Virgil and His Translators Susanna

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 CLASSICAL PRESENCES

General Editors
LORNA HARDWICK JAMES I. PORTER
 CLASSICAL PRESENCES

Attempts to receive the texts, images, and material culture of ancient Greece and
Rome inevitably run the risk of appropriating the past in order to authenticate the
present. Exploring the ways in which the classical past has been mapped over the
centuries allows us to trace the avowal and disavowal of values and identities, old
and new. Classical Presences brings the latest scholarship to bear on the contexts,
theory, and practice of such use, and abuse, of the classical past.
Virgil and His
Translators

EDITED BY

Susanna Braund and

Zara Martirosova Torlone

1
 3
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Acknowledgements

The editors wish to thank numerous scholars and friends for their assistance in
bringing this volume into being. The genesis of the volume lay in three workshops
and conferences, held in Vancouver (2012), in Paris (2014), and at Cuma near Naples
(2014). All three were inspiring events and we express our deep gratitude to all the
participants, many of whose papers appear in this book. Our co-organizers, Craig
Kallendorf at Naples and Siobhán McElduff at Paris, were crucial collaborators and
interlocutors to whom we owe a special debt of gratitude.
Two key scholars at the Vancouver event who are not present in the volume were
Stuart Gillespie and Stephen Harrison: we thank them profoundly for their insights
and encouragement. The level of discourse at all three events was exceptional and
exemplary; we recommend strongly the model we adopted, of precirculating the
papers, and we thank all participants for honouring our desire to maximize engaged
discussion at the events.
The conferences that generated this volume would not have been possible without
funding from several sources. The award, to Susanna Braund, of a Standard Research
Grant by SSHRC, the Social Sciences Research Council of Canada, funded the
Vancouver conference. The Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Studies at the University
of British Columbia supported the Wall Colloquium Abroad at the Institut d’Études
Avancées in Paris with a generous award; we acknowledge with gratitude the warm
hospitality of the Institut and its director. The Villa Vergiliana and the Vergilian Society
provided Zara Torlone with the venue for the Naples/Cuma conference. The final stages
of editorial work on the volume have been funded by Susanna Braund’s Canada
Research Chair funds, which happily were finally released to her by the University of
British Columbia.
Translations from French and Italian were undertaken by Liza Bolen, Gillian
Glass, and Jelena Todorovic; we thank Marco Romani Mistretta for additional help
with Italian idioms. We thank Einaudi for permission to print an English translation
of pages from the introduction to Alessandro Fo’s Italian translation of the Aeneid.
Some additional acknowledgements of permissions to reproduce selected material
follow below:
• Josephine Balmer’s ‘Lost’ and ‘Let Go’ have been reproduced from her collection
Letting Go: Thirty Mourning Sonnets and Two Poems (Agenda Editions,
Mayfield, 2017), and ‘Creusa’ has been reproduced from her collection Chasing
Catullus: Poems, Translations and Transgressions (Bloodaxe Books, Newcastle-
upon-Tyne, 2004) by kind permission of the author.
vi ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

• Excerpts in Chapter 27 from The Georgics of Virgil by Peter Fallon have been
reproduced with kind permission of the author and The Gallery Press
(www.gallerypress.com).
• Excerpts in Chapter 27 from Seamus Heaney’s Preoccupations: Selected Prose
1968–1978 (Faber & Faber, London, 1980), The Cure at Troy (Faber & Faber,
London, 2002), and ‘Virgil: Eclogue IX’ and ‘Bann Valley Eclogue’ from Electric
Light (Faber & Faber, London, 2001) have been reproduced with kind permis-
sion of Faber & Faber Ltd.
• The lines from ‘The Great Hunger’ and the poem ‘Epic’ by Patrick Kavanagh in
Chapter 27 are reprinted from Collected Poems, edited by Antoinette Quinn
(Allen Lane, London, 2004), by kind permission of the Trustees of the Estate of
the late Katherine B. Kavanagh, through the Jonathan Williams Literary Agency.
For their dedicated hard work we thank Jake Beard for editorial assistance, Emma
Hilliard for devising the index, and Graham Butler for completing it. Brian North
worked wonders with a challenging set of proofs and we are most grateful. We
especially thank the general editors of the series and the readers for their extremely
thoughtful and constructive criticisms and guidance on the shape of the volume. No
volume of collected essays is perfect, but we believe that, thanks to the support we
have received, we have produced a balanced and polished book, which will stimulate
many future conversations on the important topic of the translations of Virgil.
Finally, we thank our immediate support networks, who provided calmness and
sanity when the volume was threatening to become unruly: Susanna thanks her
wonderful husband Adam Morton and her many old dogs; Zara thanks her husband
Mark Torlone, her two daughters Christina and Francesca, and her parents,
Dr Sergey Martirosov and Samvelina Pogosova, for their love and support. We
have both loved this collaboration with each other: we are always, it seems, on the
same page, and that has been affirming and encouraging throughout the project.
Susanna Braund and Zara Martirosova Torlone

The publisher and the editors apologize for any errors or omissions in the above list.
If contacted they will be pleased to rectify these at the earliest opportunity.
Contents

Introduction: The Translation History of Virgil: The Elevator Version 1

Susanna Braund and Zara Martirosova Torlone

Part 1. Virgil Translation as Cultural and Ideological Capital

1. Successes and Failures in Virgilian Translation 23
Craig Kallendorf
2. Dante’s Influence on Virgil: Italian volgarizzamenti and Enrique de
Villena’s Eneida of 1428 36
Richard H. Armstrong
3. Epic and the Lexicon of Violence: Gregorio Hernández de Velasco’s
Translation of Aeneid 2 and Cervantes’s Numancia 51
Stephen Rupp
4. Love and War: Translations of Aeneid 7 into English
(from Caxton until Today) 63
Alison Keith
5. The Passion of Dido: Aeneid 4 in English Translation to 1700 80
Gordon Braden
6. An Amazon in the Renaissance: Marie de Gournay’s
Translation of Aeneid 2 97
Fiona Cox
7. Virgil after Vietnam 107
Susanna Braund
8. Translations of Virgil into Esperanto 124
Geoffrey Greatrex
9. Translations of Virgil into Ancient Greek 136
Michael Paschalis
10. Sing It Like Homer: Eugenios Voulgaris’s Translation of the Aeneid 151
Sophia Papaioannou
11. Farming for the Few: Jožef Šubic’s Georgics and the Early Slovenian
Reception of Virgil 166
Marko Marinčič
viii CONTENTS

12. Reviving Virgil in Turkish 183

Ekin Öyken and Çiğdem Dürüşken
13. Finding a Pastoral Idiom: Norwegian Translations of Virgil’s Eclogues
and the Politics of Language 195
Mathilde Skoie
14. The Aeneid and ‘Les Belles Lettres’: Virgil’s Epic in French between
Fiction and Philology, from Veyne back to Perret 209
Séverine Clément-Tarantino
15. Virgil in Chinese 224
Jinyu Liu

Part 2. Poets as Translators of Virgil: Cultural Competition,

Appropriation, and Identification
16. Domesticating Aesthetic Effects: Virgilian Case Studies 239
Richard F. Thomas
17. Du Bellay’s L’Énéide: Rewriting as Poetic Reinvention? 260
Hélène Gautier
18. Aesthetic and Political Concerns in Dryden’s Æneis 275
Stephen Scully
19. Translation Theory into Practice: Jacques Delille’s Géorgiques
de Virgile 289
Marco Romani Mistretta
20. ‘Only a Poet Can Translate True Poetry’: The Translation of Aeneid 2
by Giacomo Leopardi 305
Giampiero Scafoglio
21. Wordsworth’s Translation of Aeneid 1–3 and the Earlier Tradition
of English Translations of Virgil 318
Philip Hardie
22. Epic Failures: Vasilii Zhukovskii’s ‘Destruction of Troy’ and Russian
Translations of the Aeneid 331
Zara Martirosova Torlone
23. Virgílio Brasileiro: A Brazilian Virgil in the Nineteenth Century 345
Paulo Sérgio de Vasconcellos
24. Between Voß and Schröder: German Translations of Virgil’s Aeneid 355
Ulrich Eigler
 CONTENTS ix

25. Reflections on Two Verse Translations of the Eclogues in the

Twentieth Century: Paul Valéry and Marcel Pagnol 368
Jacqueline Fabre-Serris
26. Come tradurre? Pier Paolo Pasolini and the Tradition of Italian
Translations of Virgil’s Aeneid 385
Ulrich Eigler
27. Irish Versions of Virgil’s Eclogues and Georgics 399
Cillian O’Hogan
28. Limiting Our Losses: A Translator’s Journey through the Aeneid 412
Alessandro Fo
Afterword: Let Go Fear: Future Virgils 422
Josephine Balmer

Bibliography 431
Notes on Contributors 473
Index Locorum 481
General Index 496
 Introduction: The Translation
History of Virgil
The Elevator Version

Susanna Braund and Zara Martirosova Torlone

Virgil’s poems, especially the Aeneid, have been translated many times since long
before the advent of printing; and they continue to be translated to the present day.
As early as the mid-first century CE, Polybius, Seneca’s freedman, is said to have
translated Virgil into Greek. The Middle Irish Imtheachta Aeniasa (Wanderings of
Aeneas), written between the tenth century and the twelfth, can lay claim to being the
first extant vernacular translation, yet is best regarded as an adaptation, because of
how it recasts the Latin poem into the Irish tradition of heroic prose narrative.
Likewise, the mid-twelfth century Old French Roman d’Énéas is an important text,
but it, too, rejigs the material to reflect contemporary concerns. Italy produced
fourteenth-century prose translations of the Aeneid, while the first verse translation
is that of Tommaso Cambiatore (1430). At the same time, in Spain, Enrique de
Villena was writing in Castilian prose his own version, divided into 366 chapters.
The earliest printed Aeneid ‘translation’ (really a loose adaptation in the medieval
mode) appeared in Italian in 1476¹ and was subsequently translated into French in
1483 and into English in 1490, by William Caxton, as The Eneydos of Vyrgyl. More
rigorous translations quickly followed, as Renaissance humanism took off: into
French in 1500 (Octovien de Saint-Gelais, published in 1509), into mid-Scots in 1513
(Gavin Douglas, published 1553), into German in 1515 (Thomas Murner), into Italian
1534 (Niccolò Liburnio), into English in the 1540s (Henry Howard, Books 2 and 4,
published in 1554 and 1557) and into Spanish in 1555 (Gregorio Hernández de
Velasco). The first complete Aeneid in English is that of Thomas Phaer and Thomas
Twyne, published over the period 1558–84. Candidates for the major European Aeneid
translations include those of Joachim du Bellay (Books 4 and 6) in 1562 and 1560,
Annibale Caro in 1581, and John Dryden in 1697. Production of Aeneid translations

¹ Just eight years after the editio princeps of the Latin text, which appeared in 1469.
 SUSANNA BRAUND AND ZARA MARTIROSOVA TORLONE

continues apace; and similar (though not identical) narratives apply to the Eclogues
and the Georgics, which, because of their subject matter, move in and out of favour
more dramatically.
The history of the translation of Virgil’s Aeneid in particular is closely bound up
with the emerging phenomenon of nationalism from the Renaissance onwards,
whether or not it is avant la lettre to call it that. As nations sought to establish and
develop their own national literatures and to articulate their sovereign or imperialist
agendas, they turned to translating the poem that was at the apex of European culture
and that had been at the centre of the school curriculum since it was first published,
in 19 BCE. They did this deliberately, seeking to yoke the language and the heroic
patriotic story to their own histories, helped in no small degree by claims made by the
aristocratic families of descent from Aeneas’s Trojans.² The process continued in
countries and cultures further from the seat of Renaissance humanism, like ripples
expanding from a pebble dropped into a pond. Thus Russia’s first Aeneid translation
does not emerge until the reign of Catherine the Great, while the first attempt in
Hebrew dates from the nineteenth century. The process continues into the twentieth
century, as demonstrated by the case of Esperanto, which boasts three Aeneid trans-
lations since the language was invented in 1887.
Translations, just like other interpretations, are always framed and freighted ideo-
logically. Theodore Ziolkowski’s (1993) book Virgil and the Moderns did an exemplary
job of identifying the malleability of Virgil’s poems during the years 1914 to 1945, when
American and European interpreters found in Virgil mirrors of their own very different
concerns, whether to do with populism or elitism, fascism or democracy, commitment
or escapism. This ideological hermeneutics is readily extrapolated and applied to trans-
lations just as much as to adaptations and to the other forms of reception discussed by
Ziolkowski. That is what makes our volume important.

* * *
There are literally thousands of translations of the works of Virgil, complete or
selective, in dozens of languages.³ And yet there is no book dedicated to the study
of translations of Virgil as a national and transnational cultural phenomenon.
There are of course books, instigated especially by Charles Martindale,⁴ that investigate
the reception of Virgil; and there are studies of specific aspects of that reception,
whether by time period,⁵ by location,⁶ by genre,⁷ by interpretation,⁸ or by combinations

² See Waswo 1995, Federico 2003, some of the essays in Shepard and Powell 2004, and Hardie 2014.
³ Kallendorf 2012 is an absolutely essential resource for anyone interested in this topic.
⁴ In Martindale 1984 and Martindale 1997, the latter of which deliberately starts with reception. Three
notable recent contributions are Ziolkowski and Putnam 2008, Farrell and Putnam 2010, and Hardie 2014.
⁵ For example, Wilson-Okamura 2010, Ziolkowski 1993, and Atherton 2006.
⁶ For example, Kallendorf 1989, 1999, and Torlone 2014.
⁷ For example, Patterson 1987a.
⁸ For example, Thomas 2001b and Kallendorf 2007a (on ‘pessimistic’ readings).
 THE TRANSLATION HISTORY OF VIRGIL 

of those categories.⁹ In understanding translation as a special case of reception, the work

of Lorna Hardwick and Stuart Gillespie has been key, especially the latter’s English
Translation and Classical Reception: Towards a New Literary Theory (Gillespie 2011).
There are a few studies that specifically discuss Virgil’s English translation history,
but these are limited chronologically or unable to delve deep: the two important articles
by Tony Harrison,¹⁰ Colin Burrow’s essay in The Cambridge Companion to Virgil,¹¹
Tanya Caldwell’s (2008) Virgil Made English: The Decline of Classical Authority, Robin
Sowerby’s (2010) Early Augustan Virgil: Translations by Denham, Godolphin, and
Waller, and Sheldon Brammall’s (2015) The English Aeneid: Translations of Virgil,
1555–1646. But there is nothing yet that attempts to open up the truly big picture. One
of the editors, Susanna Braund, is at work on a major study, titled A Cultural History
of Translations of Virgil: From the Twelfth Century to the Present, which will attempt
a synthetic vision. In the meantime, this volume is designed to get the conversation
moving.
In this introduction we first describe the broad landscape of Virgilian translation
from both the theoretical and the practical perspectives. We then explain the genesis
of the volume and indicate how the individual chapters, each of which is summarized,
illuminate the complex tapestry of Virgilian translation activity through the centuries
and across the world. We then indicate points of connection between the chapters, in
order to render the whole greater than the sum of its parts. We are acutely aware that
a project such as this could look like a (rather large) collection of case studies;
therefore we understand the importance of extrapolating larger phenomena from
the specifics presented here.¹² We conclude by suggesting ways in which other
scholars can build on this material.
This volume, then, is intended as a landmark publication devoted to the complex
role that translations of Virgil’s poetry have played in world literature and culture
from the early modern period down to the present day. The majority of the chapters
collected here focus, perhaps inevitably, on European translations of the Aeneid.
‘Perhaps inevitably’, we say, because the Aeneid provided a paradigm for what was
called in medieval times translatio imperii et studii (‘the transmission of power and
learning’).¹³ The significance of Virgil to our collective literary tradition can scarcely
be overemphasized: there is not a single Western poetic tradition unaffected by
his poetry. His influence extends beyond the literary sphere into public discourse,
education, morality, kingship theory, and imperial justifications. Beyond Europe,
his work is still gaining ground, and there is growing interest in translating Virgil
in non-European traditions—including into Asian languages and, so it is said, into

⁹ For example, Cox 1999. ¹⁰ Harrison 1967 and 1969. ¹¹ Burrow 1997.
¹² We acknowledge with gratitude the stimulating seminar ‘Beyond the Case Study: Theorizing Classical
Reception’, organized by Rosa Andujar and Konstantinos Nikoloutsos at the Society for Classical Studies
meeting in January 2016.
¹³ Explored eloquently by Waswo in his essential 1997 book.
 SUSANNA BRAUND AND ZARA MARTIROSOVA TORLONE

Arabic. Although most of the essays in this book relate to the dominant cultures of
Renaissance and modern-day Europe, we are delighted to be able to include studies
from more ‘peripheral’ cultures as well as non-European traditions, including Brazilian
Portuguese, Norwegian, Russian, Slovenian, Turkish, and Chinese, alongside
Esperanto. All of these give important glimpses of what Virgil translation might
look like in its infancy, instead of groaning under the weight of a tradition five
centuries long. Of course we could not achieve comprehensiveness in our scope,
but this volume does address a broad spectrum of theories that defined Virgilian
translations across time and space. Our contribution will by no means be the last
word. Rather, it will be the (we hope) highly significant first word in a discussion that
is long overdue.

