The history of translating Lucan’s civil war epic into English is a tale of alternating neglect and enthusiasm. Lucan was popular in his own time, widely read in Europe throughout the middle ages and renaissance, translated continuously into the romance languages, and by Dante ranked alongside Virgil.¹ In England he was ignored for fifteen hundred years.

And then, starting in 1595 with Samuel Daniel, came a volley of imitations and translations interrupted by England’s civil wars. A long silence followed, but in the 20^th and early 21^st centuries another wave of translations brought the Bellum Civile back. What was it about Lucan that stimulated his belated “discovery” in Shakespeare’s England? What silenced him in the mid-17^th century? And why was he resurrected in the early 18^th and again today? Why does Lucan seem to be - at least in English and with apologies to Ben Jonson - not for all time but for an age. And with what metrical and tonal diversity has Lucan’s poetry been conveyed in English over the course of four hundred years?

This introduction will consider the eleven English verse translations of the Bellum Civile published between 1600 and the present, selecting for comparative attention Lucan’s sixty-six-line proem. I will consider some of the issues English translators face in approaching Lucan’s poetry, then describe the historical context and poetics of his early translations (shedding light perhaps on their intermittency), and finally discuss the poetics of recent translators.

Of course, its proem cannot adequately represent all the Bellum Civile. Lucan had many poetic skills, not limited to aphorism, drama, fighting, description (astral and local), grotesquerie, and outrage. Passages purple and famous abound in his epic. However, both to poet and translator an epic’s proem invites the establishment of a tone and intent, a poetic stance and stamp. I hope that this sixty-six-line passage is long enough to suggest at least the approach taken by Lucan's individual translators, short enough to keep a discussion of eleven different works from becoming tiresome, and sufficiently representative of Lucan’s own style to make clear how each translator altered it to accommodate the new language.

It is necessary to the plan of this overview but rather unfair to the authors considered that in so short an extract (less than one percent of the poem) I represent their translations of over eight thousand lines. Moments of particular brilliance cannot be highlighted, nor any cumulative effects of a translation pointed. This slight is only the worse to translators who have undertaken a poet so mercurial as Lucan. My purpose here is mainly to capture and display together, only secondarily to critique, the diversity of styles - and particularly of meters - that arose from Lucan’s poetry. That and to speculate about the on-again, off-again timing of these translations over four centuries.

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General considerations

Bede, Historia Ecclesiastica Gentorum Anglorum

Translation, I think, whether free or “ad verbum,” always falls short. How, for example, is even Lucan’s (usually applied) title to be translated? The absence of articles in Latin forces “De Bello Civili” to hover indecisively between the historical (“On the Civil War”) and the didactic (“On Civil War”).² In a sense the translator’s job is choosing a way to fall short.

Meter

The first dilemma is whether to use a native meter or one that sonically reproduces, in some way, the original. Must Lucan’s sound take precedence, or should the translator be content to make it seem that De Bello Civili has a comfortable place in the metrical traditions of its new language?

There is a worthy, ancient, and continuing history of imitating with stress Latin’s quantitative downbeats. This recurrent attempt has been applied mainly to Virgil, but the dactylic impulse is also present in PF Widdows’ 1988 translation of Lucan and to some extent in the free verse translations of Susanna Braund (1992) and Jane Joyce (1993). It is worth glancing briefly at the history of dactylic translations to get a sense of their possibilities.

Most of these were of Virgil’s Aeneid, giving ready means to compare them. Richard Stanyhurst in 1583 was first:

That Aeneid made Stanyhurst a literary pariah. Thomas Nash, at the time, wrote “Mr. Stanyhurst, though otherwise learned, trod a foul, lumbering, boisterous, wallowing measure in his translation of Virgil.” A full century later Thomas Warton piled on: “...in his choice of measure he is more unfortunate than his predecessors and in other respects succeeded worse.” And still another century later from a dyspeptic Southey: “As Chaucer has been called the well of English undefiled, so might Stanyhurst be denominated the common sewer of the language.” After Stanyhurst, nobody tried it again for a long time.

