The Translator’s Invisibility

“Written in 1636” proclaimed a continuity between Denham’s translation and the years when court poetry and drama were setting the dominant literary trends in England, when the Caroline experiment in absolutism reached its apex, and when Denham himself, the twenty-year-old son of a baron of the Exchequer, was preparing for a legal career at Lincoln’s Inn, dabbling in literary pursuits like translating the Aeneid. The Destruction of Troy was revised and published much later, in 1656—after Denham returned from several years of exile with the Caroline court in France, soon {45} after he was arrested in the Commonwealth’s campaign to suppress royalist insurgency, a suspect in a military counterplot, and just a year after the second edition of the text by which he is best remembered today, Coopers Hill (1642), a topographical poem that offers a politically tendentious evocation of English history on the eve of the civil wars (O’Hehir 1968; Underdown 1960). At this later juncture, Denham’s translation assumes the role of a cultural political practice: “Written in 1636” it functions partly as a nostalgic glance back toward less troubled times for royal hegemony and partly as a strategic cultural move in the present, wherein Denham plans to develop a royalist aesthetic in translation to be implemented now and for the future, when hegemony is regained. “The hope of doing [Virgil] more right,” Denham asserted in his preface, “is the only scope of this Essay, by opening this new way of translating this Author, to those whom youth, leisure, and better fortune makes fitter for such under-takings” (Denham 1656:A2v). Denham saw his audience as the coming generations of English aristocracy, who, unlike him, would have the “better fortune” of escaping social displacement in civil wars.

The aristocratic affiliation would have also been perceived by contemporary readers, from various classes and with differing political tendencies. The translation was cited in “An Advertisement of Books newly published” that appeared in Mercurius Politicus, the widely circulated newsweekly licensed by Parliament to present a propagandistic survey of current events (Frank 1961:205–210, 223–226). The notice revealed the translator’s identity and used the title “Esquire,” indicating not only his status as a gentleman, but perhaps his legal education as well: “The Destruction of Troy, an Essay upon the second Book of Virgils Æneis. Written by John Denham, Esquire” (Mercurius Politicus: 6921).

The social functioning of Denham’s translation becomes clear when his preface is considered in a broader context of translation theory and practice during the seventeenth century. The first point to observe is that Denham’s “way of translating” was hardly “new” in 1656. He was following Horace’s dictum in Ars Poetica that the poet should avoid any word-for-word rendering: “For, being a Poet, thou maist feigne, create, / Not care, as thou wouldst faithfully translate, / To render word for word”—in Ben Jonson’s un-Horatian, line-by-line version from 1605 (Jonson 1968:287). But where Horace took translation as one practice of the poet, Denham took poetry as the goal of translation, especially poetry translation: “I conceive it a vulgar error in translating {46} Poets, to affect being Fides Interpres” he wrote, because poetic discourse requires more latitude to capture its “spirit” than a close adherence to the foreign text would allow (Denham 1656:A2v–A3r). Denham’s term “fides interpres” refers to translations of classical poetry that aim for such an adherence, made not by poets, but by scholars, including scholarly poets (Jonson’s Horace) and teachers who translate to produce school textbooks. John Brinsley described his 1633 prose version of Virgil’s Eclogues as

Translated Grammatically, and also according to the proprietie of our English tongue, so farre as Grammar and the verse will well permit. Written chiefly for the good of schooles, to be used according to the directions in the Preface to the painfull Schoolemaster.

Denham’s slur against this method is tellingly couched in class terms: “I conceive it a vulgar error.”