In the following letter to the TLS editor, Hannibal Hamlin of the Folger Shakespeare Library corrects the record, affirming the need to remember that every age has had its translators, thanks to whose work those who come after may have more ready access to the literature of prior days:
In his review of Paul Davis’s Translation and the Poet’s Life, Henry Power writes that “the golden age of English literary translation stretched from the end of the Civil War to around the middle of the eighteenth century” (February 6), but this was surely the silver age. The golden age began a century earlier. It was not Pope’s but George Chapman’s Homer that sent Keats into raptures, and it was Arthur Golding’s Ovid that Ezra Pound called (extravagantly) “the most beautiful book in the language”. Virgil was translated by Gavin Douglas and the Earl of Surrey, Plutarch by Thomas North, and the Greek and Roman lyric poets by almost everyone. This was also the age that produced the English Bibles of Tyndale, Coverdale, and the translators of the Geneva and the “Authorized” Version, as well as the Psalms of Philip and Mary Sidney (among hundreds of others). Whoever among sixteenth- and eighteenth-century translators were literary giants and dwarves, the later writers were standing on the shoulders of their predecessors.(Emphasis added.) A neatly packaged call to bear in mind that what writers do today is made easier and better by the labors of those who came before.
