Literature, Principally Belletristic - University of Tennessee, Knoxville

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· INTELLECTU AL LIFE IN THE COLONIAL SOUTH ' which the author-compiler inserted dozens of poetic translations from the Latin borrowed from Martin Fotherby's r622 Atheomastix54 and frequent references to Greek and Roman history and literature to indicate American parallels, even in Smith's eloquent come-hither pleas. Though Smith's actual knowledge of Latin may not have gone far beyond the schoolboy's, Strachey's knowledge went deeper and perhaps wider, for he was university-educated, Strachey translates or adapts lines from Seneca, giving also the Latin, quotes a Latin sentence from a Roman history to describe the worthies of his account, appreciates a Latin epigram addressed to him by Thomas Campion, and in other ways shows his familiarity with and enjoyment of the literature in the ancient languages. The title page motto of his Historie of Travell into Virginia Britania is taken from Horace's Epistles, the aim of "Ecclesire et Reipub" is applied to the Indians-"Wild as they are, accept them, -so were we," In "A True Reportory" Strachey reflects and refers to Horace's awe of the sea and its terrors, and he finds reasons for mentioning several ancient heroes. In describing everyday American aboriginal and frontier life he is reminded of Trojan ball games, "Lacedaemonian" food, the Indian Okee as a parallel to the evil Roman god Vejovis, and the red chiefs' belief in metempsychosis as "the heathen Pythagoras held," For the Colony: Lawes Moral! and Divine also includes Latin mottos and phrases, 55 But more significant is the fact that the first piece of real literary merit produced on the Atlantic seaboard is the translation by George Sandys of Ovid's Metamorphoses, published when the treasurer returned to Britain in r626. Sandys, son of an Archbishop of York and brother of that founding father of both Plymouth and Jamestown Sir Edwin, had been educated at Oxford and the Inns of Court. A Relation 0/ a Journey begun An: Dom: I6IO (r6r 5), Sandys' popular Mediterranean travel account which went through nine editions in the seventeenth century, had been embellished by the author's own translation of a multitude of classical writers, especially poets, including his earliest known renditions into English of parts of the Metamorphoses. The list of authors translated from the Latin is formidable, ranging from an early Latin Homer to the prose of medieval church fathers and the more modern scholars Julius Caesar Scaliger and Isaac Casaubon.56 By r62 r, on the eve of his departure for the New World, Sandys published a translation of the first five books of Ovid, two issues appearing in 162r and a new edition while he was in Virginia in 1623. Though the poet apparently made some use of his fragmentary translations of the work included in his 1615 A Relation, in every case he modified and improved meter, rhyme, and imagery. Evidently the r621 version was quite
• Literature, Principally Belletristic . popular in Britain, for Michael Drayton addressed to Sandys in America words of encouragement: And (worthy George) by industry and use, Let's see what lines Virginia will produce: Goe on with Ovid, as you have begunne, With the first five Bookes .... Intice the Muses thither to repaire, Intreat them gently, trayne them to that ayre.57 On the voyage over, as Sandys wrote to a friend in England, he was able amidst the roaring of the seas to translate two more books. The other eight, during the hours "snatcht from . .. night and repose," he translated while he was in the colony, no doubt surrounded by scholarly classical works which might assist him and the great earlier Elizabethan translation of Golding. Back in Britain by late 1625, and apparently upon the request of his constant patron, now King Charles, he published in 1626 the first complete edition of his Metamorphoses, with its dedication containing the warning that it was "bred in the New-world, of the rudenesse whereof it cannot but participate; especially having warres and Tumults to bring it to light in stead of the Muses." Six years later, published in a large folio with engravings illustrating each book and the preliminary matter and with elaborate prose "philosophical commentaries," or glosses, at the end of each book, appeared what is still accepted as the standard edition. The 1632 version shows further polishing of the verse, the heroic couplet which led straight into the neoclassical heroic form. But both 1626 and 1632 versions have peculiar American interest. In composing the majority of his verse in the New World on an ancient classical subject Sandys was beginning a tradition of adaptation from the Latin, a part of the classical tradition which was to continue in several forms on through the colonial period in the southern provinces, to be distinguished by William Munford's translation of Homer in the early nineteenth century, and to come well into the twentieth century in the translations from the Roman poets of William Alexander Percy and the obvious classical influences on the critical and creative writing of Allen Tate, Robert Penn Warren, and John Crowe Ransom. What Sandys completed in colonial Virginia was and is one of the major English Renaissance translations, the meter of which was to influence Dryden and Pope and a host of lesser men, and the subject matter Keats and the Romantics. The 1626 version is not American in subject as is the prose work of Strachey and Smith, though the American aboriginals and the concept of an American Eden as well as the violent gales of the Atlantic 1343
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Literature, Principally Belletristic - University of Tennessee, Knoxville

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