Creating a literary koine: how Gavin Douglas translates repetition in the Eneados

Gavin Douglas’s ‘Eneados’ is notable both for being the first, direct, full translation of Virgil’s ‘Aeneid’ and Maffeo Vegio’s ‘Supplement’, and its extreme fidelity to Virgil’s text, though this fidelity is often at odds with Douglas’s poetic interpolation. As a result, scholars often describe the ‘Eneados’ as faithful to Virgil’s meaning but not style. This paper is a study of how Douglas translates lines that are repeated in the ‘Aeneid’ as a means of evaluating this statement. The finding is that Douglas translates repetition accurately and adopts it as a means of correcting the ‘Supplement’. This proves his interest in restoring the primacy of Virgil’s text over alternative versions. Such effort amounts to a literary ‘koine’, but one manifested by the vernacular.