ABSTRACT
Chaucer, the creator of English iambic pentameter, died in 1400, and in the fifteenth century Chaucer’s iambic verse was replaced by looser versification. Early Modern English poet Thomas Wyatt had to rediscover iambic pentameter, and Henry Howard Earl of Surrey introduced blank iambic pentameter into Modern English literature. He used blank iambic pentameter for his translation of Virgil’s Aeneid, Book 2 (1,068 lines) and Book 4 (938 lines). The translation was done between 1540 and 1545. Since that time, blank iambic pentameter began to be associated with historical and heroic subjects, and Norton and Sackville wrote the historic tragedy Gorboduc in this meter. Virgil, of course, composed The Aeneid in the classical dactylic hexameter.1 In his translation Surrey relied on two texts, the Virgil original and its Italian translation that appeared in 1535. The Italian translation was done in the syllabic mode: Italian hendecasyllable. Classical Latin hexameters are almost impossible to render into English literally because in Classical Greek and Latin, length provided phonological opposition of syllables, that is, length of syllables differentiated meaning of words (Attridge 1971, Gasparov 1996). In English, length or shortness of vowels is considered a feature of language history. Elongation of vowels alone does not change the meaning of Modern English words, as it does in German. In the English language, it is stress that is the main phonological (that is, sense differentiating) feature, as in a PREsent-to preSENT.2 Syllabic prominence can be also achieved by the vowel quality, as in German, but English is first and foremost a stress language, not a
quantity or quality language. All attempts to render quantitative meters literally into English had little success. Classical quantitative hexameters have been more often rendered into English as dactylic hexameters.
