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Although Behn's versatility as a writer is widely recognized, relatively little attention has been paid to her work as a translator. This is a mistake, not only because of the high quality of her translations and imitations, but also because translation was not regarded as a second-order activity at the period when she was writing, and should not be so regarded now. The article begins with a reminder of Dryden's distinctions between metaphrase, paraphrase and imitation, pointing out that Behn always preferred the greater creative freedom of the third. Then, after identifying briefly the key differences between early-modern English and French prosody, it analyses several short examples that show how Behn met the challenge of rendering Abbé Paul Tallemant's Le Voyage de l'isle d'amour (1663), which is a composite of prose and verse, into a long poem interspersing narrative passages mainly in iambic pentameter couplets with lyrical passages of greater intricacy. The essay ends by suggesting that comparison between the original French and Behn's imitation is not only of interest in its own right, but also throws into relief a fundamental difference in aesthetic and cultural practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The verse epistle is a key eighteenth-century form that developed in the Renaissance but gained critical mass only during the Restoration. Despite increasing scholarly attention to the work of Aphra Behn, including her poetry, her verse epistles remain relatively little discussed, and the role she played in establishing the form has not been recognized. Once Behn's contributions to the form are identified, their importance in her work, as measured both by their number and their quality, becomes clear, especially when compared with the work of other writers of her period. She produced examples both of the Horatian familiar epistle and, in “Oenone to Paris”, a striking rewriting of an Ovidian heroic epistle, along with amatory epistles, satirical epistles and one complimentary epistle. Not only are her verse epistles important in their own right, but they influenced other writers, male and female. They are particularly distinctive for the turn she gave, as a woman writer, to a form previously practised chiefly by men. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]