Early Modern Cultures of Translation 081224740X, 9780812247404

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Early Modern Cultures of Translation

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Early Modern Cultures of Translation Edited by

Karen Newman and Jane Tylus

Published in Cooperation with Folger Shakespeare Library

Universit y of Pennsylvania Press Phil adelphia

Copyright © 2015 University of Pennsylvania Press All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher. Published by University of Pennsylvania Press Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112 www.upenn.edu/pennpress Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Early modern cultures of translation / edited by Karen Newman and Jane Tylus. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8122-4740-4 1. Translating and interpreting—History—16th century— Case studies. 2. Translating and interpreting—History—17th century— Case studies. 3. Translating and interpreting—History—18th century— Case studies. 4. Translations—Publishing—History—16th century— Case studies. 5. Translations—Publishing—History—17th century— Case studies. 6. Translations—Publishing—History—18th century— Case studies. 7. Literature—Early modern, 1500–1700—Translations—History and criticism— Case studies. I. Tylus, Jane, editor. II. Newman, Karen, editor. P306.2.E17 2015 418'.0209— dc23 2015014600

Contents

Introduction

1

Karen Newman and Jane Tylus

Chapter 1. Translating the Language of Architecture

25

Peter Burke

Chapter 2. Translating the Rest of Ovid: The Exile Poems

45

Gordon Braden

Chapter 3. Macaronic Verse, Plurilingual Printing, and the Uses of Translation

56

A. E. B. Coldiron

Chapter 4. Erroneous Mappings: Ptolemy and the Visualization of Europe’s East

76

Katharina N. Piechocki

Chapter 5. Taking Out the Women: Louise Labé’s Folie in Robert Greene’s Translation

97

Ann Rosalind Jones

Chapter 6. Translation and Homeland Insecurity in Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew: An Experiment in Unsafe Reading

117

Margaret Ferguson

Chapter 7. On Contingency in Translation Jacques Lezra

153

vi

C o nt ents

Chapter 8. The Social and Cultural Translation of the Hebrew Bible in Early Modern England: Reflections, Working Principles, and Examples

175

Naomi Tadmor

Chapter 9. Conversion, Communication, and Translation in the Seventeenth-Century Protestant Atlantic

189

Sarah Rivett

Chapter 10. Full. Empty. Stop. Go.: Translating Miscellany in Early Modern China

206

Carla Nappi

Chapter 11. Katherine Philips’s Pompey (1663); or the Importance of Being a Translator

221

Line Cottegnies

Chapter 12. Translating Scottish Stadial History: William Robertson in Late Eighteenth-Century Germany

236

László Kontler

Coda: Translating Cervantes Today

250

Edith Grossman

Notes

265

List of Contributors

337

Index

343

Acknowledgments

357

Introduction K aren Newman and Jane Tylus

Evans. What is lapis, William? Will. A stone. Evans. And what is “a stone,” William? Will. A pebble. Evans. No; it is lapis. —Shakespeare, The Merry Wives of Windsor IV, i, 26–30

Would there have been a Renaissance without translation?1 According to the scholars whose essays are gathered in this collection, the answer is a resounding no. In demonstrating not only the choices individual translators made in translating ancient and contemporary texts, but as Peter Burke puts it, the “collective processes of transmission” that characterized early modernity, this volume reveals how critical translation is to our understanding of the period and its definition of itself. Given, moreover, that early modern translation was so often a collaborative venture in ways seldom considered today, these essays contest a version of the Renaissance that is still too often read in terms of a glorified individual who broke free from guilds, courts, and confraternities to pursue intensely personal forms of self-expression. Instead, we ask what are the differences that a focus on translation can make in retelling the story of early modernity—and what are the differences that story can make for current thinking about translation? The studies that follow—beginning with Burke’s own essay—both revisit canonical texts (Don Quixote, the King James Bible, Shakespeare’s Taming of

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the Shrew) and comment on lesser-known works (macaronic poetry, Katherine Philips’s translations of Corneille, a little-known treatise of Louise Labé translated by Robert Greene) as they highlight translation practices in the period: a story about collectivities and collaborations, of “borrowings” and thefts, about drearily accurate renderings of “alien” texts and generative misprisions. As they span the period from 1400 through 1800, our contributors analyze and theorize the work that translators did in early modern Europe and the Americas, as well as in at least one non-European domain: China, which presents a fascinating case study and counternarrative in its own right. Moreover, in opening up early modernity to the questions posed by contemporary translation theorists and practitioners, many of the essays suggest that current preoccupations with fidelity, accuracy, authorship, and proprietary rights were alien to this moment formative for the production of the vernaculars in which we speak and write today. At the same time, the essays also reveal preoccupations with gender, professionalism, mobility, and epistemological uncertainties that characterize our postmodern era.2 In short, these essays not only emphasize the variety and quantity of translation in early modern Europe; they also demonstrate how such a broad scope makes early modern translation an ideal locus for considering translation in its linguistic and historical specificity, as well as its theoretical dimension. Thus one ongoing question in translation studies has been the extent to which a text’s cultural specificity should be updated or conserved. Should it be “domesticated” for its new readers, or remain “foreign”? Is the production of historical distance a feature of readability or unreadability? Writing at the close of the early modern era to which this volume is dedicated, the eighteenthcentury German theorist Friedrich Schleiermacher famously observed that there are two ways for translators to address the challenge posed by cultural distance. One approach is for the translator to bring the author’s linguistic and cultural world closer to the reader of the translation, what Martin Luther in his letter on translating had called “Verdeutschung” or “Germanizing.” Schleiermacher himself objected to such translation practices because he claimed they distort the text. He advocated a second path: the translator should bring the reader toward the text’s distinctive linguistic and cultural world.3 Schleiermacher’s question remains salient today, as Sandra Berman and Michael Wood paraphrase it in the introduction to their recent collection, Nation, Language, and the Ethics of Translation. “How much of the ‘otherness’ of the ‘foreign’ should the translator highlight? How much of the foreign should he mute or erase in order to make texts easier for the ‘home’ (target) audience to

Introduction

3

assimilate?”4 Questions of proximity and distance, of “foreignizing” and domesticating, of target and source, continue to structure debates in translation studies today, just as Luther and his contemporaries were concerned with the reader’s role vis-à-vis a translated text. But perhaps an older question in translation theory is encapsulated in St. Jerome’s much-quoted phrase, non verbum e verbo, sed sensum exprimere de sensu, “I render not word for word, but sense for sense,”5 an opposition Jerome drew from Horace and from Cicero’s De oratore. As Jacques Derrida points out in his reflections on translation, Cicero, Horace, and Jerome articulate a view of translation “freed from its obligation to the verbum, its debt to word-for-word,” a view that values the translation of “sense” over “word” and that has come to dominate the ethics and practice of translation.6 This prejudice against the “literal” thus goes back to antiquity, or, as Derrida continues, “the first imperative of translation was most certainly not the command of ‘word-for-word.’ The operation that consists of converting, turning (convertere, vertere, transvertere) doesn’t have to take a text at its word or to take the word literally. It suffices to transmit the idea, the figure, the force.” By contrast, Derrida argues that “a philosophy and ethics of translation—if translation does in fact have these things—today aspires to be a philosophy of the word, a linguistics or ethics of the word” (180). Like Walter Benjamin in his reflections on translation, Derrida insists that translation always necessarily points in the direction of other words and other meanings to expose complex and multidimensional networks of signification itself.7 Words are constantly converting, turning, transferring, from one language to another, from one sense to another, from one context to another, from one historical moment to another: lapis, stone, pebble. Even as Derrida criticizes the emphasis on “sense,” he challenges us to reconsider the binaries mentioned above—domesticating a text or rendering it foreign; translating individual words or the sense of a text—as well as the (unfortunate) modern terminology of “target” and “source.” Yet even if Jerome’s admonition was echoed throughout early modernity, and Luther was concerned with bringing the reader to the text, it is nonetheless the case that the scholarship represented in this volume reveals that a heightened sense of translation’s capacity to overturn binaries was already at play in the early modern era. This is perhaps nowhere better exemplified than in attending to the constant theme of mobility in both translation theory and practice, as early modern subjects reflect on the way that translation takes us from one realm to another, from the global to the local, from the grammatical to the political, as the oft-cited meaning of the word “transfer” insists. To return to the passage

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from The Merry Wives of Windsor that opens this introduction, Shakespeare’s Evans betrays a stultifying lack of mobility in his insistence that a stone is lapis and no more. Like Bottom in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, who refuses to recognize his own “translation,” so Evans, the Welsh Parson, resists the kind of lateral thinking at which his student, with his timidly offered “pebble,” proves to be more adept 8—as do the many participants in the great project of early modern translation discussed here. Nevertheless, in insisting that “stone” be retranslated back into lapis, Evans resists remaining within a wholly English framework, one which dominates today’s world, but which had not yet been instituted in early modern Europe.9 If one dimension that this volume illustrates is a theoretical one, another is chronological: the essays depict a world before English became the dominant language. More precisely, they trace an arc of some four hundred years in which English was at first utterly unimaginable as a lingua franca to a moment when it emerges as a powerful contender.10 As Gordon Braden argues in his introduction to the recent Oxford History of Translation in English: 1550–1660, early modern translation moved “in a ‘polyglot’ environment, crossing, and indeed transcending national and linguistic boundaries.”11 And the English language itself, as Anne Coldiron demonstrates in her essay reading fifteenth-century macaronic poetry, was polyglot, peppered with the “foreign” and with dialects that crisscrossed. Her fascinating conclusion is that the foreign always and already cohabits the “home” language. The fact that the majority of the essays that follow are about translations into English reflects the historical truth that with respect to its fellow tongues on the continent, English was for a long time drastically behind.12 The collection’s penultimate essay takes us to the late eighteenth century, László Kontler’s discussion of the Enlightenment period of “multilingual modernity.” Tellingly, it is the first and only essay in this collection to focus on the translation of a text written in English into another tongue, in this instance the Scottish writer William Robertson’s History of Charles V into German, on the threshold of that conversion into our increasingly Anglophone world. The volume also contains one example of a language that today may be emerging to displace English in its current hegemony, Chinese. The rest of the introduction will explore in some more detail issues of “mobility” in early modern translation by considering several examples of Renaissance translators defending their work, including the first acknowledged theorist of the period, Leonardo Bruni, and then moving to a broader discussion of the new kinds of literary and theoretical narratives that a focus on translation produces. What was distinctive about this early modern moment,

Introduction

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and how has it influenced the ways we continue to think about and practice translation today? • At the beginning of the print era, late in the fifteenth century, a Florentine notary and diplomat named Alexandro Braccesi13 translated into Italian a scandalous little Latin tale by a man whose own life had its scandalous dimensions until he embraced a “spiritual” way of life and eventually became pope: Pius II. One of the great humanists of the fifteenth century, Pius wrote as the secular Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini a tale of two lovers who sinned outside wedlock, and eventually were forced to pay the price: the adulterous woman dies and her lover is made to take someone else in marriage. Pius’s salacious story veers off into the moralistic, but Braccesi will have none of it. Writing fifteen years after Pius’s death in 1464 and for a Florentine patron, Lorenzo Pierfrancesco de’ Medici, Braccesi produces quite a different story. Noting that he himself has been in love and that he has found in Pius’s story much that is “useful to lovers,” he goes on: It’s true that I haven’t observed the duties of a faithful translator. I’ve left out many parts of the story that seemed to me little suited to proffering delight; and in their place I’ve inserted very different material designed to give continuity to the story with pleasant and mirthful things. And at the end where the author had one of the lovers die to the tune of bitter laments, I’ve changed sadness into joy, allowing them to join in marriage and thus experience the greatest of delights. I won’t deny that the author wrote his story with singular prudence and learning. . . . But considering, as I have done, that although given their variety stories [le storie] contain infinite examples that could instruct one about the [dangers of love], love’s force is nonetheless so overwhelming that who can really defend himself against it, and what remedy or precept can really be drawn [from these tales]? . . . Having thus exercised myself in this translation [traductione] and amatory composition for my own consolation, while reflecting on this present moment, so troubled and difficult for so many reasons, I have decided to do something for you that you might find pleasing. . . . Such have been your favors to me, that I desire nothing more than to satisfy your most exquisite wit.14

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In so changing Pius’s Latin novella into something far less gloomy for its Medici reader, Braccesi makes the tale of two lovers hospitable to his own time. The date of his translation was 1479, the year plague struck Florence. In fact, Braccesi’s original version of the prologue speaks specifically of the “upheaval and fear that have been the result of the plague.”15 And only a year earlier, Giuliano de’ Medici, brother of Lorenzo de’ Medici and cousin of the dedicatee Lorenzo Pierfrancesco, had been brutally murdered in Florence’s Duomo. In Braccesi’s hands Pius’s novella becomes a palliative, aleatory text, designed to bring comfort rather than melancholy or admonition, as it becomes, in the words of a recent commentator, “an amusing and joyful celebration of illicit love that culminates in a splendid marriage.”16 And in any case, what use really are such “remedies” to love, given the overwhelming force of passion itself, as Braccesi seems ready to attest from his own experience? But particularly surprising is that Pius’s text in fact had no need of translation, at least not for its cultivated dedicatee, Lorenzo Pierfrancesco. Patron of several of Botticelli’s most famous paintings, including the Primavera, Lorenzo knew Latin, as Braccesi observes when he writes, “I believe that you won’t take issue with my changes when you read the original Latin, because in many places you’ll find it full of sad things and mournful words that can’t possibly delight; no one goes about with such a happy heart that reading these pages wouldn’t depress him.”17 Braccesi thus does not translate Pius’s tale because Lorenzo has no linguistic access to the original. Rather, he translates it in order to change the original, to offer Lorenzo cultural access, as though the very raison d’être of translation were its powers to transform. And so the translated tale will now bring Lorenzo delight rather than embittered reflections in these “tempi noiosi e gravi.” Today we would call Braccesi’s work not a translation but an adaptation: a new text, in the way that seventeenth-century productions of King Lear changed the tragic ending by letting Cordelia and her father live. Whereas in translation studies today practitioners and theoreticians argue about the translator’s “invisibility” and about the ethics of linguistic and cultural appropriation, early modern translators seem to view appropriation positively, often using metaphors of conquest and empire to describe it. Consider, for example, the following lines from Samuel Daniel’s dedicatory poem prefacing the English translation of Du Bartas’s La Semaine, ou, Création du monde: Thus to adventure forth, and re-convay The best of treasures, from a Forraine Coast,

Introduction

7

And take that wealth wherin they gloried most, And make it Ours18 The “make” in the final phrase implies a kind of transformation, while the collectivity implicit in “Ours” is telling. This is not so much about Daniel’s preemptory attempt to make Du Bartas his “own,” but to make him “English,” gathering in wealth from a foreign shore to be disseminated among his countrymen. In the same way, reasonable as the question might seem to modern ears as to the “real author” of I due amanti, it is a question that would have been meaningless to Braccesi. In both passages cited above, the most important figure is neither writer nor translator, but the reader—arguably a standard feature of most dedications, and yet someone for whom Braccesi and Daniel alike fashion a new world more hospitable than the old one. “My good friend, Hary-Osto, or mine Host Hary.” With this wonderful pun noted recently by Jason Scott Warner, Joshua Samuel Reid, and others, the first English translator of Ariosto’s Orlando furioso, John Harington, plays on the guest/host relationship so important to recent translation theory as well as early modern translation practice, as Margaret Ferguson observes in her essay in this volume.19 Harington is ostensibly speaking about the innkeeper in the Furioso’s Canto 28 who tells the pagan Rodomonte a misogynistic story about female infidelity, and here he labels Ariosto himself as the host of his poem. “Hary Osto” is a fabulous play on words, “Ariosto” translated into English in a way that invokes Harington’s name as well—so turning translator and author into a single figure. Moreover, as Janet Smarr has remarked, it also recalls the famous “host” who preceded Harington as a translator of Italian into English: the Chaucer disguised as “Harry” Bailly of Canterbury Tales, amiable and fierce in his own gathering of stories and of tale-tellers.20 The phrase, which is at once creative pun and literary reference, suggests how Harington conceptualized his own relationship to early modern translation: as a space in which multiple acts of reading and rhetorical invention produced works of all sorts by writers who happen also to be translating—and like Harry and his pilgrims, in motion.21 “Englishing” Ariosto for his readers, Harington destabilizes identities— who is the host, who is the guest?—in a fashion that anticipates the comments of philologists and contemporary theorists from Lévinas to Foucault to Derrida, as they argue for a dynamic and unsettling relationship that undoes rather than fi xes notions of property, the proprietary, and the proper. In her remarks on a play that was contemporary with Harington’s translation, The Taming of

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the Shrew, Ferguson draws on Emile Benveniste’s discussion of hospitality in which he criticizes the often cited “global” and “transhistorical” notion that the Latin word hostis “means guest but also enemy,” arguing instead for a concept and social practice of hospitality as reciprocity between two equals. In thus considering translation, Ferguson—and arguably Harington—challenge us to think outside the dominant dyadic model of translation of source and target. Such a model implies that the translator has full mastery of two languages as she moves from one to the other with something like a focused aim or intention. Yet this model is unsuitable, even misleading, for premodern translation generally, for the multiple translation acts to be found in The Taming of the Shrew or, for that matter, in Harington’s Orlando furioso, where he claims to be working as much with Ariosto’s own presumed model, Virgil’s Aeneid, as with the Orlando furioso itself. As Harington’s modus operandi suggests, in an early modern England where cross-linguistic and cross-cultural translation took place on a massive scale—the Renaissance Cultural Crossroads Project on translation at Warwick University documents over four thousand printed translations into English between 1473 and 1640 involving some thirty languages, over one thousand translators, and almost twelve hundred writers—literary translation was not necessarily distinct from other forms of imitation.22 Thomas Greene’s seminal The Light in Troy helps to elucidate the specificity of the early modern with regard to these debates, as he argues for the “double process of [the] discovery” of antiquity by which the Renaissance writer both “groped” for the text in its specificity and otherness and at the same time sought his own appropriate voice and idiom. Greene goes on: “The text cannot simply leave us with two dead dialects. It has to create a miniature anachronistic crisis and then find a creative issue from the crisis. Imitation has to become something more than a pseudo-archaeology contrived as an illegitimate solace. If Renaissance literature is troubled by an anxiety of validation, then it finds its true validation in the discovery of more hospitable codes.”23 Greene’s speculations are akin to Paul Ricoeur’s more recent notion of working to construct “comparables” during the process of translation, of finding a common turf that is neither the “host’s” nor the “guest’s.” Returning to Luther, mentioned above, Ricoeur suggests that in translating the Bible into German, Luther “constructed a comparable” for Jerome’s Latin. But in so doing, he virtually “created the German language as comparable to Latin, to the Greek of the Septuagint, to the Hebrew of the Bible.”24 To speak of either “domesticating” or “foreignizing,” as did Schleiermacher in his essay on translation, driven in part by

Introduction

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German rivalry with a culturally dominant France, seems inaptly oppositional to early modernity. To what extent can we speak instead of a third space: the common ground of Ricoeur’s comparables, the discovery of more hospitable codes for Greene? This would be—and indeed was—a space of contingency yet also of creativity: Braccesi’s altered translation of Pius II and Harington’s text with its multiple hosts. If these are some of the questions that arise from direct engagement with translated texts, it might be helpful to turn to the period’s first substantial reflections on translation, Leonardo Bruni’s De recto interpretatione of 1424. While generally considered a watershed text, it nonetheless might seem illsuited for the era it inaugurates, since it is concerned not with translation into emergent vernaculars—though Bruni wrote after the productive fourteenth century of Dante, Boccaccio, and Petrarch—but into Latin, from the Greek of Aristotle. Bruni himself wrote little in Italian, save for biographies of, in fact, Italy’s two great vernacular poets, Dante and Petrarch. And yet it is unsurpassed in its breadth of vision and its redressing of what Bruni casts, at times disingenuously, as a limited notion of translation as practiced by medieval scholars of Aristotle, among others. For Bruni, translation is not about moving from word to literal word, but neither is it simply about “sense,” though he is attentive to substance, as when he makes what would seem to be the banal observation that translators should command not only the language from which they are translating, but the one into which they are translating.25 It is, rather, about the importance of having a literary sensibility when translating— “quicumque vero non ita structus est disciplina et litteris”—and being thus able to recognize and translate individual style, as when he notes that “just as every writer has his own particular and appropriate style—characteristic of Cicero is solemnity and copiousness, Sallust brevity and sobriety, Livy a certain grandeur that can be rather harsh—so the good translator should conform his own style in a way that approximates the style of his author.”26 Interestingly, the fact that Bruni claims to have found a style in his Latin translation of Aristotle’s works that sparkled with the nuances and vibrancy of Cicero is precisely what got him into trouble. His conviction was that Aristotle’s philosophy works not only through logic but also by means of persuasion; that not only semantic import but also rhetorical power compels us to accept his argument. His translation of the Nicomachean Ethics was based on the conviction that the Greek philosopher was an orator, and it provoked the attack from which Bruni angrily recoils in the opening pages of his De recta interpretatione.27

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Far from being “dead,” Latin was a living language in fifteenth-century Florence, where Bruni was writing. It was as a spoken language—used for rituals, diplomatic negotiations, and intellectual exchange—that Bruni, Florence’s chancellor, engaged with it, just as Alessandro Braccesi would several decades later as a member of Florence’s diplomatic corps.28 Yet if Bruni’s predecessor in the chancellor’s office, Coluccio Salutati, had maintained that eloquence was the result of what one said, Bruni insists that eloquence inheres in how one speaks, and thus how one moves one’s listeners. Indeed, movement is at the heart of Bruni’s remarks in this brief, at times combative defense of his own translation practices. His view that translation was transformative— thus foreshadowing what Braccesi would do with the Latin of Pius II—is especially apparent in a phrase that oddly has been mistranslated in its most recent English version. After citing the ideal painter as one who derives his work from another’s, “thinking not of what he is doing himself but of what the other had done,” Bruni turns to translation: “sic in traductionibus interpres quidem optimus sese in primum scribendi auctorem tota mente et animo et voluntate convertet et quodammodo transformabit eiusque orationis figuram, statum, ingressum coloremque et liniamenta cuncta exprimere meditabitur” (thus in his translations, the best translator will turn and in a certain sense, transform himself into the first author of the text with all his mind, soul, and will, and he will seek to express the structure, the position, the flow and the color, and all the outlines of his [i.e., the first author’s] speech; paragraph 13).29 Bruni goes on: “Each writer has his own particular style,” and the translator should be driven and transformed by the force and personality of another’s words. Or, as he suggests a few sentences later, “Rapitur enim interpres vi ipsa in genus dicendi illius de quo transfert”: the translator is drawn toward—literally, enraptured by—the style or “manner of speaking” of the one whom he is “transferring” (paragraph 14). Here too we see an expression of the destabilization that characterizes early modern translation. In this case the “rapt” translator is caught up in a moment that can be seen in both rhetorical and erotic terms, as he is carried away by what Bruni will elsewhere call the “vis” and the “natura”—the force and nature—of another’s words. Arguably, such transformation can occur only when the translator recognizes in himself some kind of lack: one is not oneself “whole,” nor, ultimately, is one’s own language; something is always lacking even in one’s own language.30 This recognition of vulnerability is interesting when one reflects on the language into which Bruni was translating Aristotle: Latin. And it may be the shifting status of Latin in the period between Francesco Petrarch and Bruni—

Introduction

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and so during the first three generations of the humanistic sensibility that was to alter the face of Europe profoundly—that was responsible for Bruni’s revolutionary text. A brief comparison with Petrarch might be fruitful. Late in life—so we learn in the penultimate letters of his massive epistolary collection, the Seniles—Petrarch turned to translating the fi nal story of the Decameron, the tale of the faithful, persecuted wife, Griselda, one of the few novelle, he declares to Boccaccio, from which he has learned something worth preserving. In order to save for eternity this tale written in the ephemeral and untrustworthy vernacular, he translated it into Latin two years before his death: the language that for Petrarch was permanent, built on “firm foundations,” as he says elsewhere in his letters, unable to be unmoored and challenged by the unruly vulgar mob who, he complains, have massacred and misread his own limited productions in the vernacular.31 Latin was for Petrarch a closed system, a perfect language. Translating Boccaccio’s final tale from the Italian rendered that tale and its heroine Griselda newly authoritative in the Italian and European world of letters: free of contingency and of the unpredictable tastes of the “mob” of vulgar readers.32 The language of communication across borders and emerging nations, Latin was primarily for Petrarch the language of writing, a grammar used by men in the schools, the courts, and the Church. The volgare that Petrarch resisted—but only to a point, as the Rime sparse witness—came from one’s mother and one’s nursemaid and was therefore belittled as ephemeral and impermanent.33 Writing only fifty years later, Bruni saw Latin not as a closed system but an open one, capable of growth and enrichment, and largely because he has at his fingertips the language from which Latin had taken so much and next to which it had been found wanting, Greek—a language Petrarch spent much of his life regretting he did not know. In many ways, then, Bruni’s is the true return to the bilingual world of Roman antiquity. Only in the late first century ad did Greek begin to lose its prominence in the empire as Latin emerged as the hegemonic language of education, diplomacy, medicine, law, the Church, the learned, and the leisured elite. But it could do so only because of its fierce competition with Greek 34—a competitiveness that Bruni revives when he insists that translators of the Politics not succumb to the temptation of importing Greek words wholesale into Latin, but that they find Latin equivalents in the same way that Cicero and Lucretius once did when translating Greek philosophy and orations. Bruni defends Latin’s “excellence,” but not at the price of its capacity to absorb new words. Like all languages, he argues, it is a living tongue, capable of growth and change, even a perfection it has not yet attained.

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Like Horace rather than Petrarch, he accepts Latin’s and, by extension, all languages’ fragility. They are subject to historical process, as leaves that fall from a tree, in a metaphor from the so-called Ars poetica oft repeated in treatises on translation and still used today, and one that was already overdetermined in Dante’s Inferno, where those leaves become sinners waiting on the banks of Lethe. Or as Horace originally had it in his defense of neologisms in the Ars poetica, the Epistle to the Pisos: Why should I be refused the right to put in my bit . . . ? It has always been granted, and always will be, to produce Words stamped with the date of the present. As trees change their leaves When each year comes to its end, and the first fall first, So the oldest words die first and the newborn thrive In the manner of youth, and enjoy life. And in his sober finish: “All that we are / And have is in debt to death.”35 Petrarch had certainly aided in this gradual recognition of Latin’s historical impermanence. His discovery of new manuscripts of Cicero, Livy, and others allowed for an appreciation of the distinctiveness of the language of republican Rome. The recognition of a “historical” Latin that changed from Cicero to Sallust, Virgil to Lucan, and inevitably from those writers of empire to those of the Church in the centuries following the empire’s decline, necessarily undermined its status as eternal and unchanging. This historical and comparative consciousness of Latin was critical to producing the philological revolution of Lorenzo Valla’s study of the Donation of Constantine, which revealed this putative fourth-century document to be an eleventh-century fraud, and thus demonstrated that Latin had changed significantly from the time of Augustine to that of the medieval Church anxious to shore up its claims to empire. Valla’s revolution in turn laid the foundations for Erasmus, Luther, and Wycliffe and the probing questions of the Reformation: What was the authority of the Latin Vulgate, a product of the saintly Jerome’s erudition, but also of the vagaries of copying and misinterpretation over the course of a thousand years?36 The publication of Erasmus’s 1516 New Testament, and particularly its 1527 fourth edition, is a stunning example of a “corrected” Latin text, based on the very philological analyses pioneered by Bruni and Valla, vis-à-vis its Greek original: each page was unequally divided into three columns (Figure 1), with

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13

the Greek to the left, Erasmus’s new Latin translation center stage, and the old Vulgate squeezed to the right-hand side of the page, accorded less space and thus less authority since it is also the text we encounter “last.”37 Thus does Erasmus create, literally, a “third space” of translation: a new comparable. Erasmus’s New Testament, in short, is Bruni’s translation project a century later. Erasmus takes Christianity’s most sacred text, returns to the Greek source, and revivifies Latin by opening it up anew to that Greek foundation, a Latin not always and already perfect, but capable of profound and dynamic change. It is Erasmus’s example, perhaps more than any other, that would prompt the numerous translations of all kinds of vernacular texts into Latin well into the eighteenth century.38 One of the most famous changes that Erasmus made in his 1516 edition, as Marjorie O’Rourke Boyle pointed out, was to translate logos as sermo: speech or discourse, rather than the verbum or written word of Jerome and Origen.39 In the same way that Bruni recast Aristotle as an orator, so does Erasmus see the logos of Christ as a spoken word, and he translates it as such. But in this act of transmission, more has changed than the logos that is now sermo: translation itself is marked by a movement across languages, across texts, and across centuries. Far from being an attempt to preserve something absolute and fixed, it transforms a new audience to be responsive to the new ways in which arguments and even sacred truths can be cast and understood. At the same time, even as the philological rigor of a Bruni or an Erasmus claims to unveil the “original” Aristotle or New Testament, that original is remade as the mirror image of the humanist-orator and conversationalist at home in a world of debate and exchange. Nonetheless, such transformation was not about mastery in the sense that Petrarch considers himself having outmastered Boccaccio by translating his Griselda into Latin—although Bruni and Erasmus took enormous pride in their translations into Latin, especially from the Greek, be it the New Testament or Aristotle. It was rather about making accessible to modern readers the habits of antiquity (and here you should hear the pun, habits in the sense both of garments and of customs of antiquity): the way early modernists believed that the ancients thought, felt, and worked, and in a style that made it seem as if Aristotle or Paul might have written in Latin. It is, in fact, the possibility of putting those habits on, much as Machiavelli famously remarked in a letter to his friend Francesco Vettori that after a tough day in the workplace he would come home and put on “noble garments” in order to read his beloved Latin authors: “And for four hours at a time, I feel no boredom, I forget all my troubles, I do not dread poverty, and I am not terrified by death.”

Figure 1. Page 69 from Ioannes Frobenius candido lectori. Desiderius Erasmus, 1527. Universitätsbibliothek Basel.

