ABSTRACT
This chapter will focus on two of the prologues of Gavin Douglas’s translation of the Aeneid (Eneados), those to Book 7 and Book 12. Susanna Braund has shown that Douglas’s Eneados is foundational to the translation history of Virgil’s epic. In the two prologues under consideration, Douglas meditates on the process of translation, placing his reflections in a specifically Scottish landscape and in winter and spring respectively. Several of the birds that the poet mentions in his descriptions of the Scottish seasons, cranes in particular, have important metapoetic functions in classical literature. In Douglas’s prologues, allusion to Lucan and Ovid in particular through classical birds provocatively expand the Scottish translator’s concept of Roman epic and help accommodate the translation of Virgil’s poem to new cultural and geographical conditions. Douglas’s translation of Virgil’s epic is deeply informed by a broad range of classical literature. The appropriation from classical epic of birds, several of which are closely associated with poetic aspiration, suggests Douglas’s understanding of translation as verbal, cultural and physical transformation – in short as a very Ovidian process.
