Fluency emerges in English-language translation during the early modern period, a feature of aristocratic literary culture in seventeenth-century England, and over the next two hundred years it is valued for diverse reasons, cultural and social, in accordance with the vicissitudes of the hegemonic classes. At the same time, the illusion of transparency produced in fluent translation enacts a thoroughgoing domestication that masks the manifold conditions of the translated text, its exclusionary impact on foreign cultural values, but also on those at home, eliminating translation strategies that resist transparent discourse, closing off any thinking about cultural and social alternatives that do not favor English social elites. The dominance of fluency in English-language translation until today has led to the forgetting of these conditions and exclusions, requiring their recovery to intervene against the contemporary phase of this dominance. The following genealogy aims to trace the rise of fluency as a canon of English-language translation, showing how it achieved canonical status, interrogating its exclusionary effects on the canon of foreign literatures in English, and reconsidering the cultural and social values that it excludes at home.
{44} In 1656, Sir John Denham published a translation with the running title, The Destruction of Troy, An Essay upon the Second Book of Virgils Æneis. Written in the year, 1636. The title page is one among many remarkable things about this book: it omits any sign of authorship in favor of a bold reference to the gap between the dates of composition and publication. Most early seventeenth-century translations of classical texts are published with a signature, if not a full name (John Ashmore, John Ogilby, Robert Stapylton, John Vicars), then at least initials and some indication of social position, “Sir T: H:,” “W.L., Gent.” Denham’s omission of his name may be taken as the self-effacing gesture of a courtly amateur, presenting himself as not seriously pursuing a literary career, not asserting any individualistic concept of authorship (the title page presents the translation as no more than an “essay”) and thus implying that his text is the fruit of hours idle, not spent in the employ of royal authority, in political office or military service.[1] Denham’s title page presented his text as a distinctively aristocratic gesture in literary translation, typical of court culture in the Tudor and Stuart periods, and this is clear even in the imprint, For Humphrey Moseley, one of the most active publishers of elite literature during the seventeenth century and a staunch royalist who advertised his political views in the prefaces to his publications. Once the social conditions of Denham’s book are recognized, the temporal gap indicated by the dates on the title page fills with significance from his own activities in support of the royalist cause, both in the royal government and army during the civil wars and for the exiled royal family and court during the Interregnum. Perhaps the omission of his name should also be taken as an effort to conceal his identity, a precaution taken by royalist writers who intended their work to be critical of the Commonwealth (Potter 1989:23–24).
“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 welclass="underline" “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.”
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:
[1]
My conception of Denham and Wroth (discussed on pp. 44, 47) as “courtly amateurs” assumes Helgerson 1983.