Creative Translation and Classical Reception: The English Pervigilium Veneris

Abstract

This discussion addresses selected English versions of the late Latin poem the Pervigilium Veneris from the seventeenth century to the twentieth. Most translations, these versions show, construct the poem in accordance with their own era's tastes and assumptions, but this predictable outcome is not the only one possible. Creative translations are different: they seem to show not (or not only) how the work was once seen, but what it still is, or can be. Thus translations are able, in special cases, to do much more than provide evidence about how a cultural artifact of the past has been constructed over time – the usual starting point in reception study. In this instance the early translations by Thomas Stanley (1647) and Thomas Parnell (1722), rather than any of those which have proliferated since the nineteenth century, belong in this special category.