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But early modernity, of course, was not ultimately about Latin, even though the ability to historicize Latin as a language susceptible to change and flux is what, with some irony perhaps, dismantled its own hegemony and that of the institutions on which it depended—most powerfully, the Church. The recovery, interpretation, and imitation of ancient Greek and Roman texts that launched the cultural program sometimes called the Renaissance depended on the work of mediation, on a culture and practice of translation yet to be fully studied and understood. In Italy and France, the rediscovery of classical and biblical letters led to new texts and editions in Greek and Latin, but as Warren Boutcher observes in The Oxford Guide to Literature in English Translation, “for the majority of educated people, ancient letters were rediscovered by means of a comparative process of ongoing translations between Latin and a group of European vernaculars including English.”40 Translation shifted from being a means for “mastery of Latin, to an emphasis upon translation as a means of disseminating knowledge,” and to what today is sometimes termed cultural translation.41 It is with this in mind that we can move to the two narratives that the essays in this volume unfold. • The story of early modernity told with a focus on translation is first and foremost a story of the fraught competition between and among early modern vernaculars. It produces a narrative far from linear even as it seems to proceed from Latin, to Italian, to French, and finally to English as the authorized languages for cultural discourse in early modern Europe. Such a story disrupts national literatures and chronologies, insofar as translation is not the property of a single nation or author or period. It also disrupts an understanding of a single literary or cultural language in and of itself. As Sarah Rivett suggests in her essay, the transplanting of European languages on foreign soil may also transform indigenous words into divine signs, thus providing proof that God’s chosen people once roamed the face of the earth, as the language of the Algonquians took on the same status as one of the original, “lost” languages from the beginning of time. With an alphabet, a dictionary, and a vocabulary list—all fetishes for capturing an original language—translation began as transcription, as so often in the Americas, as missionaries transcribed a wholly oral tongue into signs that would endure, just as Petrarch translates Boccaccio’s one novella worth saving into Latin. Such a move was a reassuring one for the European settlers, if not for the Algonquians, as it placed them

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back into their own world—and brought the Algonquians with them. If grammar is what the vernaculars had supposedly lacked, or so Dante suggests when he along with the rest of his age acknowledges that only Latin was a fully “grammatical” language,42 then the missionaries developed a grammar for these both young and ancient languages of the new and old world, a grammar that “unlocked its rules and secrets” from the divine. This was a way of recapturing something that was not simply lost, as Jefferson’s patronizing concern might have it, but destroyed by the European colonial invaders. And as Rivett’s focus on the Bible suggests, nothing promoted the socalled rise of the vernacular more than the fraught story of religious difference.43 The Bible’s role in early modernity was pivotal. Once the authority of Saint Jerome’s Vulgate was challenged as “only” a translation, as Erasmus’s 1516 volume revealed, Catholicism’s center began to fall apart. The vernaculars of Europe in fact defined themselves by means of new Bibles, the Church and the language of the Church becoming foreign irritants in nations that defiantly held their own vernaculars to be superior to the ideologically biased Vulgate of Roman Catholicism. Clement VIII’s 1596 restoration of a “new Vulgate,” in use in the Catholic Church until Vatican II, was in many ways already belated when it appeared. By then Luther’s German New and Old Testaments had been published for over sixty years, sparking a revolution not only in theology but in literacy; Calvin’s Geneva Bible appeared in 1560. Heads of nation-states became involved in sponsoring translations that would promote not only Protestantism but the languages of their kingdoms. The Bible known as King Christian III’s Bible was published in Denmark in 1550, the first complete translation of the Bible into Danish, based on Luther’s version, while in 1617, King Gustav II Adolf (better known as Gustavus Adolphus) would order several “divine men” to revise an earlier version in Swedish from the 1530s; that version is still read in Sweden today.44 James I of England would appropriate for his national Bible the legend of the Septuagint in which seventy translators, all working in separate cells, translated the Hebrew Old Testament into Greek for the benefit of Jewish communities in Egypt no longer able to read the original.45 Each translated the whole text into Greek, and in a Borgesian miracle, their translations were identical. So James, as Naomi Tadmor recounts in her essay, sequestered seventy wise men for two years in the hallowed halls of Oxford, thus solving the problem of how to speak with the voice of God—a project that had earlier been punishable in England by death (the fate of Wycliffe) or in Spain by imprisonment (Fra Luis de Léon’s penalty for translating the Song of Songs). But in less charged situations—or with

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17

respect to translating less potentially scandalous books than the Song of Songs—biblical translation could spur literary and poetic production in newly emerging vernaculars. The Book of Psalms was particularly suited to this project, and the mid-sixteenth century saw many examples, including the Italian poet Laura Battiferra’s translation of the penitential psalms “into the Tuscan tongue,” which drew freely on Dante and Petrarch, along with similarly free translations by Du Bartas in France, Jan Kochanowski in Poland, and the Sidneys—Philip and, after his death, Mary—in England. Despite thorny doctrinal disagreements, these early modern renditions of David’s Psalms all developed metrical and literary patterns critical for the development of vernacular poetry as translators wrestled with the question, in whose voice did the translator speak? In short, the early modern period witnessed the success of the vernacular as a literary language across eastern as well as western Europe and prompted competition among the different vernaculars as to which would take the place vacated by Latin. As Bruni “opened” Latin to Greek, so did one vernacular language open itself to another, while at the same time, this opening revealed the extent to which those languages were still to a large extent unformed and in process. The “triumph” of the vernacular was not easily achieved, but instead incessantly repeated. Individual languages had microhistories of their own that the singular “triumph” obscures: the languages of translation rarely witnessed a conversation among equals, as “positive” terms such as copious, rich, muscular, versatile, and serious, and “negative” ones such as effeminate, impoverished, and sterile were invoked in the name of defending some vernacular writings and attacking others.46 Inequities of translation, whether produced by conquest and colonial expansion, or by feelings of cultural superiority and/ or inferiority, or by religious difference, can be traced throughout the early modern period. One suggestive narrative has Italian following Latin as the privileged cultural language, a title next extended to French and eventually, as Peter Burke has shown, to English.47 The fact that Louise Labé wrote her first of twenty-four sonnets in Italian, or that Sidney was admired, in John Harington’s words, as the “English Petrarke,” suggests that Italian was seen by some as the jumping-off point for “elite” French, and certainly for the French sonnet, and then for the English sonnet as well. The sonnet’s movement from Italy to Spain and France, and finally to England, enacts in miniature a narrative about cultural translation: not only were languages translated; so were genres. (Spain’s place in Europe’s cultural hegemony is puzzling, considering the sweep of its empire from the Iberian peninsula to Naples and Sicily, from the

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Holy Roman Empire and to the Low Countries. More work is needed to ascertain how widely spread—and envied—the use of Spanish texts was on the continent.48 The story in the New World, of course, is very different.) Already with Erasmus, we have seen the important impact of print. Print vastly extended the reach of literacy and thus created the need for new books for new audiences. Less obviously, when we consider the materiality of the book, we see that, far from flattening out discourse, print could and did accentuate differences among differing linguistic and national traditions. As Peter Burke notes in his essay, in translations of Serlio’s architectural treatises, cultural differences are marked even at the level of type: there is a shift from the Roman type of the Latin, to the Italic type of the Italian and French translations, to the Gothic type used in England, Germany, and the Netherlands. Roger Chartier observes that “when texts were presented in a new way and in a new physical guise that transformed their format, their page layout, the ways in which the text was sectioned and the illustrations, they reached new, broader and less learned audiences, and they took on new significations far removed from the ones their authors [and we would add translators] had intended or their original readers had constructed.”49 How else did the new opportunities offered by print lead to new relations and exchanges? The vernaculars made their way across Europe by way of a vigorous publishing trade, with books made available in the flourishing marts and markets of Venice, Lyon, and especially Frankfurt.50 In his encomium to the famed Frankfurt book fair, the principal center of the early modern European book trade, the French humanist printer Henri Estienne praises the hospitality with which strangers, “as varied in garb and feature as in the tongues they speak,” are received at the fair. At what Estienne dubbed the Fair of the Muses, they could buy books from all over Europe, whether published in Latin or in one of Europe’s many vernaculars. Translations made up a significant portion of the thousands of books sold at the fair, a crossroads of Europe that was frequented not only by booksellers and printers but, as Estienne observes, by “those celebrated universities of Vienna, of Wittenberg, of Leipzig, of Heidelberg, of Strasburg, and, among many other nations, those of Louvain, of Padua, of Oxford, of Cambridge—these academies, I say, and many others which it would take too long to enumerate, send to the Fair not only their philosophers, but also poets, representatives of oratory, of history, of the mathematical sciences, some even skilled in all these branches at once—those, in short, who profess to compass the whole circle of knowledge, which the Greeks call encyclopædia or encycliopædia.”51 The city of Frankfurt and its book fair teemed with poly-

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glot visitors, peregrini, as Jacques Lezra sees translators themselves. They communicated in Latin, which was still at the center of the humanist curriculum, but also in the European vernaculars. The fairs were places of free thought—often on borders of countries or empires—and encouraged freethinking, sometimes heretical thinking.52 Booksellers early began printing general listings of books offered at the fair, organized by subject “basically following the order of precedence of university faculties: theology, law, medicine, the liberal arts.”53 Latin works were printed in Roman typeface, German in blackletter, and later catalogues might include “libri peregrini idiomatis,” or books in foreign tongues—the European vernaculars, with no distinction between translations and “originals”—and sometimes a section announcing future offerings. Factors and bookmen such as John Bill, who later became the King’s Printer for James I, early in his career traveled throughout Europe buying books for Thomas Bodley’s library and for James himself. He, like the famous De Brys and many others, maintained a shop, with a partner, at the Frankfurt fair. In this process of languages moving across borders, English was initially a thing apart. English was a language virtually unknown on the continent in the sixteenth century, and only gradually became known in the course of the seventeenth. The “hinterland” that was English produced what we might term a “trade imbalance,” with many texts translated into English, but few texts in English translated into the continental vernaculars.54 Whereas the Romance languages Italian, Spanish, and French were readable across each other’s cultures, English was not, and so the English had to do more translation to have access to the cultural authority of classical antiquity and the humanistic study of the Renaissance—often emerging with amusing mistranslations, one of the points of both Margaret Ferguson’s and Jacques Lezra’s essays. Which is one reason why so many of the essays collected in this volume are concerned with English translation. When English is in fact put into the mix of the continental languages that are the subjects of Ann Rosalind Jones’s and Line Cottegnies’s essays, interesting new constellations and possibilities for theorizing emerge. In short, the European Renaissance saw cross-cultural translation on a massive scale. The humanists negotiated status by means of their literary skills—as translators of culturally prestigious Greek and Latin texts; as scribes; as teachers of those same culturally prestigious languages; and as purveyors of the new technologies of writing.55 Though the frequently translated Greco-Roman texts represented powerful cultural capital within the context of European humanism, the vernaculars, as we suggest,

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offer quite different and locally specific histories—histories that should not be considered in isolation, not least because national boundaries were still so unstable, and in some cases, such as Italy, nonexistent.56 The conflict among vernaculars also had an impact on the changing role of the translator him- or herself. The second narrative charted here and in the following essays could be called the rise of the professional translator, even though this was neither a role firmly tied to a distinct individual nor a craft with clear rules. Translation helped promote the image of an educated self in early modern Europe, particularly with regard to the woman writer.57 Thus Louise Labé proves her humanist credentials by translating, establishing her authority to her courtly audience by her command of a humanist idiom. But as Ann Jones’s essay demonstrates, whereas Labé had to hearken back, as it were, to a time when Latin was the lingua franca of the educated, her English translator Robert Greene undercuts those credentials by means of his own translation work. His anxieties about translation per se—let alone about translating a woman’s writing—reflect a gendered feature of the early modern discourse on translation often repeated in recent criticism and encapsulated in John Florio’s phrase, “All translations are reputed femalls, delivered at second hand.”58 Until recently, translation has often been devalued as derivative, as women’s work, and much commentary on early modern women translators often perpetuates this view.59 Yet it is not at all clear that early modern translators viewed translation as secondary, “femalls,” or degraded. Line Cottegnies’s essay on Katherine Philips considers the gendered performance of this transitional figure who was not only a polished translator of the French, but a recognized poet in her own right. Philips, moreover, was in exile in France along with her king, the future Charles II, a biographical fact that might enable us to ponder the role of the early modern translator as a kind of peregrinus—a term Jacques Lezra takes up in both a metaphorical and a pragmatic sense as he considers how translators confronted issues of mistranslation and misunderstanding through a reading of the Spanish play La Celestina.60 Philips was a literal peregrinus, as was Ovid, whom Gordon Braden considers in his essay on Ovid’s less translated “exilic” poetry. For Ovid, life experience became a provocative way for thinking about the translator him- or herself: exiled, moving between texts and places rather than being at home in any one of them, the translator is suspended between two languages, dwelling in that third space we have begun to explore. The self-conscious character of exile is apparent on the rare occasions that translators such as Marlowe chose to translate Ovid’s writings while

Introduction

21

in exile. We might think about this “no space” of the exile as eventually being transformed into a professional space that enables the woman exile Katherine Philips, or Aphra Behn, to compete in the translation game. Women writers used translation to make a space for themselves as writers, a space where they could be “loyal to themselves,” as Jones shows Greene being in his translation of Labé. And in a similar move, Braden traces Ovid’s loyalty to the self in a period of exile in his defense of his erotic poetry, poetry that Marlowe translated during a time of uncertainty about his own professional career. Yet despite these concerns for the space of the individual translator, early modern translation was, and is, a collective act. Although Erasmus translated the New Testament into Latin, the Vulgate, translated by others, remained his intertext. Burke shows how artisanal practices shaped and changed translations. And Carla Nappi describes how the Ming dynasty Translators’ College struggled to assimilate the many languages with which the Chinese—far from being isolated from the rest of Asia, as has often been assumed—were increasingly in contact. Too often we have thought of translation as a creative, individual act such as that of Matteo Ricci, the Jesuit who busily overhauled Christianity for his Chinese emperor and who translated scientific, humanist, and religious texts into Chinese. But such individual, “heroic” acts of translation must be put alongside the collective activities of the Chinese translators at the Translators’ College, or the dragomans (from the Arabic/Turkish terjuman/tercüman, meaning “interpreter”)—Mamluk, Ottoman, and Venetian translator-diplomats residing across the Ottoman Empire—or the interlocking choices of countless translators, publishers, and printers across England and the continent.61 Katharina Piechocki’s essay, for example, invokes a collective undertaking for translating maps, as she examines the way in which the shifting borders of Poland were identified for the creation of something known as “Europe.” As Piechocki shows, the production of the continent called Europe (whose borders are still shifting in current debates regarding member nations of the European Union) depends very much on the way in which geographical entities are translated across time as well as languages and space. The many voices in that conversation render insufficient any simplistic notion of early modern “mapping”—particularly as the new technology of print distances that process even further from its original “translators.” Such was the case with Amerigo Vespucci, who physically moved from one culture and linguistic space to another. After all, Vespucci was not responsible for lending his name to the continents of the Western Hemisphere. It was the German cartographer Martin Waldseemüller who did so, only to subsequently revise

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his nomenclature to call the continent “Terra Incognita.” But too late: his first version of the map had already been printed, in 1507, and the Americas have stuck. The inability of Waldseemüller to influence readers’ choices through future editions suggests that the production and reception of translations were collective enterprises that undermined the control of any individual traveler, printer, publisher, or translator. It also points to one final aspect of the process of early modern translation, and indeed, the process of translation more generally. Translation is not, and has never been, a science. Like Vespucci’s voyage into the unknown, the messy, unmethodical practice of “carrying across” one form of cultural expression to another resists any attempt at formulaic compartmentalization. William’s dry exchange of “lapis” for “stone” jars comically with Braccesi’s genial defense of his translation of Pius II’s novella. Even Leonardo Bruni’s more systematic approach to his translation of Aristotle veers off from the prescriptive into the descriptive and contingent: Virgil’s style is very different from Horace’s, Livy’s from that of Tacitus, and it is through these Roman writers in turn that Bruni chooses to read and interpret Aristotle. The varied practices that this volume as a whole showcases thus reveal the epistemological gaps with which early modernity was forced increasingly to contend, even as theoretical principles were continually invoked—and invented—to try to make sense of the confusing and productive ways in which ancient texts were juxtaposed with modern ones, Italian with French and Spanish, French with English, artistic languages with historical ones. Both Ferguson and Lezra comment helpfully and explicitly on the “misfires” between theory and practice in the period, the interesting mistakes that translators made when they pressed too hard to make their work align with an unreachable theory. And yet fascinating results of misprision are at the heart of almost all of these essays. Some of the most interesting examples of early modern translation are the product precisely of translators’ recognitions that the best translation theory is itself a practice in dialogue not only with the dead—Louise Labé in the case of Robert Greene, Pius II in the case of Braccesi—but with the living: the readers before whom Greene is concerned to prove his masculinity, or Braccesi the continued, yet new, relevance of Pius’s text. Interestingly, Bruni’s theory of translation is expounded as a letter, not as a dry treatise—a letter that angrily defends his translation of the Nicomachean Ethics, and thus represents only one voice in a dialogue. Early modern theories of translation emerged from paratexts such as Bruni’s letter or Braccesi’s introductory com-

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ments to I due amanti, or the inserted dialogue between Will and his student in Shakespeare’s comedy, or Florio’s dedication to his translation of Montaigne’s Essays. László Kontler’s essay enables us to recognize the failure of a “rational” Enlightenment modernity to divorce itself from the messiness of aesthetic and emotional experience. The uneven emergence of translation, that is, goes hand in hand with that of the theory of translation. That this theory emerged and was inseparable from practice offers us a useful way of thinking about the institution of literature today. These two narratives return us to where we began this introduction: early modern humanists and writers, printers and publishers, pursued not a narrow literal, linguistic view of translation so often assumed in the “word for word” theory that Horace toward the beginning of a new millennium had derided, and that in many ways has come to characterize the current, professionalized world of translation and translators in the computer age. We look instead, as Horace did, poised as he was between a once-imperious Greek culture and an emerging Latin one, to larger sensibilities and resonances, to that nebulous yet crucial concept of cultural translation. Our early modern authors are similarly poised between a receding Latin culture and the impure, inexact vernacular ones of a “new” Europe—or in the (not completely analogous) case of contemporary China, between the centralized body of Chinese philosophy and letters and the peripheral voices of Islamic and Christian cultures from the West. Yet even as all of the essays collected here are concerned with cultures of translation, the “work” itself is the patient toil of working with discrete words. If not always—or ever—transposing and exchanging one word for another, translation nevertheless involves engaging with language and linguistic choices embroiled in the at times lonely, at times creative, always difficult, process of living in more than one world at the same time, and weighing how best to make that crossing from one world to the other for that elusive third party, the reader. These are precisely the reflections of the final essay in this collection, by the noted translator Edith Grossman, as she comments on her work in translating the early modern classic Don Quixote. The translator’s world is aporetic—from the Greek, being at a loss—since translation is impossible, never ending, a continuing conundrum, and thus John Donne’s cautionary vision of translation from the Devotions upon Emergent Occasions might most suitably end these reflections: “All mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated; God employs several translators; some pieces are translated by age, some by

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sickness, some by war, some by justice; but God’s hand is in every translation, and his hand shall bind up all our scattered leaves again for that library where every book shall lie open to one another” (Meditation XVII). Donne envisions a paradisiacal end not in a return to when the whole earth had one language and few words, but instead in a multiplicity of translators and translations “open to one another.” It is only fitting that this volume open with an essay by Peter Burke, a social historian who has raised critical questions over the last decade as to translation’s role in defining and shaping early modernity. His work is a model in its historical breadth and theoretical rigor as he brings diverse national literatures and disciplines together to show the massive scale of translation across Europe. Above all, his essay is an appeal to the importance of the study of reception: in this case, the language of architecture and what happens to it when a frame of reference for an entire new lexicon does not yet exist, as Italian architecture struggled to make its way out of Italy through translation. Similarly, we present his and the other essays in this volume making their way toward a new understanding of early modern translation.

Chapter 1

Translating the Language of Architecture Peter Burke

One of the major shifts in cultural history in the last generation, as indeed in economic history, has been the inclusion of consumption alongside production. The new emphasis on consumers of culture treats them not as passive receivers but as active “reemployers” and as makers of meaning. Literary historians now study readers as well as writers; musicologists study listeners as well as composers and performers; historians of art and architecture study clients and viewers as well as artists; and theorists of reception offer generalizations about all these processes, shifting attention away from the individual creator and examining collective processes of transmission that often involve changes of meaning, linked to the consumers’ horizons of expectations.1 It is therefore no surprise to see a rise of interest in the history of translation. • In the case of the Renaissance (a term used here to refer to a movement rather than a period), an academic interest in the reception of Roman law and of humanism goes back to the later nineteenth century.2 As his collected works show, the central enterprise of the scholarly life of Aby Warburg was the way in which the classical tradition was received and transformed over the centuries, especially but not exclusively in the realm of visual culture.3 All the same, it is only recently that reception has become a major theme in the study of the Renaissance, especially in the case of literature, often focusing on individual writers or their books.4 General interpretations of the

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Renaissance outside Italy have also been paying more attention to the question of reception.5 The proliferation of studies in the history of reading is a move in the same direction. Terms such as “cultural transfer” and “cultural exchange” are coming into increasingly frequent use to refer to the past as well as the present. For example, they underpinned a recent collective project on the cultural history of early modern Europe, planned by the French historian Robert Muchembled and financed by the European Science Foundation.6 A related concept, which is coming to show its usefulness, is that of “cultural translation.” This phrase was originally used by British anthropologists such as Edward Evans-Pritchard to describe their own attempts to interpret to a public in their own society the cultures that they had studied in Africa, Oceania, and elsewhere. They tried to present the customs and beliefs of the Azande or the Trobrianders, for instance, in ways that would be intelligible to Western readers.7 Like anthropologists, historians may be regarded as translators, in their case from the language of the past into that of the present, facing the same basic dilemma as translators between languages—in other words, the conflict between fidelity to the culture from which they are translating and intelligibility to the audience at whom their work is aimed. More generally still, anyone who adapts ideas or artifacts to new situations and new uses, as so often happened in the course of the Renaissance, might be described a cultural translator. It should be added that translation in the literal or interlingual sense may be regarded as a kind of litmus paper that makes the process of cultural translation more visible than usual.8 What follows is concerned with translation in both senses, literal and metaphorical. It retells a small part of the story of the reception of the Renaissance, moving backward and forward between the translation of texts and the translation of artifacts, between the idea of transfer and the idea of translation (words derived from the same irregular Latin verb, transferre, transtuli, translatum). Indeed, some sixteenth-century translators such as Hermann Ryff, discussed in what follows, described themselves as “transferring” a text from one language to another. The case study presented here concerns the “language of architecture,” as Sir John Summerson and other scholars have called it.9 The metaphor is actually an ancient one, since Doric and Ionic were the names of Greek dialects before the terms were applied to forms of columns. The shift from the Gothic style to the revived classicism of the Renaissance may be seen as a change in architectural language, both in the vocabulary of ornament and in what we might call its “grammar,” in other words, the rules for combining different elements.

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For the transition from Gothic to Renaissance to take place, the physical transfer of artists and artisans was surely a necessity. It has been persuasively argued by some economic historians and also by some historians of science that “through the ages, the main channel for the diff usion of innovation has been the migration of people,” and that “the transfer of really valuable knowledge from country to country or from institution to institution cannot be easily achieved by the transport of letters, journals and books [or indeed, one might add, works of art]: it necessitates the physical movement of human beings.” In short, “ideas move around inside people.”10 The point is surely even more valid in the case of practical know-how than in that of more theoretical knowledge. A “habitus,” as Pierre Bourdieu (following Aristotle via Thomas Aquinas and Erwin Panofsky) called it, requires personal encounters in order to be transferred effectively.11 In the case of Renaissance architecture, these encounters are quite well documented, revealing the central role played by Italian artisans, especially masons from the Lake Como region, in the construction of Italianate buildings in France, Bohemia, and Poland.12 Conversely, the travels in Italy of foreign architects such as Jacques Androuet du Cerceau, Philibert Delorme, John Shute, and Inigo Jones had important cultural consequences. What they saw and learned in Rome in particular shaped the work of these architects for the rest of their lives. • Even if people come first, as suggested earlier, the migration or transfer of texts was also crucial in the reception of the Renaissance. Hence what follows will attempt to combine the history of architecture with the history of the book. As a number of scholars, notably Don McKenzie, Gérard Genette, and Roger Chartier, have pointed out, the format of a book, including so-called paratexts such as prefaces, headings, indexes, and illustrations, is almost as influential in terms of a book’s reception as the text itself.13 Following their example, it is possible to trace the history of a whole shelf of architectural treatises as they were written, printed, reprinted, edited, translated, studied, annotated, borrowed, or imitated.14 The only surviving classical treatise, written by Marcus Vitruvius Pollio around the year 27 bce, was rediscovered in the age of Charlemagne, and circulated in manuscript, sometimes in incomplete form, in the Middle Ages. It was known to medieval scholars such as Hugh of St. Victor and Albertus

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Magnus as well as to Petrarch and Boccaccio. In 1416, the Tuscan humanist Gianfrancesco Poggio Bracciolini found a complete text in Switzerland, at the monastery of Sankt Gallen. The text was printed for the first time in the 1480s and many times thereafter.15 (See Figures 2 through 6.) Another leading Italian humanist, Leon Battista Alberti, both criticized and imitated Vitruvius in the first Renaissance treatise on architecture, written mainly in the 1430s and presented to Pope Nicholas V around the year 1450. Like Vitruvius’s work, Alberti’s De re aedificatoria was first printed in the 1480s.16 Together, Vitruvius and Alberti inspired a new genre that laid down the rules for proper building just as Pietro Bembo and other humanists had laid down the rules for writing well. Examples of this new genre included the following: Diego de Sagredo, Medidas del Romano, 1526 Sebastiano Serlio, Sette libri dell’architettura, 1537– Jacques Androuet du Cerceau, Livre d’architecture, 1559 Philibert Delorme, Nouvelles Inventions, 1561 Giacomo Barozzi de Vignola, Regola delli cinque ordini d’architettura, 1562 John Shute, Grounds of Architecture, 1563 Jean Bullant, Reigle générale d’architecture, 1564 Andrea Palladio, Quattro libri dell’architettura, 1570 Hans Vredeman de Vries, Architectura, 1578 Wendel Dietterlin, Architectura, 1593– Vincenzo Scamozzi, Idea dell’architettura universale, 1615 Henry Wotton, Elements of Architecture, 1624 Today, the most famous of these treatises is surely Palladio’s. However, Serlio’s was by far the most widely read at the time, translated into Flemish, German, French, Spanish, Latin, and finally, in 1611, into English. He probably owed his popularity to his clear, down-to-earth style, together with his interest in ornament, which—helped by the numerous illustrations—made it possible to use the treatise as a pattern book. The treatises were usually prescriptive as well as descriptive. For this reason Serlio entitled his fourth book Regole generali, Vignola and Bullant entitled their treatises Regole delli cinque ordini and Reigle générale d’architecture, while Scamozzi’s book 6 was translated into Dutch under the title Grondregulen der Bow-Const (1640).

PRE VO

Figure 2. Caryatids, in Architecture, ou Art de bien bastir. Marcus Vitruvius Pollio, 1547. Bibliothèque nationale de France.

pr

Figure 3. Tower, in Architecture, ou Art de bien bastir. Marcus Vitruvius Pollio, 1547. Bibliothèque nationale de France.

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Figure 4. Caryatids, in Vitruvius Teutsch. Marcus Vitruvius Pollio, 1548. Universität Heidelberg.

The fact that Vitruvius was difficult to interpret needs to be emphasized. The dedications to the two Italian translations of Alberti refer to “gli oscuri scritti di Vitruvio” and note that the text is “molto difficile e oscuro.”17 The French sculptor-architect Jean Goujon noted that misunderstandings of the text had led to what he called “oeuvres . . . desmesurées, et hors de toute symetrie.”18 It is therefore no surprise to discover that the treatise generated an abundant literature of commentary. In the case of the Italian

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Figure 5. Caryatids, in De Architectura. Marcus Vitruvius Pollio, 1582. Universidad de Sevilla.

translation of 1521, for example, each page of the text of Vitruvius is completely surrounded by a commentary in smaller type. The French humanist Guillaume Philandrier published another commentary on Vitruvius, and so did the Venetian patrician Daniele Barbaro.19 The Italian humanist Bernardino Baldi devoted a treatise to elucidating the vocabulary of De architectura.20 The importance of these texts for the reception of the Renaissance was much enhanced by their illustrations. The edition of Vitruvius by the Dominican friar Giovanni Giocondo, published in 1511, was the first printed version to be illustrated (as some medieval manuscripts had been). By contrast, Alberti had to wait another forty years for illustrations, until Bartoli’s transla-

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li

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d c

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Figure 6. Tower, in De Architectura. Marcus Vitruvius Pollio, 1582. Universidad de Sevilla.

tion, published in 1550.21 However, later treatises were illustrated from the first edition onward. We might think of illustrations to a text as themselves a form of translation, from one medium of communication to another. In the case of Serlio in particular, the pictures—the nine fi replaces illustrated in book 4, for instance—are perhaps more important than the text. As has already been suggested, these images allowed patrons to use a theoretical treatise as a collection of samples. In similar fashion, Castiglione’s Cortegiano, in which different

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characters had debated the principles of courtly behavior, came to be presented to readers by some of its editors and publishers as a simple and practical guide to good manners.22 • To exemplify some of these points we may turn to the fortune in translation of three of the leading treatises on architecture, by Vitruvius, Alberti, and Serlio, over a “long” sixteenth century that runs from the 1480s to the 1620s. In the course of this period three barriers restricting the reception of these texts were breached: the barriers of geography, language, and price. In the first place, books were commodities relatively heavy and expensive to transport, so publishing these treatises in Paris, Nuremberg, or Madrid brought them to the attention of many more people than had been reached by Italian editions alone. In the second place, Latin was an obstacle to readers who had not studied in grammar schools, so that translations of Vitruvius and Alberti into different vernaculars widened the potential audience for these books. Four Italian translations of Vitruvius were published in the sixteenth century. Alberti’s treatise circulated in an Italian version in manuscript before appearing in two published translations in the middle of the sixteenth century, whereas Serlio himself wrote in Italian. Translations of the treatises into French, Spanish, German, Dutch, and English widened the readership still further. In the third place, the format of the treatises changed. Heavy and expensive folios were joined by cheaper quarto and even octavo editions. Abridgments or partial translations were also produced, among them Hans Blum’s summary of Serlio’s account of the five orders, published in Latin in 1550 and then in German, French, and English. The shift from the roman type of the Latin and Spanish editions and the italic type of the Italian and French ones to the Gothic type used in Germany, the Netherlands, and England symbolized the cultural translation that these texts required outside the Romancespeaking world. It may be useful to look a little more closely at the process of vernacularizing architectural ideas, in which the order in which different texts were translated affected their reception, the later ones being understood in terms of expectations that the earlier ones helped create. For example, the first architectural treatise to appear in print in French, in 1537, was not one of the three considered here but a translation of the Medidas del Romano by the Spanish architect Diego Sagredo, an imitation or simplification of Vitruvius.23 Serlio’s fourth book, the one about rules, ap-

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peared in French in 1542. Vitruvius himself, translated in 1547, came third, and Alberti, translated in 1553, came fourth. In Dutch, the tradition of architectural translation began with Serlio’s fourth book, in 1539, suggesting once again that there was a significant demand for rules of architecture at this time. In German, the story was much the same, the fourth book being translated in 1542, not from the original but from the Dutch (translation of this kind at “second hand” was not uncommon in the Renaissance). Vitruvius followed in 1548. In the Iberian peninsula, an early sixteenth-century Portuguese translation of Vitruvius circulated in manuscript, like the Spanish translation by Lázaro de Velasco made in the 1550s. The first published translation of an architectural treatise, a Spanish version of Serlio, appeared in print in 1552, followed by Vitruvius in 1582.24 Alberti was published in Spanish in the early 1580s, and Vignola in 1593. As for England, it was on the margin of this process of dissemination. It was only in 1611 that Serlio was published in translation for the first time, while the English had to wait until the eighteenth century to read Vitruvius, Alberti, and Palladio in their own tongue. The illustrations of these treatises have a story of their own, a complicated story in which the threads have not yet been disentangled. It was of course possible in principle to use the same illustrations in different translations of the same text. In practice, though, the pictures were generally copied—recut by a new engraver—as minor differences reveal. In other cases, artists or printers preferred to do things in their own way, and new illustrations were made, sometimes by well-known artists such as Jean Goujon or Andrea Palladio.25 Complicating the story, later treatises or editions sometimes copied—or perhaps we should say “stole”—illustrations from earlier ones.26 The editing, translation, and publication of these treatises were a major collective enterprise involving some well-known individuals as well as others more obscure. Architect-translators included the Sangallo brothers, who worked on a version of Vitruvius but did not publish it; Cesare Cesariano of Milan, a follower of Bramante; and in Spain, Francesco de Villalpando, Lázaro de Velasco, and Miguel de Urrea.27 Among nonarchitects who translated or commented, Pieter Coecke was a painter, printer, and entrepreneur, while Guillaume Philandrier and Jehan Martin were both secretaries to French ambassadors in Rome. A major figure in this collective enterprise who does not seem to have attracted the scholarly attention that he deserves is Walter Hermann Ryff. Ryff, also known as Rivius, described himself as a physician and mathematician, but also

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wrote on perspective, fortresses, weighing, anatomy, cookery, obstetrics, pharmacy, surgery, and the art of memory. The printers of these treatises (in an age in which the modern distinction between printer and publisher had not yet emerged) are also worth noting, like the places of publication, helping us to reconstruct the routes along which the ideas and ideals of Renaissance architecture traveled Europe. Most of the early editions of architectural treatises appeared in Rome, Venice, and Florence, but the circle gradually widened to include publications in Paris, Lyon, Paris, Nuremberg, Zurich, and Basel. A few printers were personally involved with the movement to revive antiquity, among them the Giunta brothers in Florence; Jacques Kerver of Paris, who published the Hypnerotomachia Polyphili and Horapollo’s Hieroglyphics (texts of great interest to humanists) as well as Alberti; and Johan Petreius of Nuremberg, best known for his edition of Copernicus but also the publisher of Ryff ’s Vitruvius. Ancient architecture and new astronomy appear to have appealed to the same printers, and perhaps to the same readers as well. Perhaps the most important conclusion to emerge from a study of this collective enterprise is that understanding the more technical parts of Vitruvius was the kind of problem that required both the practical knowledge of craftsmen and the philological knowledge of humanists, thus illustrating Erwin Panofsky’s well-known description of the Renaissance as “a period of decompartmentalization,” breaking down the barriers between the liberal and mechanical arts and bridging “the gap which had separated the scholar and thinker from the practitioner.”28 For example, the most important editor of the text, the philologist Fra Giocondo, collaborated with Raphael on the construction of St. Peter’s after the death of Bramante. Again, it was at Raphael’s request and in his house that the scholar Fabio Calvo translated Vitruvius into Italian, since the artist did not know Latin.29 The humanist Philandrier studied with Serlio, was a friend of the Sangallos and Vignola, and probably worked as an architect himself on the cathedral of Rodez, where he was a canon. Jehan Martin, best known as a translator, also helped design the temporary architecture for King Henri II’s state entry into Paris. Andrea Palladio illustrated Barbaro’s edition of Vitruvius. Inigo Jones was dissatisfied with the way in which editors and commentators had interpreted the obscure Vitruvian phrase scamilli impares, and used his practical knowledge to advance a hypothesis of his own.30 •

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It is time to turn, as historians of the book so often do these days, to the readers, including the readers of manuscript as well as printed versions of the books that concern us here. Some of these readers were important people. Alfonso of Aragon, king of Naples, owned a manuscript copy of Vitruvius. Lorenzo de’ Medici read Alberti on architecture before the book was printed.31 Prince Philip, later Philip II, read Vitruvius and Serlio and developed firm tastes as a patron of architecture.32 The poet Angelo Poliziano owned an autograph manuscript of Alberti. The English ambassador Sir Henry Wotton, the author of one of the first English treatises on architecture, also owned a manuscript of Alberti, in his case one with corrections by the author. Inigo Jones annotated his copies of Alberti, Palladio, and Scamozzi, while an anonymous Catalan architect covered with comments and sketches a copy of the Bartoli translation of Alberti.33 Attention should not be given to individuals alone. It may be argued that too much emphasis—in this case as in other studies of creativity—has traditionally been placed on the achievements of individuals, solitary geniuses. On the other hand, too little attention has been given to small groups or networks and the dialogue, debate, and other forms of give-and-take that occur within them.34 This point is especially true in the case of architecture, a collaborative art par excellence. It is time to go a little further in the same direction and to extend the concern with groups from production to reception, focusing on networks of readers, their horizons of expectations, and the ways in which these networks transmitted, discussed, and criticized new ideas. The traditional term to describe these groups is “circle,” but “network” may be preferable because it does not imply either centers or closure. One French network in the middle of the sixteenth century centered on the princess Marguerite de Navarre, the sister of King François I. Serlio, who had emigrated from Italy to France, dedicated his fifth book to her. Rabelais too dedicated a book to her, his Tiers Livre, while his references to Vitruvius and Alberti reveal his interest in architecture. Rabelais was also a “close friend” of the architect Philibert Delorme.35 One of his French pupils was Guillaume Philandrier, whose edition of Vitruvius has already been mentioned. Philandrier was secretary to Georges d’Armagnac, who was French ambassador to Venice and Rome as well as bishop of Rodez, where Philandrier was a canon. It was in Armagnac’s entourage that another architect and writer, Androuet du Cerceau, lived when he was in Rome. Other French readers may be discovered through inventories of their libraries, often preserved in notarial archives. The poet Remy Belleau, for

