Several lengthy quotations from Coldwell, in fact, are reproduced by the editors as statements of the methodological approach used in this most recent edition. However, due to the near illegibility of the heavily tweaked book manuscripts which Coldwell sent to the typist or compositor back in the late 1950s and early 1960s, as well as that compositor's unfamiliarity with Latin, numerous errors of transcription insinuated themselves into the published edition itself. Compounding this problem, it seems that Coldwell never corrected the proofs he subsequently received. Cunningham's contribution to the volume has focused on this issue, and involved the painstaking work of purging the new edition of such Latin errors. In addition to all these concerns, and as Bawcutt explains substantially through a reproduction of her 1973 Edinburgh Bibliographical Society Transactions article ‘Gavin Douglas and the Text of Virgil’, Coldwell's dating of a key source for Douglas's translation was incorrect. Rather than being printed in 1507, it actually left the pirate presses of Lyons in 1517, meaning that it appeared too late to have been used by Douglas, who instead, Bawcutt argues, used an edition of Virgil printed in 1501. Overcoming the former shortcomings enables this edition to better reproduce the Cambridge Manuscript version of the text (the version which bears the closest resemblance to Douglas's translation as it was first written); overcoming the latter scholarly blunder means that the commentary and notes offered here can tell us more about how Douglas translated and adapted the specific Virgilian text he saw before him, rather than any more recently reproduced form of it. This edition delivers on both the above points, and for the most part is a substantial book-by-book commentary on Douglas's translation, noting moments which offer parallels to, or divergences from, Douglas's Latin sources. These sources include Virgil, Virgilian commentators such as the fourth-century Servius and the sixteenth-century Ascensius, and other classical and contemporary poets with whose works Douglas was familiar. It is also worth noting that Bawcutt has contributed introductions to the celebrated Prologues with which Douglas prefaced his translations of each of Virgil's ‘books’, and that these are new elements, not revisions of Coldwell's. There is also, at the end of the volume, a hefty glossary (extending and amending Coldwell's) which defines Scots words which might be unfamiliar to modern (and, given Douglas's archaic tastes, even some sixteenth-century) readers. It is obvious that these elements of the volume alone are extremely valuable for current and subsequent studies of Douglas, Scots poetry, and classical reception between the late medieval and Renaissance periods. Yet there is more in this volume, as the ‘introduction’ in its title promises. In its opening section, there is a fine biographical sketch of Douglas, which fills in hitherto obscured details using new archival discoveries. Following this, there is an account of his other works, and a thorough review of existing Douglas scholarship. Then, we find a strikingly comprehensive description of surviving textual witnesses for the Eneados, as well as later printed editions running up to Gordon Kendal's 2011 effort (which here receives serious, if fair, criticisms for its modernised spellings and its reliance upon Small's problematic 1874 edition). The attention to the different kinds of reception Douglas's translation enjoyed in the early modern period is especially fascinating, as the focus shifts from marginalia concerned with morality, to printed editions which changed the text to fit a Protestant agenda, to scholars who regarded the poem as a treasury of obsolete words which could help advance their nascent studies of Anglo-Saxon. Much of this is refreshingly new scholarly ground. As it stands, this volume itself is a welcome condensation of current thought on Douglas's Eneados, produced primarily by the leading expert on the subject with the aim of providing a reference work for other students of Douglas's translation. This is not, for the merely curious reader, a book to be consumed from cover to cover. The introductory sections, on the other hand, should certainly be read completely and digested slowly by anyone at all interested in textual scholarship, even if their areas of research do not focus on Douglas, late medieval literary cultures and classical reception. This is because these sections show by example how a critical edition should be put together, and how the spurious hypotheses which bedevil that process can be identified and cast out. As the publication date of Bawcutt's reproduced article suggests, much of the wisdom within the volume is hardly new. Having said that, the decision to bring that accumulated scholarship together in a new edition was an inspired one, and to someone such as myself whose research interests touch on Douglas's translation (in my case via the 1428 sequel to Virgil's epic which was composed by the Italian humanist Maffeo Vegio, and included in Douglas's Scots rendering), it feels as though this work was a long time coming. And this was the case even before the Coronavirus hit us. It can only be hoped that the next volume, which I believe is intended to reproduce Douglas's translation itself, will be published very shortly. Then, these two books together will become new classic editions. It is entirely plausible that, like the edition they are designed to improve upon, they will go on to be consulted for at least another five decades, introducing Douglas's masterpiece to new readers and scholars. The peer review history for this article is available at https://publons.com/publon/10.1111/1468-229X.13082 The peer review history for this article is available at https://publons.com/publon/10.1111/1468-229X.13082
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