Henry Boyd

Dromore, Ireland, 1748 - 1832, Ballintemple

BiographyLC name authority rec. n 82101239.
Biography:
Boyd, Henry (1748/9–1832), translator and Church of Ireland clergyman, was born in Dromore, co. Antrim, the son of Charles Boyd, a farmer. He was educated at Trinity College, Dublin (BA 1776), before becoming a priest. In 1785 he published a two-volume translation of Dante's Inferno in English verse, only the second of its kind, with a specimen of the Orlando Furioso of Ariosto. It was printed by subscription, and dedicated to the earl of Bristol, bishop of Derry. The dedication is dated from Killeigh, near Tullamore, which was presumably Boyd's parish at the time. In 1793 he published a volume of his own verse, Poems Chiefly Dramatic and Lyric.

In 1802 Boyd issued three volumes of an English verse translation of the whole Divina commedia of Dante, with preliminary essays, notes, and illustrations. The translation is important as the first English version of the complete Divine Comedy to be published. It was, however, limited by Boyd's view of the translator's role as that of contemporizer, and his adherence to neo-classical poetic strictures. He intended to make the work accessible to a contemporary audience, and so the model was condensed, altered, and bowdlerized, Boyd's six-line stanzas bearing no real correspondence to Dante's original tercets. The edition's value was in assisting to re-establish an audience for Dante, whose reputation had suffered a decline in the previous century. It was dedicated to Viscount Charleville, whose chaplain Boyd was until the Irish rising induced him to resign his post.

In 1805 Boyd published the Penance of Hugo: a Vision, translated from the Italian of Vincenzo Monti, with two additional cantos; and the Woodman's Tale, a poem written in the manner and metre of Spenser's Faerie Queene; but he was unable to find a publisher for his translation of Ercilla's long poem Araucana. By this time he had also become the vicar of Drumgath, but was possibly best-known until the day of his death as the vicar of Rathfriland, or as chaplain to the earl of Charleville. In 1807 he issued Petrarch's Trionfi, translated into English verse as the Triumphs of Petrarch; and in 1809, some notes of his on the fallen angels in Paradise Lost were published, with other notes and essays on Milton, under the editorship of the Revd Henry Todd, as Some Account of the Life and Writings of John Milton. Boyd died at Ballintemple, near Newry, co. Down, at an advanced age, on 18 September 1832.

(B. C. Skottowe, “Boyd, Henry (1748/9–1832),” rev. Nilanjana Banerji, in Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, eee ed. H. C. G. Matthew and Brian Harrison (Oxford: OUP, 2004); online ed., ed. Lawrence Goldman, 2004, accessed August 2015. www.oxforddnb.com)

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