Languagehat quotes extensively from a C.S. Lewis essay on Gawin Douglas' 16th Century translation of the Aeneid into Scots. Apart from sharing my delight that so improbable a translation exists at all, I should add that Lewis, predictably, has much to teach the reader about productively approaching literature in foreign idioms.

I am glad that the question of quaintness should cross our path so early in the book; let us get it out of the way once and for all. To the boor all that is alien to his own suburb and his 'specious present' (of about five years) is quaint. Until that reaction has been corrected all study of old books is unprofitable. To allow for that general quaintness which mere distance bestows and thus to be able to distinguish between authors who were really quaint in their own day and authors who seem quaint to us solely by the accident of our position—this is the very pons asinorum of literary history...

[W]hen Douglas speaks of the Salii 'hoppand and siggand wonder merely' in their 'toppit hattis' it is easy to remember that 'top hats', in our sense, were unknown to him. But it is not so easy to see aright the real qualities of his Scots language in general. Since his time it has become a patois, redolent (for those reared in Scotland) of the nursery and the kaleyard, and (for the rest of us) recalling Burns and the dialectal parts of the Waverley novels. Hence the laughter to which some readers will be moved when Douglas calls Leucaspis a 'skippair', or Priam 'the auld gray', or Vulcan the 'gudeman' of Venus; when comes becomes 'trew marrow', and Styx, like Yarrow, has 'braes', when the Trojans 'kecklit all' (risere) at the man thrown overboard in the boat race, or, newly landed in Latium, regaled themselves with 'scones'. For we see the language that Douglas wrote 'through the wrong end of the long telescope of time'. We forget that in his day it was a courtly and a literary language...

Virgil describes Aeneas, on hearing Turnus's challenge, as laetitia exsultans; Douglas says 'he hoppit up for joy, he was so glad'. To get over the low associations of the verb 'hop' in modern English is the first adjustment. But even when this has been done, there remains something—a certain cheerful briskness—in Douglas which may seem to us very un-Virgilian. Here is another example; Virgil writes:

Quamvis increpitent socii et vi cursus in altum Vela voccet, possisque sinus implere secundos. (iii. 454)

Douglas translates:

Ya, thocht thi fallowis cry out, Hillir haill! On burd! ane fair wind blawis betwix twa schetis!
[Hillir hail - a nautical cry; On burd - "aboard"]

It is admirably vivid; but it sounds very unlike the Virgil we knew at school. Let us suspend judgement and try another passage.

lumenque juventae
Purpureum et laetos oculis adflarat honores. (i. 590)

Douglas says that Aenaes' mother made him 'Lyk till ane yonkeir with twa lauchand ene' [lauchand ene - "laughing eyes"]. The picture is fresh and attractive; somehow unlike the Aeneas of our imagination. But is that because Virgil has never said anything about the beauty of Aeneas, both here and in other places? On the contrary, Virgil quite clearly has told us that his hero was of godlike beauty. There has been something in our minds, but not in the mind of Douglas, which dimmed the picture; our idea of the great king and warrior and founder apparently shrinks (as Virgil's and Douglas's did not) from the delighted vision of male beauty. Douglas shocks us by being closer to Virgil than we are. Once a man's eyes have been opened to this, he will find instances everywhere. Rosea cervice refulsit: 'her nek schane like until the rois in May'. Do you prefer Dryden's "she turned and made appear Her neck refulgent"?

But refulsit cannot possibly have had for a Roman ear the 'classical' quality which 'refulgent' has for an English. It must have felt much more like 'schane'. And rosea has disappeared altogether in Dryden's version—and with it half the sensuous vitality of the image.

I have noted before my preference for translations with such quaintness, even awkwardness if necessary. The joy of reading such literature is in discovering scenes I would never imagine, not in populating my own stale imaginations with the names of Romans, Finns or Narts.