* * *
The field of translation studies has been growing now for several decades and
occupies a privileged space between comparative literature, reception studies, her-
meneutics, cultural studies, book history, creative writing, and, to some degree, even
philosophy. Because of the complicated interdisciplinary nature of translation stud-
ies, any theoretical concept proposed in analysis of a specific translation practice
has to take into account the disciplinary background from which that analysis arose.
At the same time, there is clearly a tension between the case study approach and
overarching theoretical approaches. Top-down and bottom-up: we propose that both
types of approach are essential to understanding a canonical author such as Virgil
and that ideally a dialogue between them can be achieved.
The influence of Michel Foucault and the New Historicists is more or less ubiquitous
in this volume:¹⁴ the significance of translations extends beyond the aesthetic sphere
into the social, political, moral, and even economic spheres. Collectively the essays
here make a major contribution to illuminating the cultural and ideological work
done by translations of the poetry of the most esteemed Latin poet. Likewise, the
influence of the ideas of Walter Benjamin is pervasive, if unacknowledged; the focus
of many of the contributions here is upon ‘that element in a translation which does
not lend itself to translation’.¹⁵
The language of translation theory generally works in binaries. It distinguishes
the ‘source’ text from the ‘target’ language. It constructs dichotomies between
‘literal’ and ‘free’, ‘formalist’ and ‘functionalist’, ‘domesticating’ and ‘foreignizing’
translation strategies.¹⁶ It analyses the role of the translator in terms of ‘visibility’ or

¹⁴ Most obviously, Foucault 1991; for further bibliography, see Chapter 1, n. 1.

¹⁵ Benjamin 1968, p. 75.
¹⁶ Venuti’s brief overview ‘What Is a Translation Theory?’ (Venuti 2000, pp. 4–6) is a good starting-
point. His articulation of the domestication/foreignization binary is of course a development of Schleier-
macher’s early nineteenth-century construct of the translator as either moving the reader towards the
author or vice versa.
 THE TRANSLATION HISTORY OF VIRGIL 

‘invisibility’.¹⁷ It distinguishes between use of the language of translation in the

‘instrumental’ or the ‘hermeneutic’ senses,¹⁸ in which the ‘instrumental’ approach
privileges the idea of language as communication, while the hermeneutic approach
privileges the idea of language as interpretation and thus sanctions variations in
form and effects from the source text.¹⁹ As we write, these ‘simple’ binaries are
increasingly being problematized by translation studies scholars. Likewise, the
common metaphors deployed as rhetorical strategies to describe translation, such
as appropriation, recovery, conversion, and transplantation, all emphasize the gap
between the original and the translation, at a moment when translation studies
scholars are expressing unhappiness with the concept of ‘gaps’ and with the idea of
‘bridging’ gaps, and are applying Homi Bhabha’s concept of the ‘third space’ to
translation studies.²⁰ Whether such a postcolonial sociolinguistic theory will be
productive for the study of the Urtext of European colonialism remains to be seen;
however, thinking of translation as an activity that produces hybrids and oscilla-
tions between worlds does strike us as valuable.²¹
Among the approaches mentioned above, the metaphor of domestication/foreign-
ization is particularly useful in the case of Virgil: the vast majority of translators set
out to ‘domesticate’ his poems, appropriating them to their own national literary
conventions for a mixture of aesthetic, moral, ideological, and patriotic reasons and
often obscuring the quintessentially Roman features of the original. A few translators,
preferring the foreignizing approach, have been brave enough to make their trans-
lations difficult in order to remind readers that they are engaging with literature
produced by an alien culture; but, for the majority, the cultural capital gained from
appropriating Virgil outweighs any such considerations, as this volume will repeat-
edly demonstrate.

* * *
The chapters in this volume were mostly produced for three colloquia on translations
of Virgil held during the years 2012 and 2014; a few more were commissioned for
the volume, to achieve balance and breadth. The first event took place in Vancouver,
in September 2012; the second in Paris, at the Institut d’Études Avancées, in June
2014; and the third at the Symposium Cumanum at the Villa Vergiliana, near Naples,
also in June 2014, with funding primarily from the University of British Columbia
(UBC), the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and Miami
University, Ohio. Funding from the Canada Council to support Susanna Braund’s
Canada Research Chair, formerly withheld by UBC but finally passed along, has

¹⁷ See Venuti 1995. ¹⁸ See Kelly 1979, ch. 1.

¹⁹ The theory of ‘compensation’ developed by du Bellay in his 1549 Deffence et illustration de la langue
Françoyse is a prime example of this approach, whereby literalistic translation is eschewed in favour of
techniques that reproduce the effects of the original, but not necessarily in the same sequence or form.
²⁰ Bhabha 2004. ²¹ See Ette 2016. Thanks to Patricia Milewski for this reference.
 SUSANNA BRAUND AND ZARA MARTIROSOVA TORLONE

made it possible to bring the editorial work to completion. The two co-editors were
the co-organizers of these three colloquia, alongside Siobhán McElduff (Paris) and
Craig Kallendorf (Naples), to whom we extend our deep thanks for their vision
and collaboration. The contributors include scholars at all stages of their careers—
retired and veteran full professors, mid-career scholars, postdoctoral and graduate
students—from Athens, Boston, Brazil, Cambridge, Crete, Exeter, Harvard, Houston,
Istanbul, Lille, Ljubljana, Nice, Ohio, Oslo, Ottawa, Paris Sorbonne, Shanghai, Siena,
Texas A&M, Toronto, Virginia, Zurich, and UBC; one contribution—that of Fo
(Chapter 28)—is by a recent translator of the Aeneid. Their combined expertise
embraces Castilian, Chinese, English, Esperanto, French, German, (Homeric) Greek,
Hiberno-English, Italian, Norwegian, (Brazilian) Portuguese, Russian, Slovenian, and
Turkish translation traditions. We were lucky enough to persuade the poet Josephine
Balmer, who has recently turned her hand to translating Virgil, to write an Afterword
that looks forward to future translations of Virgil.
In terms of historical scope, the volume extends from the period of transition between
the Middle Ages and the Renaissance in fourteenth-century Italy and fifteenth-century
Spain all the way down to twenty-first-century translations in English, French, and
Italian. Some of the translation traditions discussed stretch across many centuries, for
example the English, the French, and the Italian ones, while other traditions, such as the
Norwegian, Slovenian, Esperanto, Turkish, and Chinese, are relatively young and allow
us a glimpse into the sometimes highly contingent factors that affect the development of
a translation tradition.

* * *
In organizing these twenty-eight essays we could have adopted a geographical
formula or a strictly chronological sequence. We rejected those approaches in favour
of creating two broad categories: one uses the rubric of Virgilian translation as
cultural capital, which permits some useful juxtapositions, and the other groups
together the numerous translations written by poets, sometimes preeminent ones
in their own cultures. That said, the two parts of the volume are closely interwoven
and contain numerous overlaps, both cultural and theoretical. We use this introduc-
tion to indicate valuable cross-fertilizations within the volume; and we have inserted
footnotes in the chapters themselves, to direct readers to comparable or dialogic
material elsewhere in the volume. After our summaries of the chapters we will make
specific connections between individual papers, so that readers can pursue their
particular interests most easily.
We also want to explain that we have developed a novel form of interlinear
translation for this project that we have applied as consistently as possible throughout
the volume. We insert this interlinear translation in the translations from Esperanto,
French, German and so on in order to indicate the word order and syntax used by each
translator. We use hyphens to reflect where a single word in the receiving language
should be translated by more than one word in English; for example, we represent
 THE TRANSLATION HISTORY OF VIRGIL 

French du and Spanish del by ‘of-the’. We have followed OUP conventions in using
[ ] to indicate matter added and < > to indicate matter excluded. These interlinear
translations often look very clunky in English, but we hope that they will facilitate
greater understanding of the translations discussed in the volume.
The volume is accordingly divided into two parts—‘Virgil Translation as Cultural
and Ideological Capital’, comprising Chapters 1–15, and ‘Poets as Translators of
Virgil: Cultural Competition, Appropriation, and Identification’, comprising the
remaining thirteen chapters (16–28)—followed by an Afterword. Part 1 explicitly
examines the role of Virgilian translations in a range of different national cultures.
In organizing the essays for this section we took into account the broader theoretical
issues that often drive the translation of classical texts with canonical status; and we
have juxtaposed essays that raise specific questions. The resulting sequence follows
broadly, but not exactly, a chronological progression. Several chapters offer dia-
chronic perspectives on numerous Virgil translations within one particular culture,
for example Chapter 1 on French translations, Chapters 4 and 5 on English transla-
tions, and Chapter 7 on American translations. Others make fruitful cross-cultural
connections, for example the study of the influence of Italian vernacular literature on
Spanish translation (Chapter 2), or that of the eighteenth-century Homeric Greek
translation of the Aeneid in its Russian context (Chapter 10). Chapters 3 and 6 each
spotlight one particular translator and his/her context, while Chapter 8 throws light
on the recent phenomenon of Virgil’s translation in Esperanto and Chapter 9 tracks
the much older phenomenon of Greek translations of Virgil. Other chapters explore
territory that is less familiar to anglophone readers: they analyse the theory and
practice of Virgil translation at or beyond the periphery of our conventional Euro-
pean scope. Thus Chapter 11 is devoted to Slovenian translations, Chapter 12 to
Turkish, Chapter 13 to Norwegian, and Chapter 15 to the relatively recent Chinese
translations. Chapters 1 and 14 take pairs of translations from French culture
to offer contrastive insights into the range of theory and practice that can inform
translation activity. These very varied essays raise issues central to and familiar
from wider translation theory—for example claims to authority and legitimacy within
and beyond Europe, the process of developing a literary vernacular by means of
translation, and the significance of understanding the political, social, and linguistic
discourses of the moment. All of these essays to some degree challenge any literary
complacency when it comes to translation practice in general; specifically in the case
of Virgil, they offer a kaleidoscope of patterns, some of which recur while others
are unique.
There was no contest for initial position in this volume. Craig Kallendorf ’s
wide-ranging discussion entitled ‘Successes and Failures in Virgilian Translation’
(Chapter 1) starts with essential statistics that represent the fruit of several decades
of painstaking research. It is a sobering thought to realize that ‘Virgil’s poetry . . .
was translated into French 732 times, Italian 494 times, English 419 times, and
German 188 times. There are 75 Spanish translations and 55 Dutch ones,
 SUSANNA BRAUND AND ZARA MARTIROSOVA TORLONE

the other European languages being represented 35 or fewer times’ (p. 25).
Kallendorf ’s figures relate to printed translations from incunabula down to 1850;
translations that never made it into print and translations published since 1850 take
those figures much higher, of course. Against this backdrop, Kallendorf proceeds to
select three pairs of pre-1850 Virgilian translations into French, which represent
the Aeneid, the Georgics, and the Eclogues, under the rubric of successes and
failures in Virgilian translation. He thus brings back from obscurity the translations of
Perrin and Le Plat, Delille and Cynyngham (whose translation of the Georgics was never
published), Marot and Gresset and, without offering any aesthetic judgements, considers
the immediate and subsequent career success of these translators. Explicitly using a New
Historicist framework, he identifies political and religious ideologies as crucial
factors in the sometimes surprising outcomes and emphasizes that translations can
never be ranked only in terms of failure or success, because each one has elements of
both and contributes to future translation attempts. In this way Kallendorf provides
an important historical framework for the different directions of Virgilian translations
in Europe and beyond.
Richard Armstrong’s ‘Dante’s Influence on Virgil: Italian volgarizzamenti and
Enrique de Villena’s Eneida of 1428’ (Chapter 2) uses a similar approach to raise
a complementary set of fundamental questions about the role of translation as
reception in vernacular literatures. He uses another little-known translation as his
focus. According to Armstrong, the Eneida of Enrique de Villena (1384–1434),
in Castilian prose, is arguably ‘the first full scholarly translation of Virgil’s Aeneid
into a modern language’ (p. 38). It can be seen as a transitional point between
medieval and modern translational practices and as marking the beginning of
the ‘vernacularization’ of translation, which was designed to make it more
accessible to the target audience. He argues for ‘Dante’s influence on Virgil’ in that
the Divine Comedy’s configuration of Virgil as a figure of authority in effect ‘“author-
izes” the epic genre even in the vernacular’ (p. 50). In his analysis, Armstrong
contemplates the philological conscience of the translator who ‘chose to present
a prosaic, dissected, logocentric Virgil’ (p. 50) rather than a Dantesque Virgil in
terza rima.
We stay with early Spanish translations of the Aeneid in Stephen Rupp’s ‘Epic
and the Lexicon of Violence: Gregorio Hernández de Velasco’s Translation of Aeneid 2
and Cervantes’s Numancia’ (Chapter 3). Rupp’s discussion of the Eneyda de Virgilio
traducida en verso castellano (1555) provides an understanding of the role that
translations of ancient epics played in the Renaissance. Writing poetry about war
raised ethical questions about the justification of wars of conquest and expansion, as
weighed against individual emotions. In that context, the translation of Virgil moves
beyond literary relevance and into the realm of philosophical inquiry. For Velasco,
his translation of the Aeneid serves as a means of moral instruction, because he
casts Aeneas as an exemplar of Stoic virtue and examines the importance of control
over intense emotional states.
 THE TRANSLATION HISTORY OF VIRGIL 

