Boileau’s Longinus, Imitative Translation, and the Scriblerians: Neoclassicism as Event

In what follows, I propose that Nicolas Boileau-Despreaux’s 1674 translation of Longinus’ Peri Hypsous into French contributed to a period of the profound reconceptualisation of poetic subjectivity, producing in English letters a series of concerted efforts to describe the function and limits of imitation in translation and in poetics. This translation event generated ethical and poetic adherents whose culmination was the work of the Scriblerians—Pope, Swift, Arbuthnot, and Gay, among others—who mobilised the fictional author Martinus Scriblerus and wrote in his name. Longinus’s emphasis on imitation and associated phenomena (translation, paraphrase, association of ideas) as acts of poetic piety and Boileau’s exemplification of these ideals in his translation of the Greek philosopher catalysed a shift in the conceptions of imitation available for and influential on English writers in the last quarter of the seventeenth century. Detailing the development of neoclassical translation theory and aesthetics of imitation in the wake of Boileau, this paper argues that this transition in conceptions of translation helped to shape the aesthetic and ethical features of the satirical writing of the circle of poets whose Peri Bathous; or The Art of Sinking in Poetry (1727), attributed to Scriblerus, represents an imitative “translation” of Boileau’s Longinus.