TheEneados is a translation intoMiddle Scots ofVirgil's LatinAeneid, completed by the poet and clergymanGavin Douglas in 1513.
The title of Gavin Douglas' translation "Eneados" is given in the heading of a manuscript atCambridge University, which refers to the "twelf bukis of Eneados." The title of the first printed edition (London, 1553) wasThe xiii Bukes of Eneados of the famose Poete Virgill.[1]
The work was the first complete translation of a majorclassical text in theScots language and the first successful example of its kind in anyAnglic language. In addition to Douglas's version of Virgil'sAeneid, the work also contains a translation of the "thirteenth book" written by the fifteenth-century poetMaffeo Vegio as a continuation of theAeneid. Douglas supplied original prologue verses for each of the thirteen books, and a series of concluding poems. There is also an incomplete commentary, covering only part of the first book, written as marginal notes (almost certainly in Douglas's own hand) in the Cambridge manuscript.
In the first general prologue Douglas compares the merits of Virgil andChaucer as master poets and attacks the printerWilliam Caxton for his inadequate rendering of aFrench translation of theAeneid.
Douglas's reputation among modern readers was bolstered somewhat in 1934 whenEzra Pound included several passages of theEneados in hisABC of Reading. Comparing Douglas to Chaucer, Pound wrote that "the texture of Gavin's verse is stronger, the resilience greater than Chaucer's".[2]C. S. Lewis was also an admirer of the work: "About Douglas as a translator there may be two opinions; about hisAeneid (Prologues and all) as an English book there can be only one. Here a great story is greatly told and set off with original embellishments which are all good—all either delightful or interesting—in their diverse ways."[3]Kenneth Rexroth called it "a spectacular poem", albeit one that "bears little relationship to the spirit of Virgil".[4]
Douglas translates the opening of the poem thus:
The batalis and the man I wil discrive,
Fra Troys boundis first that fugitive
By fait to Ytail come and cost Lavyne;
Our land and sey kachit with mekil pyne,
By fors of goddis abuse, from euery steid,
Of cruell Juno throu ald remembrit fede.
Gret pane in batail sufferit he alsso,
Or he his goddis brocht in Latio,
And belt the cite, fra quham, of nobill fame,
The Latyne pepill takyn heth thar name,
And eik the faderis, princis of Alba,
Cam, and the wallaris of gret Rome alswa.
The principal early manuscripts of theEneados are
The first printed edition appeared in London in 1553, from the press of William Copland. It displays an anti–Roman Catholic bias, in that references (in the prologues) to the Virgin Mary, Purgatory, and Catholic ceremonies are altered or omitted; in addition, 66 lines of the translation, describing the amour of Dido and Aeneas, are omitted as indelicate. The 1710 Edinburgh folio edited byThomas Ruddiman, which includes a full glossary and a biography of Douglas byBishop John Sage, is based on the 1553 edition and the Ruthven manuscript, perhaps with corrections from the Bath manuscript. TheBannatyne Club edition of 1839 is a printing of the Cambridge manuscript.[6]
The standard modern edition of theEneados is the four-volumeScottish Text Society edition by David F. C. Coldwell.[7] The recent two-volume critical edition by Gordon Kendal regularises the spelling.[8]