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example, owned an edition of Serlio. Montaigne owned a copy of Delorme. The architectural interests of secretaries at this time are worth noting. Besides Philander and Martin, mentioned earlier, the royal secretary Jacques Perdrier owned copies of Alberti, Delorme, Serlio, and Vignola. Another royal secretary, Evrard de Vabres, owned Alberti, Serlio, and Vignola.36 The interest of French noblewomen in both architectural theory and practice is worth noting. Marguerite de Navarre has already been mentioned. Louise de Clermont, wife of François du Bellay, owned a copy of Serlio’s treatise and may have commissioned the author to build for her. Queen Catherine de’ Medici was a patron of architecture, and Delorme dedicated a treatise to her, while Catherine’s rival Diane de Poitiers, King Henri II’s mistress, employed Delorme at her famous chateau at Anet.37 In the German-speaking world, owners of Alberti’s treatise included Thomas Wolf, a humanist from Strasbourg. Maria of Hungary (sister of the emperor Charles V and an important patron of the arts, often in the emperor’s name) owned copies of Serlio in both French and Latin. The Elector Palatine Ottheinrich owned Serlio and Vitruvius. In England, Sir Thomas Tresham, a Catholic gentleman, owned Alberti, Serlio, Vignola, and Androuet.38 Sir Francis Willoughby, a rich man thanks to his ownership of coal mines, and a great builder, owned copies of Alberti, Serlio, Androuet, Delorme, Palladio, Shute, and Vignola.39 It is worth noting that at this time, the English were still polyglot. The lack of translations of architectural treatises into English did not matter too much because a number of patrons could read Latin, Italian, and French. • The translation of the treatises into different languages involved cultural translation, as a case study will show: the translations of a single section in book 6 of Vitruvius, concerned with the housing appropriate for different social groups.40 This section was in particular need of adaptation, since the ancient Roman social structure was very different from that of Renaissance Europe. The most obvious contrast comes in the rendering of the descriptions of two Roman groups: the moneylenders and tax farmers, feneratores et publicani, and the nobles (nobiles), who possess honors and offices (honores magistratusque). The problems were least serious for translators into Italian not only because Italian is close to Latin but also because Italy, like ancient Rome, was dominated by an urban patriciate. Hence the Cesariano translation was able

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to refer to fenatori, publicani, nobili, honori, and magistrati. However, a later translation by Daniele Barbaro preferred contemporary terms such as banchieri, cambiatori (money changers), avvocati, and huomini di palazzo. The French translation of this section was also a free one. The phrase “Nobles constituez en dignitez honorables” keeps close to the Latin, but the feneratores et publicani are brought up to date and also expanded into two different groups, “Banquiers, Usuriers, Publiquains, Changeurs, et autres qui present argent a interest et sur gage” on one side, and “Conseilliers, Advocatz, Procureurs et gens de Practique” on the other. The German solution is similar enough to make one wonder whether Ryff had been looking at Martin’s version, since he too distinguishes “den grossernhendlern, Gewerbsleuthe, Publicanen” from “Juristen, Advocaten, Procuratores.” In similar fashion the Spanish translation distinguishes “los usuarios y cambiadores” from “los abogados y procuradores” and from “los nobles, y que goviernan.” As for the translation of architectural terms, this would have been impossible without a massive creation of neologisms. In the Romance languages, these neologisms generally followed Greek and Latin models, while in German and Dutch there was an attempt to invent terms based on compounds of native elements (architectura becoming Baukunst, for example), a point to be discussed further subsequently. • Historians of the book are much concerned with the question of reception. These consequences are clearer than usual in the case of treatises on architecture, since it is possible to compare them with what was actually built. The translation of theory into practice was often free, a process sometimes described at the time as “accommodation.” For example, Vredeman de Vries declared that the rules of Vitruvius could be broken in order to accommodate art to local conditions (“accommoder l’art à la situation et necessité du pais”).41 Accommodatio was originally a rhetorical term, used by Cicero and others to describe the way in which orators might adapt their discourse to different audiences. It was also the word that Jesuit missionaries such as the sixteenth-century Italian Matteo Ricci used when they described their adaptation of Christianity to Chinese culture.42 Today, translation theorists prefer the term “negotiation.”43 As case studies of this kind of cultural translation, it may be illuminating to focus on two networks of English patrons. The most famous, studied

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more than once, is a late Renaissance example, the group surrounding the fourteenth Earl of Arundel, Thomas Howard. Arundel was the patron of Inigo Jones, whose architectural library “allows us to understand how the books connected a group of people with a shared interest in architecture.”44 Arundel too built up a fine library, including a Vitruvius inscribed “This book I had from my Lo. of Northumberland.”45 Henry Percy, ninth Earl of Northumberland, known as the “Wizard Earl” on account of his interest in natural philosophy, owned copies of Alberti, Androuet, Delorme, Dietterlin, Palladio, Serlio, Vignola, and Vredeman de Vries.46 Henry Wotton, who came to know Arundel in Venice, owned texts by Alberti and Delorme (annotating the latter).47 A foreign member of the group was the Dutch poet and diplomat Constantijn Huygens, an enthusiastic amateur architect who knew both Wotton and Jones.48 An earlier English group may be described as the “Somerset network.” Less well known, it deserves discussion in more detail. The network consisted of noblemen and gentlemen born in the early years of the sixteenth century, the first generation to take the Renaissance style seriously. The links between members of the network were political and economic as well as intellectual. Edward Seymour (ca. 1500–1552), who became Duke of Somerset, was briefly the most powerful man in England during the reign of the boy-king Edward VI. Despite his involvement in politics he found time to take an interest in building. Between 1548 and 1551 he spent over £15,000 on the construction of Syon House and especially on Somerset House (where the Courtauld Institute now stands), in London. Somerset was advised on building by his steward, Sir John Thynne (ca. 1513–80), best known today for having built his own house at Longleat in Wiltshire, though he may have designed Somerset House as well.49 The eldest member of the network was Sir William Sharington (ca. 1495– 1553), who was close to Somerset’s brother Thomas Seymour and built a country house, Lacock Abbey, in a mixture of the Gothic and Renaissance styles.50 John Dudley (1504–53), who became Duke of Northumberland (but was no relation of the later earl, just mentioned), was a supporter of Somerset who later turned against him. His interest in architecture is apparent from the fact that, as we have seen, he sent John Shute to Italy for training. Sir Thomas Smith (1513–77) was a humanist who acted as Somerset’s political adviser and agent (despite clashes with his patron’s wife), and was later active as a diplomat and as one of the principal secretaries to the crown. Besides building Hill Hall in Essex, Smith was the owner of a large library with

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“over twelve important books on architecture,” including four editions of Vitruvius, the Philandrier commentary, and treatises by Philibert, Androuet, and Shute. It is likely that he discovered the treatises by Philibert and Androuet during his mission to Paris.51 William Cecil (1520–98), like Smith, worked for Somerset as a secretary before serving Queen Elizabeth as a kind of first minister. A friend of Sir John Thynne, Cecil was also devoted to building, constructing both Burghley House in Lincolnshire (near the Northamptonshire border) and Theobalds in Hertfordshire, for which he imported a “stone gallery” from Flanders. Theobalds, now destroyed, may well have been the first house in England to follow an Italian model. Cecil owned copies of Vitruvius, Alberti, and Delorme’s Nouvelles Inventions (1561). Kirby Hall, another house from this period, was built by Cecil’s Northamptonshire neighbor Sir Humphrey Stafford. Vitruvius might have been surprised to see classical columns on the roof, disguising the chimneys, which had no place in his treatise, but they offer a vivid example of an attempt to adapt classical models to the English climate.52 Sir Nicholas Bacon (1510–79), Lord Keeper and father of the more famous Francis Bacon, was Cecil’s brother-in-law, having married Anne Cooke after Cecil had married her sister Mildred. Scholars have noted “the powerful kinship networks originating from the marriages of Anthony Cooke’s daughters.”53 Sir Nicholas built Gorhambury in Hertfordshire, formed yet another good library, and gave the University of Cambridge a copy of Serlio.54 The merchant and banker Sir Thomas Gresham (ca. 1518–79) built the Royal Exchange in the style of Netherlands Renaissance. He was doubly a member of the Somerset network, since his sister Christiana married Sir John Thynne, while his sister-in-law Jane married Nicholas Bacon.55 At this point, the middle years of the sixteenth century, English patrons generally had little direct contact with or knowledge of Italian art, though Smith had visited Italy around the year 1540, while other Englishmen had studied in Italy, especially at the University of Padua.56 In the case of architecture, the Italian Renaissance generally reached them via France and Flanders. Smith, for instance, had been in Paris as ambassador, while Gresham had lived in the Netherlands. These patrons probably employed French and Flemish craftsmen, who were then able to pass on the Renaissance tradition to some English artisans. In the case of a few members of this network, it is possible to say a little more about their architectural tastes. Sir John Thynne made his own drawings to show builders what he wanted. Thynne seems to have been something

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of a perfectionist, and he was criticized by a neighbor for changing his mind so often. The critique makes the house itself complain about its owner, “raising many a time with great care and now and then pulling down this or that part of me to enlarge sometimes a foot or a few inches, upon a conceit of this or that man’s speech” (in other words, following conversations or debates about good architecture).57 Cecil’s interest in the details of building emerges clearly from his correspondence with his mason, who asked him for drawings; with the financier Thomas Gresham, about obtaining a stone loggia from the Netherlands; and with the English ambassador to France, interrupting political instructions to ask for “a book concerning architecture . . . which I saw at Sir Thomas Smith’s,” a clue to an unrecorded conversation about building of a kind that must often have taken place.58 Cecil wrote to Norris in August 1568, “I pray you sir, let one of yours bring me such indices [catalogues] as be to be had for books in Paris that I may make my choice at your coming. I am now and then occupied in Vitruvius De architectura; and therefore if there be any writers besides Vitruvius, Leo Baptista [Alberti] and Albert Durer (all which three I have), I would gladly have them.” This may be how Cecil acquired his copy of Delorme, a book that he owned at the time that he was building Burghley House, the courtyard of which has been described as “très delormienne.”59 Cecil may have placed aesthetics before convenience. When Nicholas Bacon saw Cecil’s house at Theobalds, he noted that the toilet (the “privy”) was too close to the larder: “you had done better to have offended yor yey [eye] outward than yor nose inward.”60 The texts just cited offer precious examples of contemporary discussions of what the late Ernst Gombrich once called “the leaven of criticism in Renaissance art.” They allow us to hear a few echoes of the conversation of the dead, mere fragments, but sufficient all the same to give some idea of the kind of discussion that took place when the first buildings in the new style were being erected.61 Sometimes we know about the readers of architectural treatises, but not whether or what they had built. On other occasions we know something about builders without knowing whether or what they read. For once, in the case of this Somerset network, we know a little about both. • It would have been difficult to discuss the classical style of architecture without a number of technical terms, the “language of architecture” in a more literal

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sense than Summerson’s. Words such as “architrave,” “capital,” “column,” “cornice,” “frieze,” “gallery,” “metope,” “pilaster,” “piazza,” “portico,” and “triglyph” entered a number of European vernaculars at this time, often via the treatises discussed in this chapter, and so indirectly from Vitruvius.62 Glossaries were sometimes provided to explain unfamiliar terms to readers, as in the case of the Vitruvius edition of 1521 and the French translation of 1547. In this way the vernaculars of Europe were enriched, as the printer explained to King Philip II in his dedication of the Spanish Vitruvius in 1582. In Italy, especially in Florence, there was a relatively long tradition of using these technical terms. Portico, for instance had been used by the poet Jacopone di Todi in the thirteenth century, capitello (“capital”) by Boccaccio in the fourteenth, colonna by Petrarch at about the same time, cornice and pilastro by the chronicler Giovanni Villani, still in the fourteenth century, fregio (“frieze”) by the artists Lorenzo Ghiberti and Antonio Filarete in the fifteenth century. Architrave was used by Leonardo da Vinci and Baldassare Castiglione in the early years of the sixteenth century, though metopa and triglifo are first recorded in the pages of Serlio. Elsewhere it was only in the sixteenth century or even later that most of these terms came into regular use. In French, for instance, colonne is recorded in the twelfth century and chapiteau in the fifteenth, but the first known reference to architrave comes in a manuscript of 1528, and in print in the Martin translation of Vitruvius in 1547. Corniche or cornice is first recorded in a manuscript of 1524 and in print in the Martin translation. Metope, triglyphe, and volute all appeared in print in 1526, in the translation of Sagredo’s Medidas, mentioned earlier; pilastre in 1545, in the French translation of Serlio; and caryatide in 1546, in Jean Martin’s translation of the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, a romance in which descriptions of buildings play an important part. These terms and others are employed in Philibert Delorme’s Architecture (1567) as if they had become familiar. In English, the terms “architrave,” “caryatid,” “cornice,” “frieze,” “metope,” and “triglyph” all appeared in print, apparently for the first time, in 1563, in the pages of a single book, John Shute’s Grounds of Architecture. In Spanish, Sagredo coined a number of new terms such as gula, corona, bozel, echino, and escota, but they do not seem to have been taken up. It was the translation of Vitruvius published in 1582 that appears to have been crucial in launching terms such as architraves, cornija, friso, triglifo, and so on.63 The Germans moved between two opposite strategies for translations, especially from Latin: either to keep words in the original language,

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like Architectus or Architrab, or to choose a Germanic term, usually a compound such as Baukunst, Baumeister, Hoffplatz, Schlafkammer, Schreibstube, and (around the year 1700) Drieschlitz (for “triglyph”). Ryff sometimes adopted both solutions at once, doubling up terms for greater clarity, writing “Bawmeister oder Architecti” or “Ratherren/Senatores.” As the terms were domesticated, people began to use them in everyday writing and even in speaking. In his Essais (1580) Montaigne condemned what he called the “jargon” of architects who “swell themselves up with big words such as pilastres, architraves, corniches, ‘Doric’ and ‘Corinthian,’ even when referring to work of no more importance than the door of his kitchen” (book 1, chapter 51). In similar fashion the Breton nobleman Noël Du Fail’s Contes d’Eutrapel (1585) mocked the people who “had no other words in their mouth but frontispieces, pedestals, obelisks, columns and so on” (n’avaient autres mots en bouche que frontispieces, piedestals, obelisques, colonnes).64 A few years later the French nobleman Pierre de Brantôme wrote about architraves, chapiteaux, cornices, and frizes in his Vies des dames illustres. The long-term consequences of this fashion were surely significant. An international language of art was coming into existence in the sixteenth century, including a vocabulary that identified not only techniques such as fresco or damascening but also styles—distinguishing rustic, grotesque, arabesque, and above all classical (variously known as all’antica, à l’antique, a lo romano, or nach antiquischer manier). Since language affects perception, it is likely that this cluster of new terms in different languages sharpened the consciousness of differences between styles. Translation did much more than simply spread information. It also encouraged changes in attitude or mentality.

Chapter 2

Translating the Rest of Ovid: The Exile Poems Gordon Br aden

There is an awareness in contemporary literary study that it is neither possible nor useful to block the topic of translation off too distinctly from the general course of the literary and cultural life around it; study of the former necessarily takes us deep into the latter. In particular, drawing a line between what does and what does not count as “translation” is more than usually difficult and pointless in the Renaissance, when both in pedagogical practice and in literary theory a continuum ran from the most literal “grammatical” translation, to a general kind of literary imitation, to what we think of as original literary production. A major case in point is Ovid, a recognized classic whom most Renaissance writers—Shakespeare among them—could and at least at times unquestionably did read in the original Latin, but whom they also translated repeatedly. There is by now a handsome body of scholarship and criticism on the vital and complex role of “Ovidianism” in English Renaissance literature, along a spectrum from, toward one end, schoolroom practice and the published verse translations that become a steady stream from the 1560s onward, and, at the other, some of the greatest literary creations of the time. In this spirit a critic can call A Midsummer Night’s Dream “Shakespeare’s Metamorphoses—the most magical tribute to Ovid ever paid,” and without raising eyebrows.1 It almost does not matter where along the line you stop calling something a translation and reach for some other term. Most of this attention, however, has been directed at certain parts of Ovid’s legacy: above all the Metamorphoses, translated in its entirety twice during

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this period, in different ways that themselves offer a capsule history of English poetry over six decades, with some ancillary concern for the Amores (translated by no less a figure than Christopher Marlowe) and the Heroides. That emphasis is appropriate, but it falls on only about half of Ovid’s surviving corpus—three of the six volumes in the Loeb edition—and that corpus stands out not only as one of the larger corpora of a single poet to survive from antiquity, but also as probably the most diverse in its components. Apparently the only important part not to survive is a tragedy, Medea, which would have added even further diversity. The evidence is that Renaissance readers were interested in almost all of this body of work. What “Ovid” meant for them— insofar as they even worried about assembling the pieces into some kind of whole—had a greater variety to it than modern critics can easily keep in their heads when they generalize about the “Ovidian.” I do not intend to deal here with the entirety of that “other half,” only the exile poems.2 My interest is in the verse letters written from the unbeguiling western shore of the Black Sea: the Tristia and the Epistulae ex Ponto, which together fi ll the last volume of the Loeb Ovid.3 They have a documented afterlife from the Middle Ages to the present; Bob Dylan’s 2006 album Modern Times has a number of unsignaled but unmistakable quotations from a recent translation of the Tristia.4 In 1582 the Tristia were named, along with the Ars amatoria, in a resolution by the Privy Council as the kind of thing which too many people were reading in school and which should be replaced by something more edifying and patriotic.5 They had some success with the Ars, but in school curricula the Tristia remained securely on the reading list, companion to the Metamorphoses as one of the two Ovidian poems that one was most likely to encounter (in Latin) in an Elizabethan education.6 Multiple translations from the exile letters, both entire collections and individual poems and parts of poems, were published during our period: a slow start in the Elizabethan years, followed by a flurry of activity in the 1630s in what looks like a drive, in the wake of George Sandys’s Metamorphoses (1626), to English the rest of Ovid’s corpus in the newly canonical form of the pentameter couplet. Here is the roster, possibly incomplete as regards individual poems: 1572, books 1–3 of the Tristia by Thomas Churchyard (in fourteeners);7 1632, three passages by Sandys himself in the annotated edition of his Metamorphoses; 1633, the complete Tristia; and  1639, the complete ex Ponto by Wye Saltonstall (Saltonstall also translated the complete Heroides); also 1639, the complete Tristia by Zachary Catlin; 1640, Tristia 1.3–4 (a single poem in

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Renaissance editions), 1.7, and 4.10, and ex Ponto 4.13 by John Gower in the preface to his complete translation of the Fasti; 1651, Tristia 3.3 and 5.3 and ex Ponto 3.7 and 4.3 by Henry Vaughan in Olor Iscanus. Of the more substantial translators, I think the otherwise obscure Catlin is the most accomplished.8 Catlin’s tone is often light, and that is its own kind of loss, but the lightness is adroit and in its own way appropriate. In Tristia 1.1, sending his poems back to Rome: “Goe Booke, from me those welcome places greet, / Ile touch them (as I may) with Paper feet.”9 The deft metaphor there replaces the original one about metrical feet, a pun that theoretically works in English as well but seldom really does. At times the delicate wittiness acquires real poignance, precisely by being, in the context of what has happened, a kind of bathos; in Tristia 2, for instance, Ovid’s book-long attempt to excuse himself to Augustus: What I a yong man wrote, free and secure, For these, now I am old, I smart endure. My childish booke is now reveng’d too late, I suffer for a fault that’s out of date.10 That last line shimmers with both self-awareness and naiveté: the consummate man of fashion simultaneously realizing and hoping to deny that he has found himself way out of his depth. You cannot quite find that nuance in the Latin at that point, but it fits. The most consequential poet is Vaughan. Olor Iscanus collects his earlier work, preceding what now seems the discovery of his real poetic voice in Silex Scintillans; its mostly secular poems are nevertheless well done in a disciplined, relatively decorous cavalier mode. The late 1640s were melancholy years for such poetry, and Ovid’s expressions of the miseries of exile suit the times. The poems that Vaughan picks attack betrayals by supposed friends and celebrate close bonds that do survive; the translations are close, but with significant and clearly deliberate inflections. Ex Ponto 3.7 is stiffened with a Stoic heroism not really Ovid’s style: Know then, That as for me, Whom Fate hath us’d to such calamitie, I scorn her spite and yours, and freely dare The highest ills your malice can prepare.11

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Ovid just says that there are no miseries with which he is not already familiar; he wants his readers to understand that he is utterly miserable, and does not try to sound heroic. Tristia 5.3, on the birthday of Bacchus, is skillfully shifted to suggest that the other poets invoked are not absent colleagues back in Rome but present drinking companions, and to heighten the festive character of their collegiality: “you my trusty friends (the Jollie Crew / Of careless Poets!).”12 Ovid has “uos quoque, consortes studii, pia turba, poetae” (Tristia 5.3.47: and you poets, fellow aficionados, a devout company). There is wine being drunk in Ovid’s (solitary) celebration of the poetic calling, but it is flowing more freely, and its effect more general, in English. Translations like this, however, are only part of the story of translation in the most spacious sense. Further evidence offered so far of the absorption of Ovid’s exile poems into the literary bloodstream has not been at all comparable to that for his other poetry, but interest in the topic has been coming up with increasing frequency over the past decade or so.13 Jonathan Bate in particular has worked to strengthen the case as far as Shakespeare is concerned. Scholars have long thought the incipit of Sonnet 19—“Devouring time blunt thou the Lyon’s pawes”14 —could be based on Tristia 4.6.5: “tempore Poenarum compescitur ira leonum” (time softens the anger of Phoenician lions). Bate would add the immediately preceding couplet at the end of Sonnet 18—“So long as men can breathe or eyes can see, / So long lives this, and this gives life to thee”—which reproduces the sentiment and mimics the structural repetition in Ovid’s promise to his devoted wife in Tristia 5.14.5, the last poem in that collection: “dumque legar, mecum pariter tua fama legetur” (while I am read, your fame will be read equally along with me).15 This is hardly the first time Ovid prophesied immortality through poetry—he began doing so in the Amores—and both these examples are detachable sententiae of the sort that Renaissance writers were happy to appropriate without having much mind for the rest of the poem from which they come. I will, however, return to Shakespeare’s Sonnets to argue a sense in which Ovid’s exile poems are relevant beyond these momentary possible borrowings. But I also want to suggest that scholars have not completed the enterprise of noting such local connections in the literature of the time, including some in which the larger context is obviously and significantly relevant. Such is I think the case in an exchange of poems between Sir Walter Ralegh and Queen Elizabeth. These are the twinned poems “Fortune hath taken thee away, my Love” (Ralegh) and “Ah silly pugg, wert thou so sore afrayd” (Elizabeth),16 where Ralegh complains of some unspecified betrayal by his beloved, and she

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reassures him in a skillfully high-handed way that no such betrayal has taken place. Ralegh’s ruling conceit is that his love—partly because she is a woman, though he does not explicitly point that out—is under the power of Fortune and therefore unaccountably changeable. In the fourth of six stanzas he goes on to say: Then will I leave my Love in fortune’s hands, Then will I leave my love in worthlesse bands, And onelie love the sorrowe Due to me, Sorrowe hencefourth that shall my princess bee. It is the last line that catches my eye. In Tristia 1.3 Ovid recalls his last night in Rome, including the speech of his distraught wife; in Catlin’s translation: Thou shalt not part, weele both go hence or neither, Sure man and wife shall bannisht be together: In Pontus land there’s roome for mine abode, And to thy ship Ile adde but little lode. Thee Caesars wrath bids from thy Country flee, Me duty: duty shall my Caesar be.17 “Duty” in Latin is the Virgilian pietas.18 The promise to accompany her husband into exile is one she will not and cannot make good on—among other things, he needs her to stay in Rome and look after his interests, as indeed she does—but simply making the promise is the prelude to a kind of union at a distance which Ovid affirms in a number of his exile poems and which, unexpectedly for the author of the Amores and the Ars amatoria, anticipates some of the more idealized features of Renaissance Petrarchism. In the years to come, her devotion will conquer the bitter fact of physical separation; it deposes Augustus as the source of political and legal authority: “pietas haec mihi Caesar erit.” Ralegh’s “Sorrowe hencefourth that shall my princess bee” seems to be struck directly off the Latin, with pietas become “Sorrowe” and Caesar become “princess.” Catlin is the first of the translators to mimic the lines of the original so clearly. In the only known translation that Ralegh could have consulted, Churchyard fumbles the moment into something marginally intelligible: “But love, this godlye love, shal Caesar geeve to mee.”19 Saltonstall, who follows Churchyard in his translation for pietas, is clearer but clumsy: “Thee

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unto exile Caesars wrath commandes, / Me love, which love to me for Caesars stands.”20 Ralegh leaves no ambiguity that the trope is one of regime change, a choice of masters: in this case, a personal affective state, sorrow, eclipsing the awesome worldly power of that other kind of state. The gender coding is layered. Ralegh is using the voice of Ovid’s wife; surrendering to one’s emotions— especially in preference to surrendering to one’s sovereign—is of course a girlish thing to do, but the emotion in question here is invested by Renaissance culture with a special kind of dignity. Ralegh’s “sorrow” accrues in Petrarchan love poetry a prestige not unlike that which attaches to pietas in Latin; it is the privileged emotion of the despairing male lover, risking and in some quarters acquiring the reputation of whining effeminacy, but in others admired as the expression of an ungirlish steadiness of devotion in the face of the most severe hostility or indifference on the part of the beloved. Elizabeth, despite or because of her exalted office, is the one who has shown herself conventionally feminine in her changeability. Seeing that fact, her lover is anguished but also confirmed in the unshakeability of his own feelings; in that—this is where the poem is headed—he can proclaim his own superiority to her: “But Love farewell, though fortune conquer thee, / No fortune base shall ever alter me.” Elizabeth was of course in a position to give the lofty and unanswerable response which Dame Elynor gives to the haplessly reproachful F. J.: “And if I did so (quod she) what than?”21 But Elizabeth goes for something more artful, a companion poem matching Ralegh’s line for line like a series of dance steps. She takes up the challenge—“No fortune base, thou saist, shall alter thee; / And may so blind a wretch then conquer me?”—and not only denies the charge of infidelity but deftly turns Ralegh’s flank by making his doubt of her loyalty evidence of his inconstancy: “must thou neads sowre sorrowe’s servant be.” The ruler whose own proud motto was her unchangeability—semper eadem, always the same—casts her doubtful lover as the unsteady one, the one whose unmastered emotions—he is indeed the one acting like a girl— make him a slave to Fortune: “Dead to all Joyes and living unto woe, / Slayne quite by her that never gave wiseman blow.” The queen’s final word is condescending, slightly menacing advice that he get a grip: “The Lesse afrayde the better shalt thou spead.” Ralegh’s quotation from the Tristia serves his own purposes, both as allusion (if the reader happens to recognize it) and as borrowed strategy (even if the reader does not); but it also gives Elizabeth some of what she needs to counterattack, and its larger context is relevant as well. Ovid’s exile poems provide the richest treatment in classical literature of the problematics of winning back the favor of an all-powerful earthly monarch,

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and Ovid of course did not succeed in doing so. Put it that way, and it would prima facie seem that those poems would have an acute relevance to quite a few Renaissance writers; it is my suspicion that by not quite realizing what we are looking for, we have so far missed much of the evidence. A further suggestion has to do with something different: the shape that the exile poems give, or purport to give, to the whole of Ovid’s career. Patrick Cheney has had a good deal to say about the influence of classical career models on Renaissance literary ambition. The most famous such model is Virgilian, but Cheney has also set out an Ovidian “counter-Vergilian cursus,” one which he argues Christopher Marlowe for one followed or at least meant to follow.22 Ovid is from the start certainly overt, far more so than Virgil ever is, about his professional ambition; confident forecasts of his literary immortality are made several times in the Amores, with indications that he means to branch out into other modes. Cheney distinguishes this model from the Virgilian in its reach—Ovid anticipates moving on not only to epic, but also to tragedy—but also in the conscious disreputability of its starting point in the poetry of sex and the city, and in the deliberate messiness of its execution, whereby Ovid apparently (the chronology is unclear) continued to write in his supposedly immature modes even as he presumed to move on to loftier matters. It is credible that Marlowe might have been guided by some such paradigm: translating the Amores (at some undetermined date), translating Lucan (at some undetermined date), making his mark in the theater (in the late 1580s, though we are not exactly sure when). Cheney, however, misses something when he gives less weight than he might to the exile poems in this connection. Exile is indeed a catastrophic disruption of the original plan, and “demands a new career phase that even Ovid himself was not wise enough to anticipate”;23 Cheney’s intent is to reconstruct the original plan before this new phase played havoc with it. But one of the interesting things about the exile poems is the way Ovid works in them to see this unanticipated disaster as something other than an asteroid from outer space; and Renaissance readers, for whom the Tristia in particular were quite high on the Ovidian reading list, would most readily have encountered an account of Ovid’s career in his attempt there to make sense of the way it turned out, the way its end was, from the bitter perspective of Tomis, uncannily fitted to its beginning. As Cheney notes, Ovid’s retrospective in the exile poems is selective, and not necessarily in the expected ways. He does defend his erotic poetry as more moral than its reputation, and in any case fictional, not in any way the story of his own life. But he spends little time and energy reminding his

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addressees—who include Augustus himself—of his more serious work, the Metamorphoses and the Fasti. By the end of the Tristia they have all but disappeared from his retrospection; in the life story he gives in 4.10, the source of much of the autobiographical information that we have (or think we have) about Ovid, the poems of his supposedly mature phase figure, after an account of his time as a love poet, only briefly as quaedam placitura, some stuff that would have found favor had he not burned it first—out of anger, he says, with poetry and with his own poems. More and more, the poems he writes about are the ones that by his own account got him into trouble, the Amores and the Ars amatoria; in the process, he comes to speak of poetry itself as the reason for his miserable state. “You are the chief causes of my exile,” he tells the Muses (“uos estis nostrae maxima causa fugae”; Tristia 5.12.46), and compares his fate to the punishment of Perillus, burned alive inside the bronze bull that he created to be a death chamber. At the same time he keeps affirming that poetry itself has been, from his earliest memories, his whole life—“et quod temptabam scribere uersus erat” (whatever I tried to write came out as verse; Tristia 4.10.26)—and not only drawing attention to the obvious, that he is still writing poetry (he even tries his hand at verse in the Getic language of Tomis), but also continuing to write of the immortality he hopes to obtain through his works. For better or worse, this is who he is: a poet, undone precisely by his poetic gift. In an outrageous moment in Amores 2.10, after an account of his fabulously promiscuous lifestyle, he looks forward to dying in the full swing of doing what he loves most, and imagines a mourner at his funeral reflecting “conueniens uitae mors fuit ista tuae” (this death was consistent with your life; you died as you lived; 2.10.38). In the Tristia he assures us that all those stories about his sex life were fictitious, but replaces the old epitaph with a new one with the same shape: “ingenio perii Naso poeta meo” (I, the poet Ovid, died of my own talent; 3.3.74). Poetry was a drug, Ovid a lifelong addict who ended up as addicts usually end up. A bleak summing up, but it has the benefit of making sense. This is not the kind of career pattern they talk about in management seminars, but it is a harrowingly compelling vision of the kind of life that talent and ambition can and sometimes do carve out for themselves, and I suggest we think of Ovid when we find its like in Renaissance literature. I have three quick examples to offer, each linked to citations of Ovid. One of those citations is a line just quoted, though in slightly different wording: “quidquid conabar dicere, uersus erat,” whatever I tried to say came out as verse. That line is cited more than once by the seventeenth-century Mexican writer

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Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, most ominously in her Respuesta a la Sor Filotea.24 Juana was a cloistered nun in Mexico City, but also, as a result of the publication of her poems in Spain, an internationally famous writer. That fame, coupled with the mostly secular nature of her poetry, troubled the ecclesiastical hierarchy, and her Respuesta is her prose defense of her literary career, and by necessity a defense of female literacy and literary ambition generally. The Ovidian citation is from the autobiographical section of the work; using it brings in the prospect of what was not yet certain but before long became the case, that her talent itself might prove her undoing. Before long she was ordered to cease her literary activity and dispose of what was then one of the largest private libraries in the New World—a banishment of her own from what had been the great passion of her life—and she acceded.25 There is also Petrarch, one of the founding figures of Renaissance literary culture, struggling in his case not with institutional authority but with his own Christian conscience. That struggle first appears in fully articulated form in the poem that initiates the second part of the lyric sequence about his love for Laura. That love had always been inseparable from his ambition for literary fame, but in the canzone “I’vo pensando” the lover and poet suddenly sees with frightening clarity that love of her and love of the laurel crown are the two “knots” (nodi) that tie his soul to earthly pleasures and put it in spiritual jeopardy. The way he writes of what here seems like a deadly compulsion fits the metaphor of helpless addiction that I have invoked: et da l’un lato punge vergogna et duol che ’ndietro mi rivolve, dal’altro non m’assolve un piacer per usanza in me sì forte ch’ a patteggiar n’ardisce co le Morte. (Canzoniere 264.122–26) on the one side I am pierced by shame and sorrow, which turn me back; on the other I am not freed from a pleasure so strong in me by habit that it dares to bargain with Death.26 The poem’s conclusion sums up his terrified self-awareness by translating a tag from the Metamorphoses in which Medea contemplates her own tranced surrender to murderous obsession: “veggio ’l meglio et al peggior m’appiglio” (136; I see the better but I lay hold on the worse).27 This is where love and poetry have brought him.