Not until 1865, when a not more precisely identified “W. Grist,” headmaster of a public school in South London, timidly ventured his Aeneid in hexameter. “With a view,” he wrote (mindful perhaps of Stanyhurst’s fate and dusting off a shop-worn recusatio), “to assisting my own pupils in the work of translating Virgil."

Grist began:

A less tentative Oliver Crane in 1888 published what he called “Virgil’s Aeneid translated line by line into English dactylic hexameter.”
This is his opening:

The next and, to my knowledge the latest, version of the Aeneid in dactyl/spondee hexameter is by Frederick Ahl, a well-known American scholar, in 2007:

None of the above translations sound like English to my ear, and the oddity of them takes focus off the poem. Certainly, Lucan’s 17^th century translators all opted for English meters, either those of Chaucer or the blank verse then recently introduced. By the time of Rowe in 1719 the authority of Chaucer and then of Dryden had made English verse almost synonymous with iambic pentameter.

Rhyme

Rhyme also, by 1719, was at its high-water mark in England. There was then no (serious) English verse without rhymed couplets. But a century earlier it may have been thought odd that two university men like Arthur Gorges and Thomas May (but not the third university man, Christopher Marlowe) chose rhyming couplets to translate Latin hexameter. The cultural elite in Elizabethan England had an aversion to rhyme. In 1570 Roger Ascham called it:

That English poets mostly ignored Ascham may be judged not only from the practice of Lucan’s early translators, but also by Milton’s need to defend his choice of meter in Paradise Lost, a century later:

Apart from any gothic barbarity it is liable to introduce, rhyme also poses a problem in conveying Latin’s concision on the one hand and its complex, often drawn out sentence structure on the other. Rhyme can be expected to lengthen or else to simplify the Latin original by often requiring filler words whose primary function, no matter how well disguised, is to set up the rhyme. This is true especially in English, because our word endings are neither highly conventional nor gendered so as to provide the language with plentiful rhymes.⁹ Harder to find, English rhymes must more often be a little remote in salience and require additional words that excuse the slightly extraneous sense. Worse, the remarkable variety in the length of Latin sentences and clauses and the intricacy of their construction must be parceled into predetermined lengths and frequently brought up short by the finality that rhyme at strict intervals confers.

None of the six most recent verse translations of Lucan is rhymed, either because written in the commonest prosody of the last century, free verse, or in an attempt to reproduce the original, either sonically in dactyls or conceptually in “English Heroic Verse.”

Interpretation and pace

A major interpretive decision in translating the proem of De Bello Civili is how openly, if at all, to emphasize irony in Lucan’s laus Neronis and his invocation of Nero in preference to muse or god (for here is the beginning of Lucan’s extraordinary exclusion of the Roman pantheon from an epic poem). Lucan’s abrupt about face, from excoriating civil war to justifying it, is only the first of many such sudden changes in viewpoint, almost school exercises in rhetorical colores. My own sense is that to Lucan – at least in this poem – both gods and emperor are useless at best, enemies at worst. The first ignored civil war’s outrage, the second became its heir. I think Lucan’s challenge (and his poetic joy) was to tread exactly on the line – that calculation delicate – between praise of the emperor, praise that was in any case expected to be inflated and formulaic, and angry, seditious irony. Lucan could go a little farther than most, one supposes, because he must have arrived to De Bello Civili, at least in its early days, with some store of goodwill for his previous, prize-winning praise of Nero. The pace of Lucan’s first 32 lines can be interpreted as rapid or distracted, the language contemptuous or rhetorical. The decisions are personal to the translator, but one uncontroversial way to reproduce his pace is to stay at Lucan’s length.

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Early translators of Lucan: Historical Context

Not translators of De Bello Civili, but almost slavish imitators of it, both Samuel Daniel (in editions 1595-1609) and Michael Drayton (1603) produced epics decrying, respectively, English civil wars of the 15^th and 14^th centuries.^{10, 11} Playwright Marlowe was the first English translator of Lucan. ¹² The poet Barnabe Googe almost beat him to it, but gave up his projected translation in 1560 citing objections from Calliope. ¹³ George Turberville, Googe’s friend, might then have been first, except that, according to his own account, Melpomene took him in hand and administered the same sort of chiding that Ovid got from Cupid. ¹⁴ The tragic muse told Turberville that he simply wasn’t poet enough to translate Lucan. In England, at least since the 1300’s, tragedy and epic were not viewed as generically very distant, so Melpomene, the tragic muse, spoke with a reasonable degree of authority.¹⁵

15 See for example Chaucer’s envoi to his epic Troilus and Criseyde:

Go, litel bok, go, litel my tragedye,
ther God thi makere yet, er that he dye
so sende might to in som comedye!

