The Translator’s Invisibility

Fluency assumes a theory of language as communication that, in practice, manifests itself as a stress on immediate intelligibility and an avoidance of polysemy, or indeed any play of the signifier that {61} erodes the coherence of the signified. Language is conceived as a transparent medium of personal expression, an individualism that construes translation as the recovery of the foreign writer’s intended meaning. As Denham’s preface asserted, “Speech is the apparel of our thoughts” (Denham 1656:A3r). Now it will be worthwhile to recall the recurrent metaphors used in the translators’ prefaces, the analogy of translation as clothing in which the foreign author is dressed, or the translated text as the body animated by the foreign writer’s soul. The assumption is that meaning is a timeless and universal essence, easily transmittable between languages and cultures regardless of the change of signifiers, the construction of a different semantic context out of different cultural discourses, the inscription of target-language codes and values in every interpretation of the foreign text. “W.L., Gent.” noted that his versions of Virgil’s eclogues involved their own violence against the foreign texts, “breaking the shell into many peeces,” but he was nonetheless “carefull to preserve the Kernell safe and whole, from the violence of a wrong, or wrested Interpretation.” Some translators gave more of a sense that they faced a welter of competing “Commentaries” (Wroth 1620) from which they selected to rationalize their translation strategy. But none was sufficiently aware of the domestication enacted by fluent translation to demystify the effect of transparency, to suspect that the translated text is irredeemably partial in its interpretation. Denham admitted that he was presenting a naturalized English Virgil, but he also insisted that “neither have I anywhere offered such violence to his sense, as to make it seem mine, and not his” (Denham 1656:A4r).

Fluency can be seen as a discursive strategy ideally suited to domesticating translation, capable not only of executing the ethnocentric violence of domestication, but also of concealing this violence by producing the effect of transparency, the illusion that this is not a translation, but the foreign text, in fact, the living thoughts of the foreign author, “there being certain Graces and Happinesses peculiar to every Language, which gives life and energy to the words” (Denham 1656:A3r). Transparency results in a concealment of the cultural and social conditions of the translation—the aesthetic, class, and national ideologies linked to Denham’s translation theory and practice. And this is what makes fluent translation particularly effective in Denham’s bid to restore aristocratic culture to its dominant position: the effect of transparency is so powerful in domesticating cultural forms because it presents them as true, right, beautiful, {62} natural. Denham’s great achievement, in his translations as well as his poems, was to make the heroic couplet seem natural to his successors, thus developing a form that would dominate English poetry and poetry translation for more than a century.

Later writers like John Dryden and Samuel Johnson recognized that the truly “new” thing in Denham was the stylistic refinement of his verse. They were fond of quoting Denham’s lines on the Thames in Coopers Hill and commenting on their beauty, always formulated as prosodic smoothness, what Dryden in the “Dedication of the Æneis” (1697) called their “sweetness” (Dryden 1958:1047).[7] And both Dryden and Johnson saw Denham as an innovator in translation: they were fond of quoting his commendatory verses to Fanshawe’s Il Pastor Fido, singling out for praise the lines where Denham advocated the free method:

That servile path, thou nobly do’st decline,
Of tracing word by word and Line by Line;
A new and nobler way thou do’st pursue,
To make Translations, and Translators too:
They but preserve the Ashes, thou the Flame,
True to his Sence, but truer to his Fame.

(Denham 1969:ll. 15–16, 21–24)

Dryden joined Denham in opposing “a servile, literal Translation” because, he noted in his preface to Ovid’s Epistles (1680), such translation is not fluent: “either perspicuity or gracefulness will frequently be wanting” (Dryden 1956:116).