Abstract
In the 1820s, Wordsworth translated Virgil’s Aeneid, books 1–3, and I suggest this was partly to shed the burden of having become an exemplary English poet. While Coleridge complained of the translation’s “unenglishisms,” I argue that estrangement from his own poetic voice was precisely Wordsworth’s objective. The opening books of the Aeneid recount Aeneas’s exile and subsequent wanderings to find his prophesied new home in Italy. Wordsworth’s translation constitutes a coherent aesthetic project, his own sea voyage into a strange language which eventually brought him to a new sense of being at home in English. Moreover, I note distinctive features of Wordsworth’s translation: its feminisation of the divine will governing Aeneas’ fate and the comedic pressure it exerts on Virgil’s vision of Roman history.
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Falconer, R. (2018). Wordsworth Un-Englished. In: Orgis, R., Heim, M. (eds) Fashioning England and the English. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-92126-6_8
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