She said that attempting Lucan would "spoyle Lute, & stroy strings, / in straining them too farre.¹⁶ It is also possible that both Calliope and Melpomene had personal concerns about the politics of translating anti-monarchist Lucan.

In any event, Turberville gave it up in 1574, clearing the way for devil-may-care Kit Marlowe. He translated only the first book of the Bellum Civile, and it is uncertain whether he did so at university or just before his early, violent death in 1594. Marlowe’s Lucan was not published until 1600. Possibly he had planned a treatment of the whole poem; we do not know. Two more translations, these complete, followed in 1614 (Gorges)¹⁷ and 1627-1640 (May). ¹⁸ And then, at the dawn of civil war in England, this fervor to translate Lucan quite suddenly cooled. When, seventy years later, interest in Roman civil war epic returned, Statius’ star was in the ascendant with an outpouring of translations from his Thebais.

For fifty years – from the bishops’ wars beginning in 1640 through the mopping up after a (not so) “bloodless revolution” in 1689 – the British Isles were in a perpetual state of intermittent civil war. ¹⁹ During those same years, England’s leading poets were all Latinists – men of different politico-religious stripes who not only read but wrote Latin poetry: eminent John Dryden, translator of the Aeneid, priestly George Herbert, puritan John Milton, adroit Andrew Marvel, cavaliers Richard Lovelace, Robert Herrick and John Suckling, “metaphysicals” Richard Crashaw, Abraham Cowley and Henry Vaughn.

One might expect, in such times and among authors such as these, that Lucan would attract comment and, especially, translators. Yet, Lucan’s name disappeared. Early interest in translating De Bello Civili is found only just before England’s civil wars: Googe, Turberville, Marlowe, Gorges, May, Thomas Farnaby, who published the first scholarly Latin edition of De Bello Civili in 1618. ²⁰ And then again just afterwards with Nicholas Rowe’s 1719 translation. ²¹ To account for this pause in and resumption of interest, it is necessary to consider both poets of the Roman civil wars, Lucan and Statius. The 18^th century revival in translating Lucan consists of a single work, while Statius finds a raft of new translators. Nearly four hundred years after Chaucer’s borrowings from "Stace", we suddenly see English translations of Thebais – or more accurately from it – by Christopher Pitt 1727, Walter Harte 1727 and 1731, Henry Travers 1731, Jabez Hughes 1737, Thomas Gray 1775, and others.

A faint intimation of the Statius revival can be found during England’s civil war. Thomas Stephens, an obscure schoolmaster, published his only work in 1648, an English version, “for help” (of course) “to my scholars,” of five books from Thebais. ²² Stephens’ introduction hinted that he might complete the translation should there be any general interest. Apparently, there wasn’t. In addition to Stephens, and attached to a translation of the ever-popular Juvenal X, Thomas Shadwell (1687) published his rendering of Cato’s speech to Libienus in Book IX of De Bello Civili.²³ This translation, including a sharp critique of Shadwell's Latin, was revised by a Thomas Higden and then by another, anonymous author. And that was all for translating Roman civil war poets between 1640 and 1719.

Nor translation only, but discussion of Lucan and Statius was silent as well, awaiting renewal by Thomas Rymer in his controversy- provoking comparison of Statius with Dryden.²⁴ Not that there was any lack of interest in epic poetry during these years. Milton composed two long epic poems. Dryden translated the Aeneid. Epic in the Latin language was also represented: the contemporary and Jacobite Grameidos, published just after the glorious revolution, in 1691, extoled holy war. ²⁵

It is tempting to conclude from a silence so unexpected and sudden that the moral attitude offered in both De Bello Civili and Thebais – condemnation of civil war as nefas –found but cold welcome in mid and late 17^th century England, Scotland, and Ireland. Reluctance to engage with these works could be seen as a measure of the ambient disposition towards war. One might otherwise suppose Lucan’s republicanism to have found many eager translators in the mid-17^th century British Isles. More even than among his ardent adherents of the late 16^th and early 17^th centuries. ²⁶ And one might otherwise have expected the renewed interest in Statius to have arrived more robustly than in the partial work of an obscure schoolmaster.

