The Translator’s Invisibility

We gave them gone, and to Mycenae sail’d,
And Troy reviv’d, her mourning face unvail’d;
All through th’unguarded Gates with joy resort
To see the slighted Camp, the vacant Port;

(ll. 26–29)

Old guilt fresh malice gives; The peoples ears
He fills with rumors, and their hearts with fears,
And them the Prophet to his party drew.
But why do I these thankless truths pursue;

(ll. 95–98)

Laocoon, Neptunes Priest, upon the day
Devoted to that God, a Bull did slay,
When two prodigious serpents were descride,
Whose circling stroaks the Seas smooth face divide;
Above the deep they raise their scaly Crests,
And stem the floud with their erected brests,
Their winding tails advance and steer their course,
And ’gainst the shore the breaking Billow force.

(ll. 196–203)

Denham’s fluent strategy allowed the 1656 version to read more “naturally and easily” so as to produce the illusion that Virgil wrote in English, or that Denham succeeded in “doing him more right,” making available in the most transparent way the foreign writer’s intention or the essential meaning of the foreign text. Yet Denham made available, not so much Virgil, as a translation that signified a peculiarly English meaning, and the revisions provide further evidence for this domestication. Thus, the 1636 version translated “Teucri” (l. 251) and “urbs” (l. 363) as “Trojans” and “Asias empresse,” whereas the 1656 version used just “The City” (ll. 243, 351), suggesting at once Troy and London. And whereas the 1636 version translated “sedes Priami” (l. 437) as “Priams pallace” and “domus interior” (l. 486) as “roome,” the 1656 version used “the Court” and “th’Inner Court” at these and other points (ll. 425, 438, 465, 473). Even “Apollinis infula” (l. 430), a reference to a headband worn by Roman priests, was more localized, turned into a reference to the episcopacy: in 1636, Denham rendered the phrase as “Apollos mitre,” in 1656 simply as “consecrated Mitre” (l. 416). The increased fluency of Denham’s revision may have made his translation seem “more right,” but this effect actually concealed a rewriting of the Latin text that endowed it with subtle allusions to English settings and institutions, strengthening the historical analogy between the fall of Troy and the defeat of the royalist party.