Next comes a pair of essays that examine the English Aeneid with a tighter focus
on particular books: the much studied Book 4 and the much less studied Book 7.
These two essays focus upon the representations of Dido and Lavinia. Alison
Keith’s ‘Love and War: Translations of Aeneid 7 into English (From Caxton until
Today)’ (Chapter 4), which follows on neatly from Rupp’s analysis of the represen-
tation of warfare in translation, looks at English renditions of Aeneid 7 that appear
in translations of the complete poem. She explores the relationship drawn by Virgil’s
English translators between ‘arms’ and a ‘woman’ and shows how these representations
help us to understand how the translators shaped Virgil’s Italian war narrative—
beginning with Thomas Phaer’s 1558 translation and ending with Sarah Ruden’s
(2008) and Patricia A. Johnston’s (2012).
In contrast with the chronological breadth of Keith’s chapter, which runs from
Caxton in 1490 to the twenty-first century, Gordon Braden’s ‘The Passion of Dido:
Aeneid 4 in English Translation to 1700’ (Chapter 5) puts an intense spotlight on
translations of Book 4 during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, a period when
England and the English language were becoming prominent on the European and
global scene. He highlights the consistent self-consciousness of this effort to use
Virgil both as a vehicle for translatio imperii and as a medium in the search for an
English metre and idiom that could adequately convey the gravity of ancient epic
poetry. Braden resists the teleological reading of Aeneid translations of this era as
mere precursors to the achievement of Dryden in 1697 and instead analyses the
handling of three key passages from Book 4 by translators across the two centuries.
We now turn from women as the object of translation to discussion of one of
the few women translators featured in this volume in Fiona Cox’s ‘An Amazon in
the Renaissance: Marie de Gournay’s Translation of Aeneid 2’ (Chapter 6).
Cox observes that, while de Gournay’s 1626 translation is marked by imprecisions,
it also conveys a sense of pride in breaching the stronghold of men, as she places
herself in the lineage of French translators of Virgil. De Gournay uses her transla-
tion as part of her struggle for sexual equality, a struggle intensified by her
loneliness and sense of alienation from her own times.
The isolation of the female translator is also addressed by Susanna Braund in ‘Virgil
after Vietnam’ (Chapter 7), a discussion of the major American verse translations
published in the last fifty years. These translations were inevitably framed by Virgil’s
attitude to empire, since that resonated with each translator’s stance in relation to the
war in Vietnam. Braund situates Mandelbaum’s, Fitzgerald’s, Lombardo’s, Fagles’s,
and Ruden’s translations in the larger context of American classical scholarship and
previous translations of Virgil’s epic. Furthermore, she offers a provocative gender
perspective by juxtaposing the male translators, who as professors were all influenced
by the scholarly debates, with Sarah Ruden, who as a woman and as a professional
translator carries out her task away from the margins of academic controversies
and hence provides the reader with an altogether different and more distanced
perspective.
 SUSANNA BRAUND AND ZARA MARTIROSOVA TORLONE

Many of the central issues of cultural capital and of the cultural agendas involved
in translating Virgil are instantiated in Geoffrey Greatrex’s ‘Translations of Virgil
into Esperanto’ (Chapter 8). In some respects this contribution might seem to stand
apart, since it discusses the translations of Virgil into an artificial language—the
international language invented in 1887 in Poland by Ludwig Zamenhof. Yet the
translators of Virgil into Esperanto replicate the widespread phenomenon of trans-
lation of Virgil as a means of gaining cultural capital: they insist on the importance
of producing translations of great works of world literature to give legitimacy to
this new international language. Greatrex’s essay looks at three verse translations
into Esperanto, deploying examples from Book 4 and discussing metrical choices.
He suggests that these translations may have stimulated the production of original
Esperanto epics in the following years, which, again, is a phenomenon paralleled in
the national languages of Europe. However, these translations were—and remain—
isolated from the translations of Virgil into other languages.
Cultural capital is also a key concept in the next two essays, which address what
may look like a surprising phenomenon: the translation of Virgil into ancient Greek.
First, Michael Paschalis’s ‘Translations of Virgil into Ancient Greek’ (Chapter 9)
supplies a panoramic overview of translations of Virgil’s poems into ancient Greek
down to the nineteenth century. Although he discusses the Georgics and Aeneid too,
his main focus is on translations of the Eclogues, where translators have been moved
to attempt renderings in the Doric dialect, in a nod towards Theocritus, the origin-
ator of the pastoral genre. Interest in translating the Eclogues into ancient Greek
manifests in the early seventeenth century, when Scaliger and Heinsius perform this
task not once but twice. Paschalis documents Eugenios Voulgaris’s archaizing trans-
lations of the Georgics (in 1786) and Aeneid (in 1791–2) into epic Greek with notes in
Attic Greek. Voulgaris, who was invited by Catherine the Great of Russia to serve as
archbishop of Cherson and Slaviansk, wrote his translations as part of Catherine’s
social and political programme; and his translations, though they failed in their
purpose of helping to teach Latin to Greco-Russian youth, did exercise an influence
on subsequent Russian translators. In the next century translators—including Chris-
tophoros Philitas and Philippos Ioannou, both of them professors at Athens—
continued to use ancient Greek; only later on did modern Greek take over.
The second essay on ancient Greek translations of Virgil is Sophia Papaioannou’s
‘Sing It like Homer: Eugenios Voulgaris’s Translation of the Aeneid’ (Chapter 10).
Papaioannou’s focus is Voulgaris’s rendition of the Aeneid (1791–2) at the behest of
the Russian tsarina. This peculiar translation had a pronounced pedagogical mission
for an intended audience that was not Russian but belonged to the Greek diaspora.
Furthermore, Voulgaris’s strange undertaking was closely aligned with Catherine’s
complex agenda in her so-called ‘Greek Project’, which aimed at creating an image of
Russia as a Western military power and as heir to Greek Orthodoxy. Papaioannou
justifies study of this perhaps bizarre phenomenon noting that it belonged to the
same era as the first translations of Homer and Virgil in Russia, which she describes
 THE TRANSLATION HISTORY OF VIRGIL 

as ‘a project tightly entwined with Catherine’s political and cultural aspirations to

project Russia at once as a Western military power in the footsteps of Rome and the
heir to Greek Orthodox Byzantium’ (p. 152). In other words, Papaioannou demon-
strates clearly how translation was used for cultural ideology. This essay is profitably
read alongside Torlone’s discussion of nineteenth-century Russian translations
of Virgil.
The subject of Marko Marinčič’s ‘Farming for the Few: Jožef Šubic’s Georgics
and the Early Slovenian Reception of Virgil’ (Chapter 11) is the early Slovenian
translation history of Virgil, which, while still within the confines of the European
school of translation, is nonetheless poorly explored, even in Slovenian scholarship.
Marinčič analyses a little known 1863 translation of Virgil’s Georgics, which offers an
important background to the Slovenian school of translation of Greek and Latin texts.
Written in a hybrid metrical pattern, Šubic’s version is by no means a literary
masterpiece; but it is a groundbreaking work, which stays surprisingly faithful to the
original, revealing to its reader how Slovenian literary consciousness formed itself in
relation to the ancient classics.
The exploration of the twentieth-century translations starts with a contribution by
Ekin Öyken and Çiğdem Dürüşken entitled ‘Reviving Virgil in Turkish’ (Chapter 12),
which presents an interdisciplinary approach informed by literary history, reception
studies, and translation history; the last one of course has a strong tradition in
Turkey. Öyken and Dürüşken examine the complexity of translating Virgil at a
point of knowledge transmission between Asia and Europe and ask how these
translations have been deployed for different political agendas. They contrast the
limited knowledge of Virgil in the Ottoman era with the state of full acquaintance-
ship in modern-day Turkey, suggesting that the Christianizing reading of Virgil may
have delayed recognition of his work in Turkey as a result of the Islamic aspect of the
Ottoman literary tradition. Öyken and Dürüşken contrast the 1928 prose translations
of the Eclogues and Georgics by Ruşen Eşref with the archaizing 1935–6 prose version
of the Aeneid by Ahmed Reşit. That said, both translators, in their different ways, can
be seen to deploy Virgil as a foundational text.
Mathilde Skoie’s ‘Finding a Pastoral Idiom: Norwegian Translations of Virgil’s
Eclogues and the Politics of Language’ (Chapter 13) introduces yet another European
‘repossession’ of Virgil that generally remains outside the scope of most volumes on
translation and reception. This discussion is profitably read in dialogue with Cillian
O’Hogan’s paper on Irish Virgils (Chapter 27). Skoie focuses on three Norwegian
translations of Virgil’s Eclogues published in 1950, 1975, and 2016 and analyses the
way they exhibit tendencies of domestication and foreignization as the language of
translation becomes politicized and engaged in debates about Norwegian identity.
With a particular focus on Eclogue 4, Skoie explores the juxtaposition of rural and
urban voices in the context of language politics.
Séverine Clément-Tarantino performs a similar comparison in ‘The Aeneid and
“Les Belles Lettres”: Virgil’s Epic in French between Fiction and Philology, from
 SUSANNA BRAUND AND ZARA MARTIROSOVA TORLONE

Veyne back to Perret’ (Chapter 14). She walks us back all the way between two
French translations published in the same Belles Lettres series, from Paul Veyne in
2012 to Jacques Perret in 1959. She emphasizes that Veyne’s fluid and vivacious
translation rekindled interest in Virgil in the French reading public, then proceeds to
analyse the principles behind Perret’s translation of the Aeneid in the context of his
1947 work Latin et culture. In this work, elaborating on the ‘art of translation’, Perret
presented attention to the philological and prosodic intricacies of a source text as the
main goal of the ‘ideal translator’; yet he decided to translate the Aeneid in prose. For
Perret, translation had to serve the goal of facilitating the reading of Virgil in Latin;
by contrast, Veyne distanced himself from philological scrutiny, offering instead a
renewed pleasure in reading Virgil in French.
We conclude Part 1 with Jinyu Liu’s ‘Virgil in Chinese’ (Chapter 15). This essay
takes us firmly into the realm of ‘other’ Virgils, a realm that is neither conditioned
nor influenced by the concerns of European renditions of the Roman poet. Liu offers
a fascinating study of the perception of Virgil in twentieth-century China: while
Chinese engagement with Virgil is limited, it nonetheless sheds light on how a non-
European culture might engage with this text, which was completely foreign to
Chinese literary culture in all its aspects, from genre and metre to plot and aesthetics.
Looking at the handful of Chinese translations of the Eclogues from 1957 and of the
Aeneid from 1930 and 1984 (as the Georgics is still awaiting its first complete Chinese
version), Liu tackles the important question of Virgil’s ‘translatability’ and signifi-
cance in non-Western contexts. She finds that Chinese translations of the Aeneid
embrace the ‘pessimistic’ reading of the Aeneid and eschew the theme of imperialism
in favour of sorrow, anxiety, and disillusion.
Part 2 addresses the important phenomenon of poets who have turned to Virgil in
search of inspiration or legitimization of their national literary canons (or both).
Many of the chapters gathered here reflect closely the challenges encountered by
translators in their effort to convey the meaning of the source text to their audiences
while retaining the formal features of the Virgilian original. Again, we have organized
this section broadly in chronological order, and the poets discussed include Du
Bellay, Dryden, Delille, Voß, Leopardi, Wordsworth, Zhukovskii, Mendes, Schröder,
Valéry, Pasolini, Fallon, and Heaney. While this part of the volume is mainly
concerned with specific case studies, it draws on broader theoretical frameworks,
such as the domestication of the foreign in translation (Thomas, Torlone, Eigler,
Fabre-Serris, Eigler again, and O’Hogan). Several chapters address the matter of
Bloom’s ‘anxiety of influence’, which emerges in poets’ feelings of inadequacy at
translating Virgil or, by contrast, in a confidence that amounts to a cultural challenge
to, and even identification with, Virgil (Gautier, Scully, Romani Mistretta, Scafoglio,
Hardie, and Vasconcellos). Part 2 concludes with insights from Alessandro Fo, a
contemporary Italian poet and translator, about how to find a place within one of the
longest continuous traditions of Virgil translation. The volume closes with a pro-
vocative outline of future possibilities in Virgil translation by Josephine Balmer.
 THE TRANSLATION HISTORY OF VIRGIL 

We have placed Richard F. Thomas’s ‘Domesticating Aesthetic Effects: Virgilian

Case Studies’ (Chapter 16) in initial position because it ranges so widely across
the Eclogues, the Georgics, and the Aeneid; because it discusses poet-translators
such as Dryden, Day-Lewis, Lee, and Ferry; and because it identifies some central
issues in the analysis of equivalence against the backdrop of Venuti’s foreignization–
domestication framework. Thomas explores domestication by examining closely
aesthetic, linguistic, and metre-specific effects. Using many examples, he raises the
question of whether or not it is possible to translate language-specific idioms into the
target language without losing the poignancy of the source text.
We move back to sixteenth-century France for Hélène Gautier’s ‘Du Bellay’s
L’Aeneid: Rewriting as Poetic Reinvention?’ (Chapter 17). Gautier expands the
discussion on Virgilian translations into French by focusing on Books 4 and 6 of
Joachim Du Bellay’s translations of the Aeneid, written in the 1550s. She places Du
Bellay’s translation in the context of Renaissance translations and of the evolution of
French language and poetics. Furthermore, she contemplates how Du Bellay’s trans-
lations of Virgil made a mark on his own original poetry, and vice versa: Du Bellay
not only assimilates the imagery and rhythm of Virgilian epic but through Virgil
ponders upon his own poetic voice.
Stephen Scully’s ‘Aesthetic and Political Concerns in Dryden’s Æneis’ (Chapter 18)
addresses the most influential translation of the Aeneid into English. Scully proposes
that Dryden’s 1697 translation of Virgil reflected Dryden’s own time, because the
poem resonated with the political turmoil in England. Although, by Dryden’s own
admission, Virgil’s restrained mien was at odds with his poetics, he strove to bring
the voice of Virgil into British culture, retaining at the same time the Latin poet’s
lexical range and multifaceted textual fabric and conveying the poem’s force in
asserting the cause of nationhood. Scully offers a close reading of passages from
the Aeneid, which are sometimes contrasted with Dryden’s translation of Iliad 1. This
chapter looks back to many of the issues raised in Part 1.
In ‘Translation Theory into Practice: Jacques Delille’s Géorgiques de Virgile’
(Chapter 19), Marco Romani Mistretta shows that, for Delille, Virgil was more
than a poetic influence: he was rather the fons and origo of poetry itself. With
the rising interest in agricultural treatises during the Enlightenment, Delille’s
1770 translation of the Georgics acquired a wide appeal. His lifelong work on his
Géorgiques displays Delille’s aspiration to emulate the Virgilian text and to appro-
priate Virgil’s poetics by intertwining in his own poetry the physical, the aesthetic,
and the moral worlds. In that quest Delille’s Virgil becomes not only the herald of
agricultural wisdom but also a master of poetic harmony. Delille blurs the lines
between ‘translation’ and ‘commentary’ as he contextualizes antiquity within the
cultural framing and cultural cravings of his own epoch. This chapter raises many of
the same big picture questions as does Richard Thomas’s.
Many of the same issues arise again in Giampiero Scafoglio’s ‘ “Only a poet
can translate true poetry”: The Translation of Aeneid 2 by Giacomo Leopardi’
 SUSANNA BRAUND AND ZARA MARTIROSOVA TORLONE

