The Translator’s Invisibility

Wroth’s freer method ultimately rested on a scholarly rationale (“Commentaries”) reminiscent of Jonson’s neoclassicism. And indeed Wroth’s farewell to the reader (“to reade, to vnderstand, and to encrease”) echoed the exhortation with which Jonson opened his Epigrammes (1616): “Pray thee, take care, that tak’st my booke in hand, / To reade it well: that is, to understand” (Jonson 1968:4). In 1634, Sir Robert Stapylton, a gentleman in ordinary of the privy chamber to the Prince of Wales, published a version of Book Four of the Aeneid in {48} which he anticipated Denham both by questioning any close translation of poetry and by assigning the freer method the same class affiliation:

It is true that wit distilled in one Language, cannot be transfused into another without losse of spirits: yet I presume such graces are retained, as those of the Noblest quality will favour this Translation, from an Original, that was sometimes the unenvied Favourite of the greatest Roman Emperour

(Stapylton 1634:A4v; DNB)

Denham consolidated the several-decades-long emergence of a neoclassical translation method in aristocratic literary culture. It may have seemed “new” to him, not because it did not have any previous advocates, but because it did: it was a modern revival of an ancient cultural practice, making Denham’s translation a simulacral “Copy” of Virgil’s true “Original,” rationalized with a Platonic theory of translation as the copy of a copy of the truth: “I have made it my principal care to follow him, as he made it his to follow Nature in all his proportions” (Denham 1656:A3v). But Denham’s sense of his own modernity was less philosophical than political, linked to a specific class and nation. Coming back from exile in France, he may have found his translation method “new” in the sense of foreign, in fact French. French translation in the 1640s was characterized by theories and practices advocating free translation of classical texts, and Denham, among such other exiled royalist writers as Abraham Cowley and Sir Richard Fanshawe, was no doubt acquainted with the work of its leading French proponent, Nicolas Perrot d’Ablancourt, a prolific translator of Greek and Latin.[2] D’Ablancourt’s freedom with Tacitus set the standard. In his preface to his version of the Annals, he wrote that

la diversité qui se trouve dans les langues est si grande, tant pour la construction et la forme des périodes, que pour les figures et les autres ornemens, qu’il faut à tous coups changer d’air et de visage, si l’on ne veut faire un corps monstreux, tel que celuy des traductions ordinaires, qui sont ou mortes et languissantes, ou confuses, et embroüillées, sans aucun ordre ny agréement.

the diversity that one finds among languages is so great, in the arrangement and shape of the periods, as in the figures and other ornaments, that it is always necessary to change the air and {49} appearance, unless one wishes to create a monstrous body, like those in ordinary translations, which are either dead or languishing, or obscure, and muddled, without any order or gracefulness.

(D’Ablancourt 1640)