Christopher Smart's English Lyrics

Translation in the Eighteenth Century

Rosalind Powell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317166382
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Medieval & Early Modern Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

In the first full-length study of Christopher Smart's translations and the place and function of translation in Smart's poetry, Rosalind Powell proposes a new approach to understanding the relationship between Smart's poetics and his practice. Drawing on translation theory from the early modern period to the present day, this book addresses Smart's translations of Horace, Phaedrus and the Psalms alongside the better-known religious works such as Jubilate Agno and A Song to David. Five recurrent threads run throughout Powell's study: the effect of translation on the identity of a narrative voice in a rewritten text; the techniques that are used to present translated texts to a new literary, cultural and linguistic readership; performance and reading contexts; the translation of great works as an attempt to achieve literary permanence; and, finally, the authorial influence of Smart himself in terms of the overt religiosity and nationalism that he champions in his writing. In exploring Smart's major translation projects and revisiting his original poems, Powell offers insights into classical reception and translation theory; attitudes towards censorship; expressions of nationalism in the period; developments in liturgy and hymnody; and the composition of children's books and school texts in the early modern era. Her detailed analysis of Smart's translating poetics places them within a new, contemporary context and locality to uncover the poet's works as a coherent project of Englishing.

Chapter 1
Translating Original Verse

[A] poet is first a translator; the translator of an unknown world to which he gives tangible form, sensitive expression. Art is less invention than discovery, for it is insofar as the artist becomes rooted in what Shakespeare called ‘nature’s infinite book of secrecy’, that he can become a creator of our universe.¹

So eager are critics to decode the meanings and motivations of Jubilate Agno and A Song to David that revisiting these texts may seem superfluous. Mercifully, we are now far from the Robert Browning school of interpretation, which views these poems as instances of ‘trance-like states of pure consciousness’,² and much ground has been covered in decoding the theological, biographical, and scientific bases of Smart’s religious poetry.³ The influence of Geoffrey Hartman’s essay on ‘Christopher Smart’s Magnificat’ endures, particularly in his assessment of the poet as a ‘critical rather than crazy’ writer who is attempting to describe the ineffable subject of God whilst inevitably limited by language.⁴ Likewise, Harriet Guest’s 1989 monograph, which describes Jubilate Agno ‘an attempt to express the pure poetry of faith’, is a touchstone for interpreting this part of the poet’s oeuvre.⁵ Indeed, a fruitful area of enquiry, which this interpretation will continue to investigate, has proven to be a focus on Smart’s expression and oddities of diction in his original writing. Marcus Walsh, Betty Rizzo, and Suzie Tucker have written informatively about the rhetorical measures, neologisms, archaisms, and dialect words in Smart original verse. In addition, punning in particular has arisen as a subject of especial enquiry with regard to the Song and the Jubilate. Recently, too, Daniel Ennis has released Jeoffry from his confinement in coffee-table books by looking at the workings of language in the descriptions of Smart’s favourite cat as ‘a comment on the process of writing itself’.⁶

The process of writing is key to this reassessment of Smart’s original verse. Lance Bertelsen and Chris Mounsey have drawn vital connections bringing together Smart’s popular journalism and conviviality with his religious writing, offering a view of our writer as a ‘martyred satirist’.⁷ The current study takes a rather different tack in its presentation of Smart as a poet who Englishes across his poetic oeuvre. The examination of Smart’s formal translations provides just grounds, therefore, for a reassessment of his original writing through the lens of translation theory that might allow us to gain a clearer view of his overall creative endeavour. It is possible to see how the dominant body of translating work might colour the poet’s significant religious writings, and how certain poetic elements displayed in the rendering of Horace in English and the rewording of the Psalms might have been ‘translated’ and adapted to fit the requirements of the Hymns and Spiritual Songs, Jubilate Agno, and A Song to David.

There are three significant elements to discuss here: Smart’s poetic contextualising of his verse within a national tradition, the writer’s punning poetics, and his promotion of an Anglican viewpoint. The poet’s Englishing endeavour and his creation of a national ideal presented through anglicised imagery are shown most clearly in the Hymns and Spiritual Songs which were published concurrently with the Psalms in 1765. The latter collection adopts much of the same vocabulary as the original poems, albeit in the context of a fairly close translation. Furthermore, Smart’s national idealism appears in both the Psalms and Works of Horace as the poet revises Biblical and Classical history to give a particularly English focus on events. In fact, a reforming, contextualising effort of this kind might be seen as the basis for why Smart translates at all – a possibility that makes his creative outputs all the more vital to the current study. Secondly, in this context of language exchange, it is necessary to take into account what can be surmised of Smart’s own view of the workings of language and the process of writing poetry. In the poet’s verse rendering of Horace from 1767, and in its preface, we see the poet’s articulation of his own ars poetica,⁸ particularly through the discussion of Horace’s curiosa felicitas and how it might be translated into English verse. Smart’s cultivation of curious felicity in his translations, which will be demonstrated in Chapter 4, might usefully be applied to the poetic diction that he employs in his original writing, where he creates punning connections between words and ideas. A final element that bridges Smart’s poetic creation and poetic retelling is the religious counterpart to his imposition of explicitly English elements upon scenes from Horace and the Psalms. Smart’s Christian purgation of Jewish tradition is a defining element of his psalms; similarly, the explicit Christian focus is enhanced by both admonitory anti-Romanism and Anglican reference throughout Jubilate Agno and the poet’s rendering of The Parables of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ. If, as Donald Davie suggests, Isaac Watts looks forward to the New Testament as he translates the Psalms, it might be said that Christopher Smart looks even further forward to future Christian practice as he manipulates familiar images to create his own poetry.⁹