(Chapter 20). Here Scafoglio tackles one of the most debated dilemmas in translation
practice: whether or not one has to be a poet in order to translate poetry. Leopardi
was not only a great poet but also a passionate lover of classical texts, as well as a
rigorous and fine scholar of Greek and Latin language and literature. In 1816, at the
age of eighteen, he translated Book 2 of Virgil’s Aeneid, in a fusion of his philological
and scholarly interests with his aesthetic and creative ambitions. Scafoglio shows that
Leopardi came into his own poetic vocation as his translation progressed and that the
translation, which combined literary faithfulness to the original with the expressive
musicality of Italian, effectively laid the groundwork for Leopardi’s outstanding
poetic activity that followed.
The title ‘Wordsworth’s Translation of Aeneid 1–3 and the Earlier Tradition of
English Translations of Virgil’ (Chapter 21) indicates the focus of Philip Hardie’s
contribution to this volume. As a major translation project by a major English poet,
this work of Wordsworth, which engaged him during the years 1823–31, can be
compared with the Æneis of Dryden, with whom he competes, and with Pope’s Iliad.
Hardie considers Wordsworth’s undertaking not only within the longer history of
English translations of the Aeneid, but also within the history of English poetry.
He explores how Wordsworth, in anxious competition with Dryden, chooses the
rhyming couplet for his translation to show how a different verse movement and
vocabulary can produce another version of the classic English Aeneid.
Zara Torlone’s ‘Epic Failures: Vasilii Zhukovskii’s “Destruction of Troy” and
Russian Translations of the Aeneid’ (Chapter 22) addresses the lack of canonical
translations of the Aeneid into Russian. While Homer found his widely accepted
rendition in Nikolai Gnedich’s Iliad and Vasilii Zhukovskii’s Odyssey translations,
Virgil has had no such luck. Torlone argues that Zhukovskii, a major Russian
Romantic poet, in his 1823 rendition of Aeneid 2 (later titled ‘The Destruction of
Troy’), succeeded where later translators such as Fet (1888) and Briusov (1933), who
were greater poets than Zhukovskii, failed: it achieved the goal of ‘demystifying’ the
foreign text and of conveying ‘in its own language the foreignness of the foreign text’
without alienating the reader. The chapter is usefully read alongside Papaioannou’s
discussion of Russia in the preceding century; and it shares with those of Kallendorf
and Vasconcellos the theme of success and failure.
Paulo Sérgio de Vasconcellos’s discussion of Virgil translations in Brazil in the
nineteenth century takes this volume once more outside of the European context.
Specifically, in ‘Virgílio Brasileiro: A Brazilian Virgil in the Nineteenth Century’
(Chapter 23), Vasconcellos analyses the intriguing nature of the complete poetic
translation of Virgil’s work by the poet Manuel Odorico Mendes, which exercised a
direct influence on modern Brazilian literature and remains popular in Brazil.
Vasconcellos raises crucial questions about poetic identity in translation: ‘Is its
author Virgil? But what are we to do with the “Brazilian” in the title? Or do we
need to register Odorico Mendes as its author?’ He argues that the title encapsulates
the project of an emulator who maintains himself in a dialectical relation with the
 THE TRANSLATION HISTORY OF VIRGIL 

original and who signals his authorship in a way that unites source and target texts
inextricably. There is thus a great synergy between this contribution and those of
Romani Mistretta and Scafoglio.
In ‘Between Voß and Schröder: German Translations of Virgil’s Aeneid’ (Chapter 24),
Ulrich Eigler discusses the German tradition of translations of Virgil with a specific
focus on those by Johann Heinrich Voß (1789–99) and Rudolf Alexander Schröder
(1924–30). He frames his essay by referring to Sarah Ruden’s recent translation,
which has been acclaimed as ‘a great English poem in itself ’, and uses it to assess
his chosen translations. Eigler shows how Voß, influenced by modern ideas that
emanated from Göttingen and from the community of pre-Romantic poets, juxta-
poses his translation with the poetical experiments of Schiller’s translations of Books
2 and 4 of the Aeneid. Schröder, on the other hand, in his translation of the whole of
the Virgilian corpus, adhered to a meticulous imitation of Virgilian prosody. These
two translations could not have been more different, but by setting them against each
other Eigler builds a comprehensive picture of the history of German translations
of the Aeneid.
From twentieth-century Germany we move now to twentieth-century France, with
Jacqueline Fabre-Serris’s ‘Reflections on Two Verse Translations of the Eclogues in
the Twentieth Century’ (Chapter 25)—namely by the poet Paul Valéry (1956) and
by the playwright and novelist Marcel Pagnol (1958). Jacqueline Fabre-Serris
offers a comparison of these two translations because they differ drastically in the
choice of poetic form and in their theoretical positions on the precise purpose of
translation. Furthermore Fabre-Serris compares these two translations with that
of Eugène de Saint-Denis, whose 1942 prose translation of the Eclogues she con-
siders more successful.
Ulrich Eigler’s second chapter in the volume, ‘Come tradurre? Pier Paolo Pasolini
and the Tradition of Italian Translations of Virgil’s Aeneid’ (Chapter 26), takes us
into the twentyfirst century. Eigler contextualizes the translation of Virgil in Italian
within the complex social, political, and linguistic history of Italy in ways that
connect fruitfully with Alessandro Fo’s experience as a translator at the end of this
volume. Eigler addresses twentieth- and twenty-first-century translations paying
special attention to the poet and director Pier Paolo Pasolini’s 1959 version of the
opening of the Aeneid, which he contrasts with the 2007 traditional modern Italian
translation of Vittorio Sermonti: Pasolini’s translation rejects the conventional lin-
guistic, semantic, and cultural unities, while Sermonti aims at continuity between the
classical author and the Italian readers of today.
Next is Cillian O’Hogan’s ‘Irish Versions of Virgil’s Eclogues and Georgics’
(Chapter 27). These versions serve as another salient example of how culture and
nationhood define themselves through Virgil. In his essay O’Hogan explores how
Virgil has provided a way of navigating Irish identity and looks at the language
choices in Irish translations that lead away from British classically infused literature
and towards an alternative classical tradition. This chapter complements closely
 SUSANNA BRAUND AND ZARA MARTIROSOVA TORLONE

Chapter 13 on Norwegian versions of Virgilian pastoral. Examining Seamus Heaney’s

2001 translation of Eclogue 9 and Peter Fallon’s 2006 translation of the Georgics,
O’Hogan argues that both enact aspects of Virgilian ‘repossession’: poets relocate
Virgilian poems into their familiar Irish landscape replete with the grim realities of
rural life; and they make use of Hiberno-English, the everyday version of English
used in Ireland.
Part 2 concludes with a chapter by a contemporary translator of the Aeneid, the
poet and academic Alessandro Fo, whose own Eneide was published in 2012.
This piece, titled ‘Limiting Our Losses: A Translator’s Journey through the Aeneid’
(Chapter 28), is translated from Italian and published here with the kind permission
of the author and the publishing house Einaudi. Here the arduous path of the
challenges faced by a translator of Virgil is mapped out. What is most striking
about Fo’s reflections on the difficulty of translating Virgil is how personal the
relationship with the Roman poet has become for the translator. Moreover, today’s
translators face an issue never experienced by the first translators of Virgil: they need
to justify the preparation of a new translation. This chapter, perhaps more than any
other, explores the actual nuts and bolts of the translation process. It is an excellent
reminder that, whatever theoretical framework a translator may lay claim to, when
faced with the moment of choice, s/he may throw theory out of the window in search
of a particular effect.
The editors were delighted to recruit the English poet Josephine Balmer to write an
Afterword to the volume. Her fascinating, personal ‘Let Go Fear: Future Virgils’
serves as a perfect conclusion to this multifaceted and complicated volume. Evoking
the work of Alice Oswald and Anne Carson on Homer and Catullus respectively,
Balmer looks towards ‘future Virgils’, reimagined and adapted to contemporary contexts,
where women translators will not be an oddity and where Virgil’s stories of victories
and defeats will inspire a creativity readily understood by contemporary audiences.

* * *
The chapters of this volume deal with the era of print culture, and thus start at the
moment of transition from the medieval world to the humanist theories and practices
of translation that have remained by and large stable up to the present day. The arc
of the volume is initiated by Armstrong’s discussion of the transition from medi-
evalism to humanism, and proceeds through Braden’s assertion of translators’ self-
consciousness in their use of Virgil as a vehicle for the translatio imperii to Greatrex’s
demonstration that the new culture of Esperanto replicates the familiar phenomenon
whereby national literatures seek dignity, authority, and legitimacy by crafting
an elevated poetic language through translating Virgil. The essays by Öyken and
Dürüşken, and Liu, on Virgil in Turkish and Chinese respectively, depict two
different collisions between Europe and Asia that will continue to reverberate.
The majority of the essays deal with verse translations of the Aeneid, which reflects
the poem’s cultural significance as a marker of prestige and as a means to gain
 THE TRANSLATION HISTORY OF VIRGIL 

authority. But there is also discussion of prose versions in Castilian (Armstrong),

Turkish (Öyken and Dürüşken), and French (Clément-Tarantino and Fabre-Serris),
while translations of Eclogues feature in the essays on French (Kallendorf), ancient
Greek (Paschalis), Norwegian (Skoie), English (Thomas), Chinese (Liu), and
Hiberno-English (O’Hogan) translations. Of the major Virgilian works, the Georgics
is represented in the volume in French (Kallendorf and Romani Mistretta), ancient
Greek (Paschalis), Slovenian (Marinčič), English (Thomas), and Hiberno-English
(O’Hogan). Methods adopted by contributors include closely observed comparisons
between translators, often in pairs—thus Kallendorf ’s three pairs of French transla-
tions of the Aeneid, Georgics, and Eclogues; Fabre-Serris on the Eclogues; Clément-
Tarantino on prose Aeneids; Eigler on Voß and Schröder and again on Pasolini
and Sermonti. Other contributors deploy a greater number of comparisons: Keith
and Braden on English translations of the Aeneid; Braund on five post-Vietnam
American translations; Greatrex on Esperanto and Skoie on Norwegian translations;
Thomas on domesticating translations; and Torlone on Zhukovskii’s Aeneid as
measured against those of his successors. Other chapters have a single focus,
for example Cox on de Gournay, Marinčič on Šubic, Gautier on Du Bellay,
Scully on Dryden, Romani Mistretta on Delille, Scafoglio on Leopardi, Hardie
on Wordsworth, Vasconcellos on Mendes, and O’Hogan on Heaney’s Eclogues and
Fallon’s Georgics.
Most of the contributors deploy, more or less explicitly, a New Historicist
approach, which is well articulated by Kallendorf in the opening paper. The chapters
demonstrate repeatedly that translations are embedded in their own cultures:
Kallendorf on the fates of less familiar French translations, Scully on Dryden, Eigler
on German Aeneids, and Braund on post-Vietnam American translators. Armstrong
illuminates the intellectual traffic between Italy and Spain, and Gautier shows
how translating played a role in forging a national idiom in France. Papaioannou
throws light on Voulgaris’s cultural–political–pedagogical programme at the court
of Catherine the Great in eighteenth-century Russia, and Öyken and Dürüşken ask
why in Turkey Virgil has served diverse political agendas so well through the years
when encounters with Virgil take place through the prism of European culture. Skoie
illuminates the intricacies of language politics in Norway, which are manifested in
debates about city and country in relation to translations of the Eclogues. Philosoph-
ical and ethical dimensions to translating Virgil are raised with respect to Spanish
and French translations: Rupp connects Velasco’s translation of the Aeneid with
contemporary questions about war, and Romani Mistretta shows how the Enlight-
enment interest in agricultural treatises informs Delille’s Georgics.
All the essays carry assumptions about whether the language of translation is
used in the ‘instrumental’ or in the ‘hermeneutic’ sense. Many of the translators
discussed in the volume are keenly concerned with issues of aesthetic equivalence:
in Castilian (Armstrong), English (Thomas), German (Eigler), French (Fabre-Serris)
and Slovenian (Marinčič). This is a central concern for the poets Wordsworth
 SUSANNA BRAUND AND ZARA MARTIROSOVA TORLONE

(Hardie), Leopardi (Scafoglio), and Du Bellay (Gautier), who develops his theory
of compensation precisely to address this issue, while the contemporary Italian
translator Alessandro Fo lays bare how he wrestled with it. Other chapters address
the moral and ethical ramifications inherent in translations that view the source text
as a way to educate or improve the readers in the target audience, for example
Voulgaris, whose project was utterly wrongheaded, according to Paschalis.
Venuti’s development of Schleiermacher’s ideas into the spectrum of foreignizing
and domesticating translations provides a framework, implicit or otherwise, for many
essays in this volume. Torlone’s discussion of Zhukovskii’s ‘demystifying’ Russian
Aeneid is the one most explicitly theorized in this respect. Degrees of domestication
map closely onto degrees of vernacularization, a topic that recurs throughout. Arm-
strong depicts Villena as a pioneer in his Castilian Aeneid, whereas for Paschalis and
Papaioannou Voulgaris’s Homeric Greek translation is an archaizing throwback,
as is the earliest Turkish Aeneid translation for Öyken and Dürüşken. The translators’
search for an echt localized idiom permeates the material—in English (Braden,
Thomas, Scully, Braund), French (Gautier, Fabre-Serris, and Clément-Tarantino,
especially on Veyne’s novelistic Aeneid), and Italian (Eigler, Fo). This debate is
particularly visible in the Esperanto versions (Greatrex).
It is productive to juxtapose the concept of the ideal translator, a topic addressed
by Clément-Tarantino and Fo, for example, with Scully’s problematization of
Dryden’s attitude to his achievement in his 1697 Aeneid: Dryden claims that his
1700 Iliad was much more congenial and authentic. Several chapters on poet-
translators argue that translation is a two-way process that profoundly affects the
original poetry of a translator: thus the discussions of Du Bellay (Gautier), Delille
(Romani Mistretta), Leopardi (Scafoglio), Mendes (Vasconcellos), and Fo.
The tools of literary history are deployed to trace sequences of translations
that influence one another within the national traditions of France (Kallendorf),
England (Scully and Hardie), and Germany (Eigler), while Armstrong makes a telling
connection across the national traditions of Italy and Spain. Imagery of lineage or
heredity, or echoes of a Bloomian ‘anxiety of influence’, occur in chapters about the
French (Cox, Clément-Tarantino), English (Thomas, Hardie, Braund), Russian
(Torlone), Esperanto (Greatrex), Turkish (Öyken and Dürüşken), and Italian (Fo)
traditions. By contrast, while many of the chapters depict the ongoing dialogue
between translators, Cox spotlights the lonely (female) translator and Liu highlights
the alienness of Virgil for Chinese translators and their audiences. At least two
chapters explicitly depict translation as a form of resistance: Eigler on Pasolini’s
Aeneid fragment and O’Hogan on the Irish poets’ attempts to renegotiate power
relationships.
Gender and feminist readings play a small role in this volume, partly perhaps
because so few women have published translations of Virgil. Several chapters
examine the handling of gender and militarism, either singly or as a nexus (Rupp,
Keith, Braden, and Braund). Both Cox and Braund problematize the role of the
 THE TRANSLATION HISTORY OF VIRGIL 

female translator and see her as isolated from the academy; in her Afterword Balmer
calls for a future where this gender divide will be closed.

* * *
We deliberately saved till the end the ruminations of two active poet-translators of
Virgil, Fo and Balmer, as a way of looking both backwards and forwards. Balmer’s
vision of future Virgil translation activity calls for gender roles to be addressed, or,
better, redressed. This takes us neatly to the final topic in this introduction: a
consideration of things the volume does not do, and which remain open for explor-
ation. This volume does not address the phenomenon of Virgil translations that exist
in manuscript and were never printed, aside from one of Kallendorf ’s cases. Pion-
eering work by Stuart Gillespie and Sheldon Brammall is already proceeding on
English manuscript translations, but much more remains to be done, in English and
in other languages.²² None of our essays addresses the translation history of the
Appendix Vergiliana; Sheldon Brammall has a major project on the Appendix under
way, but, again, there are opportunities for further work on translations specifically.
There is a good deal more work to be done on the translation histories of both the
Eclogues and the Georgics; in the case of the Eclogues, the issue of dialect, raised here
by the essays on the ancient Greek and Hiberno-Irish translations, could be devel-
oped further. Little attention is given here to the phenomenon of prose translations.
Another promising topic that arises here only in the chapter on Turkish translations
is the use of intermediary translations; likewise the phenomenon of translation as
commentary, raised here only by Romani Mistretta. Questions concerning the
equivalence of metrical form arise in a number of the essays, but there is surely
space for a systematic and overarching exploration of this important topic, especially
of translations that seek to replicate the Latin dactylic hexameter. There are a few
major translations that are not discussed in this volume, such as those of Gavin
Douglas, Henry Howard, Annibale Caro, and Friedrich Schiller, with his attempted
rehabilitation of Virgil in early nineteenth-century Germany; and there is no discus-
sion of the Dutch, Danish, Japanese, or Polish translation traditions. We throw open
an invitation to others to take up the conversation.

²² Both Gillespie and Brammall were generous participants in the workshops.

