The Translator’s Invisibility

The ultimate aim of the book is to force translators and their readers to reflect on the ethnocentric violence of translation and hence to write and read translated texts in ways that seek to recognize the linguistic and cultural difference of foreign texts. What I am advocating is not an indiscriminate valorization of every foreign culture or a metaphysical {42} concept of foreignness as an essential value; indeed, the foreign text is privileged in a foreignizing translation only insofar as it enables a disruption of target-language cultural codes, so that its value is always strategic, depending on the cultural formation into which it is translated. The point is rather to elaborate the theoretical, critical, and textual means by which translation can be studied and practiced as a locus of difference, instead of the homogeneity that widely characterizes it today.

Chapter 2. Canon

Words in One Language Elegantly us’d
Will hardly in another be excus’d,
And some that Rome admir’d in Caesars Time
May neither suit Our Genius nor our Clime.
The Genuine Sence, intelligibly Told,
Shews a Translator both Discreet and Bold.

Earl of Roscommon

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.

I

{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).