The Translator’s Invisibility

There are other senses in which Denham’s decision to translate Book II of the Aeneid addressed the displaced royalist segment of the Caroline aristocracy. By choosing this book, he situated himself in a line of aristocratic translators that stretched back to Surrey, a courtly amateur whose literary activity was instrumental in developing the elite court cultures of the Tudor and Stuart monarchs. From Tottel’s Miscellany (1557) on, Surrey was recognized as an important innovator of the sonnet and love lyric, but his work as a translator also possessed a cultural significance that would not have been lost on Denham: Surrey’s translation of Virgil proved to be a key text in the emergence of blank verse as a prevalent poetic form in the period. Following Surrey’s example, Denham turned to Book II to invent a method of poetry translation that would likewise prove culturally significant for his class. His aim was not only to reformulate the free method practiced in Caroline aristocratic culture at its height, during the 1620s and 1630s, but to devise a discursive strategy for translation that would reestablish the cultural dominance of this class: this strategy can be called fluency.

A free translation of poetry requires the cultivation of a fluent strategy in which linear syntax, univocal meaning, and varied meter produce an illusionistic effect of transparency: the translation seems as if it were not in fact a translation, but a text originally written in English.[6] In the preface to his 1632 Aeneid, John Vicars described “the manner, wherein I have aimed at these three things, Perspicuity of the matter, Fidelity to the authour, and Facility or smoothnes to recreate thee my reader” (Vicars 1632: A3r). In Denham’s words, the translation {58} should “fit” the foreign text “naturally and easily.” Fluency is impossible to achieve with close or “verbal” translation, which inhibits the effect of transparency, making the translator’s language seem foreign: “whosoever offers at Verbal Translation,” wrote Denham,

shall have the misfortune of that young Traveller, who lost his own language abroad, and brought home no other instead of it: for the grace of Latine will be lost by being turned into English words; and the grace of the English, by being turned into the Latin Phrase.

(Denham 1656:A3r)

Denham’s privileging of fluency in his own translation practice becomes clear when his two versions of Aeneid II are compared. The 1636 version is preserved in the commonplace book of Lucy Hutchinson, wife of the parliamentary colonel, John Hutchinson, with whom Denham attended Lincoln’s Inn between 1636 and 1638 (O’Hehir 1968:12–13). The book contains Denham’s translation of Aeneid II–VI—complete versions of IV–VI, partial ones of II and III. Book II is clearly a rough draft: not only does it omit large portions of the Latin text, but some passages do not give full renderings, omitting individual Latin words. There is also a tendency to follow the Latin word order, in some cases quite closely. The example cited by Theodore Banks is the often quoted line “timeo Danaos et dona ferentes,” which Denham rendered word for word as “The Grecians most when bringing gifts I feare” (Denham 1969:43–44). The convoluted syntax and the pronounced metrical regularity make the line read awkwardly, without “grace.” In the 1656 version, Denham translated this line more freely and strove for greater fluency, following a recognizably English word-order and using metrical variations to smooth out the rhythm: “Their swords less danger carry than their gifts” (Denham 1656:l. 48).

Denham’s fluent strategy is most evident in his handling of the verse form, the heroic couplet. The revision improved both the coherence and the continuity of the couplets, avoiding metrical irregularities and knotty constructions, placing the caesura to reinforce syntactical connections, using enjambment and closure to subordinate the rhyme to the meaning, sound to sense:

While all with silence & attention wait,
Thus speaks Æneas from the bed of State:
Madam, when you command us to review
Our Fate, you make our old wounds bleed anew

(ll. 11–4)