The Translator’s Invisibility

So finish’d Priams

Fates, and thus he dy’d,Seeing Troy burn, whose proud commands did sway
So many powerful Realms in Asia;
Now on the strand his sacred body lyes
Headless, without a Name or Obsequies.

(Ogilby 1654:217, 219)[5]

Denham clearly exceeds his predecessors in the liberties he takes with the Latin text. His addition about the “signal and peculiar Fate” becomes more conspicuous and historically charged in such a comparison, as does his deletion of local markers, including the Latin “litore” (1.557), a word that situates Priam’s fall near the sea and is {56} rendered by most of the other translators (“shore,” “sea side,” “strand”). Denham’s translation not only allows the death to be shifted inland, but throughout he makes a noticeable effort to domesticate architectural terms, likening the Trojan structures to the royal buildings in England. Consider this passage where the Greeks are forcing their way into Priam’s palace:

who drove the winged steeds,Enter the Court; whom all the youth succeeds
Of Scyros Isle, who flaming firebrands flung
Up to the roof, Pyrrhus himself among
The foremost with an Axe an entrance hews
Through beams of solid Oak, then freely views
The Chambers, Galleries, and Rooms of State,
Where Priam and the ancient Monarchs sate.
At the first Gate an Armed Guard appears;
But th’Inner Court with horror, noise and tears
Confus’dly fill’d, the womens shrieks and cries
The Arched Vaults re-echo to the skies;
Sad Matrons wandring through the spacious Rooms
Embrace and kiss the Posts: Then Pyrrhus comes
Full of his Father, neither Men nor Walls
His force sustain, the torn Port-cullis falls,
Then from the hinge, their strokes the Gates divorce:
[…]
Then they the secret Cabinets invade,

(Denham 1656:ll. 453–480, 491)

Denham’s “Chambers, Galleries, and Rooms of State,” “Inner Court,” “Arched Vaults,” “secret Cabinets” render various Latin terms, but the Latin is much less defined, and it noticeably refers to a different architecture: “domus intus,” “domus interior” (“the house within”), “atria longa” (“long halls”), “penetralia” (“interior”), “cauae” (“hollow places”), “thalami” (“the women’s bed-rooms”) (ibid.:ll. 484–7, 503). Although the renderings used by Denham’s predecessors display a degree of domestication as well, they do not match the extremity of his: “the house, the court, and secret chambers eke,” “the palace within,” “the hollow halles” (Howard 1557:civ); “the roomes, and all that was within,” “the spacious pallace” (Wroth 1620:Er); “the rooms within, great halls and parlours faire,” “the rooms within” (Vicars 1632:45); {57} “the house within,” “long halls,” “Priams bed-chamber,” “arched Sielings” (Ogilby 1654:215). And Denham is alone in using “Portcullis” for the Latin “postes” (“door-posts”), refusing such previous and likely renderings as “pillars,” “gates,” and “posts” for a word that conjures up the architectural structure most closely associated with aristocracy and monarchy, the castle. Denham’s architectural lexicon permits the description of the Greek attack to evoke other, more recently besieged castles, like Windsor Castle stormed by the parliamentary armies, or perhaps Farnham Castle, where in 1642 Denham was forced to surrender the royal garrison he commanded there. Denham’s domesticating translation casts the destruction of Troy in a form that resonates with certain moments in English history, those when aristocratic rule was dominant (the medieval past) or allied, however tenuously, with the monarchy (the absolutist experiment of the 1630s), or decisively defeated and displaced (the civil wars and Interregnum).