The Translator’s Invisibility

Still, in recommending greater freedom against the grammarians, Denham was advocating a classical translation method that reemerged in England decades before he published his version of Virgil (Amos 1920). Thomas Phaer, whose translations of the Aeneid date back to 1558, asserted that he “followed the counsell of Horace, teaching the duty of a good interpretour, Qui quae desperat nitescere possit, relinquit, by which occasion, somewhat, I haue in places omitted, somewhat altered” (Phaer 1620:V2r). A freer translation method was advocated with greater frequency from the 1620s onward, especially in aristocratic and court circles. Sir Thomas Hawkins, a Catholic who was knighted by James I and whose translations of Jesuit tracts were dedicated to Queen Henrietta Maria, prefaced his 1625 selection of Horace’s odes by fending off complaints that he did not imitate classical meters:

many (no doubt) will say, Horace is by mee forsaken, his Lyrick softnesse, and emphaticall Muse maymed: That in all there is a generall defection from his genuine Harmony. Those I must tell, I haue in this translation, rather sought his Spirit, then Numbers; yet the Musique of Verse not neglected neither.

(Hawkins 1625: Ar–Av; DNB)

In a 1628 version of Virgil’s eclogues that imposed a courtly aesthetic on the Latin text, “W.L., Gent.” felt compelled to justify his departures with a similar apology:

{47} Some Readers I make no doubt they wil meet with in these dainty mouth’d times, that will taxe them, for not comming resolved word for word, and line for line with the Author […] I used the freedome of a Translator, not tying myselfe to the tyranny of a Grammatical construction, but breaking the shell into many peeces, was only carefull to preserve the Kernell safe and whole, from the violence of a wrong, or wrested Interpretation.

(Latham 1628:6r; Patterson 1987:164–168)

As early as 1616, Barten Holyday, who became chaplain to Charles I and was created doctor of divinity at the king’s order, introduced his translation of Persius by announcing that “I haue not herein bound my selfe with a ferularie superstition to the letter: but with the ancient libertie of a Translator, haue vsed a moderate paraphrase, where the obscuritie did more require it” (Holyday 1635:A5r–A5v; DNB). Holyday articulated the opposition to the grammarians that Denham would later join, and with a similarly Latinate tag, calling close translation “a ferularie superstition,” belief propagated with the rod (ferula), school discipline—a joke designed especially for a grammarian.

In 1620, Sir Thomas Wroth, a member of the Somerset gentry who affected the literary pursuits of a courtly amateur (he called his epigrams The Abortive of an Idle Houre), anticipated Denham in several respects (DNB). Wroth likewise chose to translate the second book of the Aeneid and to call it The Destruction of Troy, but he also defined his translatorly “freedome” in “A Reqvest to the Reader”:

Giue not vp your casting verdict rashly, though you find mee sometimes wandring (which I purposely do) out of the visible bounds, but deliberately take notice that I stray not from the scope and intent of the Author, iustified by the best Commentaries: and so I leaue you to reade, to vnderstand, and to encrease.

(Wroth 1620:A2v)