In England, as in Rome, limited monarchy prevailed. In both, decades passed after the end of civil unrest before full-throated condemnation of it became acceptable art. The 18^th century brought a renewal of interest in the Roman civil war poets. These new translations were characterized by a shift in focus, as mentioned, from Lucan to the stylistically more Augustan, less “uncontrolled” Statius (perhaps beginning with Stephens during the civil war period). Other characteristics were a tendency to expand and further smooth the original, a ubiquity of heroic couplets as the only conceivable prosody, and translation of selected books or ever smaller highlights rather than of complete works. ²⁷ Among many early 18^th century translations of the Roman civil war epics only Rowe’s, posthumously published, was complete, and only his was of Lucan’s poem.

With the Romantics Lucan’s stock rose again. Shelley praised Lucan in his Adonais, and he and Southey are said to have preferred him to Virgil.^{28, 29} But the Romantics never translated Lucan (or, possibly due to their emphasis on personal inspiration, much of anything else). By the beginning of the nineteenth century, poets (Landor excepted) and literary enthusiasts like Gorges and May no longer wrote in Latin or often even read it easily; translation had become the province of professional academics, and Lucan had fallen off the cannon. After Rowe, Lucan was not translated again until the Victorian era. ^{30, 31}

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Early translators of Lucan: Poetics

Except for Marlowe, Lucan’s early translators (like Gavin Douglas, Virgil’s first English translator a century earlier) used Chaucer’s meters – iambic five’s or four’s - and Chaucer’s usual rhyme scheme, couplets. None of them took a stanzaic approach, although Chaucer certainly supplied a model, as did Spenser's recent Faerie Queene. Marlowe chose the relatively new blank verse. This meter was developed for his (partial) Aeneid by the earl of Surrey, Henry Howard, in the 1540’s. But it was made popular on the Elizabethan stage – by Marlowe himself in large part. Blank verse gave Marlowe a metrical tool to approximate Lucan’s compression and render the complexity and length of Latin sentences. It let him work in a meter he used (or, if we like the youthful translator theory, would use) as playwright, as author indeed of what Ben Jonson called a “mighty line.” Also, blank verse was identified already with Latin epic through Howard’s Aeneid. In Marlowe’s hands, blank verse proved a perfect match for Lucan; in it we hear a spoken voice, as we do in the original but not so well, as we shall see, in the rhymed translations:

We can forgive Marlowe the trumpets and drums he drags into line 6. He captures the broken rhythm and uncertain sentence structure of the original. Yet in part, perhaps, the effect today of Marlowe’s verses depends on what came after. Had not Milton and then others used blank verse for epic, I wonder whether it would have so familiar, heroic, and English a sound.

The friend and admirer of Jonson, May, had a lifelong passion for this poem, correcting his work repeatedly and minutely and adding a continuation of it in two languages through the death of Julius Caesar. ³² With rhymed couplets May anglicized Lucan; Rowe positively Londonized him with pointed, polished heroics in Dryden’s style. Both placed an ancient Latin poet comfortably in the bosom of Chaucer and his heirs.

Distinguished knight and politician, Gorges, ignoring the advances in pentameter made by Drayton, Spenser, and Daniel, inexplicably hamstrung his own translation by putting it in quatrameter. Sublimity, rage, and high-minded moralizing become difficult when terse Latin lines of six feet are reduced to rhyming fours. Set-up words become an ever larger proportion of the verse when the meter shortens (as, below, the recurrent “did”). And the work-around to rhyme “pride” leads off the sense. Did Gorges have in mind Chaucer’s use of quatrameter for his translation of the “epic” Romaunt of the Rose? Certainly, Gorges’ work seems to come from a previous century:

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