PART 1
Virgil Translation as Cultural
and Ideological Capital
 1
Successes and Failures
in Virgilian Translation
Craig Kallendorf

My subject in this chapter is premodern Virgilian translations, those that predate

1850. I am not going to say much about the literary qualities of these translations,
although much could be said. Rather I am going to look at what one could do with a
translation of a canonical poet a millennium and a half or more after he passed on to
the Elysian Fields, and at whether his translators (or at least some of them) succeeded
or not in doing what they set out to do.
Now initially, this might seem to be a belaboured exercise in the obvious.
A translation is designed to make a poem accessible to those in another culture
who cannot read the literary work in the language in which it is written. If the
translation passes on the gist of the original poem, conveying in the process some-
thing of the literary qualities of the original, then presumably it is successful; if not, it
fails. That is what traditional literary criticism tells us.
For the traditionalist at least, literary translation rests in the aesthetic, the goal being
to extend something of the pleasure and utility of the original to new and different
kinds of readers. But we are now in the second, perhaps even third generation of critics
who have emphasized that literature also does work in society. As Michel Foucault and
the New Historicists have taught us, poetry cannot be extricated from power, so that
translation does cultural, political, ideological, and even economic work as well.¹ It is
this kind of work that I wish to concentrate on here. And, since this work in the present
context is done through books, I shall also draw on the newly fashionable field of book
history in order to focus on the early printed editions as physical objects as well as on
the translations they contain. A chapter in a book is by no means sufficient even to
scratch the surface here, but I want to use three carefully chosen pairs of translations,
one for each of Virgil’s major works, to show that translations of the classics can

¹ In thinking through this chapter, I have been most heavily influenced by Foucault and by the New
Historicists. Among the many works that could be cited here, see Foucault 1991 and Power in Foucault
2000, along with Kinney and Collins 1987 and with Cox and Reynolds 1993.
 CRAIG KALLENDORF

stimulate some of the same kinds of questions that scholars in other areas of the
humanities are asking and answering today.

* * *
First, the big picture. In order to say something meaningful about how Virgilian
translations affected the societies in which they were created, distributed, and con-
sumed, we obviously have to know where and when these translations were printed. Not
all translations were printed, of course: I have in my library at home two renderings, one
of the Georgics and one of the Aeneid, that were never published. I shall have something
to say about one of them later, but, ever since Gutenberg’s invention reshaped European
culture, unprinted manuscripts in general have receded to the cultural margins.² I shall
therefore concentrate on published translations.
It has proven surprisingly difficult to get basic information on where and when
Virgilian translations were printed. One would think that, after the so-called third
revolution in book history, the one inaugurated by computers, it would be easy to
collect this information, but in fact this has not been the case.³ A shocking number
of early printed editions, somewhere around 10 per cent, survive in only one or two
copies, with another significant group in the three- to four-copy range, so that many
editions are not recorded in the standard bibliographical sources.⁴ Virgil is a major
author who has stood at the centre of Western education for over two thousand years,
so one would think that his works would have attracted the attention of bibliogra-
phers who were aware of this problem and prepared to work around it. Indeed, over
fifty years ago, Giuliano Mambelli published his Gli annali delle edizioni virgiliane,
which includes translations as well as Latin texts and which should have provided the
information we are seeking.⁵ Mambelli, however, was working in the chaotic condi-
tions of the immediate postwar period, when resources were scarce and scholars did
not travel as they do now; in fact, he appears not to have made it even to the libraries
in the southern part of his own country, much less outside Italy. As a result his census
is filled with mistakes and woefully incomplete. I have therefore used the resources
available to us now to do the job myself. My A Bibliography of Early Printed Editions
of Virgil, 1469–1850 contains the answers we are looking for.⁶

² The now classic argument that the printing press revolutionized Western culture is Eisenstein 1979.
In the past thirty years book historians have been emphasizing continuities as well as ruptures in assessing
the movement from manuscript to printed book, but Eisenstein’s basic point remains valid.
³ While much has been written lately on the subject, Birkerts 1994 presents one of the earliest
compelling arguments that computerization does not involve merely doing the same things faster, but
doing them in a fundamentally different way. Mercier 2002 is a nice exhibition catalogue that organizes a
survey of book history by focusing on the passage first from script to print, then from the printed book to
computer-driven technology.
⁴ Polastron 2007 stresses how many books have been destroyed throughout history. Green, McIntyre,
and Needham 2011 note that the average number of surviving copies of a book printed before 1501 is one,
while Wilkinson 2009 estimates that over 30% of the vernacular French books originally published in the
sixteenth century did not survive.
⁵ See Mambelli 1954. ⁶ See Kallendorf 2012.
 SUCCESSES AND FAILURES IN VIRGILIAN TRANSLATION 

A survey of the early printed editions shows that, through to the beginning of the
modern era, more readers encountered Virgil in the original than in translation.
Of the 5,062 pre-1850 Virgilian editions described in my bibliography, however, 2,099,
or 41 per cent, contain a translation. As Appendix 1 shows, Virgil’s poetry, at least in
part, was translated into French 732 times, Italian 494 times, English 419 times, and
German 188 times. There are seventy-five Spanish translations and fifty-five Dutch
ones, the other European languages being represented thirty-five or fewer times.
All statistics require interpretation in order to become meaningful; and, if the goal
is to figure out what cultural work is being done by Virgilian translations and the
early printed books that carry them, then this information can suggest where we
should focus our attention. For one thing, it is clear that Virgilian translations are
going to play a relatively minor role in those cultures where the classics came late to
the educational system or where Latin was not a natural base for the vernacular
culture. We would expect this to be the case in the Slavic language areas; and in fact it
is, for we see only a handful of translations into Polish and Russian and virtually
none into the other Slavic languages. The same holds for the Scandinavian countries,
where Greek and Latin always remained a somewhat artificial addition to the basic
educational curriculum. Given this generalization, there is rather more translation into
German than one might expect, especially given the relative popularity of Homer, and
rather less than we might anticipate into Spanish and Portuguese, which are Romance
cultures, just like the French and the Italian. This is probably due to the peculiarly
restrictive publishing environment in the Iberian Peninsula, which even resulted in
a disproportionate number of Latin texts being imported from abroad, especially
from France.⁷
All in all, this is a great deal of translating activity, which suggests that a lot of
people thought it was worth getting access to this poetry, so it behoves us to try to
figure out why. Because my space is limited, I will restrict myself to French examples,
since, as these statistics make clear, Virgil was translated into French far more than
into any other vernacular language.

* * *
In the best Virgilian manner, let us plunge in medias res. One of the better-known
seventeenth-century French translations of the Aeneid—and one that comes embel-
lished with an engraved title page and a scene by Abraham Bosse (1604–76), a
prominent engraver in Baroque France, before each book—can be found in an edition
originally printed in two parts, in 1648 and 1658, in Paris.⁸ The work is described in
1859 as a ‘miserable translation’ by Grässe, who was undoubtedly reacting to it on

⁷ Beardsley 1970 identifies only 216 translations of all classical authors into Spanish during the period
covered.
⁸ See Kallendorf 2012, where volume 1 (of 1648) features as ‘FA1648.1’ and volume 2 (of 1658) as
‘FA1658.1’.
 CRAIG KALLENDORF

aesthetic grounds; but, if we ask a different set of questions, the book becomes
considerably more interesting. The translator was one Pierre Perrin, who explains in
his preface exactly what he was trying to accomplish. Like any educated person of
his day, Perrin knew that Virgil wrote the Aeneid in the early days of rule by
Augustus, who slowly but surely transformed Rome from a republic into an empire.
Then as now, it was a commonplace of Virgilian criticism that Augustus and Virgil
worked closely together, that, through Maecenas, Augustus paid Virgil’s bills, and
that Virgil in turn wrote a poem about Rome’s mythical founder that also praised
the man who was refashioning it in Aeneas’s image. Perrin knew all this and saw
here an opportunity: he dedicated his translation to Cardinal Mazarin, the influ-
ential cleric and diplomat who played an important role in shaping the foreign
policy of several French monarchs, and placed the translation into the cultural
setting of the Ancien Régime:
In effect, Sir, the famous century of this grand author, does it not seem to have come around
again in the present? Is Paris not now a Rome triumphant, like her [sic] enormous in
population and territory, like her [sic] queen of cities, mistress of nations, capital of the
world? Is our monarch not a nascent Augustus, in his first years already the most victorious,
already the most august of kings? And your eminence, sir, are you not a faithful Maecenas, like
him a Roman, like him the most grand and the most cherished minister, and the sacred
depository of his secrets and his power? To complete these illustrious connections, does not
Heaven require for France a French Virgil?⁹

Perrin, of course, is presenting himself as the French Virgil. In this preface he

transfers the entire ideological framework of Virgil’s Rome to seventeenth-century
France, but in doing so he also makes it clear that he wants the same sort of rewards
that the author he was translating had received centuries ago. In other words, his
translation was part of his authorial self-fashioning, which had material as well as
aesthetic goals.
Sometimes, however, the decision to translate is more complicated than this.
Within the Virgilian tradition, a special kind of translation is the ‘travesty’, a
rewriting that takes the common cultural stock and uses it to poke fun at someone
or something. The Virgilian parodies of Charles Cotton (1630–87) in English, Paul
Scarron (1610–60) in French, Aloys Blumauer (1755–98) in German, and Giovanni
Battista Lalli (1572–1637) in Italian are known at least to the specialists, but the
parody of Victor Alexandre Chrétien Le Plat du Temple (b. 1762) resides now only in
the darkest recesses of off-site library storage. Le Plat’s poem has a curious history.
Composed originally in Flemish, it was published in 1802–4 but was savaged
immediately, in the Vaderlandsche Letter-Oeffeningen and Vaderlandsche Bib-
liotheek, by critics who denigrated Le Plat, calling him an ‘ape of Scarron’, then

⁹ I am quoting from Vergilius Maro 1664, fo. 31r–v (‘FA1664.1’ in Kallendorf 2012; this is a reprint of
the 1648–58 edn).
 SUCCESSES AND FAILURES IN VIRGILIAN TRANSLATION 

insulted him with a bewildering variety of epithets: buffoon and barbarian, liar and
slanderer, an author of mediocre talent and impoverished imagination, and so on.¹⁰
One’s initial impulse is to feel sorry for the author—how can the parody be that
bad?—until we discover that, when Le Plat translated the poem into French, he
reprinted all the negative reviews in the new edition, which is certainly a failed
intelligence test of sorts. He explains there that his poem is a satire, whose goal is to
instruct, to amuse, and to correct. The last goal is often not attained (Le Plat du Temple
1807–8, vol. 1, p. xxvi), but it is one he found congenial, so he set out with enthusiasm
to correct the faults of a number of peoples. Among them were the Belgians,
whose people are liars, whose aristocracy is corrupt (ibid., vol. 1, pp. 292–6), whose
clergy is degraded, and so forth (vol. 2, pp. 189–93). Then he decided to publish his
translation in Brussels . . .
Anyway, in this parody, Troy is France—specifically, Paris during the Revolution—
and the Greeks who sack Troy are the Jacobins who enter the city by guile, hidden in
the Trojan horse of liberté through which the Reign of Terror was introduced.
Aeneas’s wanderings take him from the new world to the old, from Haiti to
Belgium and Switzerland, then down the Dalmatian coast to Egypt, where in
Le Plat’s geography Dido lives, and eventually to Rome. The text has been described
as ‘grotesque and most strange’, and it certainly needs the accompanying notes that
were designed to stabilize the poem and explain what is going on.¹¹
It is difficult to pin down Le Plat’s attitude towards the events he is recounting. On
the one hand, Louis XVI is identified with Priam, whose death is equated with the
regicide of the French Revolution. The condemnation of the king is presented as
treasonable treachery, and Le Plat’s sympathies seem to lie with King Louis XVI in
the person of Priam, ‘victim at the same time of fraternal jealousy and of the double
dagger of open slander’, who is slain, we are told, ‘like a heifer’ (Le Plat du Temple
1807–8, vol. 1, pp. 135–6). At the sight of Louis XVI’s headless trunk, Le Plat writes,
‘I felt this chill, this impulse of horror’ (ibid., vol. 1, p. 136), and he writes later that
‘[a]mong the revolutionary evils brought forth by liberty, equality, and fraternity, the
confusion of stations is without doubt not the least, because it is a permanent source
which perpetuates the calamities of society’ (vol. 2, p. 165). Further on, however, Le
Plat’s rewrite focuses on Dido and makes changes that begin with the other voices in
Virgil’s poem and strengthen them, at the expense of Aeneas. In his Virgile en France,
Dido’s confidante is not her sister Anna, but her confessor, and a priest is present
during the scene in the cave where Dido and Aeneas are joined together, adding the
blessing of the church to a union that was profoundly ambiguous in Virgil’s original
poem and making Aeneas the clear offender when he leaves his lawfully wedded wife

¹⁰ Le Plat du Temple 1807–8, vol. 1, pp. 178–81. The original Flemish version is Le Plat du Temple
1802–4. An extended discussion of this parody from a somewhat different perspective can be found in
Kallendorf 2007a, pp. 196–212.
¹¹ Brunet 1864, vol. 5, col. 1305.
 CRAIG KALLENDORF

later on (vol. 2, pp. 1–28). In Book 5 we find a long note explaining that religion and
politics have conspired throughout history to oppress women (vol. 2, pp. 244–5), and
several notes in Book 6 include the Jews among the peoples who will participate in
the coming glories of Rome. Whatever vices the Jews exhibit, Le Plat explains, they
‘are the result of their oppression by the Christians’ (vol. 2, pp. 379–80); and he
argues that it is important that the Jews be fully integrated into the emerging nation-
states of Europe. In other words, at several key places in the poem Le Plat responds to
and strengthens the other voices in Virgil’s poem, the ones that represent all that is
lost in the creation of Rome and of the absolutist states that were built upon it.
In the end, even though Louis XVI traced his ideological roots back to Augustus
and Augustus in turn identified with Aeneas, Le Plat’s Aeneas is not an imperialist
but a republican. Aeneas aligns himself throughout the poem with what he calls ‘the
good republicans’ (vol. 1, p. 123, 1. 128), and in his ‘new Troy’ he has had his new
order and his new code adopted ‘in this republic’ (vol. 1, p. 213). Indeed we cannot
forget that the allegory in Le Plat’s translation makes the Aeneid a story about the
French Revolution, and that the outcome of the French Revolution, at least initially,
was a republic. There is one problem here, however: at the time when Virgile en
France was published France was no longer a republic, but an empire under the
control of Napoleon Bonaparte. Le Plat tried to work this out, explaining that France
passed from a republic to an empire when the people voted to declare the first consul
of the French republic their emperor, making this ‘the only example history offers us
of an emperor elected by subscription’ (vol. 1, pp. 65–6). The same passage, however,
suggests that the people could take away what they had offered, and a note in Book 5
argues that the power of the governor and the liberty of the governed both rest in
common law, making it clear that, if the governor exceeds his authority, the people
can—and should—replace him (vol. 2, pp. 207–8). Le Plat’s translation, in other
words, ends up as a thoroughly republican poem, not the allegorical support for the
establishment of the new ‘Roman Empire on the Seine’ that Napoleon would have
preferred. Virgile en France was therefore a thoroughly subversive document, the
polar opposite to Perrin’s sycophantic screed, and Napoleon responded by having his
agents seize all the copies they could find and burn them. Le Plat did finish the book,
but from the safety of exile in Germany.
As we have seen, then, Roman poetry did not—indeed, I would argue, could not—
remain ideologically neutral in early modern France. What is interesting to me is the
fact that two translations of the same poem could do work that was diametrically
opposed, one enlisted in support of the Ancien Régime and the other pulling away to
challenge the ideological and political power structures of its day.

