Equivalency, page design, and corpus linguistics: an interdisciplinary approach to Gavin Douglas’s 'Eneados'
Keywords: Gavin Douglas
Quantitative Analysis of Literary Texts
Eneados
Supplement
Maffeo Vegio
Aeneid
Virgil
Digital Humanities
Descriptive Translation Studies
Philological Computing
Translation
Corpus Linguistics

This thesis demonstrates an interdisciplinary method for analysing medieval translations that makes use of descriptive translation studies, corpus linguistics, and philology. This method involves the compilation of a set of digital texts that can be analysed by a computer and are encoded with features salient to the study of translation. The method also advises the inclusion of information regarding layout, arguing that how texts are presented intrinsically affects how they are read and translated.
This thesis applies this method to the study of Gavin Douglas’s Eneados (1513)—the first full, direct translation of the Aeneid in either the English or Scottish tradition. Douglas’s text is posited as a suitable testing ground for this method, based on its complexity and length, which has made it a difficult text for a single critic to analyse by traditional means. This has resulted in some large gaps and contradictions in scholarly descriptions of Douglas’s translation method, which has fed into a general confusion about his periodisation, his status as a humanist, and the nature of his nationalism.
To resolve this confusion, this thesis embarks on a series of studies that examine units of equivalence across the whole of the Eneados. It discovers that Douglas’s method is not consistent but evolves away from a ‘sense for sense’ method towards a more literal, but also more expansive, one. This evolution is driven partly by content, with expansive and compendious translation proving to be stylistically conditioned, partly by the layout in Douglas’s source text—Ascensius’s (1501) edition—which also changes over the course of the text, and partly by pragmatic type, with speech attracting the addition of more original content than narrative.
Such a practice has several implications. First, it reveals that Douglas probably translated the Aeneid in its textual order. However, the evolution in his translation away from paraphrased forms of translation suggests that his Prologues were not written in order, as Prologue I criticises adaptative translation and thus was probably written towards the end of the Eneados when Douglas’s translation practice was fully realised. Consequently, Douglas’s comments in Prologue I do accurately describe his translation practice, but make a fine distinction between ‘word for word’ and literal translation, where ‘word for word’ translation describes fidelity to form and extreme lexical equivalency, whereas literal translation more specifically describes Douglas’s practice of closely following the content and grammar of his source. In this way, Douglas narrows the purview of acceptable translation to one that is tied closely to its source.
The fact that Douglas translates the Aeneid in its textual order corroborates that layout influences how a text is translated. More than that, however, it indicates that Douglas has a greater interest in the formal qualities of the Aeneid than previously acknowledged. Not only do arbitrary aspects of his source text’s layout, like page breaks, affect how he segments his translation, but he also imitates many of Virgil’s repeated lines. Such activity reveals a real interest in the quality of his source text indicating an editorial streak in Douglas’s practice.
This interest in textuality also affects how Douglas translates certain aspects of character. Douglas aligns Aeneas with his own voice in the Prologues, making Aeneas representative of Douglas’s poetic capability. This is part of an intertextual allegory that reinterprets the Aeneid as Douglas’s own evolution as a poet-translator. In this allegory, Douglas’s ideas on gender, religion, and nationality are conditioned by the textual traditions they represent. His objections to Dido are based on how she represents an alternative mode of reading the Aeneid that he objects to, not necessarily because of her gender. Likewise, his layout necessitates him to Christianise the text to avoid the attribution of Virgil’s pagan ideas to his own authority. Moreover, Douglas’s declaration that he writes in Scots is motivated more by a desire to disassociate the Eneados from romance traditions of the Aeneid that are written in English than nationalism—though the fact that he conducts the first complete and direct vernacular encounter with the Aeneid in Scots has nationalist significance. In this way, many alterations that Douglas makes to the Aeneid are justified as being in service to the text. The one big shift in his presentation of the Aeneid is the importance he attaches to rhetoric and poetic capability. While Virgil does not trust rhetoric unless it is in service to the state, Douglas creates a rhetorical, poetically expressive form of translation that can nonetheless represent truth.
The Introduction explains the significance of this project within the ‘Two Cultures’ debate and gestures towards what gaps it fills in current criticism. Chapter 1 introduces the interdisciplinary method used in this thesis, with an overview of each subject this method utilises, and a summary of some of the most important translators before Douglas and their contributions to translation theory. Chapter 2 introduces Gavin Douglas and the Eneados, providing essential information regarding Douglas’s biography and the content of the Eneados, as well as an overview of criticism concerning the Eneados and an analysis of the main scholarly debates. Chapter 3 introduces the corpus-based apparatus created for this method, which is comprised of digital versions of the Eneados and its source text. Chapter 4 measures equivalency in the Eneados, discovering that Douglas’s ideas on translation change over the course of his translation and that this is partly stylistically conditioned. Chapter 5 cross-references Douglas’s fluctuating ideas on equivalency with the layout of his source text, revealing that how he translates is largely conditioned by how his source is presented. Chapter 6 considers how Douglas handles formal, imitable aspects of Virgil’s style—namely his use of repetition—and how this indicates an editorial facet in Douglas’s intentions. Chapter 7 investigates Douglas’s methods of translation and how they fluctuate when presenting the discourse of characters—especially characters with different sociolinguistic variables. Chapter 8 summarises the results of the previous chapters and produces a comprehensive description of Douglas’s translation method.