The Translator’s Invisibility

Compare Denham’s preface: “Poesie is of so subtle a spirit, that in pouring out of one Language into another, it will all evaporate; and if a new spirit be not added in the transfusion, there will remain nothing but a Caput mortuum” (Denham 1656:A3 r ). Denham echoed D’Ablancourt’s body/soul metaphor, although following Stapylton’s example (“wit distilled in one Language, cannot be transfused into another without losse of spirits”) he imagined translation alchemically, as a distillation in which the residue was termed a caput mortuum (OED; Hermans 1985:122). The alchemical image indicated that a free translation effected a radical change, in which what “was borne a Forraigner” can now be “esteeme[d] as a Native”—or, in this case, English (Stapylton 1634:A2 r).

The “new spirit” that is “added” with this translation method involves a process of domestication, in which the foreign text is imprinted with values specific to the target-language culture. D’Ablancourt called it “changer d’air et de visage.” The elliptical, discontinuous discourse of Tacitus must be translated

sans choquer les delicatesses de nostre langue & la justesse du raisonnement. […] Souvent on est contraint d’adjoûter quelque chose à sa pensée pour l’éclaircir; quelquefois il en faut retrancher une partie pour donner jour à tout le reste.

without offending the delicacy of our language and the correctness of reason. […] Often one is forced to add something to the thought in order to clarify it; sometimes it is necessary to retrench one part so as to give birth to all the rest.

(D’Ablancourt 1640)

Henry Rider reverted to a clothing metaphor in the preface of his 1638 translation of Horace:

Translations of Authors from one language to another, are like old garments turn’d into new fashions; in which though the {50} stuffe be still the same, yet the die and trimming are altered, and in the making, here something added, there something cut away.

(Rider 1638:A3r)

Denham’s formulation used a similar metaphor while nodding toward the classical author with whom D’Ablancourt pioneered the free method:

as speech is the apparel of our thoughts, so are there certain Garbs and Modes of speaking, which vary with the times […] and this I think Tacitus means, by that which he calls Sermonem temporis istius auribus accommodatum […] and therefore if Virgil must needs speak English, it were fit he should speak not only as a man of this Nation, but as a man of this age.

(Denham 1656:A3r)

Denham’s advocacy of free translation was laden with a nationalism that, even if expressed with courtly self-effacement, ultimately led to a contradictory repression of the method’s parallels and influences, foreign as well as English:

if this disguise I have put upon him (I wish I could give it a better name) fit not naturally and easily on so grave a person, yet it may become him better than that Fools-Coat wherein the French and Italian have of late presented him.

(Denham 1656:A3v)