The Translator’s Invisibility

(ll. 26–29)

(ll. 95–98)

(ll. 196–203)

Denham’s fluent strategy allowed the 1656 version to read more “naturally and easily” so as to produce the illusion that Virgil wrote in English, or that Denham succeeded in “doing him more right,” making available in the most transparent way the foreign writer’s intention or the essential meaning of the foreign text. Yet Denham made available, not so much Virgil, as a translation that signified a peculiarly English meaning, and the revisions provide further evidence for this domestication. Thus, the 1636 version translated “Teucri” (l. 251) and “urbs” (l. 363) as “Trojans” and “Asias empresse,” whereas the 1656 version used just “The City” (ll. 243, 351), suggesting at once Troy and London. And whereas the 1636 version translated “sedes Priami” (l. 437) as “Priams pallace” and “domus interior” (l. 486) as “roome,” the 1656 version used “the Court” and “th’Inner Court” at these and other points (ll. 425, 438, 465, 473). Even “Apollinis infula” (l. 430), a reference to a headband worn by Roman priests, was more localized, turned into a reference to the episcopacy: in 1636, Denham rendered the phrase as “Apollos mitre,” in 1656 simply as “consecrated Mitre” (l. 416). The increased fluency of Denham’s revision may have made his translation seem “more right,” but this effect actually concealed a rewriting of the Latin text that endowed it with subtle allusions to English settings and institutions, strengthening the historical analogy between the fall of Troy and the defeat of the royalist party.