ABSTRACT
Methods of Translation The prefatory material which accompanies Arthur Golding and George Sandys’s translations of the Metamorphoses delineates their respective efforts to control the text. By way of an implicit comparison with Phaeton’s unsuccessful effort to rein in Apollo’s chariot, Golding’s epistle to his patron, the Earl of Leicester, in his Metamorphosis, translated oute of Latin into English meeter (1567) begins ‘at length my chariot wheele about the mark hath found the way,| And at their weery races end, my breathlesse horses stay’ (sig. A iir). A further perspective on the toil of Ovidian translation is offered in Sandys’s preface to the general reader of the Metamorphosis Englished (1632). Here Sandys emphasizes the difficult task of producing a version of the poem suitable for ‘the meere English Reader, since divers places in our Author are otherwise impossible to be understood but by those who are well versed in the ancient that the ordinary Reader need not reject it as too difficult, nor the learned as too obvious’ (p. 4rn. p.). After placing his reader in a subordinate position, Sandys returns to describe his own translation practice in more detail: ‘to the Translation I have given what perfection my Pen could bestow; by polishing, altering, or restoring, the harsh, improper, or mistaken, with a nicer exactnesse then perhaps is required in so long a labour’ (p. 4rn. p.).2 Both Golding and Sandys are concerned with the intricate nature of translating Ovid’s poem into English. Yet in the period following the Interregnum Ovid’s translators appear to ignore the disruptive dialogism of the complete Metamorphoses in favour of monologic forms. According to Rachel Trickett, the dominant Ovidian text in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries is the Heroides and she discusses the relative dismissal of the Metamorphoses in the following way:
Ovid’s influence on English poetry, from the allegorisations of his stories in the Middle Ages to the profusion of material – style, subject-matter, theme – from the Metamorphoses which occurred during the Renaissance, had contracted formally […] to this particular model of the epistolary monologue […]. A general decay of
belief in the vital symbolism of myth in this period accounts for the comparative neglect of the Metamorphoses.3