An understanding of Smart’s poetry as constantly upholding his principles and practices regarding translation forms a firm foundation for understanding his treatment of the Psalms, Horace, and Phaedrus, especially as the original works are better known and can provide a route into the more derivative translations. Additionally, this application can also be read in reverse to inform our view of the translations as creative acts. This chapter will explore the application of translation theory to Smart’s original poetry and the process of reading Smart’s religious works as examples of translation along three main routes of enquiry. The first section, ‘Translation versus Englishing’, addresses the action of Englishing in the Hymns and Parables as the product of an endeavour to nationalise, as described in the introduction. The second and third sections, ‘Puns: Wordplay as Translation in Jubilate Agno’ and ‘Translating Free Prayer into Structured Anglican Canticle: Jubilate Agno to A Song to David’, look more directly at the translation process in Smart’s original work: first I shall present a detailed account of Smart’s practice of wordplay and punning in Jubilate Agno to demonstrate the poet’s interest in the expressive possibilities of language and how this might be read alongside his translating endeavours; finally, I shall argue that A Song to David is a covert example of the rewording that the poet employs in the Psalms, paying particular attention to liturgical form.

Translation versus Englishing

The practice of Englishing is one of the most distinctive features of Smart’s rewriting technique. For example, the verses of the Psalms are transposed from their Old Testament context and expression in Hebrew stock phrases to English settings where the often violent and retributive sentiments are pacified and replaced with grace. Similarly, in translating Horace Smart replaces the busy Roman forum with a more familiar setting and converts Latin odes to English lyric. The root of this impulse to anglicise can be found in Smart’s original writing, where native imagery and ideals are expressed more freely. This outlook is nowhere more in view than in the Hymns and Spiritual Songs, published alongside the Translation of the Psalms in 1765 and reflective of many elements of the translated verses, particularly in the manner in which traditional expectations of religious practice are overturned. These poems, much maligned in past and present criticism, can finally be assimilated as part of Smart’s poetic endeavour.

It is fitting to read the Hymns alongside Smart’s psalm translation because both works have a similar object in view and they feed into Smart’s vision in Jubilate Agno for the public use of his verses. In fact, it is possible to consider the Hymns, in conjunction with the Psalms and the Parables, as examples of how Smart rewrites the texts of the Anglican liturgy that he practises. Whereas in the Psalms we see Smart’s translation of the Judaic Old Testament to encompass Christianity, the Hymns represent Christian themes within the specific terms of the Church of England. The poet’s Englishing endeavour is directed at several important themes: anti-Catholicism; the Eucharist and Anglican liturgy; Episcopal structures; hymn singing; and finally feast days, national events, and their providential alignment with the English seasons.

Anti-Catholicism is a central element both of Smart’s interpretation of liturgical material and of his writing more broadly. It is worth pausing for a moment to register this tendency in the poet’s writing as it informs the Hymns quite significantly. The poet’s attitude towards Catholicism is displayed most clearly in his 1764 ‘Ode to the Earl of Northumberland’, written to commemorate Hugh Percy’s ‘being appointed Lord Lieutenant of Ireland’ in April 1763 and the birth of his heir the following year.¹⁰ Smart clearly sees Northumberland as a guardian of the Protestant Church working, as viceroy from the Anglican king, ‘for Ireland’s aid … to counter-work/ the mines of Rome’ (68, 73–4). The poet articulates his own unabashed views of ‘Rome’s ambitious cheat’, and accuses Roman Catholics of ‘Denying Scripture to our ears,/ And beauty to our eyes’ (81, 113–14). A contemporary reviewer of this piece deemed it ‘not destitute of merit’, and praised Smart for his anti-Catholic expressions therein: ‘he merits the thanks of every true Protestant, for he fights with a truly British spirit against the Whore of Babylon’.¹¹ From this account, it would seem that Smart’s promotion of the Church of England over Rome is in keeping with contemporary popular opinion.

The Ode to Northumberland is possibly the most extreme example of anti-Romanism in Smart’s oeuvre; however in Jubilate Agno, where a Christian theme is more explicit, the poet employs the pejorative Puritan term ‘Moabite’ to refer to Catholics, before forecasting that ‘the exactions of Moab will soon be at an end’ (C95) with the overthrow of that denomination by Anglicans in other countries with England at the head of Reformation (C95–C102) driven by the ‘Liturgy [that] will obtain in all languages’ (C100).¹² Donald Davie’s elaboration upon this kind of rewriting endeavour demonstrates that it is focused on a new Anglican liturgy, bound up with the Hymns:

The particular form which religious mania took with Smart was a fervent wish that the Church of England should supplant the Church of Rome as the cardinal and catholic church of Christendom. This is a wish which many Anglicans have entertained and doubtless still entertain. But they held by it, or they hold by it, only as a pious hope; Smart espoused it as a deliberate programme, and one which might be speedily implemented, since he believed that God had called him to implement it. Apparently he thought it quite feasible that St Paul’s in London might supplant St Peter’s as the metropolitan cathedra...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• References and Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 Translating Original Verse
• 2 A Translation of the Psalms: Replacing David
• 3 Fracturing Phaedrus: Smart’s Translated and Original Fables
• 4 Smart’s Horace: Creating Curious Felicity in English Verse
• Conclusion: Smart’s Lyric Immortality
• Bibliography
• Index