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Then there is Shakespeare. He makes one explicit reference to Ovid’s exile in Touchstone’s joking comparison of himself with a herd of goats to “the most capricious Poet honest Ovid . . . among the Gothes” (As You Like It 3.3.7– 10),28 and tucks another inside a throwaway line in The Taming of the Shrew (1.1.33), but I think a subtler impress makes itself felt elsewhere. One of the unifying threads in Shakespeare’s notoriously diverse sonnet sequence is a neoPetrarchan bad conscience about the spiritual danger in the twin powers of love and poetry, a more serious and sustained business than the joking about Petrarchan clichés in Sonnet 130. I have in mind an ongoing sense that love and poetry may work together in a coordinated and dangerous fraud; that sense occasionally breaks out into the open in poems like Sonnet 35: No more bee greev’d at that which thou hast done, Roses have thornes, and silver fountaines mud, Cloudes and eclipses staine both Moone and Sunne, And loathsome canker lives in sweetest bud. All men make faults, and even I in this, Authorizing thy trespas with compare, My selfe corrupting salving thy amisse, Excusing thy sins more then thy sins are. (1–8) “Compare” means “metaphor,” exactly what the speaker has been using to excuse the beloved’s behavior: thorns mean you are just like a rose, mud means you are a silver fountain, and so on. This excuse making is a steady activity in the sequence; sometimes the speaker seems to convince himself; sometimes, as here, it feels more like self-deception—or perhaps more accurately, in the legal idiom of this particular poem, not acting in his own best interests. But of course—and I take this to be part of the drama of the sequence—he keeps on doing it, at least in the poems about the young man. The dark lady is more of a challenge; the poems about her end the sequence on something closer to a definitive defeat of his power to see what he wants to see: “For I have sworne thee faire: more perjurde eye, / To swere against the truth so foule a lie” (152.13– 14). Love and poetry have only brought him to what Yeats calls “the desolation of reality.” Perhaps more instructive, though, is Shakespeare’s treatment of exile in the literal sense of the term: the story of Prospero in The Tempest. That story is very different from Ovid’s, but still Prospero found himself in the middle of nowhere because he was undone by his love of his books. That love put him

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at the mercy of a brother savvier in real-world politics; but once on that island Prospero sought his redemption in perfecting his mastery of the one book that was left to him. As several critics have intuited, the imaginative guess at what that book is would be the Metamorphoses;29 one of the pivotal speeches in the play, Prospero’s speech at the beginning of act 5, begins as a virtual translation (its wording close to Arthur Golding’s) of a passage from the Metamorphoses— a speech by Medea, in fact: not the one that Petrarch quotes in “I’vo pensando,” but nearby (7.797–209). Critical interest in the speech and its source is heightened by the feeling that The Tempest is the capstone work of the Shakespearean corpus, his summing up of the power and nature of his theatrical craft. It seems appropriate that a centerpiece of this summing up would be the most extensive of the direct appropriations from Ovid that had characterized his writing almost from the beginning: this had always been his great book of magic, the one he would choose to take with him to a desert island. But there is an un-Ovidian twist here, and the twist is instructive. This exile gets to go home. And at least in the play, that is not just because he brings his magic power to perfection, but also because—this the ultimate destination of the great speech—he gives it up: “this rough Magicke / I heere abjure” (5.1.50–51). He drowns his book. I will not push the parallel with the playwright’s impending retirement to Stratford; to speak just for Prospero, the story of his exile differs at the end from Ovid’s in these two key ways, which would seem to be related. To go from the picture we get from his works (the only picture we have), Ovid never did or would surrender his magic; his gift never left him, but it never set him free. Prospero’s story ends with a gesture of letting go. He returns home an ordinary mortal man, soon to die— and he has to ask for the audience’s help to do so—but he does return home, as Ovid never did.

Chapter 3

Macaronic Verse, Plurilingual Printing, and the Uses of Translation A. E. B. Coldiron

Inner discord is reflected in the linguistic form which [Teofilo Folengo] chose for his epic parody Baldus [1517]—macaronic Latin. . . . The macaronic epic remained a thing apart, an episode. But it illuminates the intellectual crisis of the period, as the intellectual crisis of our day is illuminated by our contemporary macaronic prose epic, James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. —Ernst Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages, trans. W. Trask

Macaronic verse, an intense and strange kind of poetry, the fugitive oddball lurking at the far edge of a spectrum of early modern plurilingual practices, is little discussed today. In the sixteenth century, however, it was a flexible textual strategy that could reflect discord and intellectual ferment in ludic and satiric ways.1 Nearly a century ago, when Ernst Curtius identified Folengo’s wild, landmark, macaronic epic, the Baldus, as a sign of and a response to sixteenth-century cultural tensions, he focused on the literary-theoretical project of syncretism, setting out the macaronic’s discordant themes and genres in broad binaries. Classical and Christian, epic and pastoral, satiric and serious, rustic and urbane: a rapidly changing world brought competing alterities up against each other, as riotously in the multivolume Baldus as in the Rabelaisian works that it influenced.2 Sometimes using the same dynamics

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of discord, the macaronic poems of Tudor England that are my topic here are notable not for their sprawl but for their compact intensity. These compressed, interlingual sites reveal how printers juxtaposed alterities, representing— and sometimes harmonizing—broad cultural confl icts in a small textual space. Although medieval macaronics have received some scholarly attention, less has been said about macaronic poems in print, and nothing at all, to my knowledge, about their position at the far end of a range of practices related to printing and translation.3 Multilingual printing in England, including the printing of macaronic verse, began with William Caxton and took different forms and purposes over the course of the early modern period. Indeed, printers and translators cooperated to such an extent that the English literary Renaissance was from the start a transnational enterprise, with printing and translation linked in ways that are only now being fully recognized. For example, in England, printers and translators were often the same person, especially during the first five or so decades of printing: Caxton, Wynkyn de Worde, and king’s printer Richard Pynson were typical in translating many works they also printed. The Act of 1484 set favorable conditions for foreigners to work in the printing trades in England, and the first two generations of printers in England were mostly francophone and/or foreign-born.4 This situation fostered plurilingualism in the world of early English printing. Yet among the many transnational textual engagements and strategies of early modern print, the printed macaronic in England remains the least discussed and yet the most immediately engaged in creating intensive, plurilingual contact zones. The present chapter connects macaronics to early modern translation and printing, reads several early printed macaronics for their verbal strategies and for their printers’ interventions in plurilingual signification, and finally sketches the poems’ place in the history of macaronics. The macaronic poems sampled here are chosen to illustrate a range of techniques and purposes, and to show the relation of translation and printing to macaronics’ stubbornly visible foreign presences. Two of Caxton’s earliest productions are macaronics in Latin and English verse: the Paruus Catho, an instructional work, and the “Salve Regina,” an acrostic prayer;5 they tend to integrate linguistic and ideological cultures (though only the Paruus Catho translates). Next, John Bale’s aggressively polemical macaronic “Song,” a finale to A Comedy of Thre Lawes,6 replaces parts of the Latin Benedictus with strong-arm, pro-Edwardian translation. Unlike Bale’s appropriative translation, William Dunbar’s mock-testament macaronic poem, “I

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maister Andro Kennedy,” juxtaposes untranslated fragments of Latin and Scots, creating what comes to seem a metonymic social satire.7 At the end of the century, Reginald Scot’s Discoverie of Witchcraft,8 a groundbreaking, skeptical treatise that problematizes English beliefs about witchcraft, puts code-switching and translation to additional satiric uses, associating Latin with thievery and witchcraft; the passage’s humor depends on the miscomprehension of macaronic Latin. These poems in no way exhaust the early printed macaronic’s interest. Macaronics, furthermore, touch several wider topics beyond my scope here: they witness insular England as persistently polyglot; they may have been related to the development of the aureate line in English poetry; they may indicate certain strands of poetic hybridity that the usual literary histories do not map; they are not always, but often, as Curtius saw, synecdoches for wider cultural conflicts.

Early Macaronics’ Strategic Use of Translation Macaronic verse might seem to be of no interest to translation scholars, since it displays different languages without translating them. Macaronic verse refuses to translate precisely because its meaning and point depend on a juxtaposition of differences. These differences are linguistic, geographical, or accidental, yet they are also often substantive and consequential. That is, macaronic verse makes legible precisely what most translations negotiate or try to hide: differences between religions, classes, genders, or cultures, sometimes residual, sometimes manifest. In macaronic verse, such legible differences may be tapped for serious critique and ribald comedy alike, as I hope my samples will show. The samples also show that some macaronics do rely on translation to create or preserve the juxtaposition of different languages (for instance, Caxton, Bale, and Scot here). While some printed macaronics in England juxtapose languages without translating, others rely on partial, visible translation to make the juxtaposition of foreign elements meaningful.9 Regardless of the role of translation or the purpose, theme, tone, or form of any given macaronic poem, linguistic difference in macaronics signals the meaningful contact of other kinds of Otherness. Early modern translations and macaronics alike reached a rapidly broadening readership of print.10 The increasing proportion of monoglots in that expanding readership probably stimulated translations; yet an increasing proportion of monoglots does not necessarily entail a reduction in the numbers of

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polyglot readers. Translators did the work of cultural negotiation for both monoglot and polyglot readers, both in Englished books and in plurilingual printing, but macaronics reassign that work to the reader. If the ideal reader of macaronics is a fluent, code-switching polyglot who need not translate, a probably greater number of less fluent readers of early print must have been less ideal but still numerous readers who read by translating, some with lexical aids. Just as a range of readerly fluencies in the English language probably composed the expanding readerships of print, a range of polyglot fluencies probably composed the expanding readerships of plurilingual printed books. We can thus posit a fairly broad range of readers of macaronics in addition to the fluent, polyglot code-switchers / reader-translators, from the skilled to the struggling. So even monolingual readers of early printed books had access to some kind of encounter with foreign languages on English pages (since so many printed books were translated and/or plurilingual and/or macaronic, and since other kinds of linguistic mixing persisted in the culture itself ). But for our purposes here, this range of readerly skills means that for many readers of print, the act of reading macaronics must have often involved rapid mental translation. That is, macaronics relocate the work of cultural negotiation from the translator to the audience of translating readers (or code-switching readers)— and many macaronics, such as Dunbar’s “I maister Andro Kennedy” or the macaronic curse in Scot’s Discoverie of Witchcraft, make the work of crosscultural negotiation the central experience and point of the poem.

Integrative Incunables Early modern printers of macaronics cooperated in visually highlighting the role of translation and the presence of the foreign. One of the first things Caxton prints after bringing the press to Westminster in 1476 is the Paruus Catho. In this macaronic-via-translation, the translator, Benedict Burgh (d. before 1483), has amplified a Latin line (or distich) into an English rhyme royal stanza. The third stanza is typical: Itaque deo supplica / parentes ama Pray thy god and prayse hym with al thyn herte Fader and moder haue ay in reuerence Loue hem wel and be thou neuer to smerte To here mennys counceyl but kepe the thens

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Til thou be cleped be clene withoute offence Salewe gladly to hym that is more digne Than art thy self thy place to hym resigne (1483; [A2v]) The part of this macaronic that is translation—the English part—expands the compact Latin sententiae, illustrating what was still a high English verse form, the rhyme royal stanza. The English stanza, however, adds a great deal of matter beyond the Latin line, “And pray to God and love your parents.” Nothing in the Latin line suggests the specific advice translated as lines 4–8 about modesty, humility, and reverence. The macaronic performs translation as a copia exercise. Caxton’s pre-1500 printings of the work increasingly distinguished between Latin aphorism and English translation. The whole text is in Caxton type 2* in the 1477 editions, with the Latin lines set left and the English lines indented right. In 1483, the printer preserved the indentation and created further visual distinction between Latin text and English translation: the Latin lines are in a larger typeface, 4*, a type often called early black letter.11 This early English effort to use printing technologies to distinguish between languages persists, and sixteenth-century printers continue to dispose typefaces and stanzas so as to highlight the juxtapositions of linguistic difference on which macaronics and other multilingual texts depend.12 This macaronic poem highlights language difference visually but does not express Curtius’s discordant ideologies or social formations, instead presenting the languages and their ideological metonyms as harmonious. As in other bilingual instructional works, the two languages mutually reinforce one another in Paruus Catho, displaying coherence, unified meaning, and shared values. As in practical works such as dictionaries, conversation manuals, or law books, and as in such literary works as the polyglot romances, translation and printing aim together at a harmonized plurilingualism and pluriculturalism, a seamlessness and even an implied equivalence (in both the general and linguistic senses) between languages and the conceptual systems they represent. We find similarly harmonious results, though with different tactics less dependent on translation, in the macaronic “Salue Regina,” a poem in the popular, oft-reprinted instruction book Stans Puer ad mensam. The Monk’s Tale stanzas of “Salue Regina” are intended to stimulate worship, aid memory, and convey respect for authority (among other pedagogical goals). There is no translation per se, but as in the Paruus Catho, the English elaborates and amplifies an initial Latin phrase; the English takes Latin as its point of departure:

Macaronic Verse, Plurilingual Printing, and the Uses of Translation

An holy Salue regina in Englyssh [S]Alue with all obeisance to god in humblesse Regina to regne euyr more in blysse Mater to crist as we byleue expresse Misericordi[a]e / vnto alle wrecchisse Vita to quyken to helpe leall and lisse Dulcedo of most plesant beaute And we saye this londe thy dowayr is And therfore we synge / et spes [nostra] salue Ad te most meke & most [benigne] virgine Clama[n]s lowde with voys tymerous Exules made / by false frawde serpentyne Filij freyll carefull and dolorous Eue / therfore oure lyf laboryous Ad te best mene to our lord god and man Suspiramus here in this see trobelous Gementes as sorofully as we can Et flentes ofte with bitter teris smert In hac doleful / payneful and lamentable Lacrima[rum] wonding the mortal herte Valle restles greuouse and changeable Eya ergo mayden most amyable Aduocata nostra oure mediatrice Illos tuos bryghtest and confortable Misericordes ocules ful of Ioye of paradyce Ad nos fletyng in this see of torment Conuerte / now of thy souerayn pyte Et ihesum oure lorde prince omnipotent Benedictum full of most hye bounte Fructum of lyf and riche benygnyte Ventris tui most ewrous creature Nobis post hoc exilium ostende To oure eterne grettest ioye and plesure O clemens ful of mercyful rychesse O pia ful of riche compassion

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O dulcis ful of helpe in eche distresse Virgo fairest waye to saluation Maria floure of swettest meditacian Salue with alle our most lowly seruyse Mater of lyf and eterne creacion Salue euer as feir as we can suff yse. Amen. Each line begins with a familiar Latin word or phrase then developed in English in the rest of the line. Since the “Salve Regina” is the final prayer of the rosary and part of the calendrical liturgies of the Catholic Church, most readers would already have memorized it; such fluent code-switching readers of this text would have no need of a translation. Perhaps the book’s intended audience of young readers would have “translated”—at least in the sense of connecting the familiar sounds of the prayer to the letters of the text. But the real “translation” in this macaronic takes place at the formal level, since this poem’s main strategy is to adapt a primarily continental-identified poetic technique to an English stanzaic pattern. Reading down the left side of the poem, one finds the familiar “Salve Regina” prayer printed as a lexicalor phrasal-level acrostic: “Salue Regina, Mater misericordiae, vita dulcedo,” and so on. If the poem is read left to right, line by line, in the normal way, each Latin word or phrase opens easily into an elaborating English meaning. But if we read down the left side, ritual Church Latin audibly organizes the macaronic and dominates the English phrases following. The poem makes something like the literary sense of acrostic/anaphora poems and is generally related to metaverbally organized abecedarian poems, mnemonic poems, or palindromic and retrograde poems. Although there was little poetry in England like that of the grands rhétoriqueurs of late fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century France, where metaverbal tactics created a whole poetic movement, this macaronic’s use of Latin prayer as an acrostic attempts to translate such a poetics into English—translation, that is, not of content but of form. The “Salue Regina,” using Latin prayer, English phrasing, and French form, is in this sense a tricultural macaronic.13 The second printing of this poem marks the attempt to signal an acrostic poem more clearly than the first printing (STC 17030.5). In both early printings, Latin and English parts of the text stand in a relatively seamless visual relation: both languages are in the same typeface, without special indentations. In 1477, the printer, Caxton, sets all the lines in Lombard-based Caxton 2 typeface. In the edition of 1510, printer Wynkyn de Worde uses all black-letter

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type and places a curved mark—not the common straight caesura-stroke— after each Latin phrase to emphasize visually the linguistic shift in each line (and a reverse curvature to set off the stanza’s final Latin phrase).14 Whereas Curtius’s continental examples and later English macaronics reflect discord or crisis, here the English elaboration of authoritative Latin texts is harmonious.

Discordant Ideologies Quite unlike those two integrative, conservative macaronics is John Bale’s macaronic “Song,” originally printed with its own title at the very end of the polemical Protestant interlude A comedy concernynge thre lawes, of nature Moses, & Christ, corrupted by the sodomytes. Pharysees and Papystes.15 Having complained in King Johan that clerical “Latyne howres, serymonyes and popetly [sic] playes” show disdain for “Englandes cause” (ll. 413–15), Bale builds his patriotic, Protestant macaronic on the Catholic Benedictus. One of the three major canticles of the New Testament, the Benedictus is an address from Zachariah to his son, John the Baptist, a song of thanksgiving, and “an expression of Christian hope.”16 It was not only a Catholic canticle, since it was also used in Anglican services and in the Book of Common Prayer.17 Still, it was (and is) a central text of the Old Religion, arguably one that connects new and old even in highlighting their discord. In creating English Protestant polemic out of the Latin canticle, Bale seems to use macaronic techniques not unlike those used in the harmonizing examples above: translated English phrases inserted inside stanzas framed by familiar, authoritative Latin phrases. But in fact Bale’s highly charged English insertions revise the content of the canticle completely, fully appropriating what had been central, Catholic-ritual language to the use of his pro-English Protestantism. Bale’s English insertions form four rhymed lines (aaaa) between the Latin lines that frame each stanza and contain strong anti-Catholic and/or pro-English content not at all present in the Latin. To illustrate the extent of Bale’s revisions, I have placed, to the right of each transcribed stanza, the Latin words replaced by Bale’s English.18 BEnedictus dominus, Deus Israel, Whych hath ouerthrowne, the myghty Idoll Bel, The false god of Rome, by poure of the Gospell,

[quia vistavit et fecit]

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And hath prepared, from the depe lake of hell, Redemptionem plebis su[a]e.

5

Bale’s English replacements continue this pattern, fi lling the lines between opening and closing Latin from the Benedictus. One stanza is directly topical: T[u] puer propheta, elected of the lorde, Kynge Edwarde the sixt, to haue Gods lawe restorde, Folowest Iosias, therof to take recorde, In all thy doynges, and in Gods holy worde, Parare vias eius.

[altissimi vocaberis: praeibis enim ante faciem Domini] 45

After two more such stanzas, the poem closes: Illuminare, swete lorde we the desyre, To men in darkenesse, and in the popysh myre, Lete not hys baggage, thy faythfull seruauntes tyre, But vs delyuer, from them and from hell fyre. In uiam pacis. Amen.

[his, qui in tenebris et in umbra mortis sedent, ad dirigendos pedes nostros] 60

In translating, Bale adds, with absolutely no suggestion from the Latin, consistently antipapal expansions: “the myghty Idoll Bel, / The false god of Rome, by poure of the Gospell” (ll. 2–3); “That cruell tyraunt, now clerely to deface, / Whose bloudy kyngedome, demynysheth apace, / By the worde of God, whych lately hath take place” (ll. 5–7); “That Romysh Antichrist, is lyke to haue a fall, / With hys whole table, of sectes dyabolycall, / And now the nombre, wyll florysh ouer all” (ll. 12–14); “Forsakynge the pope, with hys dampnable store” (l. 29); “from Romysh tyrauntes fre” (l. 31); “in the popysh myre” (l. 57); “and from hell fyre” (l. 59). John Stephen Farmer says of Bale’s Benedictus: “This performance is really an impudent and scurrilous attempt to make use of a well-known and beautiful composition for the purpose of throwing mud at those who stood by the old doctrines. It is worth noting that Bale’s summary of the commandments, at the conclusion of The Three Laws, follows the Catholic custom of omitting what is usually known in England

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as the second commandment, referring to graven images” (346).19 This macaronic insists on being read through both ideological lenses and demonstrates the potential of macaronic verse to signal ideological conflict. Bale also reshaped his translation to suit political events: the naming of Edward VI in lines 41–44 altered the canticle for immediate topical-political use in 1548, the year following Edward’s coronation.20 In 1562, to acknowledge a new monarch, the London edition of Bale’s “Song” printed by Thomas Colwell changed the wording of lines 41–42: “Tu puer propheta, elected of the lorde / Our Quene Elizabeth, to haue Goddes lawe restorde” (Lii[v]). Colwell also added a visual distinction between languages, printing the final, Latin line of each stanza (but not the stanzas’ opening Latin) in a smaller civilitébased type. With the printers’ assistance, Bale found macaronic a useful mode with which to greet each monarch, to vilify the Roman Church, and to juxtapose two conceptions of a biblical text. The poem involves both translation and untranslated residues, and each plays strategically against the other. Read as a Latin poem, English Protestant polemic inserts itself into and threatens to overwhelm the Benedictus. From this view, Bale’s amplifying translation smashes the lines like icons and reinterprets the meaning of the fragments; such a reading could well generate outraged comments like Farmer’s, noted earlier. But read as an English poem, each stanza seems to push the Benedictus remains to the edges; a “Protestant” reading would reduce the remnant Latin phrases to mere relics, decorations around the central English words that write the new faith. Such a dual lens on the poem shows how Bale’s macaronic work in a sense reenacts the break with Rome and the development of Reformation ideas from recycled fragments of Catholicism. Here, macaronic verse uses translation to record intellectual crisis and cultural discord, suggesting both acute awareness of and active resistance to the old ways. Likewise, translation reveals reform under way and here depends for its best effects on the contrastive presence of the untranslated prior language.

Eschewing Translation? Macaronics’ Satiric Mobile Phonemes The previous examples show some of the uses of translation, and of untranslated residues, in early printed macaronics. The commonest cases of the latter are probably foreign refrain lines, especially those Latin liturgical phrases that punctuate secular poems. Wyatt’s refrain “Circa regnam tonat” (it thunders

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around the throne) or the many “Timor mortis conturbat me” refrains (the fear of death distresses me) are well-known examples. “Nunc in pulvere dormio” (now I sleep in dust), Skelton’s refrain to the macaronic elegy on Edward IV, “Miseremini mei ye that be my friends,”21 also comes from the Latin Office for the Dead (though his first line derives from the book of Job). Skelton’s refrain, reprinted eighteen times between 1559 and  1621, appeared steadily in the Renaissance best seller The Mirror for Magistrates, and, like “Timor mortis conturbat me,” is used in English poetry down through the twentieth century.22 Such untranslated residues may take on ritualistic functions; in any case, they have a long history in English poetry as detachable phonemic fragments available for various reuses. Many macaronics use untranslated foreign phonemes for political or social critique or satire. One late-century macaronic mocks the Spanish Armada, starting with the full title: A Skeltonicall Salutation / Or condigne gratulation / And iust vexation / Of the Spanish Nation / That in a bravado / Spent many a Crusado / In setting forth an Armado / England to invado (Oxford: J. Barnes, 1589; London: T. Orwin, 1589). The silly faux- (and real) Spanish words, rhyme-syllables, Latin phrases, and other untranslated elements gloat gleefully and yet also reflect the crisis that had just been narrowly avoided. Other sixteenth-century printed macaronics treat transgressive sexuality or are bawdy, as with this Latin refrain inverting part of the Lord’s Prayer:23 Inducas inducas In temptationibus The nunne walked on her prayer Inducas &c. Ther cam a frer and met with her In temptationbus [sic] &c. . . . This nunne began to falle aslepe Inducas The frer knelyd downe at her fete In temptationibus. . . . This fryer began the nunne to grope . . . It was a morsell for the pope In temptationibus &c. . . . The frere & the nu[n]ne wha[n] they had done Inducas

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Eche to theyr cloyster dyd they gone Sine temptationibus Inducas inducas In temptationibus. (A.iii[r–v])24 Such poems create anticlerical satire with bawdy bilingual puns; macaronics are a perfect vehicle for this kind of ludic effort and satiric point. As Karen Newman points out, macaronic verse here would seem to hide what cannot be spoken, but in fact draws attention to it.25 In a related vein, using both Rabelaisian and Villonesque elements, the humor of Dunbar’s faux-testament macaronic “I maister Andro Kennedy”26 gestures to broader social and religious conflicts. The speaker opens by admitting, in juxtaposed Scots and Latin, that he is the devil incarnate, though he knows not of his birth: In fayth I can nocht tell trewlie unde aut ubi fui natus Bot be my treuth I trow trewlie Quo[s\d] sum diabolus Incarnatus (ll. 5–8)27 The interlaced rhymes generally offer an alternation of Scots in one line and Latin in the next, but the pattern is not perfectly maintained. Sounds move between language systems; phonetic play in a line like “Willelmo Gray, sine gratia” (61), with “Gray, sine” sounding “grace” immediately denied in “sine gratia,” or punning “grace in a gratia,” shows slippery, mobile phonemes moving between language systems. As for the content signaled by the poem’s phonetic juxtapositions, Kennedy’s individual life of pleasure and excess confl icts with—and is placed defiantly at the center of—the ceremonies and sanctifications of Holy Church. Most of the poem focuses on the persona Kennedy’s love of drink, and his rejection of all but his rustic tavern life and companions. The testament, the legacy, is one of defiant discord, mixing the two languages. About his death, he vows: I will na preistis for me sing Dies illa dies Ire [sic] Nor [yet] no bellis for me ring

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Sicut solet semper fiere Bot ane bag pyp to play ane spring et unum ailwisp ante me In steid of baneir for to bring . . . (ll. 109–15) He rejects the ceremonies of the Church, preferring the bagpipe to bells and priests’ songs, and an ale-wisp (tavern sign) instead of a banner borne before him. Rowdy Scots orthography is to Latin grammar as the skirling bagpipe is to the decorous church bells. That key line, “et unum ailwisp ante me” (114), places the comical ale-wisp or tavern sign in the center of the Latin line so as to disrupt it. This is a verbal analogue to the stanza’s image of the funeral: a tavern sign, instead of a funeral banner, held rakishly ahead of the fictional Kennedy’s no doubt rotund, dipsomaniacal corpse as it is borne down the center aisle of the church, would disrupt the ceremony, replacing decorum with drunkenness, in something like the way the Scots word “ailwisp” disrupts the Latin line. At the moment of death when the language of Church ritual takes over, the faux-testament lobs into the ceremony the incorrigible legacy and favorite sign of the ungovernable drunkard. The poem’s humor derives from the contrasts, of course, but the serious point is nevertheless made that the Rabelaisian figure attempts a last word in his unruly Scots. Yet the poem’s actual last words, “De terra plasmasti me,” are those of the Latin burial rite, claiming Kennedy, as he is in both senses and both registers, as a creature of the earth. The refusal of translation here is the point, the stubborn language difference underlining the stubborn resistance of the earthy Master Kennedy to submit to the metaphysics of the mass, and the abstract opposition between the spiritual and the material. From one view, then, the vernacular linguistic residue tropes the defiant individual, and only death will “translate” his undisciplined Scots corpus. From the opposite view, the residue is the Latin mass and the language of the Church, which remains a foreign irritant even in a libertine life like that of Kennedy. Translation—the act of negotiating alterities—has been relocated as the responsibility of the reader, who must make meaning from difference, and who is faced with the social and ideological discord the languages signal when humorously brought together here. In terms of translation, readers whose native language is Scots dialect may not experience as much alienation as readers of English, who will mentally code-switch or translate through both languages. Yet the code-switching reader and the translating reader alike must oscillate

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between the two systems, the idiom of each jostling the other, and the friction between them becomes the essential gambit of the poem. The reader has to make meaning of both sides, and then put the two sides of meaning in relation to one another—just as a translator would do. Language difference signals the wider discord between high and low, order and disorder, Latinate and vernacular, Church and folk, and so on, along the lines Curtius suggests; the macaronic never allows readers to forget the dissonance, insisting that we act like translators and negotiate it in every line.

Linguistic-Dramatic Irony? Reginald Scot’s Discoverie of Witchcraft 28 contains a macaronic curse with a satiric, literary twist. The four-line “All you that have stolne the Millers eeles” and the surrounding prose explanation make for a funny story, the humor of which derives ultimately from the tradition of French farce but depends most immediately on the changing, or changed, status of Latin: the plot hinges on a failure of translation. The verse also relies on Latin’s long affiliation with Catholicism and on Catholicism’s further association with witchcraft in the English Renaissance. Here, the Latin lines are an ironic curse, used by Scot to deplore “popery”: Hereby it is bewraied both the malice and follie of popish doctrine, whose uncharitable impietie is so imprudentlie published, and in  such order vttered, as euerie sentence (if opportunitie serued) might be proued both hereticall and diabolicall. But I will answer this cruell cursse with another cursse farre more mild and ciuill, performed by as honest a man (I dare saie) as he that made the other . . . [:] So it was, that a certeine [priest] Sir John,29 with some of his companie, once went abroad a jetting, and in a moone light euening robbed a millers weire and stole all his eeles. The poore miller made his mone to Sir John himselfe, who willed him to be quiet; for he  would so cursse the theefe, and all his confederates, with bell, booke and candell, that they should haue small ioy of their fish. And therefore the next sundaie, Sir John got him to the pulpit, with his surplisse on his backe, and his stole about his necke, and pronounced these words following in the audience of the people.

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All you that have stolne the Millers eeles, Laudate Dominum de coelis; And all they haue consented thereto, Benedicamus Domino. Lo (saith he) there is sauce for your eeles my maisters. (265–66)30 In this passage, Scot associates Catholicism and Church Latin not only with witchcraft, as he does throughout this seventeenth chapter of the Discoverie, but with fraud and theft. Yet overall Latin occupies the more powerful position here, since the humor of the story depends on a kind of linguistic dramatic irony: for this episode to be funny, the audience must know that the Latin lines are a blessing on the thieves—that is, readers must know that Sir John the priest is not cursing but blessing the thief: himself. A division is created between readers who can understand the joke (that is, the code-switchers or reader-translators who cannot be fooled) and those who cannot (that is, the monoglot readers who, unable to translate, are in the duped position of the miller and the congregants). Even though Latin is proclaimed a mystifying language associated with fraud and witchcraft, the macaronic verse thematizes bilingualism and shows that Scot aims at, and privileges, Latinate readers. (However, a look at the page itself shows us that many of Scot’s italicized Latin phrases are translated into English marginalia in roman type; but here, the printer sets in no translations, thereby not saving monoglot English readers from being in the party of the duped, who may have heard those words in the service, but who do not actually know what they mean.)31 Scot’s point is that Latin is hocus-pocus that allows crafty, performative thieves to prosper and to trick the Latin-illiterate. However, there is a sting: if you do understand the joke, your Latinity may place you in the party of Sir John. It is both an antiCatholic anecdote and a special use of macaronic to favor the code-switching or translating reader and to raise language comprehension as an issue of power. Untranslated residues, and a complicated relationship between readers and the two kinds of text, form the basis of humor and meaning here.

