Surrey’s Aeneid

Chapter 6 reconsiders the Earl of Surrey’s reputation as an exemplar of English humanist translation. His translations of Books II and IV of the Aeneid reveal an idiosyncratic, highly experimental translator. Although often and rightly praised for his concise, scrupulously faithful rendering of the Aeneid, Surrey achieved this concision by selectively omitting words from Virgil’s original Latin. His compression of Virgil’s text was driven by his experiments to capture the formal effects of Latin metre. In certain passages, he sought exact line-for-line translations between his English pentameters and Virgil’s hexameters. However, his experiments in poetic form were not taken up by later English translators. Surrey represents only a modern ideal of English humanism, and is unrepresentative of wider sixteenth-century translation practice.