* * *
My second pair of translations will reinforce the same point, but in a less overtly
political and more traditionally literary context. As Appendix 1 shows, the Aeneid
was by far the most popular of Virgil’s poems among translators, but the Georgics
 SUCCESSES AND FAILURES IN VIRGILIAN TRANSLATION 

also attracted its share of attention. The subject of the Georgics is ostensibly farming,
which does not appear to be a very promising theme for great poetry, but in Virgil’s
hands farming with its attendant challenges and opportunities becomes a metaphor
for life, which makes the poem, like the Aeneid, a potential commentary on society
in general. Twenty-five years ago Anthony Low published a wonderful book, The
Georgic Revolution, which tracks the entrance of georgic into seventeenth-century
English poetry.¹² What is less well known is that the incursion continued into the
eighteenth-century and extended to France as well as to England. Beginning in the
sixteenth century, French translators like Thomas Guyot, Pierre Tredehan, and Jean
Regnauld de Segrais turned their hands to the Georgics, but none of these efforts really
caught on, each being published just a couple of times in turn. This situation changed
dramatically in 1770, when Jacques Montanier, generally called Delille (1738–1813),
published his translation.¹³
I shall say something about the literary qualities of Delille’s Georgics a little later,
but for now I want to focus on its role as an instrument of power. It is hard to imagine
how one could use an object like a translation of a poem about farming to get
something worth having in the world of politics and personal relationships, but
this is precisely what happened. Delille had a pedigree of sorts—his mother was a
descendant of the chancellor Michel de l’Hôpital—but he was illegitimate by birth
and began his career as an elementary school teacher—then as now, not a direct route
to fame and fortune. He wrote poetry in his off hours and gradually began to acquire
a reputation of sorts. Then came the Georgics translation in 1769. Delille’s version
was an immediate bestseller, going into five editions before the end of 1770 and an
average of one more each year through to the middle of the next century. And these
were not small-run, vanity press editions: his publisher was Claude Bleuet, who
presided over a prominent Parisian house, and the fact that these early editions of
Delille’s Georgics are among the most common items of early Virgiliana on the rare
book market today suggests that the press runs must have been enormous.
So far, so good, but it is what happens next that matters. Delille’s cause was taken
up by Voltaire, one of the most famous writers of the burgeoning Enlightenment; and
the successful translator was proposed for membership in the Académie française.
This is important. The French Academy, whose nominal function was (and still is) to
exercise oversight over the French language and its usage, was founded in 1635 by
Cardinal Richelieu. There are only forty members, who elect their peers and are
referred to as the ‘immortals’. The membership rolls of the French Academy read
like a ‘Who’s Who’ in French literary history: Rousseau, Balzac, Descartes, Diderot,
Flaubert, Molière, Proust, Sartre. This is the club Delille was nominated for. He was
elected immediately but his entrance was delayed by the king, who argued that he

¹² See Low 1985.

¹³ For an account of Delille and his translation of the Georgics, see Guitton 1974, pp. 237–53. See also
Chapter 19 in this volume.
 CRAIG KALLENDORF

was too young (he was thirty-two at the time). Finally, in 1774, Delille took his
seat. He was able to exchange his school position for the professorship of Latin poetry
at the Collège de France, and in 1782 the successful publication of Jardins, a
collection of original poems, seemed to confirm the wisdom of the Academy electors.
Membership in the French Academy is power, then and now, and Dellile got it by
translating Virgil.
But not everyone liked what Delille had done. On my bookshelf at home is a
manuscript, written by Antoine Cunyngham, containing his translation of the
Georgics. Cunyngham had achieved recognition in the 1820s and 1830s as a writer
of poetry and treatises on French literature and the rights of man, and he had also
translated Pope and Goldsmith, so his Georgics translation was not his first
effort in this area.¹⁴ Cunyngham’s interest in Virgil was not unknown in his day:
in La littérature française contemporaine, Joseph-Marie Quérard (1848) cites
Cunyngham’s Essai d’une nouvelle traduction en vers des Géorgiques de Virgile
(published in Lille in 1839), which contains extracts from the first book of the
Georgics, and notes that ‘we do not know if this translation was continued’.¹⁵
Thanks to the appearance of this manuscript at auction several years ago and to
my good fortune in the bidding, you and we now know what Quérard did not: that
Cunyngham continued to work on his translation.
Cunyngham states very clearly in this unpublished manuscript that he began his
translation out of dissatisfaction with Delille’s version, which was still being pub-
lished again—each year in his lifetime. As he puts it in the Advertisement that
precedes his text,
among the different versions, there is one that has for a long time enjoyed great fame. This is
the one that is owed to the elegant and fertile pen of Delille. But in reading this version, and
comparing it with the original text throughout, I have been surprised to see that it leaves a great
deal to desire in its fidelity [to the original], and that in places its author has entirely disfigured
the poetry of Virgil.

For this reason Cunyngham redid the work himself, but his translation was never
published.
So, if we look back to the title of this chapter, which of these translators succeeded,
and which ones failed? One could argue, certainly, that Cunyngham was not very
successful, given that his translation was never published and got him nothing but a
passing reference in the literary history of his day. Delille strikes us as the successful
translator in this pair, and, at one level at least, this is certainly true: his version of
the Georgics was republished again and again and outsold all its competitors, so

¹⁴ The manuscript probably dates to the early 1840s, since a note on p. 10 attributes the decision to
abandon the project to Cunyngham’s ill health; besides, his last published work dates to the early 1840s, but
an accompanying letter by Henri Auguste Gouttière, Cunyngham’s brother-in-law, is dated 1862, making
this a firm terminus ante quem.
¹⁵ Quérard 1848, vol. 3, p. 118.
 SUCCESSES AND FAILURES IN VIRGILIAN TRANSLATION 

that, even two generations later, complaining about it accomplished little, as the
unfortunate Cunyngham discovered. But we should not rush to judgement. Not
twenty years after Delille’s translation got him his seat in the French Academy, the
Revolution arrived. Delille managed to stay alive by swearing allegiance to the new
order; but he was reduced to poverty and forced to leave Paris. He completed his
translation of the Aeneid in the thriving metropolis of Saint-Dié-des-Vosges, whose
population today is under 25,000 and was even smaller then. By now circumstances
had changed and Delille’s new Virgilian translation could not be leveraged into
anything substantive. Delille was forced to flee to Switzerland, then to Germany,
then to London. He was able to return to Paris in 1802 and even to reoccupy his chair
at the French Academy, but by that time he was old and blind, barely managing to
hang on in retirement for another decade, and his Aeneid translation is virtually
unknown today. Delille may have been an ‘immortal’, but he did not end up having
the kind of immortality that any writer wants: the power to attract and hold readers
from one generation to the next.
Something similar could be said about Perrin and Le Plat. Perrin served the state
well and his translation of the Aeneid helped Cardinal Mazarin prop up the ideological
underpinnings of the Ancien Régime for almost another 150 years. Yet nobody reads
this translation any more either. And then there is poor Le Plat. He tried to have it
both ways, showing sympathy for the powerful and for the common man, but he
ended up where most centrists who lack Bill Clinton’s nine lives seem to end up:
without the support of either side. Like Cunyngham, he failed both to attain literary
fame and to use his translation to material or ideological advantage. So, among the
four translators in my two case studies, we have two men (Cunyngham and Le Plat)
who seem to have received little if anything in exchange for their efforts, and two
others (Perrin and Delille) whose flirtation with power brought them initial success,
but whose success did not endure.

* * *
I have now covered two of my three pairs of translators: those who rendered the
Georgics and the Aeneid into French. This leaves the Eclogues. The two translators of
the remaining pair are more alike than the previous ones in terms of their literary
careers, but a close look at the early printed editions of their translations allows us to
judge their relative success, at least initially, in a somewhat different light.
For the Eclogues I have focused on Clement Marot (1496–1544) and Jean-Louis
Gresset (1709–77), the two men whose French translations dominate the early
modern literary scene. Marot only translated the first eclogue, but his version,
which was initially published in the 1530s, appeared more than sixty times over the
next two centuries in collections of his poetry and another ten times between 1574
and 1615 in French translations of Virgil’s works in which each poem was rendered
by a different translator. One year before 1731, when the last major edition of Marot’s
collected works appeared, the first edition of Gresset’s translation of all ten eclogues
 CRAIG KALLENDORF

was published. Reprinted more than seventy times, this translation was the prevalent
one for the next seventy-five years.¹⁶
Both Marot and Gresset achieved considerable fame during their lifetimes, but
religious issues impacted their literary careers negatively and both translators were
out of favour when they died. Marot was a favorite of King Francis I and his sister
Marguerite d’Alençon, who appreciated his literary talents, but was imprisoned on a
charge of heresy in 1526; was implicated in the Affair of the Placards in 1534; took
refuge with Renée, duchess of Ferrara, who supported the Protestant Reformation in
France; renounced heresy and returned to France; then produced a translation of the
Psalms that remained popular in Protestant circles and fled to Geneva, finally dying
in exile in Turin. It is difficult to say whether he was more of a freethinker than a
Protestant sympathizer, but in any event he came to be identified as a Protestant, and
that got him into trouble.¹⁷ Gresset was educated by the Jesuits and was teaching in a
Jesuit college when the reaction to his Vert-Vert, a satire on monastic life, forced him
to withdraw from the order, which he did reluctantly. He achieved sufficient success
in the larger world to obtain the support of Madame de Pompadour and a place in
the Académie française, but the religious feelings that initially drew him towards the
Jesuits caused him later on to renounce poetry as a dangerous art and to express
regrets for the scandal that his comic writings had caused. He died in Amiens, in a
sort of self-imposed exile from the centre of French literary life in Paris.¹⁸
For both Marot and Gresset, translating the Eclogues got mixed up in the larger
religious and political events of their day. Given that pastoral is often envisioned as
an escape from such matters, this might seem ironic at first glance; but we should
recall that the outside world impinges regularly on Virgil’s pastoral landscape, just as
it does on those who tried to keep that landscape alive in early modern Europe.
Annabel Patterson has written eloquently about how Marot used Virgilian pastoral
in an effort to create a space for free inquiry in the religious, intellectual, and political
milieu of his day, and I have little to add to that discussion.¹⁹ But, in line with
the argument of this chapter, it is worth noting that Patterson’s analysis can be
complemented by a closer look at the publication history of Marot’s translation. As
I mentioned earlier, this translation of Eclogue 1 appears in two different venues:
the collected works of Virgil and the collected works of Marot. The first five editions in
the first group were published in Paris, but the last five were published either in Geneva
(perhaps Cologny), Switzerland, which was under Protestant control, or in Lyons and
Rouen, where press restraints were less rigid than in Paris. A similar pattern prevails
with the publication of Marot’s complete works: initial publication is centred in Paris,

¹⁶ These statistics are from Kallendorf 2012, pp. 179–80, 191–209.

¹⁷ On Marot’s life and works, see Mayer 1972 and Smith 1970.
¹⁸ On Gresset’s life and works, see de Cayrol 1844 and Wogue 1894.
¹⁹ See Patterson 1987b (also reprinted in Patterson 1987a, pp. 106–32). As Patterson notes, Marot’s
interest in Virgil’s Eclogues influenced several of his other poems as well; see also Renner 2012.
 SUCCESSES AND FAILURES IN VIRGILIAN TRANSLATION 

but from 1583 to 1607 reprints appeared in Lyons and Rouen. Marot’s work was not
printed again in France during the seventeenth century. This was undoubtedly due in
part to the perception that, after the Pléïade poets, his verse appeared somewhat
unrefined, but it also reflects the fact that he was identified as a Protestant at a time
when that was a big problem in France. Publication of Marot’s collected works resumes
at the beginning of the eighteenth century, but only in the Hague, which was beyond
the reach of the agents of the French crown. After several editions had appeared early
in the eighteenth century, Marot was not published in France again until 1823, well
past the end of the French Revolution.
Gresset began his career as a teacher of Latin literature in a series of Jesuit
colleges—in fact his translation of the Eclogues was made while he was at the college
of La Flèche, after he had been censured by his religious superior for Vert-Vert and
right before he was forced to leave the Jesuit order. It is hard to imagine what could be
controversial about translating Virgil—indeed one wonders whether the translation
project was designed, at least in part, to underline his commitment to the Christian
humanism taught by the Jesuits—but, since Gresset’s translation was always pub-
lished as part of his collected works, its fate became tied up with the reaction to the
other licentious, anticlerical writings in his œuvre. As book historians like Robert
Darnton have shown, the French monarchs of the eighteenth century were unusually
sensitive to the seditious potential of books and established a system of denying a
publication licence to any work that might threaten the established order and of
confiscating and destroying any dangerous books that managed to get into circula-
tion.²⁰ An examination of where and when Gresset’s works were published shows
clearly that they ran afoul of this system. The first three editions were published in
Tours and Blois, but publication was quickly suppressed and editions began to
appear in Amsterdam, the Hague, Geneva, even Vienna—the places where books
that were destined for the French market but could not obtain a publication
licence at home were printed. The title pages of the largest single block of editions
assert that they were printed in London, either by Édouard Kelmarneck or Kermaleck,
but no such printer existed: these were false imprints, printed most probably in Paris
and shielded by a title page that was designed to deflect the ire of the authorities
if copies were found.²¹ One edition was printed openly by the widow of Nicolas-
Bonaventure Duchesne in Paris in 1783, but the relatively small number of surviving
copies suggests that much of the press run may have been confiscated and destroyed.
Once the Revolution arrived and controls began to break down, editions appeared
again in the provinces, like the one that was published in 1790 in Saint-Brieuc

²⁰ Darnton 1995. See also Dawson 2006.

²¹ See Dawson 1991. Dawson was the expert on eighteenth-century false imprints in France; his
collection of books, which contains many examples of false imprints, is in the Cushing Library at Texas
A&M University.
 CRAIG KALLENDORF

(in Brittany) by Louis-Jean Prud’homme, a printer whose anticlerical sentiments

aligned nicely with those of Gresset.²²
So, how successful were these two translations of the Eclogues? Over seventy editions
spread over the decades suggest initially that both did the job, and did it well. A closer
look at their publication history, though, reveals that the issue is more complicated than
it first appears and confirms that even the effort to translate poems about shepherds
and singing contests becomes caught up in politics, religion, and the control mechan-
isms of power that Foucault has written about so influentially. Marot’s case is perhaps
the simpler of the two: as France evolved into a modern state with authority centralized
in the crown, a poet who became increasingly identified with Protestantism moved to
the margins of French culture. Gresset’s translation in turn became collateral damage in
the war between the French crown and the liberating ideals of the Enlightenment,
such that the full force of the most powerful monarchy in Europe was directed against
it. Yet the number of editions—over seventy in less than a hundred years—suggests just
how ineffective, in the end, the efforts to contain subversive texts like Gresset’s were: in
spite of the crown’s best efforts, Gresset’s translation became the standard rendering of
the Eclogues in French for the last two thirds of the eighteenth century.
So, initially, the translations of Marot and Gresset seem to occupy a middle ground
between those of Perrin and Delille, who obtained enough support from the rich
and powerful to amass considerable success during their lifetimes, and Le Plat and
Cunyngham, whose work never caught on in any serious way. The fortunes of Marot
and Gresset rose and fell repeatedly during their lifetimes, and the publication history
of their translations reflects their changing positions within their society. Yet in the
course of time all six translators have ended up in the same place; for no one in search
of a French translation today would go to any of these versions. To be sure, newer
versions always push older ones aside, at least to a certain extent, but Dryden’s
translation, for example, still maintains a viability that has been denied to all six of
the French renderings we have examined here.
So where does that leave us? Perhaps with the writer of long ago who said,
Vanity of vanities, says the Preacher,
Vanity of vanities! All is vanity!
What does man gain by all the toil
At which he toils under the sun?
...
There is no rememberance of former things,
Nor will there be any rememberance
Of later things yet to happen
Among those who come after.²³

²² Information on this printer can be found at http://thesaurus.cerl.org/cgi-bin/record.pl?rid=cni00011295,

an entry in the CERL Thesaurus (a resource maintained by the Consortium of European Research Libraries in
London; accessed on 14 May, 2014).
²³ Ecclesiastes 1:2–3, 11.
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
IV LUKU.

Tarvitsematta nyt enään suurestikaan pelätä, mutta kuitenkin

rikoksensa muiston kiusaamana, pesi kokki kasvonsa vähäisessä
vesilätäkössä. Tallustettuaan vielä tuntisen eteenpäin, saapui hän
aivan oudolle maantielle ja pääsi nöyrän rukouksen jälkeen ohi
ajaviin kuormavaunuihin. Siellä istuskeli hän nyt heinäkuorman
päällä ja katseli levottomana maisemia ympärillään. Noin puolen
tusinaa penikulmia ajettuaan, pysäytti kuski hevosen mahtavan
talonpoikaistalon eteen. Kokki antoi pari muutamista mukanaan
olevista lanteista ajomiehelle ja läksi matkaansa kierrellen —
eksyttääkseen takaa-ajajia — tieltä toiselle, kunnes vihdoin pimeän
tullen saapui pienen kylän syrjään.