Expressive Tactics of Macaronic Verse In addition to using linguistic difference to signal other kinds of difference; giving maximum contact with the untranslated, intractable foreign and thus

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reassigning translation to the reader; and relying on technological resources used by printers, sixteenth-century macaronic verse deploys particular expressive tactics. Phonetic play features prominently in early modern macaronics— making the implicit point that phonemes are mobile, and that the meaning of any sound will change according to the context of a particular system. Macaronic residues, and especially bilingual rhymes and bilingual puns, are thus inherently subversive sites with relativistic implications. Just as early modern cosmographers found that all is in motion, so plurilingual poetics pointed to a proleptically “modern” or even postmodern semiotics in which the old connection between res and verba is interrupted by the fact of language difference. The compressed textual space of macaronic verse intensifies the disruptive power of language difference (and the other differences to which it points). The printers add to such effects, visually highlighting difference within stanzas or even single lines. Yet each bit of metonymic or synecdochal foreign residue must be not only visually recognizable (the printers help with this) but also meaningful enough to work quickly on even a slowly translating reader—to resonate immediately outward through allusions and connotations so as to signal the broader alterities at issue. For a macaronic poem’s best success, the translating reader, like the fluent code-switching reader, must be led quickly to interpret the metonymic foreign elements in wider terms. That is, if the foreign elements in a macaronic verse are not vivid enough or transculturally (or transhistorically) comprehensible enough to be “translated” as signifiers of larger ideological formations in contact, they will fall flat. And so, even laureate Skelton now falls prey to devouring time, since what were once pointed, resonant foreign allusions no longer witness crisis or discord to modern monoglot eyes without the help of footnotes from the likes of Scattergood, Walker, Carlson, or Brittan.32 Because macaronics use deliberately untranslated elements in a compressed space, they often expose raw alterities without offering a solution, a kind of “negative capability” on the printed polyglot page that spotlights but refuses to resolve difference. Although in many fifteenth-century macaronics and in hymns and carols, juxtaposed Latin refrains and vernacular verses (or vice versa) seem to genuflect together to a harmonizing auctoritas, these are the calm predecessors and exceptions to the more usually agonistic macaronics composed and printed in the sixteenth century.33 Whatever the balance between serio and ludens, the juxtaposed languages in macaronic verse usually leave their polyglot reader-translators unsettled, with the sounds of unreconciled disparities echoing in our heads; the more darkly satiric macaronics

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leave a bitter taste of conflict. Jean Braybrook notes that macaronic codeswitching recreated Babel, a sign of sinfulness, for early modern readers; linguistic and cognitive studies associate code-switching, which occurs in both the composition and the fluent reading of macaronic verse, with anger, with laughter at incongruity, with excitement, and with ethnic identity and ethnic humor.34 These subliminal affective dimensions of macaronic poems, relying so much on tone and on the sociocognitive coding of particular bits of language, may help explain why they are at once difficult and irresistible to analyze. (Some of the same factors that have affected literary translations have probably also reinforced macaronics’ absence from monoglot, national literary canons.) These effects—laughter, anger, personal identity formation or identification, shame, a sense of discord—are not problems of syntax or readerly miscomprehension. In fact, macaronics count on precise linguistic comprehension to do their unsettling work. The aesthetic tactics of most sixteenth-century macaronic verse, then, served certain fairly specific ideological functions, functions diverging in identifiable ways from those they had served in prior centuries. This chapter’s epigraph introduced Curtius’s treatment of macaronic syncretism: Bembo’s theory, Ariosto’s romance, and indeed a whole gamut of Renaissance cultural tensions ground Curtius’s discussion (232–34). More recently, Massimo Scalabrini has explained the disruptive, Bakhtinian force of the epic Baldus, noting “the extent to which macaronic contamination is indebted to the amalgam of opposites—the rustic with the urbane, the vulgar with the sophisticated” (189). In another vein, Folengo’s macaronic may have represented a chief site of resistance to the major linguistic- and literary-nation-forming project of Tuscanization in Italy.35 Braybrook notes how Rémy Belleau’s 235-line macaronic poem De Bello Huguenotico echoes Folengo and creates a critique of Protestantism from witty intertextuality and interlingual play, further unfolding the subversive potential of macaronic and its use in “the comedy of the horrible.”36 It makes sense that macaronic aesthetics would connect to the social, linguistic, and theological changes accelerated in the sixteenth century by the technology of printing. The history of medieval macaronic practice offers relevant antecedents to such expressive tactics, but it also suggests how sixteenth-century practice developed some of the same tactics differently. In medieval Italian-Latin macaronics, languages often joined at the lexical or syllabic level; that is, mixed words were created, usually by adding Latin endings onto Italian words. More widespread were line-level or strophic habits of placing foreign words side by

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side or inserting foreign phrases, refrain lines, or other whole lines, as in many Old French lyrics (Paul Zumthor and others explore such tactics as “barbarolexis”).37 Old French and Occitan poems purposefully juxtaposed foreign words and lines, as Robert Taylor notes, “to exploit the dynamic of two opposing linguistic systems to attain specific effects.”38 Taylor illustrates the macaronic practice of contre-texte, in which two languages invoke competing or contrasting poetic traditions, with an Old French sexual parody that depends for its satire on the addition of Occitan phrases in the elevated style of courtly love lyric. With such methods, untranslated foreign insertions served as poetic resources, sometimes invoking whole literary traditions in an allusive phrase. By the early to mid-fi fteenth century, the self-translating Charles d’Orléans could engage in an almost strictly ludic practice of macaronic verse,39 likely related to the vogue that Elizabeth Archibald notes was taking place in England at the time.40 In early modern England, we find what at first seems an almost palimpsestic continuity with such medieval macaronic practices: a traditional reliance on shorter forms; the frequent use of foreign refrain lines; the continued predominance of Latin-English macaronics (with many fewer examples of French-English and other vernacular-English combinations); the reprise of certain themes; and the reprinting of many specific medieval poems. Th at continuity is part of what I have called elsewhere the “Renaissance reprint culture” that translates, edits, and otherwise re-presents manuscript (and previously printed) texts for the English print market.41 While some scholars have read macaronics as contributing to the aureate line in English, or as reflecting a Latin-to-vernacular shift, this verse also suggests that multilingualism, too, persists in English literary culture well beyond the medieval phases studied by D. A. Trotter, Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, and others.42 Since so many macaronics are reprinted from prior printed copies or medieval manuscripts, much of what Archibald and others have established about late medieval macaronics still applies to the early printed English corpus. Yet even within a powerful system of textual reiteration that fostered continuity, macaronics in early modern England differed from both the medieval heritage and the continental competition. That is, on the continent, macaronic verse had clearly intervened in larger literary-cultural agendas over the long term, and in the sixteenth century was turned to address the increasing pace and proliferation of change. In England, however, the connection between macaronic poetics and ideological discord seems a bit more tenuous than followers of Curtius might have it. As we have seen, macaronic in

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England lends itself frequently to religious polemic and social satire. But while sixteenth-century editions of the Baldus and De Bello must have been available in England,43 there is no sixteenth-century English macaronic comparable to either of those (or other continental examples) in scale, breadth of topics, or significance. The variegated topics and levels of satire in Speke, Parott may function somewhat as the Baldus does, if on a smaller scale that we might call court-satiric epyllion; still, England sees nothing like the resonant French use of contre-texte, nor much barbarolexis apart from Skelton’s careerlong interest in polyglossia. True, as Scalabrini says, “macaronic contamination is indebted to the amalgam of opposites” even in England, but there, the ideological reach beyond Reformation polemic is uneven. What critique macaronic tactics do achieve in England, however, is largely owed to the wide distribution and visual displays made possible by printing technology: like visible translations, macaronics in print are reminders of residual foreign presences and undeniable irritants to English insularity.

Conclusions Macaronic verse occupies a revealing, unusual place in the larger context of sixteenth-century translation and printing. Patterns of printed translation in the Renaissance varied greatly, and they suggest that English literary engagements with the foreign far exceed the linear “source-and-influence” model that used to govern translation studies.44 A linear pattern of translation, as we usually understand it, means that a text has been translated directly from one language to another, along the East-to-West lines of the translatio studii. However, the record of early printing suggests that this was not by any means the only way English printers incorporated foreign texts into their production. Many early translations were nonlinear, involving recursive patterns of back-translation, retranslation, spin-offs, or fusions of several texts into one translation. Another nonlinear pattern of translation, the fascinating, scattershot pattern that we might term radiant or radiating translation, involved a single printer making (or having made) multiple-language versions at once, and printing them more or less simultaneously in separate-language volumes. The resulting discourse community for any such work was dispersed both geographically and culturally (and polyglot in at least a corporate sense); this pattern was much more common on the continent than in England. A pattern of interlingualism common in England was a sort of opposite to the

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radiating translations: the polyglot or multilingual pattern in which the printers (with the help of translators) brought several language-versions of a work into one volume. Most multilingual printing in England was practical in nature— dictionaries, conversation manuals, accounting books, pedagogical books, and so on. But certain key literary texts, such as the many polyglot romances or the trilingual Book of the Courtier (John Wolfe, 1588), were printed in bilingual and multilingual editions that bring distinct literary worlds together in one volume, or on one page. Such patterns of printed translation in England suggest the manifold engagements of textual transformers—printers and translators—with foreign-language texts. These complex engagements stand quite apart from the author-to-author transmission lines that most modern criticism has followed. And among these patterns, macaronic verse offers the most compressed and intensive record of interlingual contact, exposing what some translations made opaque. Even if printed macaronics in England did not “illuminate the intellectual crisis of the period” with the broad effects of their continental counterparts, nevertheless, the full visibility of the foreign invited attention to intercultural fault lines and ideological conflicts. Printing and translation were crucial, mutually catalytic cooperations— two kinds of textual transformation that together animated a transnational literary culture even in what we usually think of as insular England. Although it is less evident from a post-Romantic view that privileges single authorship and linear influence, English literary nationhood was, from the start, thanks to printers and translators, an English literary transnationhood. A complex multilingual textuality is the context in which macaronic verse made itself understood in England: Renaissance cultural conflicts, writ small.

Chapter 4

Erroneous Mappings: Ptolemy and the Visualization of Europe’s East K atharina N. Piechocki

When Pliny the Elder, in the fourth book of his Natural History, turns to a description of Europe’s northeastern coast, moving past the Don (Tanais) River, he halts before the Riphean Mountains. These mountains, he contends, are in a part of the world that lies under the condemnation of nature and is plunged in dense darkness, and occupied only by the work of frost and the chilly lurking-places of the north wind. Behind these mountains and beyond the north wind there dwells (if we can believe it) a happy race of people called the Hyperboreans, who live to extreme old age and are famous for legendary marvels. Here are believed to be the hinges on which the firmament turns and the extreme limits of the revolutions of the stars, with six months’ daylight and a single day of the sun in retirement. . . . Some authorities have placed these people not in Europe but on the nearest part of the coasts of Asia, because there is a race there with similar customs and a similar location, named the Attaci.1 Pliny locates the Riphean and Hyperborean Mountains at the edge of the world. Beyond these mountains dwell the Hyperboreans, the legendary gens felix; here also may be the hinges of the world (cardines mundi). But in Pliny’s text the mountains are made to serve as a twofold and ambiguous border. They

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mark the limits of the oikoumene, the inhabited world known to the Romans, as well as dividing Europe from Asia. Thus, the mountains concomitantly separate one continent from another and the inhabited world from the legendary world of the Hyperboreans. Far from being a straightforward line of demarcation, then, Pliny’s Riphean and Hyperborean mountain range emerges as a limes whose location cannot easily be determined, if indeed it can be located at all. In fact, the fictitious chain of the Riphean and Hyperborean Mountains had already been introduced by Homer and Aristotle, and described by ancient geographers such as Strabo, Pomponius Mela, and Ptolemy, as well as Pliny. The idea of their existence was revived during the Renaissance, when the rediscovery of Ptolemy’s Geography in Europe prompted the emergence of the discipline of cartography. Absent from medieval mappae mundi, the Riphean and Hyperborean Mountains started to emerge on fifteenth- and sixteenth-century maps as mobile markers of boundaries and “natural” demarcation lines of Europe’s eastern territories. As we shall see, it was the Polish humanist Maciej Miechowita who first challenged Ptolemy’s description of the Riphean Mountains in his 1517 treatise titled Tractatus de duabus Sarmatiis. Yet despite Miechowita’s claim that these mountains were imaginary, cartographers continued to inscribe them on maps throughout the sixteenth century. The aim of this chapter is twofold. First, I discuss the rediscovery of Ptolemy’s Geography in Europe as a linguistic and visual translation process. Ptolemy’s Geography was translated from Greek into Latin in the early years of the fifteenth century and enjoyed immediate success across Europe in various Latin and, subsequently, vernacular editions. These editions triggered the rise of cartography as a complex process of visualizing the ancient treatises in an appropriate way, of translating words into images and maps. Second, my reading of Miechowita’s treatise together with the contemporary production of maps centering on eastern Europe offers a unique—and hitherto little studied—vantage point from which to examine the collision between two epistemological frameworks: the slow and nonlinear translation and visualization process of partially mythical and ill-informed ancient geographic knowledge against the backdrop of the growing empirical knowledge about Europe’s East. Taking the Riphean and Hyperborean Mountains as a powerful and quite unique example of erroneous mapping, I explore the creation of early modern cartographic knowledge as well as the persistence of

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nonknowledge inscribed on maps as a resistance to empirical knowledge—a resistance that arose from two factors: the persisting authority of ancient geographic and historical sources and a process of mistranslation.

Translating and Visualizing Ptolemy’s Geography in Fifteenth-Century Italy Early modern cartography emerged as a process of visualization and translation of ancient geographic knowledge. Cartography as the translation of geographic knowledge and the figurative codification of shifting spaces became particularly crucial during the “epoch of translations,”2 the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, when voyages of exploration and the mapping of hitherto unexplored territories significantly influenced the understanding of Europe’s contours. Maps call our attention to the oblique relationship between words and images. They serve as a reminder that words do not “illustrate” images or vice versa, but are subject to a complex hermeneutics that requires a skillful interpretive navigation between these two types of figuration. Maps encapsulate knowledge, which unfolds diachronically, as well as the manifold linguistic, cultural, and visual translation processes at their very core. Renaissance cartography and cartographic writing, defined as writing between a poetic and geographic space,3 emerged together with and as a humanist practice of translation. In the last years of the fourteenth century, Byzantine émigrés such as Manuel Chrysoloras, who settled in Florence to promote the study of ancient Greek,4 introduced hitherto unknown ancient Greek and Latin texts to Italy.5 Among the manuscripts Chrysoloras brought in 1397 was Claudius Ptolemy’s Geography, already partially translated by Chrysoloras himself.6 Ptolemy, a Roman citizen whose mother tongue was Greek, lived and wrote in Alexandria.7 His seminal work on geography and cartography, Geographike Hyphegesis (written ca. 150 ce), circulated widely in Arabic in the Middle East, where it served as the basis for medieval Arab maps and charts. But it remained unknown in Europe until the last years of the fourteenth century, when it became one of the most—if not the most—authoritative texts on the geography and cartography of the oikoumene. From the fifteenth to the seventeenth centuries, Ptolemy’s Geography served as an undisputed catalyst for the rich production of maps and charts in Renaissance Europe. Ptolemy’s practical instructions for representing the globe on a two-dimensional surface were taken up as a novelty by cartographers and artists alike.

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Early fifteenth-century translations and editions of Ptolemy’s Geography reveal the instability of cartographic terminology due to the hesitant application and location of ancient toponyms in a period radically different from Latin antiquity. According to some historians of cartography, the Renaissance translations of Ptolemy and humanist reflection upon the Geography’s nomenclature made more of an impact on the creation of early modern cartographic terminology than the actual discovery of new territories. David Woodward has claimed that “more printed maps of the world owed their allegiance to Ptolemy in the first fifty years of map printing than to the new discoveries, even though by the end of that half-century period Magellan’s Vittoria had sailed round the world.”8 As John W. Hessler has recently pointed out, “the influence of Ptolemy’s Geographia during the Renaissance in Europe cannot be overstated.”9 The Geography was first translated from Greek into Latin in the first decade of the fifteenth century. The Italian humanist Leonardo Bruni, one of Chrysoloras’s students and the author of the first theoretical Renaissance treatise on translation, De interpretatione recta (ca. 1424), followed Chrysoloras in his attempt to translate Ptolemy’s Geography. From a letter he addressed to Niccolò Niccoli we know that Bruni finally abandoned this translation project,10 which was eventually completed by Jacopo Angeli da Scarperia.11 Angeli da Scarperia, who had owned a manuscript of the Geography since 1400, was encouraged by Cardinal Peter Filargis of Candia to revise and complete Chrysoloras’s version for publication,12 a task Angeli accomplished in 1409– 1410.13 Ptolemy’s Geography then appeared under the title Cosmographia. Angeli da Scarperia dedicated his Latin translation14 to Pope Alexander V.15 In the dedication, he emphasized the importance of Greek language and culture for the study of geography and cartography. According to Angeli, the Romans (and Pliny the Elder in particular) were “unambitious, unmathematical, and anecdotal”: they neglected the “problems of depicting scale, the calculation of longitude and latitude, and techniques of celestial measurement.” None of the Latin writers, Angeli continues, “explains how our globe, which is spherical, can be described on a two-dimensional surface.”16 For this reason he had undertaken the task of translating Ptolemy from Greek into Latin.17 Furthermore, Angeli traces the translation of power and knowledge from antiquity to his own times. He establishes a translatio imperii, creating a genealogy that runs from Alexander the Great to the Alexandrian geographer Ptolemy to Pope Alexander V, under whose aegis Italy will come to realize its imperialist project: “A kind of divine presentiment of your [Pope Alexander V’s] soon-to-be-realized empire impelled you to desire the work,

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so that you could learn clearly from it how ample would be the power you would soon hold over the entire world.”18 Angeli’s project is thus more than a linguistic translation—it strongly promotes the idea of imperial expansion under the guidance of the Roman pope. Already the chancellor of the Republic of Florence, Coluccio Salutati, as well as the banker and humanist Palla Strozzi, “the most important backers of Chrysoloras’ mission,”19 had envisaged a translatio studii through the translation and dissemination of important and powerful texts from Greek antiquity. Ptolemy’s Geography was considered to be such a text. Despite the fact that the editio princeps of Angeli’s translation did not contain maps,20 which were added only in subsequent editions,21 quite understandably “the visual and theoretical elements of Ptolemy’s work . . . came to exert far greater influence across the Italian peninsula” than its exhaustive catalogues of ancient toponyms, which “even to many committed antiquarians, must have seemed arcane, dry, and hopelessly out of date.”22 In the first half of the fifteenth century, Florence was known for its botteghe, the workshops of illuminators, bookbinders, scribes, and, later on, printers; and the production of the Geography soon became part of the flourishing publishing industry. The gridded maps produced by these workshops allowed for a radically new cartographic design that significantly differed from the schematism of the medieval mappae mundi.23 Although there is no evidence that Ptolemy himself had actually produced maps, Renaissance humanists considered the maps that Chrysoloras brought with him from Byzantium to be contemporaneous with Ptolemy. Yet of the fifty-three extant Greek manuscripts of Ptolemy’s Geography, none was produced before the late thirteenth century. Hence, a time span of over one thousand years separates the earliest extant manuscripts from Ptolemy’s original text,24 allowing the translational uncertainties posed by single words and toponyms to enter the interpretive spaces between geographic description and depiction. Florian Mittenhuber notes that “the drawing of a map is the translation of a text into an image. When the text contains instructions on how to create the drawing, and the original maps have also survived, the text and maps can be checked against each other.”25 In the case of Ptolemy’s manuscripts, this was obviously not possible. However, the cartographic relationship between text and image is not only a question of comparing extant materials: it is also a careful process of resisting errors—while inevitably introducing them. Jonathan Bloom has argued that “ancient authors such as Vitruvius, Pliny the Elder, and Galen actually avoided illustrating their works and advised others against the practice because images would soon be corrupted in the hands

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of copyists.”26 Copying a word, though, was understandably less difficult than copying a map. “Complex visual data could not be communicated via visual media; for the most part, such data had to be translated into verbal discourse, primarily that of the written word.”27 From the purely pragmatic perspective of an ancient scriptorium, “if a reader dictated a text to ten copyists, there resulted ten copies of the same text, albeit with potential variations in the styles of handwriting that would not, in principle, compromise the legibility of the alphabetic text. Images could not, of course, be dictated in the same fashion.”28 Images followed a different logic of replication and circulation, and it is not surprising that Ptolemaic map production rapidly increased during the second half of the fifteenth century, concomitantly with the development of printed books, when the reader-copyist system slowly became obsolete. While ancient geographers rarely copied maps, Ptolemy’s interest in visualizing space allowed him to perfect “a system of plotting geometric coordinates in which a pair of numbers (representing longitude and latitude) could describe every significant point on a map.”29 It seems, however, that Ptolemy’s system of map production remained hypothetical and was, as far as we know, never put into practice. While favoring potential map productions, his system was, at the same time, designed to allow the translation of images into numbers. Or as Jonathan Bloom observes: “The alphanumeric data in his commentaries contained all the necessary information to generate these images afresh without recourse to earlier drawings. Ptolemy’s greatness lies, therefore, in his discovery of how to transform images into a sequence of letters and numerals that could be recorded and transmitted without distortion. In effect, he was the first to digitize images.”30 Ptolemy was thus the first to theorize and elaborate a system of digital cartographic translatability and the conversion of iconic into numeric data. While his maps are not extant—or never existed, as some scholars claim— his Geography offered, for the first time, a method for producing and reproducing visual images by transposing alphanumeric data onto a gridded and uniformly scaled surface.

Charting Cartographies in Europe’s East Around 1460, Nicolaus Germanus, a Benedictine friar of German origin, developed a new set of Ptolemaic maps.31 Germanus recognized that previous models as well as older Byzantine maps could not have used the techniques

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Figure 7. Nicolaus Germanus, ca. 1460. Cosmographia Claudii Ptolomaei Alexandrini, “Eight Map of Europe (Sarmatia).” Manuscript and Archive Division, New York Public Library, Astor, Lenox and Tilden Foundations, 427027.

that Ptolemy described in his work. Germanus based his own maps, one of which he presented to Borso d’Este of Ferrara, on a sustained reading of the theoretical part of Ptolemy’s Geography, which enabled him to offer a new visualization of the oikoumene. His maps became a crucial point of reference for subsequent cartographers and were disseminated across Europe (Figure 7). On Germanus’s map, eastern Europe is imagined after Ptolemy, who had posited the limes between Europe and Asia as the Don River (also known by the Greek name Tanais), and named the borderlands on each side of the river the “two Sarmatias.”32 In Ptolemy’s Geography, the territory of Sarmatia (nowadays Poland, the Baltic States, and Ukraine) is permeated by numerous (and fictitious) mountain chains, such as the Riphean Mountains, which gives it the appearance of a tightly knit web of knotted ropes, forming the region’s centerpiece and the map’s distinctive visual feature. The mountain chains span the region diagonally,

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from northeast to southwest: from the source of the Tanais River (the Riphean Mountains, according to the imagery of the ancients) to “Germania.”33 The rediscovery, translation, and visualization of Ptolemy’s Geography, which allowed the localization of the source of the Tanais River, thus triggered the question about the precise location of the Riphean Mountains. Renaissance cartographers like Germanus placed the Riphean Mountains in eastern Europe. However, Germanus moved the mountains like a mobile set piece across the map from Europe’s borders with Asia, where Pliny had located them in his Natural History, to the very center of eastern Europe. On Germanus’s map, the Riphean Mountains do not function as a natural boundary between two continents or a powerful line of demarcation between the oikoumene and the fictional world of the Hyperboreans. Rather, they occupy the entire region like an obstacle course, turning eastern Europe into an inaccessible and impenetrable part of Europe. The Polish historian, astronomer, and physician Maciej Miechowita (1457c.–1523), the author of the first printed history of Poland, Chronica Polonorum (1519),34 was the first European humanist to challenge Ptolemy’s description and the Renaissance cartographers’ mapping of the Riphean Mountains. It is to a particularly complex boundary that Miechowita dedicates his treatise: the continental divide between Europe and Asia. In his 1517 Tractatus de duabus Sarmatiis Asiana et Europiana et de contentis in eis, Miechowita dismissed the Riphean Mountains as a fictitious mountain chain.35 Published in Kraków, the capital of the Polish kingdom, the treatise was disseminated across Europe in successive Latin editions as well as in German, Polish, Italian, and Dutch translations.36 Its 1535 translation into Polish by Andrzej Glaber z Kobylina makes the Tractatus one of the first texts published in the Polish vernacular. Moreover, it was the first work by a Polish author to be translated into Italian, and was included in Giovanni Battista Ramusio’s seminal 1583 travel anthology, Navigazioni e viaggi, in a translation by Annibal Maggi, alongside such authors as Marco Polo, Columbus, and Vespucci. Immediately after its publication, Miechowita’s Tractatus provided a blueprint for European cosmographers, historians, travelers, and politicians to rethink the topographies, languages, and cultures of eastern Europe and to conceptualize Europe’s eastern boundaries. Highly invested in a study of both ancient and medieval geographic and historical accounts and of cosmographers’ descriptions of the origins and migrations of European and Asian peoples, Miechowita understood that territories are subject to continuous movements and shifts. Miechowita wrote his treatise at a time when several other Polish humanists, cosmographers, and cartographers were reflecting upon the cartographic

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Figure 8. Marco Beneventano. Rome, 1507. Tabula Moderna Polonie, Ungarie, Boemie, Germanie, Russie, Lithuanie. Rapperswill, Polish Museum, CRP: 00100-04939. Map image from the Collection of Cartographia Rappersvilliana Polonorum Rapperswil, Switzerland.

representation of eastern Europe, and of Poland in particular. In 1506, Jan of Głogów, a professor of astronomy at Jagellonian University, published a commentary on Sacrobosco’s Introductorium in tractatum Sphaerae, which, according to Leszek Hajdukiewicz, contains fragments commenting upon the discovery of the New World.37 The next year, 1507, marked a crucial moment in discovery-related mapmaking for both the East and the West: in that year Martin Waldseemüller and Matthias Ringmann famously included the name “America” in their world map titled Universalis Cosmographia.38 In the same year, the Polish cartographer and historian Bernard Wapowski (ca. 1450–1535), cathedral canon at Kraków, collaborated on Marco Beneventano’s 1507 Rome edition of Ptolemy’s Geography (Figure  8). Th is edition included twenty-seven ancient maps depicting the Ptolemaic oikoumene next to six modern maps of newly discovered territories.39 In particular, Wapowski helped to map Europe’s hitherto unknown eastern territories,40 creating what is considered to be the first modern map of Poland. Among the map’s most

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Figure 9. Detail: Rissei [Riffei] Montes. Marco Beneventano. Rome, 1507. Tabula Moderna Polonie, Ungarie, Boemie, Germanie, Russie, Lithuanie. Rapperswill, Polish Museum, CRP: 00100-04939. Map image from the Collection of Cartographia Rappersvilliana Polonorum Rapperswil, Switzerland.

prominent cartographic features are the Riphean Mountains, here called “Rissei Montes” (Figure 9). In 1512, Jan Stobnica published an edition of Ptolemy titled Introductio in Ptolemaei Cosmographiam (a second edition followed in 1519). Besides providing references to Amerigo Vespucci and the “mundus novus,” Stobnica’s Introductio contains an abridged version of Enea Silvio Piccolomini’s treatise De Europa—which Stobnica titled Epitoma Europe—as well as Piccolomini’s treatise De Asia, Isidore of Seville’s Sirie compendiosa descriptio, Paulus Osorius’s Africe brevis descriptio, and Anselm’s Terrae sancte & Urbis Hierusalem apertior descriptio.41 Stobnica contends that the western boundaries of the oikoumene have shifted with the discovery of the “mundus novus,” the site of territories “unknown to Ptolemy and other ancients,” while Sarmatia, Europe’s eastern part, has remained unchanged.42 Piccolomini’s description of Europa thus exemplifies and underscores what Stobnica considers to be “the immutable [immutabile] parts of Sarmatia.”43 A look at the different texts assembled in Stobnica’s Introductio makes it clear that the western and eastern parts of the oikoumene belong to two epistemologically disconnected frameworks. Similarly, Waldseemüller’s Universalis Cosmographia map features the portraits of both Vespucci and Ptolemy, juxtaposed as geographic authorities contemplating the shifting

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Figure 10. Detail of Amerigo Vespucci. Martin Waldseemüller. Saint Dié, 1507. Universalis Cosmographia Secundum Ptholomaei Traditionem et Americi Vespucii Alioru[m]que Lustrationes. Washington, D.C., Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division.

boundaries of the “mundus novus” in the fi rst case and the immobilized borders of the oikoumene on the other. While Vespucci gazes at “America” (Figure 10), Ptolemy contemplates Europe, Asia, and Africa (Figure 11), the three continents described in his Geography.44 Termed a “transitional” or “synthetic” map,45 Waldseemüller’s map contains updated geographic knowledge in the west, while displaying an ancient, specifically Ptolemaic, spatial and toponymic organization of the oikoumene, in particular “the northern and eastern parts [which] have Ptolemaic, schematic or even imaginary shapes.”46 John W. Hessler has argued that “the Mediterranean and the north of Africa on the Waldseemüller 1507 map are very much Ptolemaic representations. The majority of the shapes and outlines of the coastlines of these regions are similar in appearance to those found in Ptolemy’s Geographia, even though Waldseemüller would have known them to be quite different.”47 Yet the example of Sarmatia—and, in particular, the question of where to locate and how to map the Riphean Mountains—shows that Europe’s East was perceived as a territory whose borders had been rendered unchangeable in deference to the long-standing authority of the ancients. Stobnica’s Introductio is a unique example of cartographic writing organized analogously to Waldseemüller’s map. Stobnica’s choice of texts to

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Figure 11. Detail of Ptolemy. Martin Waldseemüller. Saint Dié, 1507. Universalis Cosmographia Secundum Ptholomaei Traditionem et Americi Vespucii Alioru[m]que Lustrationes. Washington, D.C., Library of Congress, Geography and Map Division.

describe the “four parts” of the world shows that he relies on both Ptolemy and Vespucci: “Ptolemy translated [tradidit] the three parts of the world known to the ancients into twenty-six images [tabulis], of which ten are on Europe, four on Africa and twelve on Asia.”48 “The other, fourth, part”—that is, the New World—“has been invented by Amerigo Vespucci, a man of acute genius, and they want to name it ‘Amerige,’ ‘Land of Americo,’ so to speak, or ‘America’ after its inventor Amerigo himself.”49 Waldseemüller’s map as well as Piccolomini’s treatise De Asia, first published together in Paris in 1509 by the French humanist Geoffroy Tory and then in Stobnica’s Introductio,50 recognize the Riphean Mountains as an intrinsic part of Europe’s East. In De Asia, Piccolomini writes that “the Apennines cut across all of Italy. On the other side, high summits run across Histria and Dalmatia to the Peloponnese and Thracia, and between the Rhine and the Danube emerges a mountain ridge, which, deriving from the Alps, dissolves toward Germany and Sarmatia. Above the sources of the Tanais River it reaches the Riphean Mountains, from which it joins the Caucasus and then the Taurus through the Caspian Antitaurus. Beyond the Taurus, the Romans allowed Antioch the Great to rule. One concludes that the entire continent can be understood as a series of mountains, although in many places it appears as not much more than a swelling [tumor].”51 Thus

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Piccolomini describes Europe’s geography and cartography as mountain chains stretching across the continent like a more or less pronounced “swelling.” The Riphean Mountains did not disappear from early sixteenth-century maps, and the cartographic image of eastern Europe as an ill-defined network of orographic protuberances persisted. Considered “immutable,” these mountains took on the function not only of boundaries between Europe and Asia but also of natural highways traversing and connecting Europe’s hitherto poorly understood and described geography. The Riphean Mountains were translated not only onto modern maps but onto the first globes as well. In 1515 the bishop of Babenberg, Johann Schöner, “one of the great neglected personalities of the scientific revolution,”52 created a globe along with a cartographic work titled Cosmographia to describe and explain it. In the chapter focusing on “Europa,” Schöner states that “the Alps put forth three branches. The first extends across Swabia, Bohemia, Silesia to Poland, where [Nikolaus] Krumpach calls the vernacular language Carpathian. Continuing, one proceeds to Russia, where the Riphean [Mountain] seems to rejoice in the perpetual breeze of winds.”53 Thus for Schöner in his Cosmographia the Riphean Mountains originate in Europe and terminate in Asia, as orographic extensions of the Alps. Only two years later, in 1517, Maciej Miechowita published his Tractatus de duabus Sarmatiis—the first European treatise to overtly challenge the existence of the Riphean Mountains. In several passages Miechowita underscored that the Riphean Mountains are a mere invention of ancient geographers who had never even traveled to those territories. In the dedication to his treatise, Miechowita writes: [Ancient] writers claim that in the northern regions there are worldfamous [orbe terrarum nominatissimos] mountains, called the Alan, Hyperborean, and Riphean mountains, from which flow no less famous rivers such as the Tanais, the major and minor Borysthenes, and the grand river Volga, described by cosmographers and famous poets in words and songs. Yet this is far from being true, since this information does not originate in a consideration of the thing itself (abs re)—experience is the teacher of sayable things—and has to be rejected as a profane and inexperienced declaration [prophanum, inexperteque provulgatum]. We know for certain and have seen that the Hyperborean, Riphean, and Alan mountains do not exist and that the above-mentioned rivers originate and have their sources in a flat plain [ex terra plana].54

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The publication of Miechowita’s treatise fueled discussions about the topography of eastern Europe and, in particular, about the veracity of the ancient cosmographical claim that a lofty mountain chain, the mythical Riphean and Hyperborean Mountains, cut through Europe’s eastern regions, dividing not only the different northeastern peoples from each other but also the inhabited from the uninhabited zones. Miechowita claimed that Europe’s East was entirely flat and girded by a few fully passable hills.55 This claim—a bold rejection not only of ancient authorities, but also of authoritative near-contemporaries and influential Italian humanists such as Enea Silvio Piccolomini and Flavio Biondo—received attention from Europe’s humanists, geographers, and politicians alike. Emperor Maximilian I sent his delegate Siegmund von Herberstein to the Grand Duchy of Muscovy, where he had already been on a diplomatic mission in 1517, in order to verify Miechowita’s geographic claims. Von Herberstein returned with an affirmation of Miechowita’s findings and a new travel account, Rerum Moscovitarum comentarii (1549),56 the first sustained description of the Grand Duchy of Muscovy, albeit highly indebted to Miechowita’s Tractatus.57 In fact, Miechowita himself had never traveled to the lands that he described. His knowledge of the nonexistence of the Hyperborean, Riphean, and Alan Mountains stemmed from the accounts of political emigrants, soldiers, merchants, and prisoners of war.58 Thus his claim to have seen for himself the flat plain where the ancients had located the alleged mountains should be taken with a grain of salt.59 Miechowita did base his treatise on ancient sources—traceable even in the choice of his Ptolemaic title—even while altering or dismissing them in a few specific instances. Familiar with maps such as Nicolaus Germanus’s “Sarmatia Europe,” where eastern Europe is depicted as a dense and formidable orographic grid, Miechowita proposed not only a new cartography but also a different perception of Europe’s East, which now became open and accessible. Miechowita’s concomitant appropriation and rejection of Ptolemy constitutes a unique vantage point that discloses the selective adaptation of ancient geographic knowledge in early modern Europe. The specific example of the mountains offers a particularly powerful insight into this adaptation and transformation process. As scholars have claimed, Miechowita’s emphasis on the absence of the mountains was politically motivated—which may explain why this specific deviation from Ptolemy seemed so important to him. It allowed both the author and the Polish king Sigismund I (1467–1548), in whose service Miechowita was writing, to imagine and project Poland’s expansion to the east.

