William Wordsworth, Translations of Chaucer and Virgil. Ed. Bruce E. Graver. Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1998. ISBN: 0801434521. Price: $80.

Bruce Graver's new volume in the Cornell Wordsworth series provides the first full account of Wordsworth's most extensive work as a translator—his modernizations of selections from Chaucer, begun in late 1801, and the incomplete translation of Virgil's Aeneid on which he worked chiefly in 1823-1824, with significant revisions in 1827. It is actually two books in one. The first 152 pages present and contextualize Wordsworth's versions of "The Prioress's Tale," "The Cuckoo and the Nightingale" (thought by Wordsworth to be Chaucer's), Troilus and Cresida, Book V, ll. 519-686, and "The Manciple's Tale" (including the portrait of the manciple from the "General Prologue" to the Canterbury Tales). Except for the work on the "Manciple's Tale," which was first published by De Selincourt in 1947, all of the modernizations were published in Wordsworth's lifetime. "The Prioress's Tale" first appeared in 1820 in the River Duddon volume. The "Cuckoo" and the extract from Troilus were published in R.H. Horne, The Poems of Geoffrey Chaucer, Modernized (1841) and subsequently in Wordsworth's Poems, Chiefly of Early and Late Years (1842). Pages 153-583 are devoted to the Virgil work. The translation of the Aeneid is the longest and, according to Graver, most neglected poetic composition of Wordsworth's later years. Begun as an experiment, the project developed into an attempt "to supplant John Dryden as the pre-eminent voice of Virgil in English." By 1830, Wordsworth had to acknowledge that his experiment had failed, but not before he had completed translations of Books I-III (entire), Book IV, ll. 688-692, and Book VIII, ll. 337-366, and had engaged in extended and revelatory correspondence and conversation about principles of translation with Lord Lonsdale, Coleridge, and (through his nephew Christopher Wordsworth, Jr.) some of the leading classical scholars of his day. Only a small selection of the translation—from the end of Book I, lines 901 ff.—appeared in print in Wordsworth's lifetime, in a journal of classical studies, The Philological Museum (February 1832). In 1947, Ernest de Selincourt published for the first time a complete text, in reduced type, as Appendix A of Volume IV of the Poetical Works of William Wordsworth. Like the Cornell volumes that precede it, Graver's book is a model of scholarly care and a treasure chest of information about the composition, revision, publication, and reception of the work it presents. In addition to its presentation of authoritative reading texts, the book contains photographic reproductions and transcriptions of the most important manuscripts, a full census of manuscripts, and a meticulous account of the development of the poems from draft through fair copies and, where applicable, into first printed versions and subsequent revisions. Appendices to the Aeneid work provide selections from a series of letters of 1823-1824 to Lord Lonsdale in which Wordsworth outlines his theories of translation, a photographic reproduction of Coleridge's notes on Book I in DC MS 101, and a text of the selection published in the The Philological Museum. Coleridge's commentary on Book I, presented here for the first time in its entirety, is itself a major contribution, allowing valuable insight into the evolution of both poets' thinking about poetic diction over the quarter-century separating the Lyrical Ballads from the Aeneid work. One example may suggest the fascinating nature of these notes, which Graver characterizes as "witty, cranky, incisive, and obtuse, sometimes all at once" (163). Responding to Wordsworth's translation of Virgil's "Multa malus simulans, vanâ spe lusit amantem" as "His arts conceal'd the crime, and gave vain scope / In Dido's bosom to a trembling hope" (I. 479-480), Coleridge tells Wordsworth, "You have convinced me of the necessary injury which …