Ajatellen kaikkivoipaa sähkölennätintä, mikä epäilemättä oli tehnyt

kyselyjä hänen suhteensa, piiloutui hän pensas-aidan taakse,
kunnes valot kylästä vähitellen sammuivat. Sitten alkoi hän suurella
varovaisuudella etsiä kattoa itselleen. Lopuksi huomasi hän pari
taloa kylän syrjässä. Toisen puutarhassa oli iso vaja joka näytti
suovan hänelle toivomansa suojan. Kokki aukaisi oven. Oli pilkkosen
pimeä sisällä… Samassa kuului jokin rapsahtavan. Kokki pelästyi,
kompastui pieneen kiveen lattialla, mutta pelastui kaatumasta
saatuaan kiinni jostakin orresta. Mutta surkeus! Yht'äkkiä kuului
sydäntäsärkeviä avunhuutoja ja tusina kanoja pyrähti lattialle. Koko
vaja oli täynnä siipien lepatusta ja pelästyneitä kanoja kiirehti
villinään kokin jalkain välistä, tämän yrittäessä takaisin ovelle juuri
parahiksi rynnätäkseen oudon, tuvasta juosseen miehen syliin.

"Sain kiinni sen, Poli", huusi tämä ja huiteli kepillä kokkia selkään.
"Sain kiinni sen!"

Hän aikoi vielä jatkaa lyömistään, mutta raivoissaan kivusta,

kääntyi kokki ympäri ja töyttäsi miehen selälleen. Silmänräpäyksessä
oli tämä kuitenkin uudestaan pystyssä ja vaimonsa auttamana, joka
yövaatteissaan riensi paikalle, onnistui hänen kaataa kokki alleen ja
asettaa polvensa hänen rinnalleen. Toinen mies viereisestä tuvasta
ilmestyi avuksi ja suurella levollisuudella etsittyään vapaata paikkaa
kokin ruumiissa, astui hän viimein tämän kämmenelle ja kysyi syytä
meluun.

"Aikoi varastaa kanojani", sanoi ensimäinen mies puhkuen, "mutta

onneksi kuulin ajoissa."

"En minä mitään varastaa aikonut", änkytti kokki.

"Suljetaan sisälle hänet", sanoi toinen innokkaasti.

"Niin olen aikonutkin", vastasi ensimäinen. "Ole hiljaa, senkin

varas."

"Viekää hän yöksi sisälle ja sitokaa hyvin kiinni, minä kyllä huomen
aamuna kuljetan hänet Wintonin poliisiasemalle. Se on vaarallinen
sälli."

Koska kokkia ei uskottu itse kävelemään, kannettiin hänet

miesvoimalla kyökkiin. Vaimo veti tulta rikkitikkuun ja sytytti kynttilän.
Sitten aukaisi hän kaapin oven ja veti kokin kauhuksi esille ainakin
kaksikymmentä syltä pitkän köyden.

"Paras ja varmin keino on sitoa hänet tuoliin", sanoi naapuri.

"Muistelen isoisän kertoneen joskus tehneensä saman tempun
jollekin roistolle."

"Se kyllä parasta lieneekin", sanoi vaimo tuumivana.

"Mukavampikin hänen tuolissa on, vaikka ei suinkaan hän mitään
sellaista ansaitsisi."

Miehissä nostettiin kokki suureen tammiseen tuoliin ja sidottiin

kiinni, jotta kokkiparka tuskin voi hengittää.

"Kiinni sidottuaan antoi iso-isä roistolle jonkun kerran

'pääkuoreen'", sanoi naapuri ajattelevana kokkia katsellen.

"Niin, niin! Ne olivat niin raakoja siihen aikaan", sanoi kokki

ennenkun toiset ennättivät vastata.

"Saadakseen vaan miehen pysymään paikallaan", selitti naapuri

esitystään puolustellen.

"Kyllä tämä paikoillaan muutenkin pysyy", sanoi kanojen omistaja,

tarkastaen vangin köysiä.

"Tulkaahan tänne huomenna, Pettit, niin viemme kärryillänne

hänet
Wintoniin. Olenpa varma, että miehellä on hyvin musta omatunto."

"Niin minäkin luulen", sanoi Pettit — ja kokki värisi. "Hyvää yötä

nyt."
 Mies läksi matkaansa ja kun pariskunta vielä kerran oli tarkastanut
vangin siteet sekä varoittanut karkaamisen seurauksista, vetäytyivät
he jatkamaan häiriintynyttä untaan.

Pitkän aikaa istui kokki suuriakaan tietämättä mistään. Ihmetteli

vaan helppoutta, millä hän oli vaipunut rikoksesta toiseen — ja miten
paljon kaikista tulisi saamaan. Sirkka lauloi nurkassa, rotta vikisi
lattialla. Väsyneenä levottomuudesta ja ponnistuksista vaipui kokki
uneen.

Hän heräsi yht'äkkiä hirveään suonenvetoon jalassaan ja aikoi

hypätä lattialle kojustaan. Mutta samassa selvisi hänelle asemansa
ja raivoisasti ponnistellen yritti hän nousta seisomaan, ojentaakseen
suonenvetoista jalkaansa. Hyväksi lopuksi pääsikin hän
jonkunlaiseen seisovaan asentoon; muistuttaen puoleksi ihmistä,
puoleksi etanaa laahusti hän tassutellen ympäri huonetta. Aluksi
ajatteli hän vaan suonenvetoa, mutta sen loputtua, kiitos ja kunnia
liikkumiselle, sai rohkea pakenemishalu hänessä vallan. Tuoli yhä
selässään sai hän ponnistustensa tulokseksi oven säpin suuhunsa ja
aukaisi sen. Viiden minuutin kuluttua oli hänen ilokseen aukinainen
veräjä selkänsä takana ja — avonainen maantie edessään.

Mutta tällainen liikkumistapa oli, kuten ymmärretään, kovin

hankalaa; kokin oli istuttava lepäämään mukana seuraavaan
tuoliinsa sekä ajattelemaan samalla eteenpäin pääsemisen
mahdollisuuksia. Pelko lisäsi siipiä, joskin tässä tapauksessa hyvin
yksinkertaisia; huomatessaan jo olevansa ulkopuolella korvan
kuulemaa, asettui kokki selin puuta vasten ja kolahutteli tuolia
runkoon.

Vikaantunut tuolin taka-jalka katkesi, ja nyt sai kokki istuessaan

tehdä tasapaino-koetuksia, mitkä olisivat olleet kunniaksi itse
Blondinillekin.

Aina päivän koittoon saakka sai onneton miesraukka ryömiä

taakkoineen eteenpäin ja kun aurinko nousi, löysi se hänet
istumassa keskellä maantietä ja toivottamassa kuolemaa ja kirousta
kapteeni Gethingille ja kaikelle, joka vähänkin häntä muistutti.
Yht'äkkiä hän pelästyi, kuullessaan askeleita takaansa ja kun päätä
oli mahdoton yksin kääntää, nousi hän ylös ja teki tuoleineen
vaivaloisesti kokokäännöksen.

Astuja pysähtyi heti ja katseli hämmästyneenä tätä tuolista ja

ihmisestä laitettua kaksoisolentoa. Etäämpää oli hän luullut kokkia
innokkaaksi tutkijaksi, joka luonnon rakkautensa takia antautui mihin
seikkailuihin tahansa, nyt ei hän tiennyt näkikö peikkoja vai aaveita.

"Hyvää huomenta", sanoi kokki väsyneellä äänellä.

"Hyvää huomenta", vastasi mies ja peräytyi muutaman askeleen.

"Otaksun", sanoi kokki ja koetti teeskennellä hymyä, "teidän

ihmettelevän tavatessanne minut tällaisessa asemassa?"

"En todellakaan ole ennen sellaista nähnyt", sanoi mies näyttäen

olevan varuillaan.

"Ette luultavastikaan", sanoi kokki. "Olenkin ainoa koko

Englannissa joka taidan tällaista."

Mies kertoi uskovansa.

"Teen tätä ainoastaan vedon tähden", sanoi kokki.

 "Vai niin", sanoi mies ja kasvonsa kirkastuivat. "Vedon! Ja minä
kun luulin teitä hulluksi! No, paljoko on kysymyksessä?"

"50 puntaa", vastasi kokki. "Olen kulkenut aina Lontoosta saakka."

"Ooh! Peijakas!" huudahti mies. "Mitähän ne keksivätkään ensi

kerralla?
Aiotteko pitkällekin?"

"Oakvilleen", vastasi kokki; hän oli joskus matkoillaan kuullut

puhuttavan Oakvillesta. "Halusta sinne yrittäisin, mutta nyt tunnen
sen olevan mahdotonta. Ettekö katkaisisi poikki näitä nuoria?"

"Ei, ei!" huudahti toinen rohkaisevasti, "elkää antako perään.

Seitsemän penikulmaa on enää jälellä!"

"Minun täytyy", sanoi kokki surullisesti hymyillen.

"Ei teidän täydy", sanoi mies innokkaasti. "Pitäkää päälle vaan,

niin tulettepa pian iloiseksi kuin 'pelimanni', ajatellessanne miten
vähällä olitte hävitä."

"Katkaiskaa vaan nuorat", sanoi kokki, väristen

malttamattomuudesta. "Olen voittanut neljäkymmentä puntaa
päästyäni näin pitkälle. Jos katkaisette, lähetän teille kymmenen
niistä."

Mies epäili; synnynnäinen urheiluharrastus taisteli ahneutta

vastaan.

"Minulla on vaimo ja lapset", sanoi hän lopuksi ikäänkuin

lieventäviksi asianhaaroiksi, ja otettuaan kynäveitsen taskustaan
olivat nuorat pian poikki.
 "Jumala teitä siunatkoon", sanoi kokki ojennellen köyryyn käynyttä
selkäänsä tuolin pudottua maahan.

"Nimeni on Jack Thompson", sanoi hyväntekijä. "Jack Thompson,

Winchgate, sillä osotteella tulee kirje perille."

"Nostan summan 12 puntaan", sanoi kokki, "ja tuolin saatte

päällekaupan."

Lyötiin kättä vahvikkeeksi, ja kokki jatkoi iloisena vapaata

matkaansa, viattoman rikostoverinsa kääntyessä ympäri tuoli
selässä — kuullakseen sen oikealta omistajalta kiukkuisia totuuksia
yksinkertaisista luonnonlahjoistaan.

Kokki ei tiennyt miten paljon hän oli edellä pelkäämistään uusista

takaa-ajajista, ja huolimatta nälästä ja väsymyksestä asteli hän
eteenpäin minkä jaloista läksi. Tunnin kuluttua kysyi hän tietä eräältä
kyntäjältä ja pyysi samalla pienen, hyvin pienen osan hänen
aamiaisestaan. Seuraavalta kukkulalta näki hän vilahduksen
merestä, ja pitäen huolellisesti tätä vanhaa nuoruuden ystäväänsä
silmällä marssi hän kohti Brittleseaa. Päivällisaikaan kerjäsi hän taas
ylijääneitä ruokavaroja eräästä metsänvartijan torpasta, ja saatuaan
suurimman nälkänsä tyydytettyä jatkoi hän uudestaan kulkuaan.
Kymmenen aikaan illalla laahusti hän pitkin Brittlesean laituria ja hiipi
varovasti laivaan. Kannella ei ollut ketään, mutta miehistön hytistä
loisti valoa. Kokki ryömi sisään. Henry, joka juuri oli häviämäisillään
tammipelin Samille, hytkähti, hypähti pystöön ja käänsi laudan
ylösalaisin.

"Herra minun luojani! — Kokki!" huudahti Sam. "Missä sinä olet

ollut?"
 Kokki ojensi ruumistaan ja osoitti kädellään kaikille ilmansuunnille.
"Vähän joka paikassa."

"Sinä olet ollut rellumassa", sanoi Sam, katsoen terävästi kokkia.

"Rellumassa", sanoi kokki itku kurkussa. "Rellumassa!"

Tunteensa olivat tukahuttaa hänet ja koetettuaan heikosti

puolustautua, vaikkakin turhaan, kömpi hän kojuunsa ja nukkui heti.
V LUKU.

Purjehdittiin kello neljältä seuraavana aamuna ja kello 3,30

herätettiin kokki kahvia keittämään. Uudestaan herätettiin hän 3,45
ja 3,50 vedettiin hänet kojustaan pitämään huolta
velvollisuuksistaan. Kokki ryömi silmät ummessa takaisin kojuunsa
heti kun pääsi kiusaajistaan, ja vaikkakin temppu uudistettiin kaksi
eri kertaa, niin hän yhä tiedottomassa tilassa kömpi takaisin ja jatkoi
untaan.

Brittlesea oli jo kolmekymmentä penikulmaa takana päin kun hän

vihdoinkin heräsi ja tuli kannelle, kuunarin kiitäessä rivakan tuulen
ajamana aaltoja. Se oli juuri sellainen tuuli, jollaisesta perämies piti
ja hänen katseensa oli rauhallinen ja tyytyväinen aina siihen saakka,
kun huomasi kokin kömpivän keittiöön.

"Kokki!" kirkasi hän. "Tulkaa tänne — kirottu kuleksija! Missä olette

ollut koko tämän ajan?"

"Minulla on ollut vastoinkäymisiä, sir", sanoi kokki nöyränä.

"Tuskin voitte uskoa millaisia kidutuksia olen kärsinyt aikoessani
palvella laivuria."
 "Säästäkää sellaiset jutut toisille", kirkui perämies varottavasti.
"Missä olette ollut? Kas niin! Laulakaa ulos vaan."

Vielä väsyneenä seikkailuistaan, nojautui kokki kajuutan seinään

ja alkoi kertoa matkoistaan, selvittäen niitä monenmoisilla
näytelmällisillä eleillä. Perämiehen hengitys tiheni, hänen poskensa
saivat tavallista punaisemman värin ja peränpito alkoi käydä
huolimattomasti. Mielissään näistä näennäisistä osanoton merkeistä,
jatkoi kokki kahta innokkaammin.

"Lopettakaa nyt", sanoi perämies vihdoin.

"Pahinta ette vielä kuullut", sanoi kokki.

"Jos vielä sekunninkin seisotte ja valehtelette, niin väännän

niskanne nurin", sanoi perämies kiukustuneena. "Juomassa olette
ollut kaksi päivää — siinä koko asia."

"Puhun totta, Salomonin parran kautta puhun totta, sen vannon",

sanoi kokki juhlallisesti.

"Odottakaa vaan jahka laivuri tulee kannelle", sanoi toinen ja

puristi nyrkkiään. "Uskaltaisinpa vaan jättää tämän peräsimen, niin
kyllä asiat kanssanne pian selvittäisin, siitä saatte olla varma."

Kokin harmiksi oli laivuri samaa mieltä perämiehen kanssa ja

pidätti häneltä kahden päivän palkan — hyvin ajattelemattomasta ja
tunteettomasti tehty. Alhaalla miehistön hytissä ei hänelle käynyt
ollenkaan paremmin, sillä näiden rehellinen tunnustus ja ihmettely
hänen kaskujen kertomistaidostaan, meni yläpuolelle kaikkien
sopivaisuuden rajojen.
 Tämä epäuskoisuus oli surkea pettymys kokille. Itsekseen oli hän
ajatellut tulevansa ihailluksi ja ihmetellyksi kuin sankari konsanaan.
Toimensa hoiti hän sentähden alakuloisena ja toverit, jotka kyllä
"sellaisia" asioita ymmärsivät, luulivat hänellä olevan "kupariseppiä."

Sivuutettiin Northfleet ja saavuttiin Rotherhitheen. Kokin persoona

sai osakseen halventavaa arvostelua joka kerta kun poliisivene meni
sivutse. Kului useita tuntia ennenkuin häntä halutti lähteä maalle, ja
kun hän sen vihdoin teki, tapahtui se niin tarpeettoman maailmaa
pelkäämättömän näköisenä, että olisi luullut häntä joksikin ylistetyksi
rosvopäälliköksi.