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In the years during which Miechowita was writing the treatise, the Polish king and the grand duke of Muscovy were competing for the territories east of the Polish Commonwealth—territories that Miechowita referred to by the Latin name “Sarmatia.” Although Muscovy was defeated in the battle of Orsha in 1514 and the Polish kingdom was charting an expansionist politics to the east, Muscovy’s subsequent conquest of Smolensk, as well as its increasing power, which resulted in the establishment of the Russian tsardom in 1547, made “Sarmatia” a contested battleground—a flat plain, devoid of mountain chains, that could easily be traversed. The flatness of Europe’s East was strategically important, not only politically but also economically. In his dedicatory epistle to Stanislas Turzo, bishop of the Bohemian town of Olomouc and member of a powerful banking family, Miechowita describes the topic of his treatise: I wrote the subsequent Treatise on the two Sarmatias, which the Ancients referred to by lesser known names than our contemporaries, to tell you, most learned patron, truthfully about these and many other things contained in the Sarmatias [in Sarmatiis]. I write to you briefly, my dearest master and patron, as the topic demands, and will make sure [curabo] to encourage others, who have discovered greater things to write more freely and in more elegant words. Just as the Portuguese king discovered the Southern Hemisphere with peoples adjacent to the ocean as far as India, so the Polish king shall venture into the northern hemisphere and reveal and illuminate, through the discoveries undertaken by means of military campaigns and wars, peoples oriented toward the east living close to the northern ocean.60 Here, Miechowita establishes an analogy between the discoveries of India and the Southern Hemisphere by the Portuguese king (referring to Manuel I) and, as Miechowita hopes, the new territorial discoveries of northeastern Europe under the aegis of the Polish king (Sigismund I). Miechowita suggests that Sigismund I venture into and disclose (aperta) the hitherto unexplored Northern Hemisphere by means of military campaigns and wars (per militia et bella). Like the Portuguese king61 who discovered and colonized the Southern Hemisphere, Sigismund I will thus illuminate (clarescat) the Northern Hemisphere, inhabited by peoples bordering on the northern ocean facing the East, in order to make it accessible to the world (mundo pateat). Miechowita’s

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use of a wide range of verbs that denote openness,62 such as the participle “aperta” or the verbs “clarescat” and “pateat,” gestures toward the discovery and disclosure of the Northern Hemisphere, beyond the present boundaries of Poland.63 Miechowita’s powerful geostrategic positioning of the Polish king as a discoverer of new territories—by translating the vertical Ptolemaic landscape into a horizontal and trafficable territory—created, for the first time, a larger European awareness not only of the geography but also of the geostrategic potential of Europe’s East.

From Maciej Miechowita to Abraham Ortelius Yet despite the manifold editions and translations of Miechowita’s new reading of Ptolemy, the myth of the Riphean Mountains persisted in the imaginary of Renaissance cartographers. Abraham Ortelius’s 1570 Theatrum orbis terrarum, considered to be one of the first atlases, is a powerful case in point that illustrates the complex relation between early modern cartography and the translation and visualization of ancient geographic sources.64 While Ortelius relies on sources such as Miechowita and dismisses the Riphean Mountains from his maps, a mountain range still occupies the northeastern part of the oikoumene, east of Tartaria, at the borders of the “Oceanus Sciticus.” Ortelius names this mountain range the “Orbis zona montes”65 (Figure 12) or the “Zona mundi montes.”66 The Riphean Mountains have disappeared in name only: a generic mountain chain now takes their place as a remnant of a fading yet persistent Ptolemaic geography. But here the “natural” mountain chain has been transformed into an artificial and symbolic, rather than effective, marker of boundaries. At the same time, the divergent cartographic nomenclature associated with the mountainous zone, which oscillates between “orbis” and “mundus,”67 gestures toward early modernity’s multiple—and conflicting— epistemological frameworks and its wavering mapping and irresolute naming of the “world.” While the name of the Riphean Mountains has vanished from the map proper, it persists in the Album amicorum written for Ortelius by several of his friends with the purpose of chronicling and commenting upon the creation process of his Atlas. These comments and testimonies offer a look not only into the workshop of a famous Renaissance cartographer, but also into the

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Figure 12. Detail: Orbis Zona Montes. Abraham Ortelius. Antwerp, 1570. Theatrum Orbis Terrarum. Harvard University Map Collection, Pusey Library.

etymology of the noun théatron (theater) and the verb théaomai (to see, look), especially in the context of the new territorial discoveries. One commentator, Pietro Bizzarri, writes that Ortelius has brought to light a territory that many people had ignored and that has now been made visible to everyone.68 For JeanMarc Besse, a “new visibility of the world” emerged precisely with Ortelius,69 whose entourage found that accurate vision and visualization offered a new way of representing the world in its totality. Even the title of Ortelius’s work, Theatrum, turns the focus onto the etymological meaning of “theatron” as

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vision and visualization. Yet a careful reading of other contributions to the Album shows that this new visibility and process of visualization were still obscured and obstructed by readings drawn from ancient geographical sources. Thus the antiquarian Cornelis Claesz Van Aecken from Leiden can note: Who would deny that you [Ortelius] have mastered all the sciences? You certainly have mastered all those pertaining to the lands. What could be more famous than your world, which you dared suspend on a thin paper, after having it cut into gores [= sectors of a map’s curved surface] on several maps, so that what had previously been unknown, and what one could enjoy up till now only as if through a sort of haze, has been proposed to the eyes, to the senses of humans? This very universe is accessible by the virtue and the genius of your Theater from the rise of the sun to the Sea of Azov; one can traverse it beyond the occidental isthmus, to the Riphean and Hyperborean Mountains.70 For Van Aecken, Ortelius’s “genius” consists in his ability to present the world in such a way that the boundary separating the onlooker and the cartographic representation disappears. In a crossing of empirical and fictional boundaries, this newly discovered world itself becomes accessible to the readers of the atlas in the form of a sequence of regional maps71 and comprehensible in its globality and universality, all the way from the west to the Riphean and Hyperborean Mountains. What might surprise, however, is Van Aecken’s choice of topographic examples to help the reader visualize the widening extent of the world in an age of territorial “discoveries.” Instead of citing territories discovered by his contemporaries, Van Aecken hearkens back to the imaginary and mythical places described by Greek and Roman geographers. The world he describes is indebted to Ptolemy more than to Magellan, in stark contrast to the topography of the already known and circumnavigated world. Van Aecken’s reference to the Riphean Mountains reveals the slow, nonlinear process of implementing, applying, and expanding early modern cartographic knowledge. It also sheds light upon Van Aecken’s doubt about cartography as a new science whose task it was to translate ancient geographic knowledge into early modernity. What Van Aecken seems to underscore in his comment is, instead, cartography’s performativity, its ability to represent and visualize the world as a theatron of nonknowledge.

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In one of his works on early modern cartography, Tom Conley states: [New historicists] ask how the “world” could be both imagined and experienced when its boundaries were expanding at exponential rates. Cartographic studies have shown where the unknown, vital for any definition of consciousness or even the drives of life itself, was located and bracketed. The unknown was an integral part of cartography prior to the eighteenth century. But to assert, as many have, that cartography sought to contain the unknown within the terrae incognitae it indicated on its maps does not solve the relation of the discipline with the unknown. Evidence shows how much in the early modern age the unknown inhabits most written and schematic representations of the world. Unnamed patches that we retrieve on maps printed in the sixteenth century prompt reverie of spaces that can be fancied as unknown by virtue of the maps themselves.72 Although the world was potentially known and navigable in its entire extension since its circumnavigation by Magellan in 1519–22, cartographers and humanists continued to depict the Riphean Mountains on maps and to describe them in geographic texts as a way of indicating the remaining areas of nonknowledge. The Riphean Mountains powerfully reveal that several topographic “patches” remained unnamed or were misinterpreted on early modern maps even after Magellan. Early modern cartography was composed of “reveries of spaces” creating visualized fictions based on ancient geographic knowledge in an age of territorial discoveries. For J. P. Harley, who describes “mapping and silencing knowledge on maps” as an “active human performance,”73 cartographic activity involved the translation, visualization, and representation not only of knowledge, but also, as for Conley, of nonknowledge. In Harley’s view, the consciously inserted lacunae and topoi of nonknowledge from Homer’s Odyssey to early modern cartography can be understood as a complex and nonlinear interaction between geographic knowledge and nonknowledge, where “silence and utterance are not alternatives but constituent parts of map language, each necessary for the understanding of the other.”74 The complex interaction between knowledge and nonknowledge, concretized in the creation of early modern maps, is a process of translation. As the case of the impossible translation and repeated visualization of imaginary mountains shows, the Riphean and Hyperborean Mountains revealed the persistence of nominal and spatial mistranslation. One might ask whether ficti-

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tious mountains are not bearers of an additional translational dimension, serving as tokens that facilitate cartographic translation by rendering chaotic landscape more comprehensible and thus meaningful. In his “Essai de géographie physique” (1751), the French geographer Philippe Buache advanced the theory that a mountain range spans the entire globe, enclosing it like an exoskeleton, partly under sea level, partly in the shape of dispersed islands. The cultural geographer Bernard Debarbieux argues that Buache’s insistence on this chain of mountains is an “expression of his desire to find order in this apparent disorder, and to identify some principles by virtue of which natural objects may hold together. The theory of the continuity of mountain ranges rests upon these assumptions. It treated mountains analogically as a kind of framework, which [Buache] envisages as the support for different parts of the terrestrial globe and which is formed of high ranges encompassing and crossing it.”75 These visualized mountain chains serve as systems for organizing objects in space. They are not empirical objects that can be represented and measured scientifically. Rather, they function as conceptual frameworks and theoretical constructs that help translate and visualize knowledge. Thus, for Debarbieux, “Buache’s system is therefore first and foremost a logical ordering of natural objects in space, objects which are organised into reasonably simple and complementary categories.”76 In his early essay on uninhabited islands, Gilles Deleuze compared islands with mountains. For him, islands are mountains set in bodies of water, while mountains are islands on dry land. Both islands and mountains are not primary original sites, created by God, but sites created by the human imagination. They constitute sites of a second origin: The island, and all the more so the deserted island, is an extremely poor or weak notion from the point of view of geography. Th is is to its credit. The range of islands has no objective unity, and deserted islands have even less. . . . The essence of the deserted island is imaginary and not actual, mythological and not geographical. At the same time, its destiny is subject to those human conditions that make mythology possible. Mythology is not simply willed into existence, and the peoples of the earth quickly ensured they would no longer understand their own myths. It is at this very moment literature begins. Literature is the attempt to interpret, in an ingenious way, the myths we no longer understand, at the moment we no longer understand them, since we no longer know how to dream them

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or reproduce them. Literature is the competition of misinterpretations that consciousness naturally and necessarily produces on themes of the unconscious, and like every competition it has its prizes.77 For Deleuze, there are no maps without an imaginary element—a desert island or an unknown mountain—which serve as productive nuclei of cartographic productions and translational activities. Here, literature becomes an attempt to interpret and translate “myths we no longer understand.” No wonder, then, that the Riphean Mountains have not entirely vanished from our maps. While twenty-first-century GIS-based digital mapping leaves little space for cartographic nonknowledge on our globe, the Riphean Mountains have undergone a translatio from the earth to the moon. The “Montes Riphaeus, or the Riphaean Mountains” is now the name for “an isolated range on the Oceanus Procellarum, the Ocean of Storms. Running in a north-south direction these low peaks are not particularly high, the tallest is just short of being 1 mile above the plain.”78 The isolated and island-like Riphean Mountains continue to function as a productive source of spatial translations and cartographic visualizations. They serve as a mobile limes, now transported to the moon. As such, they help to chronicle the complex boundaries between knowledge and nonknowledge, charting the intrinsic relationships among cartography, translation, and visualization in an age of digitalization.

Chapter 5

Taking Out the Women: Louise Labé’s Folie in Robert Greene’s Translation Ann Rosalind Jones

This chapter focuses on two early modern prose texts whose writers represent love as an allegorical figure and a social force: Louise Labé’s dialogue Le Débat de Folie et d’Amour (Lyon, 1555) and its translation by Robert Greene, The Debate betweene Follie and Loue (London, 1584). The two texts reward comparison because they demonstrate how strongly translation is gendered, how that gendering is shaped by historical context, and how an early modern translation could so aggressively transform its source that it might better be called an adaptation. Anne Lake Prescott poses the issue succinctly in her study of Greene’s translation: “What happens to authorship when a text by a woman is translated by a man?”1 Among other theoreticians of intertextuality, Gérard Genette proposes that “any text is a hyper-text, grafting itself onto a hypotext, an earlier text that it imitates or transforms”—a text that may or may not be explicitly identified by the writer.2 Greene stays on the implicit side of this process by keeping his hypertext anonymous and by “re-visioning it,” to use Adrienne Rich’s term, “entering a new text from a new critical direction.”3 But Greene reverses the gendered process that Rich described in the 1970s: he appropriates a woman’s text and reworks it in his own interests to entertain the “Gentlemen readers” to whom he addresses his dedication. In 1584 Greene’s publisher, William Posonby, put the emphasis of the book on its long opening romance, Gwydonius, with the subtitle “The Carde of Fancie wherein the folly of those carpet knights is decyphered, which guyding their course by the compasse of Cupid, either dash their ship against most daungerous

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rocks, or els attaine the hauen with paine and perill. Wherein also is described in the person of Gwydonius, a cruell combat betvveene nature and necessitie.”4 Greene’s translation is printed after the last page of Gwydonius, with the title The Debate betweene Follie and Loue, Translated out of French by Robert Greene, Master of Artes. Neither in this nor in the three following editions is Labé’s name mentioned.5 One change in the second edition, however, is that Posonby expanded the title to advertise Greene as its author: Greene’s Carde of Fancie. This emphasis on his name confirms that the romances and pamphlets Greene had gotten into print by 1587 had made him a name that sold books, several dedicated to women as well as men: among others, Mamillia (1583); The Myrrour of Modestie, wherein appeareth as in a perfect Glasse howe the Lorde delivereth the innocent from all imminent perils (1584); Pandosto (1585), which would become a best seller; and Penelope’s Web (1587). In his early career, as Lori Humphrey Newcomb points out, “Greene’s dual literary parentage in both the essentially oral (rhetorical) training of the humanist university and the primarily print-based world of the Elizabethan book trade . . . [meant that] his publications were well suited for the early modern transitional period in which, as [Roger] Chartier puts it, ‘different media and multiple practices . . . mingled in complex ways.’ ”6 Why might Greene have decided to translate Labé’s Débat? Or, rather, to revise it? His eye to both scholarly and popular audiences is clear in his presentation of Gwydonius and the Debate. He opens his long euphuistic romance with an address “To the Gentlemen Readers,” while the following learned but also brief and comic debate, arising from a conflict between two goddesses, Folly and Venus, incorporates theories of love likely to appeal to the women thought to be the most devoted readers of romance.7 Greene’s pickup on the dialogue as a fashionable genre was also manifest in his first romance, Mamillia, centered on two lovers who discuss the nature of love.8 Likewise, he directed his Mirrour of Modestie, published the same year as the Debate, toward a double audience. He composed The Mirrour, he claims, for a “certaine Gentlewoman,” whom he names in the following second dedication as “the Ladie Margaret, Countesse of Darbie,” who asked him to write “this storie of Susanna, more largelie then it is written in the Apopcripha” [sic], a favor he could not refuse her (a4r).9 But he begins by courting the discriminating “Gentlemen readers” to whom he wishes “Health” in the first dedication of the dialogue, referring to the as yet unnamed lady’s request by way of apologizing for his topic: to “trouble your ears with such trashe, I thought was to straine to[o] muche upon your curtesie” (a1r). He ends his dedication, hopefully, to

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“The Gentlemen”: “when you weigh what a spur I had, you will wink if you spie a spot” (a3v). From the beginning of this early text, and in following ones, Greene appears to be balancing two audiences, writing to please women and at the same time to deflect the censure of men for doing so. But was he really writing to please women? Newcomb posits that “it is men’s opinions that matter,” and she quotes Juliet Fleming’s argument that many men’s addresses to women readers in this period are disingenuous: “the female audience to which [the text purports to be addressed] is invited to assist at the spectacle of its own discountenancing. . . . The ladies’ text is always presented as a trifle or a toy.”10 In Penelope’s Web, too, in the middle dedication to “The Gentlemen,” though it is set between two addressed to women, Greene apologizes that “the matter is women’s prattle” and goes on to a slightly prurient classical allusion: “Mars will sometime bee prying into Venus’ papers” (A4r). Greene’s attention to male readers in these texts accounts for a major difference between his and Labé’s texts: the way he restructured hers. After an “Argument” summarizing the events to come, she divides her text into five “discours,” which give it the dramatic structure of five acts.11 In “Discours 1,” Folie (feminine) and Amour (masculine, called Cupidon later in the dialogue) meet on their way to a banquet of the gods and quarrel over precedence: Who should go in first? He insults her and shoots an arrow at her; she puts out his eyes and blindfolds him. In “Discours 2,” he complains to Venus; in “Discours 3,” Venus complains to Jupiter. He orders Venus and Folly to appoint advocates to argue the question of which of them is more powerful in the world and therefore owes deference to the other: Love chooses Apollo, Folly Mercury. In “Discours 4,” Amour visits Jupiter and advises him that he will succeed better in love if he behaves more courteously and treats mortal women as his equals; Jupiter is not convinced. In “Discours 5,” by far the longest in the debate, Apollo speaks for Love, who has the power to civilize and bring delight. At greater length, Mercury argues for Folly, who reigns over every human endeavor, including love: without irrational excess, no great undertaking would be possible. Jupiter finally gives his judgment: Love and Folly, conjoined as they have turned out to be, must live with each other in peace. Greene departed from his source text radically. First, he cut it by half, by omitting “Discours 4” entirely and combining the third and fifth into a new “Discours 3.” This abridgment may have, in part, responded to a practical necessity: Did Posonby want an additional short text to follow Gwydonius—to fill out the book, but not to add too many pages?12 Greene produced a text far

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shorter than Labé’s—of ten octavo leaves, bringing the total number in the book to seventy-eight—by eliminating long sections of dialogue among the gods. In particular, he abridged Labé’s display of humanist erudition and her vocabulary of courtly and Neoplatonic love by eliminating Cupid’s advice to Jupiter, the topic of “Discours 4,” and Apollo’s description of love in “Discours 5” as the force that unifies the cosmos. Less leisurely than Labé and more polemical, Greene cuts to the chase: the forensic contest between Apollo and Mercury. He deletes the radical political critique articulated by Folly in Labé’s Débat and expands his own text with language so alliterative and burlesque that a reader might wonder whether Folly presides over the practice of translation. But I will spare my readers the tired and very old lament that the source text is superior to its inadequate translation. To paraphrase Rainer Schulte in his introduction to a 1989 collection of essays, The Craft of Translation, “between languages, there are no equivalent words; and between cultures, there are no equivalent situations.”13 These two texts are energetically different: composed in different places by writers with different training, addressing different audiences, and pursuing different agendas. Reading the Débat and the Debate together is illuminating because they exemplify how differently writers reworked the dialectical genre practiced so widely throughout Renaissance Europe—and how, consciously or unconsciously, a historically situated man’s transformation of an earlier text by a differently situated woman could be motivated.

Labé in Lyon: A Coterie Bourgeoise Many passages Greene cut from Labé’s dialogue would have been appreciated as well informed and witty by the audience to whom she addressed it: her colleagues in what has come to be called l’ école lyonnaise, a group of scholarwriters who revolved around the humanist publisher Jean de Tournes, including Clément Marot, Maurice Scève, Jacques Peletier du Mans, and Pontus de Tyard. By the 1550s, de Tournes was well known for his editions of Greek as well as Latin texts and of books written by scholars and poets throughout Europe, including Brunetto Latini’s compendium of Aristotle’s Ethics, several Latin editions of Aesop’s Fables, Leone Ebreo’s De Amore in a French translation, Petrarch in Italian, Erasmus’s Apothegms, Vives’s Institution de la femme chrestienne in both Latin and French, the poems of Marguerite de Navarre, and a series of French Bibles.14 De Tournes and his circle certainly also knew

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Erasmus’s Praise of Folly and would have appreciated Labé’s use of his text as a basis for her own personification of Folly as a playful, irreverent critic of contemporary society.15 Labé could participate in a group of men like these because their gatherings were neither academic nor professional: the University of Paris was far away, and de Tournes’s circle met as book-loving intellectuals rather than physicians or lawyers. Janet Smarr points out the esteem a few women, at least, won by taking part in dialogues in such mixed-sex academies and salons: “Friendly dialogue with an educated man—or with a learned woman— becomes the university that is open to women . . . an alternate educational institution.”16 Labé’s dialogue makes it clear that such meetings (which citizens of Lyon described her, not always sympathetically, as hosting in her own house) included detailed discussion of the ancients and satire of the moderns.17 She begins her Oeuvres with a now famous call to women to educate themselves and to write. In Labé’s view, women will have a Renaissance if they join her in public performances that can win them fame: Estant le tems venu, Madamoiselle, que les severes loix des hommes n’empeschent plus les femmes de s’apliquer aus sciences et disciplines: il me semble que celles qui ont la commodité, doivent employer cette honneste liberté, que notre sexe ha autre fois tant desiree, à icelles aprendre: et montrer aus hommes le tort qu’ils nous faisoient en nous privant du bien et de l’honneur qui nous en pouvoit venir. Since the time has now come, Mademoiselle, when the strict laws of men no longer prevent women from applying themselves to study and learning, it seems to me that those who have the means should take advantage of this well-deserved freedom—so fervently desired by our sex in the past—to pursue them, and to show men how wrong they were to deprive us of the benefit and recognition these things might have given us. (43) This defense of women’s capacity for education and challenge to them to demonstrate it to men is not a call to oratory or political action, but it is certainly a defense of their participation—including that of women of the bourgeoisie like Labé herself—in the kind of coterie in which she had polished the playful erudition she displays in her Débat.18

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There was, of course, no reason that Greene should have reproduced Labé’s paratext as printed by Jean de Tournes. Their different contexts—historical, cultural, rank- and gender-ruled—are crystallized in their dedications. Labé writes to maintain her camaraderie with elite intellectuals who can influence a distinguished local publisher to print her work, while Greene writes as a professional to persuade London publishers that they can sell his books to both elite and popular audiences. Each writer occupied a complex social situation. Labé was the daughter of a wealthy chandler in Lyon (Pierre Charly), but she received, atypically in light of her rank, a belletristic education, which she displayed in her prose and poetry.19 Looking upward socially, she dedicated her Oeuvres to a young noblewoman of Lyon, Clémence de Bourges, naming her with the initials A. M. C. B. L. (To Mademoiselle Clémence de Bourges, Lyonnaise), a code that invited readers in the coterie to which both women belonged into a text written for them as well as for Clémence.

Greene in London: Suitor to the City At this early stage of his career, Greene, too, aimed high, though his appeal to a patron may have been intended to impress his other readers more than the nobleman himself. In a forthright, ringing salute, he dedicated Gwydonius “to the right honourable, Edward de Vere Earle of Oxenford, Vicount Bulbecke, Lord of Escales and Badlesmire, and Lord great Chamberlaine of England. Robert Greene wisheth long life with increase of honour” (A3r). This dedication appeared, unchanged, in the three following editions of the book—which I take as evidence that it was unsuccessful. Nothing in Greene’s later life suggests that he benefited from ongoing patronage from de Vere or anyone else. Rather, the variety of his dedications to highly placed patrons (including Elizabeth I), as well the many theatrical companies for which he composed his plays, is evidence that he never found stable niches for his writing.20 Literary historians agree that Greene came from a family of the middling sort in Norwich or Yorkshire and spent eight years in universities as a sizar, working to pay for his BA and MA at Cambridge and then winning an honorary MA at Oxford. He then made his living—never a good one—by writing fast and furiously for the popular press and the London theater until his death at age thirty-four. Greene was twenty-six at the time William Posonby published his translation of Labé, after which, constantly writing and publishing

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in the format of the small octavo books called pamphlets, he appears to have lived a dissolute life until his death in poverty six years later.21 Charles Crupi, following Richard Helgerson in The Elizabethan Prodigals, makes two points about Greene’s career that are relevant here: for Greene and young men like him, literature was “a form of social aspiration”; and his works “show him a member of a newly developing class in England: authors dependent on the public at large, not on patronage or court appointment” (17). Greene commended his readers as consumers of texts from London’s popular press—of which a posthumous pamphlet, Greenes News from both Heaven and Hell (1593, probably ghostwritten by Barnabe Rich), reminded them: “I am the sprite of Robert Greene, not unknowne unto thee (I am sure) by my name, when my wrytings lately priviledged on every post, hath given notice of my name unto infinite numbers of people that never knewe me by the view of my person” (14).22 Whatever the flourish in this claim to Greene’s popularity with readers on the street, in his dedication to Gwydonius he calls upon a different audience: the kind of classically educated students he had known at Cambridge and Oxford. He begins his dedication “To the Gentlemen Readers, health,” and continues with two comic anecdotes about overweening poets: Pan, who played his flute so badly that his listeners shut him up by telling him his “pipe was out of tune,” and a Greek poet whose “rude vearses” so bored Augustus that he told him, “Thou hadst neede . . . reward me wel, for I take more paines to read thy workes, then thou to write them” (A3v). Perfect English sprezzatura: a little urbane erudition, a little pretense at self-mockery. The masculine camaraderie he invites here contrasts strongly to Labé’s bold call to women and her implicit claim to knowledge on a level playing field with the men in the Lyonnais circle into which she encouraged her women compatriots to make their way. Richard Helgerson argued in the 1970s that Greene rejected the misogyny of Lyly’s Anatomy of Wit and earlier humanist texts; he introduces Mamillia, for example, by claiming that therein “with perpetual fame the constancy of gentlewomen is canonized and the unjust blasphemies of women’s supposed fickleness . . . by manifest examples clearly infringed.”23 But Greene’s prowoman position was only temporary: in his Alcida, published three years after his translation, he accuses women of three governing vices: pride, inconstancy, and prattle, symmetrically opposed to his earlier praise, in Penelope’s Web, of the heroine’s obedience, chastity, and silence (95). It is not surprising in

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his translation, then, that he abbreviated Labé’s positive representations of women and the courtesy-manual love theory that worked in their interest. Nor was Greene always as critical of men as he was of the bellicose villain Clerophantes in Gwydonius. Throughout his translation he remains focused on figures of male authority in three ways. He revises Labé’s Amour, or Cupidon, from an impulsive youngster into a firmer, more independent figure; he eliminates passages that expose Jupiter’s imperfections; and he cuts passages in which Labé represented mortal men in irreverent ways. In this analysis of his transformation of Le Débat, I will investigate not how the source text masters the translator but how the translator masters the source text—in this case, a text originating from a more privileged writerly position than any this translator would occupy in his lifetime. Labé lightheartedly treats her Amour as a whiner. Her Folly, an older and more powerful goddess, describes him immediately as young and weak (“si jeune et foible”) and comically undercuts his arrogant claim to be all-powerful: “Je te feray connoitre en peu d’heure ton arc, et tes flesches, ou tant tu te glorifies, estre plus molz que paste” (50; I will teach you right away that your bow and arrows, in which you glory so much, are softer than wet noodles). The childish impulsiveness in his response to her attack on his eyes confirms this description: “Il vaut mieus par despit descharger mon carquois, et getter toutes mes flesches, puis rendre arc et troussse à Venus ma mere” (58; I might as well empty my quiver in spite and shoot off all my arrows, then give my bow and weapon case back to Venus, my mother). His self-pity elicits Venus’s sorrowful wish—“Au moins si pouvois arroser la plaie de mes larmes!” (If at least I could wash your wound with my tears!)—to which he replies pettishly and unreasonably, “A tard se feront ces defenses, il les failloit faire avant que fusse aveugle: maintenant ne me serviront gueres!” (60; You should have set up safeguards like that before I was blind. They’ll hardly be of any use to me now!). Greene writes a stronger Cupid. A close comparison of Labé’s scene of the confrontation between Amour and Folie and Greene’s version pinpoints what will turn out to be governing differences in frame of reference, diction, syntax, and sound between her miniature drama and his harder-breathing translation. Amour. Qui est cette fole qui me pousse si rudement? quelle grande háte la presse? se je t’usse aperçue, je t’usse bien gardé de passer.

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Folie. Tu ne m’usses pù empescher, estant si jeune et foible. Mais à Dieu te command’, je vois devant dire que tu viens tout à loisir. Amour. Il n’en ira pas ainsi: car avant que tu m’eschapes, je te donneray à connoitre que tu ne dois atacher à moy. Folie. Laisse moy aller, ne m’arreste point: car ce te sera honte de quereler avec une femme. Et si tu m’eschaufes une fois, tu n’auras du meilleur. Amour. Quelles menasses sont ce cy? Je n’ay trouvé encore personne qui m’ait menassé que cette fole. (48) Love. Who’s this madwoman who’s pushing past me so rudely? What’s her big rush? If I’d seen you, I’d certainly have stopped you going through. Folly. You’d never have been able to stop me, young and weak as you are. So farewell, I’m going on ahead to say you’ll be coming along at your own pace. Love. That’s not the way it’s going to be. Before you get away from me, I’ll show you that you’d better not attack me. Folly. Leave me alone, don’t try to stop me, because you’d shame yourself by arguing with a woman. And once you get me heated up, it’ll only get worse for you. Love. What kinds of threat are these? I’ve never met anyone who threatened me except this crazy woman. Greene’s version is as follows: Loue. What foole is this that repulseth me so rudely? take heede least hast make wast, and that thy rashnesse cause thée not cry Peccaui. Folly. Oh sir, blame me not though I make hast, for I goe before to tell the Gods, that you come at leasure. Loue. Nay, that which is easely begun, is not alwaies lightly ended: for before thou escape me, I will reuenge this thy iniurious iesting. Folly. Let me goe fond Loue and stay me not, for as it is a shame to quarrell with a woman, so it is more discredit to take the foyle. Loue. The foyle. What boasting brags be these? who hath euer aduentured to despise mée, much lesse to defie mée? But doost thou know what I am. (T1v/69v).

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Prescott, in her wonderfully perceptive essay on Greene’s translation, points out that he masculinizes his version of Love by giving him salty sententiae when he and Folly start to argue: beware “lest haste make wast” and “that which is easilie begun is not always easilie ended.”24 I would add that that Greene, with a similar effect, gives Cupid a Latinate threat that he will force her to confess “Peccavi” (I have sinned) and a promise to “revenge [her] injurious jesting.” Greene also adds, in contrast to Folly’s response in the language of courtesy (“it is a shame to quarrell with a woman”) the fiercer language of dueling: “to take the foyle [rapier].” The lines Labé gives the childish god encourage her readers to imagine him as an excitable young boy; Greene’s Love sounds like a university student preaching in commonplaces and showing off his knowledge of the language noblemen use to call each other out. Greene also emphasizes manliness when he revises Amour’s description of the powers he has lost: Labé: Je faisois aymer les jeunes pucelles, les jeunes hommes; j’acompagnois les plus jolies des plus beaus et plus adroits. Je pardonnois aux laides, au viles et basses personnes: je laissois la vieillesse en paix: Maintenant, pensant fraper un jeune, j’asseneray sus un vieillart: au lieu de quelque beau galand, quelque petit laideron à la bouche torse. Et aviendra qu’ils seront les plus amoureus, et qui plus voudront avoir de faveur en amours: et possible par importunité, presens ou richesses, ou disgrace de quelques Dames, viendront au dessus de leur intencion. (58) I used to make young maidens and young men fall in love; I paired the prettiest ones with the most handsome and clever partners. I spared the ugly, the worthless, and the low-born. I left old people alone. Now, when I intend to hit a youth, I may very well hit an old man—or instead of some handsome suitor, an ugly little fellow with a twisted mouth. And it’ll turn out that they’ll be the ones to fall most deeply in love, and to be the most determined to win favor. And perhaps by virtue of persistence, presents or wealth, or because of the unfortunate [sexually vulnerable] state of some women, they’ll end up with far more than they aimed for. (59) Greene: Hetherto I haue onely caused daintie damsells and young youths to loue, I did choose out the brauest blouds, and the fairest and most well featured men: I did pardon vile and base persons, I

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excused the deformed creatures, and let olde age remaine in peace. But now thinking to hit a young gallaunt, I light vpon some olde doating lecher: in stéed of some braue Gentleman, I strike some filthie foule lurden. And it shall happen (I doubt) that they shall bée most fortunate in their loue, so that by patrimonie, presence, or wealth, they shall soonest winne the fauour of women. (T4v/72v) At the beginning of this speech, Labé writes a sentence of two parallel clauses in which Cupid balances young lovers of each sex: “Je faisois aymer les jeunes pucelles, les jeunes hommes: j’acompagnois les plus jolies des plus beaus et plus adroits” (58); Greene’s Love adds a sentence entirely about men, and manly men at that, using the euphuistic double syntax and alliteration with which he inflates his translation throughout: “I did choose out the bravest blouds and the fairest and best-featured men only.” He also reworks the lines Labé gives Amour to describe the chaos that will ensue now that he is blind. Labé’s “viellart” becomes a grotesque “olde doating lecher,” and the “petit laideron” a “filthie foule lurden.” Either will win young women “par importunité” (by persistent persuasion), a phrase Greene transforms into “by patrimonie.” One effect of this change is to invoke a blunter social fact: money, not talk, wins the girl. Labé’s Amour goes on to say, with sympathy for women caught up in such disorder, that such men will succeed in love far beyond their expectations: “et possible par importunité, presens ou disgrace de quelques dames, viendront au dessus de leur intencion” (58). Greene eliminates the possible damage to women in such reversals by condensing this chaotic state of affairs into a more deliberate, status-reinforced masculine triumph. He replaces “presents” with “presence,” in the sense of the grand self-presentation of a king; and, again, he uses alliteration to pair “patrimonie” with “presence,” heightening the repetition with the three following w’s of “wealth . . . win the love of women”: “so that by patrimonie, presence, or wealth, they shall soonest winne the fauour of women.” Greene’s mortal men, then, manage their fates better than Labé’s. His gods do, too. He puts Jupiter at the center of his translation, emphasizing his authority as a judge of the gods rather than the antihero of amorous misadventures mocked by Labé. Her Jupiter needs to be corrected on several fronts. In “Discours 4,” which Greene omits in its entirety, Jupiter complains to Amour that in spite of his high rank (“quelque grand degré où je sois”; 66), he has never been truly loved. Amour then gives him an anti-Ovidian conduct

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manual for courtship. He will always fail if he continues his fantastic metamorphoses, to which Labé alludes with dismissive brevity, referring to Semele, Antiope, and Europa among the other women Jupiter pursued in animal disguises; her “choses insensibles” refers to the golden coins he showered on Danaë: Les Dames que tu as aymees, vouloient estre louees, entretenues par un long tems, priées, adorees: quell’Amour penses tu qu’elles t’ayent porté, te voyant en foudre, en Satire, en divers sortes d’Animaus, et converti en choses insensibles? (68) The women you’ve loved wanted to be praised, wooed at great length, implored, adored. What love do you imagine they could have felt for you, seeing you as a thunderbolt, a satyr, a whole array of animals, and even transformed into inanimate objects? (69) From mythology, she then turns to the courtly/Neoplatonic vocabulary elaborated by Lyonnais love poets such as Maurice Scève and Pernette Du Guillet, possibly with an echo of St. Paul:25 La richesse te fera jouir des Dames qui sont avares; mais aymer, non. Car cette affeccion de gaigner ce qui est au coeur d’une personne, chasse la vraye et entiere Amour: qui ne cherche son proufit, mais celui de la personne, qu’il ayme. (68) Riches will allow you to enjoy the company of greedy women, but will not win you their love—for the desire for gain in someone’s heart drives away true and complete Love, which seeks no benefit for itself, but only for the one who is loved. (69) Amour adds that a durable love requires equality on both sides, taking a metaphor from progressive treatises on the duties of marriage: “Amour se plait de choses egales. Ce n’est qu’un joug, lequel faut qu’il soit porté par deus Taureaux semblables; autrement le harnois n’ira pas droit” (68; It’s a yoke that can only be carried by two well-paired oxen; otherwise the harness will not move along levelly). All of this is cut in Greene’s version. Labé ends her “Discours 4” with a speech by Jupiter, who rejects Cupid’s advice and reveals that he is too impatient, haughty, and emotionally detached

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to follow it. He dismisses Cupid’s counsel: “Tu dis beaucoup de raisons: mais il y faut un long tems, une sugeccion grande, et beaucoup de passions (68; What you say certainly makes sense, but it calls for so much time, such subjection, and so many strong feelings). Then, imperiously, he breaks off the young god’s advice by telling him that it is time they went to the assembly of the older gods, where he will preside as king. Greene also shortens the preceding “Discours 3,” in which Apollo courteously agrees to defend Venus against Folie and appeals to Mercury to defend her against Amour. The English translator skips their lengthy politesses in order to move directly to the trial scene—which would have been appreciated by Greene’s male readers, Prescott points out, as a Lucianic satire or a parodic courtroom argument, or both, “familiar to audiences in two masculine worlds: the universities and the schools of law.”26 In Greene’s framing of the debate, the goddesses name their two advocates and then withdraw into silence, leaving the male disputants to confront each other in the language of both the courtroom and the tournament field: Venus: I choose Appollo to defend my cause. Follie: And I Mercurie to maintaine my right. (U2r/74r) In the two final speeches of Apollo and Mercury, the deep politics of both texts emerge. Labé’s disputants raise serious questions of equality versus privilege. In “Discours 3,” when Folie has asked Mercury to argue on her behalf, Jupiter commands him to agree, saying: Mercure, il ne faut jamais refuser de porter parole pour un miserable et afligé: Car ou tu le mettras hors de peine, et sera ta louenge plus grande, d’autant qu’auras moins ù de regard aus faveurs et richesses, qu’à la justice et droit d’un povre homme: ou ta priere ne lui servira de rien, et neanmoins ta pitié, bonté, et diligence, seront recommandées. (64) Mercury, no one should ever decline to speak on behalf of the unfortunate and the downtrodden. For either you will get such a person out of trouble, to your own greater glory for having shown less concern for favors and riches than for justice and the rights of a poor man; or your pleading will do him no good but your pity, generosity and diligence will be highly thought of.

