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.
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.
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’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 sought to distinguish his translation from burlesque versions of the Aeneid that were fashionable on the Continent, Paul Scarron’s Virile Travesti (1648–1649) and Giovanni Battista Lalli’s Eneide Travestita (1633) (Scarron 1988:10). He, like other translators associated with the exiled Caroline court, was following another French fashion in translation, although one linked closer to a monarchy whose absolutist experiment proved effective: D’Ablancourt’s version of the Annals was dedicated to the powerful royal minister Cardinal Richelieu. Denham’s translation of Virgil in fact reflects the strong resemblance between English and French translation methods during the period. But the deep nationalism of this method works to conceal its origins in another national culture—a contradiction that occurs in Denham’s case because the method answers so specifically to an English problem: the need for {51} a “new” cultural practice that will enable the defeated royalist segment of the Caroline aristocracy to regain its hegemonic status in English culture. In his commendatory verses “To Sir Richard Fanshawe upon his Translation of Pastor Fido” (1648), Denham calls free translation “a new and nobler way” (Steiner 1975:63). Given the political significance of this method, it is important for Denham to translate a text in a genre that treats nobility, the epic, and refuse the French burlesques that debased Virgil’s aristocratic theme by treating social inferiors in the epic manner.
Denham’s intention to enlist translation in a royalist cultural politics at home is visible both in his selection of the foreign text and in the discursive strategies he adopted in his version. The choice to translate Virgil’s Aeneid in early modern England could easily evoke Geoffrey of Monmouth’s legend that Brute, the grandson of Aeneas, founded Britain and became the first in a succession of British monarchs. Although this like the Arthurian legends was losing credibility among historians and antiquarians, the matter of Troy continued to be the cultural support of a strong nationalism, and it was repeatedly revised from different and often conflicting ideological standpoints in a wide range of texts—from William Camden’s Britannia (1586) to Jonson’s Speeches at Prince Henry’s Barriers (1609) to Thomas Heywood’s Life of Merlin (1641).[3] The early Stuart kings were often given a Trojan genealogy. Anthony Munday’s contribution to the royal progress through London, The Triumphs of Re-united Britannia (1605), referred to James I as “our second Brute”; Heywood described his narrative as “a Chronographicall History of all the Kings and memorable passages of this kingdom, from Brute to the Reigne of our Royall Soveraigne King Charles” (Parsons 1929:403, 407). In the political debates during the Interregnum, a Trojan genealogy could be used to justify both representative government and absolute monarchy. In 1655, the parliamentarian polemicist William Prynne interpreted the significance of the legend as “1. A Warre to shake off Slavery, and recover publick Liberty. 2. A kinde of Generall Parliamentary Councell summoned by Brute”; whereas in a legal commentary published in 1663 Edward Waterhouse argued that Brute “by his consent to reward the valour and fidelity of his Companions” instituted laws “both touching his Royal Prerogative, and their civil Security in life, member, goods and Lawes” (Jones 1944:401, 403).
Denham’s own appropriation of the Brute legend in Coopers Hill swells with patriotic fervor, but it also possesses the awareness that the Trojan genealogy is a legend, increasingly under attack yet able {52} to function in cultural political struggles, and even, somewhat contradictorily, true. In a passage that reflects on the vista of London and environs, Denham writes that “The Gods great Mother,” Cybele,
The mention of “contest” in the parenthetical remark seems at first to question the credibility of heroic genealogies for English kings, whether historical or literary: “contest” as a reference to the historiographical “controversy” or “debate.” But the couplet quickly shifts the issue from credibility to social effectivity: even if of questionable authenticity, poetic genealogies (“Homers birth”) are cultural capital and can motivate political and military conflict. In England’s case, however, the heroic genealogies are metaphysically validated, by “Nature design’d.” For Denham, the Brute legend constituted a strategic move in an ideological cultural practice, poetry in the service of a specific political agenda. But, like many of his contemporaries, he was apt to mask these material conditions with providentialist claims and appeals to natural law that underwrite a notion of racial superiority.
Denham’s choice of Virgil’s Aeneid was uniquely suited to the nationalistic leanings of his domesticating translation method. And in line with the recurrent Trojan genealogies of English kings, his choice of an excerpt he entitled The Destruction of Troy allowed him to suggest, more directly, the defeat of the Caroline government and his support for monarchy in England. Denham’s political designs can be seen, first, in his decision to prepare Book II for publication. In 1636, he had {53} written a version of the Aeneid II–VI, and in 1668, he revised and published part of IV under the title, The Passion of Dido for Aeneas. In 1656, he chose to issue the excerpt whose “argument,” the fall of Troy, better lent itself to topicality. The topical resonance of his version becomes strikingly evident when it is juxtaposed to the Latin text and previous English versions. Book II had already been done in several complete translations of the Aeneid, and it had been singled out twice by previous translators, Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, and Sir Thomas Wroth. Yet both of them had rendered the entire book (some eight hundred lines of Latin text). Denham, in contrast, published an abbreviated translation (some 550 lines) that ended climactically with Priam’s death.
[3]
The Brute legend in English historiography is treated by Parsons 1929, Brinkley 1967, Jones 1944, and MacDougall 1982. Bush 1962 offers a useful précis of the issues.