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- Title
John Dryden's Sister Arts: Face-Painting and Translation.
- Authors
Zou, Qifei
- Abstract
This essay explores an alternative figuration in Dryden's thought and writing on the sister arts: face-painting and translation. In this parallel, Dryden conceives of the face as the original text, the face-paint as the translated word, the cosmetician as the translator, and vice versa. To explore the interrelationship of these arts is to reveal the contradictory impulses that shape Dryden's 1697 Aeneis , reconciling opposing critical views of his translation strategies. In this essay, I survey the prevalent satiric and aesthetic functions of face-painting in Dryden's writings. I show that in his essays of the 1690s, Dryden's ambivalent views on cosmetics inform his views on translation: both the original text and the unpainted face are sacred designs that, paradoxically, may still be beautified by the translator's expression or the cosmetician's paint. In translation, Dryden is thus caught between the desire to foreground his own paint and the obligation to preserve Virgil's design. By way of conclusion, I offer a reading of Dryden's three renderings of the Aeneas and Lausus episode (Aeneid X), in which he liberally daubs and delicately paints upon Virgil's original. These diverse strategies are poetic manifestations of the conflicting energies that define Dryden's sister arts, face-painting and translation.
- Subjects
DRYDEN, John, 1631-1700; FACE painting; COSMETICS; AESTHETICS; PHILOSOPHY
- Publication
Review of English Studies, 2023, Vol 74, Issue 313, p95
- ISSN
0034-6551
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1093/res/hgac041