Oli sateinen aamu kun taas palattiin Northfleetiin. Koko yö oli tullut
vettä taivaan täydeltä ja mustia pilviä kulki taukoamatta taivaalla.
Lastaus aiottiin alkaa vasta seuraavana aamuna. Päivällisen jälkeen
vaihtoivat Henry ja perämies merkitsevän katseen nähdessään
laivurin ottavan lakkinsa ja lähtevän maalle.

Hän asteli Gravesendiin, kulki ilman määrää ja suuntaa katuja,

tuon tuostakin pysähtyen kauppapuotien ikkunain alle välittämättä
mitään virtaavasta sateesta. Jonkinlainen romantillinen ajatus sanoi
hänelle tapaavansa Annis Gethingin. Kouluissa oli lupa — siksi oli
luonnollinen asia, että neiti Gething kuljeskelisi huvin vuoksi
Gravesendin katuja rankkasateessa. Noin neljän tienoissa, kun
laivuri jo oli läpimärkä, huomasi hän toivonsa turhaksi ja poikkesi
erääseen siistin näköiseen ravintolaan, joi lasinsa ja valmistautui
apealla mielellä kotitielle. Kuljettuaan kappaleen matkaa, vetäytyi
hän syrjään antaakseen tietä nuorelle ohi kulkevalle neidolle, mutta
vilkasi samassa vanhaan tapaansa, sateenvarjon alle. Katseensa
kohtasi — miss Gethingin.

"Hyvää iltapäivää", sanoi laivuri hämillään.

 "Hyvää iltaa", vastasi tyttö.

"Rivo ilma", tuumi laivuri, seisten kunnioittavasti ainakin kolme

metriä käytävältä.

"Kovin ruma", sanoi miss Gething.

"Minulle se ei mitään tee", sanoi laivuri.

"Olette varmaan hyvin märkä", sanoi miss Gething. "Aiotteko

mennä äitiäni tervehtimään?"

"Sitä juuri ajattelin", sanoi laivuri iloisena, kun sai kiinni sopivasta
valheesta.

"Minun on käytävä muutamissa kauppapuodeissa", sanoi miss

Gething.
"Hyvästi!"

Laivuri kohotti lakkiaan, teki kokokäännöksen ja lähti eteenpäin.

Useat kerrat kääntyi hän ympäri, mutta miss Gething, tuntien
paremmin miehet, kuin laivuri naiset, ei katsonut taakseen
kertaakaan.

Neljännestunnin reippaasti käveltyään oli laivuri pienen tutun

rakennuksen edessä, pudisti veden lakistaan ja kolkutti varovasti
ovelle.

"Onko rouva Gething kotona?" kysyi hän kun ovi aukeni ja joku
mies, pitäen kiinni ovenkahvasta, katsoi kysyvästi häneen. "Ei",
kuului vastaus.
 "Ellei teillä ole mitään vastaan, astun hetkeksi sisään
odottamaan", sanoi laivuri, totellen silmänräpäyksellistä ajatustaan.

Toinen epäili, mutta vetäytyi kuitenkin syrjään ja antoi laivurin

kulkea ohitsensa. Molemmat astuivat pieneen etuhuoneeseen.
Rohkeudella, joka ihmetytti häntä itseäänkin, istuutui laivuri
käskemättä tuolille ja alkoi nenäliinalla pyyhkiä housujaan.

"Luulen rouva Gethingin viipyvän pitemmän aikaa", sanoi toinen

lopulta.

"Ei minulla ole mitään kiirettä, voin mainiosti odottaa jonkun

minuutin", sanoi laivuri, joka halusta olisi istunut paikoillaan vaikka
koko viikon.

Pyyhkittyään partansa ja viiksensä nenäliinaan muodosteli hän

niitä sormillaan. Toinen katseli näitä toimia vastenmielisen
levottomana.

"Ehkä saan sanoa terveisiä rouva Gethingille?"

Laivuri pudisti päätään ja alkoi nyt vuorostaan tarkastaa

isäntäänsä: nuori, kaunis mies, vahatut mustat viikset, ohut silkkinen
kaulaliina ja komea rintaneula. Päällään hänellä oli ruskea pitkä takki
ja keveät samanväriset kengät.

Kului taas neljännes tunti.

"Häijyä ilmaa", sanoi laivuri, saadakseen alkuun edes jonkinlaista

keskustelua.

Toinen myönsi, huomauttaen samalla epäilevänsä rouva Gethingin

sateen vuoksi viipyvän hyvinkin kauan. Puhe taukosi siihen, kunnes
keveitten askelten ääni ja avaimen vääntäminen lukossa sai
molemmat hypähtämään pystyyn.

"Eikö äiti vielä ole tullut?" kysyi miss Gething kummissaan.

"Olittepa kiltti kun jäitte odottamaan, kapteeni."

"Ei se mitään", vastasi laivuri, joka ei todella tiennyt tehneensä

mitään kiitosta ansaitsevaa.

Tyttö puristi nuoren miehen kättä ja hymyili laivurille. "Teidät

tapasin jo kadulla", sanoi hän. "Olette varmaan hyvin märkä.
Kapteeni Wilson — herra Glover."

Molemmat herrat kumarsivat kylmästi; laivuri tuli alakuloiseksi,

käsittäen nyt olevansa tiellä. Miss Gething vei pois hattunsa ja
takkinsa; hänen palattuaan alkoi keskustelu vähitellen sujua. Herrat
kuitenkin käyttivät tyttöä jonkunlaisena telefoonina, minkä kautta
ilmaisivat ajatuksensa.

"Puoli kuusi", sanoi yht'äkkiä miss Gething. "Matkustatteko junalla

6,30, herra Glover?"

"Täytyy", vastasi tämä synkkänä. "Toimet, kuten ymmärrätte",

lisäsi hän alakuloisena.

"Juotteko kupin teetä ennen lähtöänne?" kysyi Annis.

Tyttö seisoi herra Gloverin edessä tätä sanoessaan, ja laivuri, joka

yhä enemmän ja enemmän alkoi tuntea olevansa tiellä, mutisi jotakin
pois lähdöstä ja nousi seisomaan. Hänen ihmettelynsä, kun miss
Gething kääntyi häneen ja iski silmää varottavasti, olikin sentähden
niin äänekäs, että herra Glover kääntyi kiireesti katsomaan syytä
siihen.
 "Juotte myöskin kupin teetä, kapteeni?" sanoi miss Gething
kohteliaasti hymyillen.

"Kyllä, kiitoksia", vastasi laivuri ja istuutui äskeiseen paikkaansa.

Ajatuksensa myllersivät hurjasti tytön asettaessa teepöytää kuntoon.

"Todellinen tee-seura", sanoi miss Gething iloisesti. "Yksikö

kappale sokuria, herra Glover?"

"Kaksi", vastasi tämä loukatun äänellä.

Tyttö katsoi kysyvästi laivuria ja piti sokeripihtiä ylhäällä.

"Jätän sen teidän määrättäväksenne", sanoi tämä ujosti. Herra

Glover nosti vähäisen silmäkulmiaan ja hymyili halveksivasti.

Miss Gething pudotti yhden kappaleen kuppiin ja ojensi sen

laivurille.

"Toisinaan otan yhden, toisinaan taas kaksi, kolmekin", sanoi

laivuri puolustellen. "En ole niiden kanssa niin turhan tarkka."

"Taidatte olla huoleton", sanoi miss Gething.

"Tai ei hän tunne ruumistaan", huomautti herra Glover

nenäviisaasti.

"Toisissa tapauksissa ehkä sitä paremmin", vastasi laivuri.

Ääni millä tämä huomautus tehtiin, sai herra Gloverin

ihmettelemään mitä sellaiset tapaukset olisivat. Herroilla ei
kummallakaan ollut halua keskusteluun, ja ilman emäntää olisi tee
juotu hiljaisuuden vallitessa. Kymmenen minuuttia yli kuusi nousi
herra Glover tuoliltaan, selittäen nyt olevan ajan lähteä.
 "Paljoa ei enää sadakaan", sanoi miss Gething lohduttavasti.

Herra Glover otti eteisestä hattunsa ja sateenvarjonsa, puristi tytön

kättä ja katsoi kysyvästi laivuria.

"Tuletteko samaan matkaan?" kysyi hän erittäin kohteliaasti ja

ystävällisesti.

"Hm! — En", vastasi toinen.

Herra Glover painoi tulisesti hatun päähänsä, nyökkäsi

suuttuneena ja läksi.

"Kyllä hän vielä junalle ennättää", sanoi laivuri nähdessään miss

Gethingin ikkunasta katselevan Gloverin tulista kiirettä.

"Toivon niin", vastasi tämä. "Ompa ikävää, ettei äitinne sattunut

kotona olemaan", sanoi laivuri pitkän vaitiolon jälkeen.

"Niin. Ehkä teillä on ollut ikävä täällä?" sanoi tyttö.

Laivuri huokasi raskaasti ja ihmetteli itsekseen, oliko herra Glover

sellainen mestari tekemään tyhmiä huomautuksiaan miltä hän näytti.

"Onko hänellä pitkäkin matka edessään", sanoi hän lopulta,

tarkoittaen herra Gloveria. "Lontoo", vastasi Annis lyhyesti. "Minun
on sentään lähdettävä", sanoi laivuri, huomaten mahdottomaksi
viipyä pitemmälle.

Annis vetäytyi syrjään laivurin noustessa ja seurasi tätä hitaasti

eteiseen.

"Jospa voisin antaa teille edes sateenvarjon", sanoi hän ja katseli

ympärilleen.
 "Oo! Kyllä se näinkin menee", sanoi laivuri. "Minähän olen jo
melkein kuiva."

"Kuiva?" sanoi Annis, laskien pienen kätensä laivurin hihalle.

"Tehän olette läpimärkä", sanoi hän vastenmielisesti. "Että

saatoinkin antaa teidän istua sellaisessa tilassa."

"Hiha onkin märjin", sanoi laivuri, jonka olosuhteet olivat

opettaneet viekkaaksi. "Täältä on aivan kuiva."

Hän silitteli takkinsa etupuolta.

"Sepä hauskaa", sanoi Annis kohteliaasti.

"Hm!… Mutta täältä", sanoi laivuri ja piteli takkinsa kaulusta.

Annis koetteli keveästi.

"Te olette perinpohjin kastunut", sanoi hän. "Ei saisi istua

paikoillaan tuonlaisissa vaatteissa. Odottakaahan silmänräpäys.
Lainaan teille jonkun isäni päällystakeista."

Hän juoksi ketterästi toiseen huoneeseen, tuli takaisin pitkän,

paksun takin kanssa ja ojensi sen laivurille.

"Kyllä se teidät kuivana pitää", sanoi hän, kun laivuri heikkojen

vastustelujen jälkeen alkoi vetää takkia päälleen.

"Sanotteko hyväntahtoisesti terveiseni rouva Gethingille?" kysyi

laivuri aukaisten eteisen oven.

"Kyllä, kiitoksia", vastasi tyttö. "Hän varmaan on pahoillaan, ettei

sattunut olemaan kotona. Viivyttekö kauankin täällä?"
 "No, ehkäpä kolme päivää."

Annis mietti.

"Huomenna menee äiti pois", sanoi hän koetteeksi.

"Ylihuomenna on minulla muitakin asioita tännepäin", sanoi laivuri.

"Ellen häiritse, niin voinhan poiketa sisään. Hyvästi."

Pää sekaisin puristi hän tytön kättä, ajatellen lieneekö mennyt liian
pitkälle, ja sulettuaan oven, pisti hän kätensä kapteeni Gethingin
taskuihin ja kulki synkkäin ajatusten vaivaamina kohden laivaansa.
Ajatuksensa muodostuivat vähitellen kokonaisuudeksi — ja lopulta
alkoi hän puhua ääneensä. "Tyttö tiesi minut kadulla kohdatessaan
äitinsä olevan poissa", sanoi hän pitkäveteisesti, "samoin kuin
toisenkin olevan siellä. Olisi sentään luullut… Rakkauskiusottelua!"
huudahti hän yht'äkkiä katkerasti. "Ja tyttö tekeytyi minulle
rakastettavaksi, kiusotellakseen häntä. Mies on huomenna siellä
uudestaan, kun äiti on poissa."

Pahoilla mielin saapui hän laivaansa. Kirosi teetä, jota Henry

tarjosi, vaihtoi vaatteita ja heittäytyi selälleen sohvalle polttelemaan.

"Olette vähän märkä", sanoi perämies. "Mistä tuollaisen takin

olette saanut?"

"Eräs tuttava", vastasi laivuri, "lainasi sen minulle. Muistatte kai

vielä sen kapteeni Gethingin, josta kerran puhuin?"

"Tietysti", vastasi perämies.

"Antakaa miehistölle tieto, että palkinto on nostettu viiteen

puntaan", sanoi laivuri ja veteli sankkoja sauhuja piipustaan.
 "No! Jos palkinto on korotettu viiteen puntaan, tulee kokki
hirtettäväksi murhasta tai muusta kauheasta rikoksesta", sanoi
saapuvilla oleva Henry. "Ei ole ollenkaan hyvä antaa miehistön
auttaa koko asiassa — ei ollenkaan."

Laivuri ei suvainnut vastata. Mutta kun hänen terveisensä saapui

miehistön hyttiin, syntyi siellä ilo ja elämä.

"No! Nyt lähden minä ulos", sanoi Dick innostuneena. "Viisi

puntaa! —
Ei sitä niin kannata halveksua."

"Toivon ettei kohtalo leiki teidän kanssanne, kuten minun", sanoi

kokki tunteellisesti.

"Mitä nyt tarvitaan", sanoi paksu Sam, "niin se on sellainen kuin

ihmisillä on kaupungissa… sellainen… mikä sen nimi nyt taas
onkaan?"

"Taksamittari", esitteli kokki.

"Taksamittari! — Miten kirotun tyhmästi puhuttu", sanoi Sam

halveksivasti. "Ei, vaan tarkoitan sellaista — sellaista, jossa on
paljon ihmisiä."

"Raitiotievaunu", sanoi kokki ollen aivan väärillä jälillä. "Mutta

ethän sillä voi matkustaa ympäri Englantia, Sam."

"Sinä olet tyhmä kuin pässi", tiuskasi Sam kärsimättömästi.

"Tarkoitan jotain sellaista, johon ihmiset kiinnittävät rahansa."

Kokki oli jo ennättänyt sanoa: "säästölaatik…", kun Henry nyhjäsi

häntä kylkeen.
 "Mitä sinä oikein tarkoitat, Sam?" sanoi Dick. "Mikset sitä sano?"

"Kun en muista sanaa", vastasi Sam suuttuneena. "Ihmisiä yhtyy

monta yhteen ja jakaa saamansa voitot."

"Tarkoitat osakeyhtiötä", sanoi Dick.

"Juuri niin!" sanoi Sam henkäisten helpotuksesta.

"No mihin sitä tarvittaisi?" kysyi Dick.

"Me perustamme osakeyhtiön ja ja'amme rahat miehen

löydettyämme. Sehän olisi julmaa, Dick, jos minä, kun sinä olet
päässyt miehen jäljille, tulisin ja sieppaisin hänet juuri nenäsi
edestä."

"Koetappas yrittää", sanoi Dick synkkänä.

"Ajatuksesi on mainio, Sam", sanoi kokki. "Minä olen mukana."

"Tule mukaan sinäkin, Dick", sanoi Sam.

"En kiitoksia", vastasi Dick. "Tarvitsen kyllä viisi puntaani

jakamattakin."

"Mehän tullaan työskentelemään sinua vastaan, minä, kokki ja

poika", sanoi Sam innokkaasti.

"Ohoo!" sanoi Henry. "Älkää luulko minun suostuvan."

"No niin", sanoi Sam. "Os… Osak… Miksi sitä taas kutsuitkaan,
Dick?"

"Osakeyhtiö."