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This is courtly counsel, not ethics: whatever the outcome of the debate, Mercury will come out of it looking good. But the speech Labé gives Jupiter defines godly responsibility in a way that destabilizes divine and human hierarchies: the duty of the powerful is not to search for patronage or financial gain, but to support justice and the poor man’s rights. She presents a similarly sharp critique of self-interest among the powerful in a later passage, also cut in Greene’s version, in which Mercury offers a history of how Folly brought divisions of power and wealth into the world. Even in the pastoral world where men began, Folly drove some of them to want more than their fair share of the goods of the earth: Petit a petit ha cru Folie avec le tems. Les plus esventez d’entre eus, ou pour avoir rescous des loups . . . les brebis de leurs voisins et compagnons, ou pour avoir defendu quelcun d’estre outragé, ou pource qu’ils se sentoient plus forts, ou plus beaus, se sont fait couronner Rois. . . . Et croissant l’ambicion, non des Rois, . . . mais de quelques mauvais garnimens qui les suivoient, leur vivre a esté separé du commun. (100–102) Little by little, Folie grew as time passed. The most brazen among them—either because they saved their friends’ and neighbors’ lambs from wolves . . . or defended someone against abuse, or just because they considered themselves stronger or more handsome—had themselves crowned kings. . . . And as ambition grew—not among the kings themselves, . . . but among some ne’er-do-wells in the company of the royal followers—their way of life became cut off from that of ordinary people. Labé sails close to the wind here, but she avoids lèse-majesté by having Mercury blame the primordial courtiers, not the kings, for the inequality that ensued: Il ha fallu que les viandes fussent plus delicates, l’habillement plus magnifique. Si les autres usaient de laiton, ils ont cherché un metal plus precieux, qui est l’or. . . . Et, ou est la plus grand’Folie, si le commun ha ù une loy, les grans en ont pris d’autres pour eus. Ce qu’ils ont estimé n’estre licite aus autres, se sont pensé estre permis. (102) Their meats had to be more tender, their clothing more magnificent. If others were using brass, they sought out a more precious metal,

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gold. . . . And here’s where the greatest folly lies: when common people obey one law, and powerful people adopt others of their own. Whatever they considered unacceptable for others, they believed was permissible for themselves. Labé writes a more daring passage, however, in her criticism of the link between royal and ecclesiastical powers, which aligns her with the radical Protestant discourse of mid-sixteenth-century France. Rigolot points out that Rabelais, citing Homer, had written of kings as “mangeurs de peuples” in the first chapter of book 3 of his Gargantua and Pantagruel series.27 The word folly also had resonances from the Psalms and the New Testament: Folie ha premierement mis en teste à quelcun de se faire creindre: Folie ha fait les autres obéïr. Folie ha inventé toute l’excellence, magnificence, et grandeur, qui depuis à cette cause s’en est suivie. Et neanmoins, qui ha il plus venerable entre les hommes, que ceus qui commandent aus autres? Toymesme, Jupiter, les apelles pasteurs de Peuples: veus qu’il leur soit obéis sous peine de vie: et neanmoins l’origine est venue par cette Dame. (102) Folly first gave someone the idea of making himself feared, and then she made others obey him. Folly created all the distinction, grandeur and might that have resulted ever since. Yet who, still, is more respected among men than those who have authority over others? You yourself, Jupiter, call them the people’s shepherds and want them to be obeyed at the cost of life itself—and yet it all began with this lady. Several literary historians, including Enzo Giudici and Karine Berriot, have noticed Labé’s barely concealed antagonism toward the hierarchy of rank, including ecclesiastical orders.28 An explanation is proposed in the consensus among social and cultural historians that Lyon was a center for progressive thought in the mid-sixteenth century because of its status as a free city, not the fiefdom of a king or an aristocrat; because of the high level of organization and visibility of its guilds, including the printers studied by Natalie Davis; and because of its distance from royal authority in Paris and from the theological faculty of the Sorbonne. Labé’s own situation, too, as the wife of a wealthy artisan but herself an intellectual who identified with other women as a writer in an elite public sphere, seems to have been productively

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contradictory. Neither fish nor fowl in her social identity, she understandably turned a critical eye on established hierarchies and modes of power. Greene, however, must have considered carefully the risk of including such passages in a text he hoped would reach the lord chamberlain. He was writing in a city where, in 1597, the Privy Council was to censure irreverent writers such as Thomas Nashe and Ben Jonson for a supposedly seditious play, The Isle of Dogs, and send three of its actors to prison.29 Greene completely omitted Labé’s passage on the rise of Folly’s world of social divisions. He also played down the sexual politics of Labé’s text by abridging passages that celebrate feminine virtues. Labé includes in Apollo’s oration on behalf of Venus a portrait of the good wife, who soothes her husband in his troubles and whose unity with him “le fait avoir deus corps, quatre bras, deus ames, et plus parfait que les premiers hommes du banquet de Platon” (78; two bodies, four arms and two souls, making him more perfect than the first men in Plato’s Symposium). Greene omits this restored hermaphrodite from his text. He also reformulates Labé’s explanation of the motives for which women write. Her Mercury acknowledges such writing in his list of proofs of the power of Folly but interprets it as proper behavior in love, performed by the women of the upper ranks, who do fine embroidery with needles and thread: “Plusieurs femmes, pour plaire à leurs Poëtes amis, ont changé leur paniers et coutures, en plumes et livres. Et certes il est impossible plaire, sans suivre les afeccions de celui che nous cherchons” (124; A few women in order to please their poet friends have exchanged their workbaskets and sewing for pens and books. Surely it’s impossible to please without taking up the preferences of those we’re pursuing). Greene replaces the approving second sentence with a negative judgment, reducing his gentlewomen to foolish everyday spinners, when in fact such work was mostly done by women of lower rank: “Many Gentlewomen to please their lovers which were Poets, left the rocke [the distaff ] and the needle, and tooke in hand pens and bookes: now tell me if these straunge Metamorphosis [sic] be not meere pointes of folly?” (X2r/78r). In Apollo’s final speech, as in earlier passages, Greene suppresses Labé’s mockery of certain categories of men. Using Apollo as her mouthpiece, Labé offers a detailed portrait of unloving old bachelors in a fiercely satirical mode: “ces Mysanthropes, et Taupes cachées sous terre . . . gens mornes sans esprit . . . creintifs, avares, impitoyables, ignorans, et n’estimans personne,” (80; Misanthropes and moles hidden underground . . . gloomy and humorlesss, repulsively slovenly at home, suspicious, stingy, ruthless, ignorant, and disdainful

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of everyone). Rigolot points out that Labé may be following Rabelais again here, who first used the word “mysanthrope” in the “Bref Declaracion” to his Quart Livre.30 In this passage, Labé’s mockery implies through contrast that a civilized man is sociable, welcoming, and graceful—the ideal of courtly culture. Greene, living in a tougher urban world, deletes Apollo’s contemptuous representation of an unlovable male type. He also revises a later comic scene: Labé’s ridicule of young suitors in the list she gives to Mercury of the ridiculous miseries into which Folly forces them once their beloved shows signs of favor: Elle se laisse visiter à l’heure suspecte. En quels dangers? D’y aller accompagné, seroit déclarer tout. Y aller seul, est hazardeus. Je laisse les ordures et infeccions, dont quelquefois on est parfumé. . . . Quelquefois on est surpris, batuz, outragez et ne s’en ose vanter. Il  faut se guinder par fenestres, par sus murailles, et tousjours en danger. (118) She allows visitors at a suspicious time. At what a risk! To go with company would be to reveal all; to go alone is dangerous. I won’t mention the excrement and sickening fi lth he’s sometimes scented by. . . . Sometimes these men are ambushed, beaten, abused, and they don’t dare brag about it. They have to squeeze through windows and over walls, and always in danger. Greene: She appoynteth him to come at some suspitious houre, which he cannot performe without great perill. To come with companie, were to bewray his secrets: to go alone, most daungerous: to goe openly, too manifest: . . . so he must passe, scaling the walles with ladders, clyming vp to the windowes by cordes: yea, continually in daunger of death. (X1r/78r) Labé’s lover, standing at night beneath his lady’s house, is prey to humiliations, including the pouring out of chamber pots: “les ordures et infeccions, dont quelquefois on est parfumé.” He is likely to be helpless in the face of ambushes and has to conceal his embarrassment with silence. Greene, by leaving out these details and expanding what he keeps into three parallel clauses linked by his usual energetic alliteration, makes his lover braver and more heroic: “scaling the walles with ladders, clyming vp to the windowes by cordes; yea, continually in daunger of death.”

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So far, I have been concentrating on what Greene does not say—that is, what he omits from Labé’s dialogue in his own. As Macherey and Derrida have taught us, what is absent from a text is as significant as what is present. Greene, however, also expands lines and inserts stylistic flourishes that differentiate his text from Labé’s through addition rather than subtraction. As a case in point, in Mercury’s oration she lists what mankind would have lost if not for Folly: the courage of sailors who braved the seas—“trafiquer avec gens barbares et inhumaines” (106; to trade with barbaric, uncivilized people), the boldness of research into “la terre, les proprietez, et natures des herbes, pierres et animaus” (106; the earth and the nature of its herbs, stones and animals). Greene translates this list exactly. Labé’s Mercury goes on to ask, “combien de mestiers faudroit il chasser du monde, si Folie en estois bannie?” (106; From how many occupations would the earth have to be deprived, if Folie were banished from it?). But Greene expands the question to point to his own livelihood: “How many Arts and occupations shuld be driuen out of the world, if Folly were banished?” (Y4v/76v, emphasis mine). Labé’s Mercury gives a concise answer to this question: “The majority of people would die of hunger.” Greene expands this conclusion by adding a grimmer detail: “truly the most part of men should either beg for want, or dye for hunger.” Beggars would have been no strangers to Greene in the cony-catching subcultures he haunted in London—or in his own life, if there is truth in the story that he died in the house of a London shoemaker, owing him ten pounds that he asked the wife he had not seen for six years to repay.31 In another of Greene’s expansions of Labé’s text, Apollo’s final supplication to Jupiter warning of the danger that Folly brings to Love, he fills out her portrait of the riotous behavior of young men who should be serving their prince and studying seriously by adding several phrases with the ongoing repetition of consonants and parallel double-noun phrases that signal his relish of his own verbal performance and his invitation to fellow university wits to appreciate his sonorous euphuism: Et ay belle peur . . . que [La Folie] n’empesche les jeunes gens de suivre les armes et de faire service à leur Prince: ou de vaquer à estudes honorables: qu’elle ne leur mesle leur amour de paroles detestables, chansons trop vileines, ivrongnerie et gourmandises; qu’elle ne leur suscite mile maladies, et mette en infiniz dangers de leur personnes. (90)

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I truly fear that she might prevent young men from taking up arms and serving their prince, or from pursuing worthy studies; that she might mix their love with foul words, vulgar songs, drunkenness and greed; and that she might make them vulnerable to a thousand sicknesses and put their lives in endless danger. [Folly] will cause young Gentlemen to leave feates of armes, to forsake the seruice of their Prince, to reject honourable studyes . . . and to applye themselves to vaine songs and sonnets, to chambring and wantonesse, to banketting and gluttonie, bringing infinite diseases to their bodies, and sundrie daungers and perills to their persons. (W3v/75v) In long and short passages, Greene’s exuberant alliteration and “lexicographical intoxication” (a term Donald Frame uses to describe Rabelais’s style in his essay on translating early French writers) differentiates his English from Labé’s colloquial but pared-down French.32 In the complaint of the blinded Cupid about the mismatched pairs he will unintentionally create, Labé gives him a specific picture: when he wants to hit a handsome young man, his arrow will strike instead “quelque petit laideron à la bouche torse” (58; some ugly little fellow with a twisted mouth). Green renders this image less precisely but with greater aural intensity as “in steed of some braue gentleman, I strike some filthie foule lurden” (T4v/72v). Again: in Apollo’s praise of the power of Love, Labé offers a neat aphorism: “Brief, le plus grand plaisir qui soit apres amour, c’est d’en parler” (88; In a word, the greatest pleasure there is, after love itself, is to talk about it). In his rephrasing, Greene adds drama and alliteration: “To be short, the greatest pleasure after loue, is to tell what perillous daungers are passed” (w3r/75r). For a similar effect, he reworks the warning of Labé’s Apollo about Folly’s power to derail love: for “Folie fera jouir quelque avolé en moins d’une heure du bien ou l’autre n’aura pù ateindre” (90; Folly will see to it that some nitwit enjoys in less than an hour the favor that another [devoted lover] could never win), he gives “Folly will cause some fickle and false flatterer, to enjoye that in one houre, which in all their life they coulde not attayne” (W3v/75v). Every translator works with an ear to the sounds in his own language, but Greene pumps up Labé’s French with alliterative rodomontades that give his translation a manly bravura.

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These details of difference suggest a final perspective on the gendered language of these two debates. Labé, writing as a woman in an elite male-centered coterie, could allow herself a certain degree of satiric mockery, but to be read or published at all, she had to demonstrate her humanist erudition in a decorous way. She balances the fantasy of her imagined dialogue with pithy bons mots and allusions to writers as various as Plato, Lucian, Virgil, Dante, Leone Ebreo, and Erasmus. Nonetheless, through her displacement of her political views onto Mercury arguing on behalf of Folly, she fiercely criticized the social hierarchies she was challenging as a woman of the middling sort bent on creating herself as a serious writer. Greene, however, was beginning a lifelong struggle to live by his wits as an underemployed university graduate, in a city where livelihoods were hard to come by and sharp official ears were cocked for criticism of the social order. Translating Labé, he occupied a doubly subordinate position, dependent on both his publisher and the prior French text. But his Debate masters Labé’s Débat in powerful ways: by omitting Labé’s name, reducing its length, effacing its irreverent comedy at the expense of men, downplaying its praise of women, pulling out its political teeth, and reworking its precise, restrained phrasing in ways that called attention to his own roaring boy’s rhythmic hullabaloo. In this translation, Greene, a masterless and placeless man, made a place for himself: a court of historical and allegorical subjects over whom he held linguistic sway. Translators may or may not be traitors, but in Greene’s Debate, he was spectacularly loyal to himself.

Chapter 6

Translation and Homeland Insecurity in Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew: An Experiment in Unsafe Reading Margaret Ferguson

Indeterminacy means not that there is no acceptable translation, but that there are many. —W. V. O. Quine, “The Behavioral Limits of Meaning,” 1984

The play text first printed in 1623 as The Taming of the Shrew has an indeterminate number of translations woven into its highly malleable text.1 It also figures the process of translation in a dizzying multitude of ways. Chief among these are the play’s explorations of translation as a transformation of character with social, economic, sartorial, and (perhaps) ontological results; and as the dramatization of a humanist exercise in translating (“construing”) Ovid in act 3, scene 1. Finally, the play is laced with examples of the rhetorical trope that ancient rhetoricians called “translatio.” Quintilian called this the “most beautiful” of figures in De Institutio Oratoria (ca. 95 ce); and he explained that it translated the Greek word “metaphora.”2 Modern scholars often explain that both terms signify “a carrying or bearing across.” There is no doubt that the spatial image of crossing from one place to another has been central to discourses of translation in the West. But the Greek prefix “meta” means not only “across” but “beyond”—and other things too.3 This seems significant to me not because something was lost in translation but rather because the existence

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of both “metaphor” and “translation” in English underscores Quine’s point in my epigraph: indeterminacy, in the sense of an uncertainty that cannot be solved, arises from the multiplicity of possible translations. Although the idea of a translative couple has dominated discourses about translation in the West, as I shall discuss in what follows, The Taming of the Shrew invites us to look beyond the couple to scenes of translation occupied by a crowd. The play is a rich case study for my purposes because its story of the strange courtships and eventual marriages of two sisters—Katherina Minola, the “shrew” of the play’s title, and her apparently docile younger sister Bianca—is also a story about two households in which female characters are distinctly unsafe. These households, in and near the Italian university town of Padua, belong respectively to Baptista Minola—a rich merchant and a weak master in several ways—and to Petruccio, who eventually marries Baptista’s eldest daughter against her will and cruelly “tames” her in his country house (“for her own good,” some critics believe). These households are the key settings for the drama, but it begins and ends in neither of these places. It begins on the cold ground outside of an alehouse with a character initially called “Beggar” cursing a Hostess for having ejected him from her site of hospitality;4 it then moves to the “fairest chamber” in the great house of an unnamed English lord, where the drunken beggar, now revealed to be Christopher Sly, is pressed into service as an actor/spectator in the lord’s evening entertainment, which involves making Sly think he is a “Lord” watching a play about Italian shrew taming next to a servant boy dressed up as his wife. The “Italian” play is performed by a troupe of traveling actors who are what one might classify as “working guests” in the Lord’s home. The Lord’s metatheatrical “jest,” as he calls it, sets up various comparisons and contrasts between the Induction and the Paduan play. But that latter drama, unlike an alternate version of the shrew-taming play first printed in 1594, does not end up returning us to England and to Christopher Sly’s story. Instead, the 1623 play text (nicknamed The Shrew to distinguish it from the 1594 play text nicknamed A Shrew) ends in yet another Paduan house: the perhaps temporary lodgings of Bianca’s new husband, Lucentio, during a banquet celebrating his marriage. From that setting, in which both Petruccio and Katherina act like rude guests, we see the play’s most famous image of a house: one in which a singular husband is said to rule his wife as a prince rules his subjects (5.2.161ff.). Katherina envisions such a house in a speech that ostensibly demonstrates her own newly acquired quality of wifely obedience, and many critics have

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shared Julia Reinhard Lupton’s view that “the play’s interpretation turns on how one reads (or performs, or reads Katherina as performing) Kate’s final speech.”5 I do not agree with that judgment, although I find Lupton’s reading of Katherina’s speech and the whole play sophisticated and provocative. Like Barbara Hodgdon, I question a critical practice that reads the play “backwards” through one speech and that by so doing detaches it from a scene that “troubles comic form and cultural custom.” Why? Hodgdon ascribes the troubling effect to the fact that the scene sets Katherina—however her role is interpreted and performed—“against two conventional (perhaps even misaligned) couples who represent the status quo.”6 I argue, however, that the other two couples do not represent a status quo with respect either to what we can reconstruct of contemporary English society or to what most Shakespearean comedies present as an old, overly rigid society in need of being renewed by comic mimesis. On the contrary, the formation of those other two couples, which begins in the middle of the play (3.1) in a scene often shortened by directors and overlooked by critics, arguably makes them just as unconventional as Katherina and Petruccio are—or, perhaps, just as conventional. The problem, for me, is that the play offers no clear image of a status quo or a status quo ante in any of its multiple households. The plot about Petruccio’s efforts to improve his fortunes by wooing, marrying, and taming a rich wife whose unruliness makes her an undervalued commodity on the Paduan marriage market has dominated critical discussions of the play. Debate has focused with particular intensity on the ethical and political questions raised by Petruccio’s treatment of Katherina as if she were a wild animal in need of domestication—and on her responses to that treatment.7 The intricate subplot having to do with the courtship of Katherina’s younger sister Bianca by four suitors—Hortensio, Lucentio, Gremio, and Tranio—has stayed in the background of both critical and performance histories, as has Bianca’s clandestine marriage to Lucentio after they arguably negotiate its terms by means of joint mistranslations of a passage by Ovid from one of his least famous poems. In the past fifteen years, however, there have been several critics who have reread Bianca’s story to make strong cases for why her plot should not be neglected. The “Bianca” critics disagree among themselves about the play’s ideological take on marriage as a social institution and on whether females should “naturally” be subordinate to males in private and public spaces. The critical debates about Bianca’s courtship and marriage are crucial to my suggestion that The Shrew makes multiple and unharmonized statements about the importance of procreative marriage to the

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well-being of the body politic. All of the statements that the 1623 play text and its indeterminate number of intertexts make about marital couples are inflected, I argue, by the hybrid institution that produced the play as a theatrical and printed property that was jointly owned by a “company” to which William Shakespeare belonged and in which he held shares. Behind the spousal couple celebrated by romantic comedy is an awareness of the workings of medium-sized groups (the actors, but also the annotators and other “close contrivers” that Paul Werstine analyzes in his work on the “nameless collaborators” who produced early modern plays). Behind that “awareness,” which includes a hypothesized authorial intentionality but does not assume that the author was singular or fully in control of the materials—is the image of a potentially unruly crowd that is represented, if only partially, by the mixedstatus paying audience in a public theater.8 • The image of a crowd in which no single person has more than temporary mastery over the others is part of the critical construction this chapter makes by yoking translation with the phrase “homeland insecurity.” The critical construction attempts to respond both to textual and historical evidence in and around the 1623 text of The Taming of the Shrew and to aspects of my own situation in the post-9/11 era: a geotemporal period in which the U.S. government launched a war in Iraq soon after creating a Department of Homeland Security in 2002. With a requested budget of $38.2 billion for 2015, the department has an official mission of “secur[ing] the nation from the many threats we face.”9 Situated in a nation that reacts to insecurity by increasing it at home and abroad, I reread The Shrew with new eyes. I noticed its obsession with houses and its status as the only one of Shakespeare’s plays that disrupts the dramatic fiction of a location outside of England by bringing the entire non-English site into the home of an unnamed English lord who evidently lives and enjoys hunting in Shakespeare’s own county of Warwickshire. No other Shakespearean drama has a short play within the play that both engulfs the main plot and is, as it were, forgotten by it, since in the 1623 Shrew text, as I have noted, there is no concluding return to the frame story and thus to the fiction of a stable “meta” location in England.10 My experiment in unsafe reading of The Shrew is a product of my own situatedness, which is a phenomenon I do not fully grasp. I borrow the term from David Simpson, who argues that it designates “an instability or obscu-

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rity in the language describing our way of being in the world. It is meant to preserve rather than to resolve the tension we experience between being in control and out of control, between seeing ourselves as agents of change and as passive receivers of what is already in place. . . . Situatedness can be read as the designation of an antinomy or aporia.”11 But that does not mean that one gives up on the project of historical understanding. It means, rather, that one proceeds with it without security, without being removed from care. As John T. Hamilton points out in his important book Security: Politics, Humanity, and the Philology of Care, “security” translates a Latin word with three key components, the prefix se- (apart, aside, away from), the noun cura (care, concern, attention, worry), and the suffi x -tas (a condition or state of being).12 “Translation” and “homeland insecurity” might be provisionally understood as sites (with a pun on “cites”) in a network that puts the present and the past into conversation in a quest for a certain kind of historical understanding. Starting from Walter Benjamin’s provocative statement (translated from the German) that “historical materialism conceives historical ‘understanding’ as an after-life of that which is understood, whose pulse can still be felt in the present,” I attempt to yoke translation and homeland insecurity in a critical narrative that allows “the past and the now [Jetzzeit]” to “flash into a constellation.”13 That borrowed formulation gives my “experiment in unsafe reading” more melodrama than it warrants; but Benjamin’s thinking about the pursuit of historical understanding without a master narrative of historical continuity or teleology—without, therefore, a secure grounding in the version of “historical materialism” usually if debatably associated with Marx—is important for my project. The phrase “unsafe reading” is devised to suit particular aspects of Shakespeare’s play text and its intertexts. But the phrase “unsafe reading” also signals my theoretical and methodological debts to many other scholars who work, and have worked, under the sign of skepticism and against the grain of common sense, which so often, though not always, sustains orthodox thinking. Intellectual critique, according to a German anthropologist named Helmuth Plessner, is a form of “Entsicherung,” a “ ‘desecuring’ that vividly removes the ‘safety catch’ (Sicherung) of false authority and dogmatic, reifying patterns of thought.”14 It is of course possible that those undertaking desecuring projects are blind to their own “reifying patterns of thought”; and some writers working the veins of deconstructive critique have explicitly included their own authority in the circle of that which must be doubted, often through versions of the Cretan liar’s famous paradox: “All Cretans are liars; I

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am a Cretan.” My experiment in unsafe reading accompanies a writing practice that attempts to acknowledge, at least intermittently, that the author lacks authority. I cite Helmuth Plessner “through” Hamilton’s recent book, through the lens of his concern with the radical ambiguity of the concept “security.” My experiment in unsafe reading entails a writing practice that allows that citation is a risky business that can reveal as well as conceal the mediated and fragmentary nature of a writer’s knowledge. Citation, especially when it involves leaving the comfort zone of one’s first language, is full of gaps that signal different things to different readers; it is also full of mistranslations and misrepresentations. It is, in short, a site of indeterminacy, uncertain in extent, amount, or nature. How does one register uncertainty in a way that is not merely tedious for the educated reader? The use of scare quotes is one tactic for signaling doubt about one’s terminology, but what are the principles determining which terms are placed in quotes? Why are nouns and verbs more often set off in (deconstructive) quotation marks than prepositions are, despite the fact that a sophisticated “grammar of the mind” such as John Locke’s holds that knowledge “consists in prepositions”?15 How does skepticism about the very concept of “evidence” (from “videre,” to see), widely shared though it is, come to receive sustained and productive attention?16 I do not have answers to these questions, but they underpin my effort (experiment, essay) to explore how the indeterminacies of translation “in” Shakespeare’s shrew-taming play provide an occasion for thinking against the tendency to instrumentalize language— and a narrow conception of translation—in the world we live in now.

Mixing Species of Translation In an article written in 1959, Roman Jakobson puts “translation proper” in the second of three categories. First, there is intralingual translation or “rewording,” an “interpretation of verbal signs by means of other signs of the same language”; second, there is interlingual translation—the dominant meaning of the word: “an interpretation of verbal signs by means of some other language”; and third, there is intersemiotic translation or transmutation, “an interpretation of verbal signs by means of signs of nonverbal sign systems.”17 The Shrew provides examples of each of these species of translation in the course of the play, as we shall see; but it does so in ways that show the three

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species metamorphosing into one another unpredictably, creating numerous occasions for misunderstanding. Although Jakobson’s categories are useful in that they pluralize the commonsense understanding of translation, Shakespeare’s text destabilizes Jakobson’s categories in ways that anticipate Jacques Derrida’s critique of Jakobson for assuming that the language in which “intralingual” translation occurs is a fundamentally homogeneous entity. In Aporias, Derrida writes: “The border of translation does not pass among various languages. It separates translation from itself, it separates translatability within one and the same language.” He elaborates the point in The Ear of the Other: “If the unity of the linguistic system is not a sure thing,” he writes, “all of this conceptualization around translation (in the so-called proper sense of translation) is threatened.”18 This is an idea-complex that runs across Derrida’s writing and has also been explored in texts by commentators and Derrida’s own translators, with whom he often collaborates.19 Shakespeare anticipates it and also, arguably, sometimes extends it, especially in scenes in which intralingual translation games reveal the existence of a distinction “within” the domain of English inflected by the social differences among characters who have been educated in Latin and those who have not. A character like Grumio, for instance, who is Petruccio’s chief though not only manservant, clearly lacks the cultural capital of a grammar school education: when Petruccio and his friend Hortensio speak a couple of lines of polite Italian to each other in the scene where Petruccio first arrives in Padua (1.2) (just enough to create a joke about the metatheatrical fiction that all of the characters in the Paduan parts of the play are native Italian speakers)—Grumio hears their exchange as something they are “alleging” in Latin (1.2.28). The joke is doubly funny since a version of French was the language of the law in early modern England. Grumio’s example shows, however, that chasms “within” the supposedly unified native language can open not only around a grammar school Latin education as a mark of social distinction that creates a situation linguists call “diglossia.” Chasms also open around regional linguistic differences that tend to show differences in the historical “state” of English at a given time. Grumio resists his master’s first command in the play—significantly, a command to make a signal to open a gate to a closed house—by pretending not to understand Petruccio’s initial command, “Here, sirrah Grumio, knock, I say” (1.2.5), which is followed by a clarification that uses an “archaic” dative construction, that is, a form of English that shows its Germanic rather than Latin ghosts: “Villain, I say, knock me here soundly” (1.2.8).20 Grumio interprets

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Petruccio’s “me” not as a dative in a sentence something like “knock [this gate] for me firmly,” but instead as a direct object that effectively and provocatively substitutes the person of Petruccio for the house gate he desires opened. Grumio does not bow to Petruccio’s will to make what Amanda Bailey persuasively interprets as an ostentatious display of status by a “country rube who has just recently come into a sizeable enough but by no means impressive inheritance.”21 Though I am not certain that anything Petruccio says about his status is to be taken as the truth, Bailey is right that the scene dramatizes the “precarious nature” of Petruccio’s station. Petruccio farcically asserts his mastery at the end of the exchange by wringing Grumio by “the ears,” the bodily conduit for the “intralingual” mistranslations in which the master and servant have engaged the textual/performative space of the deictic “here.” Above, across, or beyond what the text signifies are the intersemiotic interpretations we can infer to have occurred in a “once and future” time of performance: these involve pointing gestures, in this scene, and also, perhaps, “interrogative” blows that are risky in terms of the mimesis of master/servant relations but comically secure (as Thomas Moisan argues) in the domain of performance and, in particular, in that historical repertoire of performance options that Gina Bloom, Anston Bosman, and William West have persuasively described as “intertheatricality.”22 When Grumio says, incredulously, “Knock you here, sir? Why, sir, what am I, sir, that I should knock you here, sir?,” an actor playing Grumio’s part could well offer a simulated “knock” on Petruccio’s chest, as if to say, is this the place you mean, sir? Such a gesture would add to the play’s running critique of the notion that efficient communication is the major aim of verbal exchanges between those in master and servant roles; such characters’ identities (“what am I, sir?”) and degrees of power relative to each other are not known in advance but are instead subject to verbal and physical negotiation at every stage of the action. Read carefully, with a certain kind of queer philological attention that is part of what I mean by “unsafe” reading, The Shrew makes an inquiry into “intralingual translation” that suggests the existence of covert and often sexualized language games within the already hybrid terrain of the English language. That terrain had been formed, as George Puttenham stated in his Arte of English Poesie, by a series of historical conquests that continued to create divisions in the present. What we “now” speak, Puttenham averred in 1589, “is the Norman English,” but before that “it was the Anglesaxon, and before

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that the British, which, as some will, is at this day the Walsh, or as others affirme the Cornish: I for my part thinke neither of both.”23 Into this fractured linguistic zone comes Petruccio, whose “archaic dative” seems like a verbal tic that the character may or may not be supposed to perform with something like intentionality over the considerable distance he travels between his first appearance in Padua in 1.2 and his return there, as someone almost ready to buy and rule a townhouse of his own, in the final scene. There, he repeats his use of the dative—and the punning adverb “soundly”—to demonstrate his mastery over Katherina and all the other male and female characters on stage in the concluding banquet scene. “Go fetch them hither,” Petruccio commands Katherina, referring to the other wives in the play, Bianca and a Widow whom Hortensio has conveniently married when his bid for Bianca failed. If these females deny his wish, Petruccio adds, “Swinge me them soundly forth unto their husbands” (5.2.109–10). The formulation can be interpreted as “thrash them for me soundly”; but “swinge” has other intralingual translations as well. According to Gordon Williams, it is one of “many copulation–synonyms with [a] primary sense of ‘strike.’ ”24 It can therefore lead us to consider some of the ways in which the two plots of The Shrew—along with its third, unfinished plot about Christopher Sly—invite us to think about homeland insecurity and translation in a sociolinguistic space that I want now to consider as a labile and enigmatically monetized zone between hosts and guests.

