‘Splendid Amplifications'

John Mullan has noted that ‘The Lives is remembered for its dismissive treatment of some works now universally admired’. Yet, it also praises some works that are now (near-)universally dismissed or ignored. The most pronounced example of this comes in Johnson’s remarks on Pope’s Homer . Although Johnson commended it as ‘that poetical wonder … a performance which no age or nation can pretend to equal’, its detractors have ultimately proved more influential. This landmark text remains largely absent from curricula and is often overlooked by readers of Homer, Pope, and eighteenth-century literature more generally. Even critical discussions of the Life of Pope itself frequently contain little or no engagement with Johnson’s remarks on the Homer translation. This chapter re-centres Johnson’s ‘Life of Pope’ around these remarks. It interrogates Johnson’s evaluation of Pope as both a translator and a poet by examining how Johnson used Pope’s drafts to demonstrate how the translation ‘advanced to correctness’. It also considers how Johnson’s comments can usefully illuminate the renewed critical (and general) interest in translation as a creative and interpretative act, which has been prompted by several high-profile new translations of classical texts.