ABSTRACT
Date and publication. Sylvae: or, the Second Part of Poetical Miscellanies was published by Tonson in 1685 (SR 10 January; advertised in The Observator 1 January); reprinted 1692 (some copies dated 1693). The translations of Lucretius and the part of the Preface discussing Lucretius were added as an appendix to the 1700 edition of Creech’s Lucretius and Manilius . . . Translated. The date of composition of the various pieces in Sylvae can be estimated approximately. D. would have written the Preface shortly before the publication of Sylvaey so probably in November or December 1684. In the Preface (1. 1) he assigns the translations to ‘this last half year’, i.e. roughly April-October 1684. D .’s statement in the Preface that he began with Theocritus and Horace, and proceeded to Lucretius and Virgil, is confirmed by his letter to Tonson c. August 1684: ‘You will have of mine four Odes of Horace, which I have already translated, another small translation of forty lines from Lucretius: the whole story o f Nisus & Eurialus, both in the fifth, & the ninth of Virgils Eneids; & I care not who translates them beside me, for let him be friend or foe, I will please my self, & not give off in consideration of any man. there will be forty lines more of Virgil in another place; to answer those of Lucretius; I meane those very lines which Montaign has compar’d in those two poets: & Homer shall sleep on for me: I will not now meddle with him’ (Letters 23; for Montaigne see ‘Venus to Vulcan’, headnote). It would seem, then, that the translations of Theocritus and Horace were made in the late spring or early summer of 1684. There are some parallels between D .’s translations of Theocritus and those by Creech, but the chronological precedence of the two is unclear (see the headnote to ‘Amaryllis’). There are also verbal parallels between D. ’s translations of Horace and those by Creech, which were published in 1684 with a Dedication to D. dated 25 May. D. could have seen these before making his own translations, but Creech’s statement that D. has thought Horace ‘worthy your Study and Imitation’ (sig. A4γ“v) suggests that Creech knew of the existence of at least some versions of Horace by D. at the time he was writing the Dedication. If Creech had seen a MS, the verbal borrowings might be by Creech from D. rather than vice versa. The question remains open. The translations from Lucretius Book I and Aen. V, VIII, and IX would have been made in the summer of 1684, and those from Aen. X and the other parts of Lucretius in the autumn: evidently these were not envisaged at the time of D .’s letter. It is possible that D .’s ‘Theocritus: Idyllium the Eighteenth’ was composed in 1683 or early 1684: see headnote to that poem. For other aspects of the complicated chronology of D .’s work in 1684 see Edward L. Saslow, M Ph lxxii (1975) 248-55.