Insecurities of Hosts and Guests The First Folio Shrew text begins with a “Begger” cursing a woman who has expelled him from her tavern: “Ile pheeze you infaith,” says (or shouts) the Beggar, and the Hostess returns the insult: “A paire of stockes you Rogue.”25 The opening line is usually glossed as “I’ll fi x you, I’ll get even with you”; but the Folio’s “pheeze,” also spelled “phease,” “feeze,” “vease,” and “feaze,” has a bawdy meaning too, like Petruccio’s “swinge.” According to the Oxford English Dictionary, “feeze,” signifying “twist,” derives from the Old Norse “feyka,” or fuck. Though the OED examples of this sense are late, the corollary play on “fee” as “coital reward” is attested in several Shakespearean examples.26 The Beggar’s exchange with the Hostess acquires reverberating ironies in the course of the drama; the lines anticipate the violence of Petruccio and Katherina’s battle of wits before their marriage puts her under his

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control, and they also stake out a territory just outside a house-like structure in which a paying guest who has transgressed the house rules is berated by a host who has lost all semblance of manners. The exchange reminds us that the category of the “shrew” could be inhabited by men as well as women, though as a term of abuse, “shrew” was becoming increasingly feminized during the sixteenth century. Moreover, as the Induction progresses and we see Sly taken into the house of a male lord intent on amusing himself by “civilizing” the drunken beggar, transforming him into a lord who is married to a boy-wife, we see that the opening exchange with the Hostess sets the stage for the play’s intermittent and unsettling reminders that what we think are exchanges between male and female characters are also—simultaneously—exchanges between male actors dressed in clothes signifying different genders. When the Hostess threatens to call in the local “headborough” (constable) to make Sly pay for the glasses he has “burst” (Induction 1.6, 11), Sly promises to “answer him by law” and not to “budge an inch, boy.” The insult shifts without a beat from the dramatic fiction that a hostess is female to the boy’s body under the Hostess’s gown: a body, Sly implies, that has small genital accoutrements.27 Christopher Fitter reads Sly’s opening lines as “lewd and ludic, disreputably incontinent,” an invitation to the audience to experience “holiday license.”28 I would add that Sly’s lines also give expression to a frustrated rage against the Hostess as a figure for anyone with the authority to deny hospitality to members of the “large and growing class” of persons who could be legally charged as “vagrants” under a series of acts of Parliament that defined the unemployed as slothful and dangerous to social order. The statutes prescribed punishments of “bloody” whipping, time in the stocks, ear cropping, branding, and, for repeat offenders, execution. Vagrancy is what A. L. Beier has discussed as a “classic crime of status”: poor people were arrested for the crime “not because of their actions, but because of their position in society”— a position that signified that they might be thieves in the future or might have committed crimes in the past that went undetected.29 The category of the vagrant encompassed not only the unemployed but also, as Patricia Fumerton has shown, those who engaged in “multiple, serial, and occasional” forms of work that were deemed illegitimate under the statutes.30 A statute of 1572, as Beier notes, “included among vagabonds ‘common players in interludes and minstrels’ who were not patronized by the peerage or the Queen.”31 The traveling company that performs the play Sly watches in the Lord’s house would be subject to arrest, therefore—unless they could persuade the Lord to be-

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come their patron and master, as the lord chamberlain was for the company in which Shakespeare became a shareholder in 1594—and as King James was when that company opportunely changed its name to the King’s Men in 1603. The queen was the patron of a rival company, and her status as the ruler of England is relevant, I will suggest, to The Shrew’s reflection on homeland insecurity. From the point of view of conventional Tudor-Stuart doctrine, any country not ruled by a king is in a state of insecurity; and if it is ruled by a queen who has no heir of her body and refuses to name one, things may be seen as dire indeed, at least by some portion of the audience and readership Shakespeare’s company aimed to entertain. The Hostess is, from Sly’s point of view, a shrew who threatens him unjustly with legal punishment. The scenario reminds us of a tension in the ideological construction of vagrancy. Those arrested for that crime could be punished by being returned to their birthplace; but once back in that space, they could be charged with vagrancy for being unemployed. If they misbehaved, as Sly obviously has, the ideological crack in the criminalization of vagrancy was easy to miss. When Sly goes from being rejected by a hostess to having a great host who gives him food and drink—and the prospect of sex with a “wife”—the play arguably reflects on the fantasy of masculine rule that began the moment Elizabeth became queen and that continued not just to her death but beyond. Whenever The Shrew was first written, it is significant that it leaves open-ended the fantasy that Sly’s “translation” to a lord will somehow continue beyond the fifth act, in contrast to what happens to him in A Shrew: in that text, he finds himself at the end once again on the cold ground outside of the tavern, where he converses with the “tapster” about the “best dreame / That ever I had in my life,” and about the “valuable lesson the dream has given him about how he can tame his own wife.”32 In the Induction of The Shrew—though not in the corresponding scene of A Shrew—Sly provides a telling account of a “career” that seems to have left him in the same geographical and economic state he was at his birth, in striking contrast to the career of William Shakespeare, born down the road from Sly’s village of Burton Heath. Sly names his paternal village and suggests that he has made a circular journey through various jobs to end close to where he began. All of his jobs, including that of “beggar,” would have been categorized under the law as vagrancy. A “pedlar” by birth, he became a “card maker” by “education,” a “bear-herd” by “transmutation,” and he is by “present profession” a “tinker,” that is, a “mender” of metal goods who often traveled—as a pedlar did—to sell cheap goods.33

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Both in his exchange with the Hostess and in his subsequent conversations with the Lord, his servants, and the itinerant actors who are working guests in the Lord’s house the night Sly is conscripted as a key element in the spectacle the Lord constructs for his own amusement, the Beggar sheds a searching (if also ludic) light on the zone between guest and host which the Paduan play also explores, most obviously in its depictions of Petruccio’s egregious behavior both as a guest at his own wedding in Baptista Minola’s house (3.2) and as a cruel and ungenerous host to Katherina in the taming scenes set in his cold and underfurnished country house (4.1, 4.3). Katherina herself draws a fleeting analogy between her situation and Sly’s at the beginning of the play when she exclaims to Grumio, “Beggars that come unto my father’s door / Upon entreaty have a present alms,” whereas Petruccio gives her no food at all (4.3.4–5). The text gives her an odd moment of reflection on the insecurities of the entire system of charitable hospitality, however, when she pauses in her self-pitying comparison to acknowledge that some beggars at her father’s door may not have received “present alms” but, “if not, elsewhere they meet with charity” (4.3.4–6). The present tense blandly masks the epistemological shakiness of her statement and opens the door on a pun cluster centered on the word “meet”—as an act of encountering, as a term for conventions of decorum, and as the food that Petruccio and Grumio deny to Katherina with relish, and, allegedly, for her own good. To approach the play’s less visible explorations of the host/guest embedded in the translations subtending the Bianca subplot, I consider Emile Benveniste’s historical theorization of the ambiguity carried by the Latin word “hostis.” In a section on “hospitality” in volume one of his massive study Le vocabulaire des institutions indo-européennes, Benveniste argues that “hostis” originally signified a relation of “reciprocal value” between two persons who were strangers in each other’s eyes but who were both bound by conventions of behavior, by an economy of mutual compensation—what others have analyzed as the economy of the gift—that could extend its requirements from one generation to another.34 Benveniste critiques the “global” and “transhistorical” notion that the Latin word “hostis” “means guest but also enemy”— the formulation offered in a note to the English translation of Derrida’s fascinating book Of Hospitality.35 Instead, Benveniste argues that a concept and social practice of hospitality as reciprocity between two equals gradually gave way to a more rigid usage of hostis as a term signifying an enemy. Benveniste confesses not fully to understand the historical causes of this shift, and his treatment of it is brief. But he makes a valuable intervention in a large field

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of inquiry through his suggestion that with the rise of the Roman civitas, which he treats as a precursor of the much-debated concept of “nation,” fixed geographical boundaries separating insiders from outsiders became more important for practices and ideas of hospitality than they had been in a clan-based society.36 Benveniste invites us to think expansively about how England’s uneven development as a nation—or what I have elsewhere called an “imperial nation” modeled on Rome’s “civitas”—impinges not only on the host/guest relations depicted in The Shrew but also on that play’s treatments of translation as a means whereby strangers engage in risky modes of communication across different kind of barriers within the so-called nation as well as between what we now call national languages. Those two sets of boundaries are not ideologically symmetrical, and it would not be difficult to argue that in The Shrew, as in other Shakespearean play texts, English emerges as an imperial language because it so often incorporates elements of regional languages (Welsh, for instance, as it is misrepresented in Henry V ) or European languages (especially those that have Latin as a common ancestor) without suggesting that there is any semantic resistance to the incorporation—or any loss to meaning when words from Spanish or French are mistaken by an English speaker such as Christopher (or, as he also says, “Christophero”) Sly.37 We can also, however, view the attitude to “foreign” languages suggested by some of the verbal practices in The Shrew as a challenge to one of our own culture’s dominant beliefs about the commensurability of national languages. The notion of commensurability is tightly knotted to the idea that translation in its “proper” sense involves a conveyance of linguistic goods from one language to another by a singular translator who has full mastery of two languages.

Questioning the Dyadic Model of Translation Theories of translation in the West have been dominated by a concern with dyads since the humanist scholar Leonardo Bruni wrote the first (extant) treatise on translation in the fifteenth century. Bruni construed translation in terms of an affectively charged master/slave dialectic between an original author—presumptively Greek—and his translator, presumptively writing in Latin, although for most humanist scholars and educators, Latin was not their “native” tongue. As Jane Tylus explains in her incisive essay on Bruni in the Dictionary of Untranslatables, Bruni envisions the “best translator” as

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someone who will “turn his whole mind, heart, and will to his author, and in a sense be transformed by him.”38 This language of self-abnegation, which also appears in many humanist discussions of literary imitation, dramatizes the ways in which humanist discourses of translation overlap with early modern discourses about the religious subject’s subjection to God (“convertere” is indeed a Latin term for “translation”).39 Moreover, Bruni’s description of the “best translator” also evokes Renaissance discourses about the proper wife, who, under English common law, becomes legally as well as physically “one” with her husband when she enters the institution of matrimony. Bruni conceives of translation as a two-stage process, however, and the second involves a transformation into a master’s role along with a conception of translation as a transportation of valuable goods from one place (or language) to another. As Tylus explains, “After losing his identity,” Bruni’s translator “must regain it, and he can do so only if he is absolute master of his own language” during a process that he sometimes calls “traductio” (to lead across), though in his title, he uses the term “interpretatione” and combines it with the adjective “recta” (correct). The possibility of correctness depends on the idea that Greek and Latin are fully commensurate entities; for Bruni, as Tylus remarks, “there are no untranslatables,” because everything that can be said in Greek can be said in Latin.40 Bruni worries, however, about the extreme “difficulty” of correctly translating figurative language, and much of his treatise is taken up with minute complaints about “incorrect” translations of “varieties of figures,” down to their number of syllables. He may well have been the first to use “traductio” to render the idea of translation in its “proper” sense, but the problem of “translatio” as a Latin rendering of “metaphora” haunts his treatise and the formulations of other humanist theorists who advocate “correctness” in translation. The pedagogical analogue to Bruni’s translative couple is the theory of “double translation” articulated in Roger Ascham’s The Scholemaster (1570): let the pupil “take a paper book and, sitting . . . by himself, translate into English his former lesson,” Ascham writes. “Then, showing it to his master, let the master take from [the pupil] his Latin book, and, pausing an hour at the least, . . . let the child translate his own English into Latin again in another paper book.”41 In his discussion of this passage in Scenes of Instruction, Jeff Dolven justly remarks that Ascham is “vague on exactly what constitutes the final form of the exercise—an idiomatic variation? A copy?” But other humanist writers are more specific. John Brinsley in Ludus Literarius (1612) writes that the pupil’s product should be “the very same latine of their Authors”; and Brinsley compares the double translation process to retracing the steps of a journey,

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“for there is the same waie from Cambridge to London, which was from London to Cambridge.” As Dolven astutely comments, Brinsley thus manages to combine the journey of translation with the safety of repetition. The pupil is “like a prodigal son, who has ventured out into the vernacular but is now come home safe to a London, or an ancient Rome, that has been waiting, unchanged and immemorial, for his return.”42 What happens, I want to ask, in those Shakespearean textual sites where humanist methods and conceptions of translation are ridiculed—as Patricia Parker and others have shown them being in The Taming of the Shrew? 43 What happens when the critique of humanist translation occurs not only overtly but covertly, and with repercussions for the still-influential theory of the movement of culture from East to West—the theory of translatio studii et imperii? The answer is that nothing happens if editors are not alert to the possibility of significant mistranslations of Latin lines occurring in the seemingly known territory of an English play. Such a mistranslation arguably occurs in the first act of the Folio Shrew play, but it is erased in all modern editions. It was called out, however, by Thomas Moisan in an article entitled “Interlinear Trysting.” He observes that when the character Tranio changes the gender of a word in a Latin line from Terence’s Eunuchus through the intermediary source of John Lyly’s famous Latin grammar, modern editors silently correct Tranio’s error. The Folio line is “Redime te captam quam queas minimo”; the line in modern editions is “Redime te captum quam queas minimo,” or “Buy yourself out of bondage for as little as you can.”44 By the change of one letter—a u for an a—the editor adds a notion of Latin and gender correctness but subtracts the Folio text’s joke about a male character putting on a female persona. “Captam,” the Folio text’s feminine form, modifies Lucentio appropriately—that is, queerly—if one grants some significance to his own previous comparison of his love for Bianca to Dido’s love for Aeneas. The line appropriated from Eunuchus and from Lyly by Lucentio’s servant might perform a mistake at Tranio’s expense; but given that this servant successfully and lengthily impersonates his master for most of the rest of the play, it seems plausible to grant him the wit to regender his master in Latin after his master has compared himself to a famous female enemy of Rome. Here we have an example of translation involving multiple hands from multiple places—and not all of the hands are working in concert for the same master. Instead of a source and target or “receptor” text, we have a tissue of translations, mistranslations, imitations—silent emendations of an intralinguistic mistranslation deemed insignificant by educated modern editors. We

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also see multilingual puns on proper names of characters who travel to Shakespeare’s version of northern Italy from Italian, Latin, and earlier English textual sites. This practice of translation is concerned with but by no means bound by the concept of fidelity so important to biblical translation and to the traditional and often gendered figurations of the translator as a handmaid to an authorial (male) original. Bélen Bistué has argued that Bruni’s influential theorization of translation is a defense against a set of historical practices that provide a much better analogue to the practices in The Shrew than do humanist models of translation as the safe transport of linguistic treasure from one presumptively unified (and hence masterable) language to another. Bistué analyzes translation practices common in medieval and Renaissance Europe but largely neglected by historians of translation in Europe and North America. She focuses on team translation, which did not always require all parties to be in the same geographical space, and on multilingual editions of texts in various genres produced between the twelfth and the seventeenth centuries across Europe. She is interested in these practices and textual products “because they make visible the fact . . . that translation involves more than one writing subject and more than one interpretive position.”45 The Bianca subplot of The Shrew takes us into a site of comic “team translation” that is also a crossroads, as it were, where multiple acts of translation and communication mingle and sometimes produce conflict; but they also produce some new knowledge, rememberings of things that had been forgotten, and even some intriguing “new/old” social arrangements that occur on the borders of what is conventionally considered licit behavior. A key moment in the courtship of Bianca occurs in the garden of Baptista’s house when she and Lucentio “construe” a text by Ovid—and do so in a way that makes Ovid, as an author of multiple poems mentioned or alluded to in the play, a ghostly presence in the main plot as well as the subplot. Ovid is liminal both for translation and for homeland insecurity, for he himself was translated, against his will, from Rome to a place of exile on the Black Sea. The poet who wrote the Tristia, a series of laments in which he begs his angry patron to pardon him for his two “crimes,” a poem (“carmen,” perhaps the Ars amatoria) and a behavioral “error” (perhaps, scholars speculate, an indiscreet affair with the emperor’s own daughter), is fleetingly mentioned in the scene where Tranio and Lucentio first enter Padua: Tranio advises Lucentio not to be so devoted to Aristotle’s “checks” (his moral philosophy, teaching self-discipline) as to make “Ovid be an outcast quite abjured” (1.1.33).46 The allusion has a double

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edge, since Ovid, author of the Metamorphoses, was not only a “teacher of love” (“praeceptor amoris”) but also a negative model for the punishment a love poet could reap if he transgressed a limit set by a powerful patron and patriarch.

Home Schooling Bianca The best scene for exploring the multiple translational practices and theories that The Shrew both performs and reflects on occurs at the beginning of act 3; the scene contrasts neatly with act 4, scene 1, in which Katherina begins her “education” in Petruccio’s country house, and is a fulcrum point—at the center of the play—for the “exchange” between the two sisters in terms of the willfulness associated with the role of the shrew.47 Moreover, in this scene, Bianca’s two major suitors, Lucentio and Hortensio, disguised as tutors with counterfeit foreign names, also begin to change dramatically: both start the scene adoring the fair Bianca, but by the end, Lucentio has been ordered through the text of a Latin translation to “despair not,” while Hortensio has been rejected along with his amorous translation of an elementary musical text, the “gamut.” Gremio, the rich suitor who has foolishly hired Lucentio to plead the old man’s case, is out of the picture, as, for the time being, is Lucentio’s servant Tranio, who is masquerading as Lucentio very ably. Hortensio, by the end of the scene, starts to see his mistress as a lustful female very likely to become a “ranging” falcon who will go for any decoy pigeon, a “stale.” I will return to that term, which the rejected suitor chooses for his rival. The behavior of the male tutors in this scene and—less blatantly, but still significantly—their female mistress/pupil seems designed in part as a satiric response to antitheatrical views of the stage as a locus for “bad,” that is, immoral, education. Shakespeare’s Paduan sisters both point obliquely, I suggest, to the figure of Queen Elizabeth; the Minola sisters, like Elizabeth and her older sister Mary, exist ambiguously on the contested border between public and private domains, between documents of state and discourses containing gossip about the female rulers’ bodies. The house in which Bianca and Katherina receive numerous suitors with various educational agendas looks in some ways more like the chief household of England—the court—than it does like the small, private, bounded, ostensibly safe spaces associated today (fantasmatically) with the idea of the home.

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In the main paratext for the home-schooling scene of The Shrew, George Gascoigne’s The Supposes, the home is defined early on as a space less safe for private conversation than is the public street. The Supposes begins with a female character instructing a virgin—the double of the Shakespearean character Bianca—to “Come forth” out of the house; “let us looke about,” Gascoigne’s version of Ariosto’s Italian character says, “to be sure least any man heare our talk: for I thinke within the house the tables, the planks, the beds, the portals, yea and the cupboards themselves have eares.” In The Shrew, Bianca inhabits a textual house filled with echoes of Ariosto, Gascoigne, and Ovid, echoes that thematize the dangers that may arise, for the virginal (English) body and body politic, when words circulate promiscuously across borders. The Gascoignean/Ariostean version of Bianca, a young woman named Polynesta, does in fact sleep with her tutor, belying the purity connoted by Bianca’s name and fulfilling the dark expectation of her that is articulated at the end of the home-schooling scene by her music tutor, who is also in the place of the rejected suitor.48 The house in which the Shakespearean Bianca lives is repeatedly presented as a space open to foreign influence and rife with boundary crossings—between male and female bodies, masters and servants, hosts and guests, suitors and thieves, and, last but not least, humans and birds, both female hawks and male decoy pigeons, or “stales.” For the moment, I want to stress that themes of education (of birds or women) are closely tied to reflections on dubiously hospitable spaces in The Taming of the Shrew. Such spaces resemble Penelope’s home in Ithaca, penetrated by predatory suitors; and they also resemble an English court filled with spies, intrigues, and competitions for “place.” In the home schooling scene of 3.1 the rival suitors disguise themselves as a tutor of music and Latin, respectively, while tensely exchanging the roles of actor and spectator. As Lucentio woos Bianca under and through Ovid’s rendition of Penelope’s words in the Heroides, Hortensio looks on suspiciously and impatiently, having been ordered by Bianca to take his “instrument” and “play you the whiles; his [Lucentio’s] lecture will be done ere you have tun’d” (3.1.22–23). As Laurie Maguire has remarked, this stringed instrument (a kind of lute) works like many other images of instruments in early modern English texts as an elaborate comic synecdoche “for sexual organs or sexual activity.”49 Bawdy puns proliferate in this scene as Hortensio and Lucentio spar verbally for Bianca’s favor while she herself asserts her mastery over them in a ringing denial of schoolboy status that works resonantly and ironically to call attention to her boy’s body—and backside—beneath her woman’s apparel: “I

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am no breeching scholar in the schools,” she proclaims (3.1.18). The participle— the only use of it in Shakespeare’s textual corpus—is usually glossed as a reference to the common (though disputed) practice of boy-beating by pedagogical masters with a rod named “my ladie birchely” in a famous passage by Richard Mulcaster in Positions (1581).50 But Shakespeare’s use of “breech” and its homophone “breach” elsewhere, most famously in Henry V, to signify a hole in the fortifications or the enemy line (“Once more unto the breach!,” 3.2.1), lurks in the air of this scene, especially when the Latin teacher orders the music teacher to “spit in the hole” (of his instrument) to make the peg stick.51 Entrance to Bianca’s body, whether viewed as belonging to the boy actor or to the privileged young Italian lady the actor is figuring, is a major goal in the verbal game the male characters are playing in this scene—and Bianca is an apparently sophisticated participant in this game, although she preserves appearances at the scene’s end by insisting that she prefers “old fashions” to “odd inventions.” Throughout the scene, the Latin tutor carrying a book of Ovidian verse about abandoned women is abusing the trust not only of Bianca’s father but also of the elderly suitor Gremio, who has hired Lucentio to carry his (Gremio’s) suit forward. As a translator both of Gremio’s desires and of Ovid’s original Latin words, Lucentio performs freely, with an eye firmly on his own self-interest. He invites us to think about translation as a web with ontological, social, and linguistic strands carrying his desires from one book— Ovid’s—to another, the “white” bride he figures as a copyrighted book in act 4, scene 4; here, as Lorna Hutson has astutely argued, Bianca’s quality of whiteness is “soiled” through the “clandestine” marriage Lucentio’s servant Biondello arranges by giving “counterfeit assurances” to various senex figures (including Bianca’s father and even the “old priest” hired to perform the hugger-mugger ceremony). But the book metaphor arguably soils Lucentio as well, mocking his belief that he is somehow the sole author or “imprinter” (his black ink on Bianca’s white pages) of the chaste marital property he thinks he has transported from Ovid’s Ithaca (already secondhand from Homer’s) to Shakespeare’s Padua. Biondello tells Lucentio that the Bianca-book is his “cum privilegio ad imprimendum solum” (a Latin copyright formula signifying “with exclusive printing rights”) (4.4.89–90).52 But Lucentio/Cambio’s interchanges with Bianca and Hortensio in 3.1 ask us think about translation not as a means of transferring goods such as a book or “household stuff ” from one male owner to another but rather as a mode of queering notions both of ownership and agency. By queering I mean that such notions are not so much

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“subverted” as rendered strange, odd enough to belong in the socio/textual territory that Bianca enters as a rule-bending translator who likes “old fashions” such as that of the clandestine marriage. It is perhaps not surprising that 3.1’s exploration of translation as multiple “supposes,” in that word’s Latin sense of placing under and also in its English sense of hypothesizing falsely, has tended to be cut in modern performances. The scene requires slow reading to be grasped as a reflection on translation. Drawn from the Italian tradition known as commedia erudita and specifically, as I have mentioned, from Gascoigne’s translation of Ariosto’s I Suppositi,53 the scene of Bianca’s supposed education is often drastically altered, as, for instance, in Franco Zeffirelli’s 1967 film starring Liz Taylor and Richard Burton. In this film, Bianca’s education in a garden by apparently “courtly” tutors is cut, spliced, and ideologically subordinated to the BurtonPetruccio character’s perspective—and plot—as he, like an early version of Henry V, pursues a rustic-looking Katherina up stairs and through doors, so that Bianca’s lesson becomes a grossly comic (and hardly comprehensible) backdrop for the luscious erotic chase going on “above.” Zeffirelli’s reading of Shakespeare, however, simply adds a new twist to a quite traditional and Anglophilic understanding of the play. Indeed, Zeffirelli’s English-language film corresponds strikingly with Brian Morris’s view of the play as outlined in his 1981 introduction to the Arden II edition. Morris argues that “the deepest sources of The Shrew lie in the folk-tales and ballads Shakespeare would have known from boyhood. Woven into the strong simplicity of these stories of shrewish wives and drunken tinkers is the fashionable complexity of Italian comedy, which has its roots in the Latin commedia erudita” (87). Morris’s way of contrasting the play’s strong native roots with its learned and apparently effete foreign ones suppresses the fact that Petruccio’s name and character originate in the same commedia erudita tradition from which Bianca’s suitors come. In Gascoigne’s The Supposes, “Petrucio” is a servant, or rather, one of a pair of low-born men who serve a “gentleman stranger” referred to only as “The Sienese.” In Shakespeare’s 1623 text, Petruccio has become a version of his erstwhile master; now he himself is ostensibly a “gentleman stranger” who relishes beating his servants. His roots in a translation from the Italian may acquire a new purchase on our interest if we think about him— and his educational project of wife taming—in relation to the play’s theme of dubious genealogical “roots” (starting with Christopher Sly’s claim to be descended from “Richard Conqueror”)54 and its multiple games of “supposing”

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that involve changes of name as well as of social rank. Bianca’s tutors have significant name changes, to which I turn now.

Translation as/and Promiscuous Naming Lucentio takes the name Cambio, meaning “I change” or “exchange.” He is a walking allusion, as it were, to Ovid’s Metamorphoses.55 Under his Lucentio moniker, this character, like Petruccio, has a previous (and parallel) life in Ariosto’s and Gascoigne’s Supposes. In the Gascoignean/Ariostean textual arena, Lucentio not only uses deceit to gain entrance to the father’s house but also, as I noted earlier, penetrates Bianca’s virginal body before any marriage ceremony occurs. The two tutors in the Bianca plot are characterological versions—the effect of letters on the page and speaking bodies on the stage—of what we might fairly call multilingual puns.56 Cambio/Lucentio competes for Bianca’s favor with Hortensio disguised as “Licio” (also spelled “Litio” and “Lisio” in the First and Second Folio texts that are the bases for modern editors’ renderings of this name). Petruccio introduces Hortensio, disguised as a master of music and mathematics, to Baptista, who presumably knows his fellow Paduan Hortensio well, and who is the owner of the house where the action is occurring. The introduction turns Hortensio from Petruccio’s initial host, and apparently his friend and social equal, into a servant verbally effeminized by being treated as a kind of gift between men: I do present you with a man of mine Cunning in music and the mathematics To instruct her fully in those sciences Whereof I know she is not ignorant. Accept of him, or else you do me wrong. His name is Licio, born in Mantua. (2.1.55–60) Whoever or whatever Licio is, he hails from Virgil’s birthplace and enters textual existence as a Shakespearean character in the context of Petruccio’s scheme to gain entrance to Baptista’s house and elder daughter. Petruccio aggressively turns his host Hortensio not only into a servant but also into a kind of emblem for Petruccio’s own ambitions. Initially recognized by Hortensio as someone or something “blown” by a “happy gale” to Padua from “old

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Verona” (1.2.44–45), Petruccio could have been recognized by Elizabethans with some schooling as a servant from another textual home who is now appearing in the (perhaps false) guise of a man of independent means: “Crowns in my purse I have, and goods at home,” this son of a recently dead father proclaims to Hortensio; but if he has all those goods, why is he so eager to “thrust” himself into the comic “maze” of marriage plots aimed at “wiving” and (thus) “thriving” (1.2.50–52)? The comic glaze over the words and names in this play suggests that we take all of the male characters’ genealogical claims with some skepticism. Hortensio, whose role as Petruccio’s friend is later taken over by Tranio, is a problematic character textually; Hodgdon suggests that his peculiar role may represent “a stage of revision we cannot recover.”57 His appearance as a double and erotic rival to Lucentio suggests that Hortensio exists, in both his original name and in his set of differently spelled aliases, as a supplemental and liminal figure; in the Folio texts of The Shrew, Hortensio is part of the “courtship of Bianca” plot, but he, unlike Lucentio, has no analogue in the plot’s main textual source: Gascoigne’s 1566 translation of Ariosto’s play about mistaken substitutions, which is itself an imitation—or what might also be classified in Dryden’s phrase as “translation with latitude”—of Terence’s Eunuchus. Although Hortensio the music master and rival to Lucentio is absent from those source texts, his alias is present in The Supposes in the form of a servant—a character named Litio or Lytio who knocks on a sleeping man’s door in a way that comically resembles Grumio’s knocking—after repeated instruction—on Hortensio’s door in the Folio’s Shrew play. So Hortensio is a character who both is and is not “translated,” we might say, from an Italian set of texts into an English set including both Gascoigne’s play and the 1623 Folio version of Shrew. What is then in his nickname, we might ask? Something about the lability of master-servant relations in the world Shakespeare constructs to mirror aspects of England in apparently Renaissance Italian settings that are themselves full of ancient literary echoes. Hortensio, in any case, the man with a house in Padua who is alleged to come from Mantua, is an interesting if not altogether trustworthy guide into the intertextual and multilingual territory limned—in a fragmentary way—by the puns I hypothesize as lurking in his alias. Licio’s name has been endowed with semantic baggage in its intertextual travels by only one scholar I have found: Richard Hosley. Writing for the Huntington Library Quarterly in 1964, three years before publishing an edition of Shrew for Pelican, Hosley persuasively argues that Hortensio’s alias should be

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read within the New Comedy tradition of meaning-bearing names:58 after all, Hortensio’s main rival is nicknamed Cambio, which, as we have seen, carries an Italian verb and noun into the English play text while signaling as well a complex set of allusions to Ovid. Hosley argues that the names of other servant-characters in The Shrew also carry foreign meanings, for instance “Grumio,” the name of Petruccio’s servant, signifying “clodhopper,” or, I would add, the English word “groom”; Grumio gains in comic richness by having his name separated by only one vowel from the rich senex figure, Gremio. Hosley does not, however, consider the possibility of a signifying name carrying more than one possible meaning, and that is where he and I part company. To put his argument about Hortensio’s alias in a nutshell, Hosley thinks that Hortensio’s alias comes from an old Italian word for garlic found in the verse version of Ariosto’s I Suppositi; the Italian word is “lizio,” and the name in the English playwright’s text should therefore be spelled that way in a modernized text of Shakespeare’s play; “Litio”—as a variant spelling for “Lizio” in Ariosto’s text—should be used henceforth in “normalized old-spelling texts.”59 Although modern editors have evidently not found Hosley’s semantic argument persuasive—and his notion of a “normalized” old-spelling text strikes me as a contradiction in terms—most modern editors do standardize the nickname as “Litio.” I propose an alternative to Hosley’s interpretation of the nickname that interrogates that standardizing practice. There is a web of potential puns on the name in question, and “Litio,” of the three possible spellings in the First and Second Folio versions of The Shrew, does the least to make that web visible for the modern reader. Hortensio’s nickname appears as “Litio” (three times) and as “Lisio” (four times) in the First Folio; in the Second Folio, it also appears as “Licio.” No one of these spellings is more correct than another—none, that is, can be preferred on the grounds that it faithfully represents a singular author’s intention. But the historical fact that variant spellings are common in an age before lexical standardization should not prevent us from seeking historical understanding in “minute particulars,” as William Blake called them. My candidate for Hortensio’s nickname is “Licio”—and Barbara Hodgdon, I am delighted to say, has voted for this option in her Arden III edition—on the grounds that it opens more semantic windows for modern readers than do the other spellings.60 “Licio” has both a phonic and a graphic kinship with the Italian verb “licere,” “to allow or to license”; and that semantic dimension of his nickname links Hortensio to characters in other early modern English plays who have versions of this name (Licio, for instance, in John Lyly’s Midas of 1592, and, as mentioned

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above, a servant named Lytio or Litio in Gascoigne’s Supposes). The intertextual network creates links among an indeterminate number of characters who share Hortensio’s qualities of ambition, unrootedness, and desires that may be deemed illicit by someone with authority over them. The interlingual pun on “licere” brings Ovid the exiled (because transgressive) lover together with many characters who were defined as vagrants in early modern England; the pun blurs the boundary between elite and popular cultures, as does the possibility that the pun works intralingually as well as interlingually. One feature of the “forward” suitor bearing the name Licio is that he is “lecherous.” This is an English word that has Old English, French, Italian, and Provençal roots connoting, among other things, licking, living in debauchery, and greediness. In “What Is a ‘Relevant’ Translation?,” Derrida writes that “if I love the word, it is only in the body of its idiomatic singularity, that is, where a passion for translation comes to lick it as a flame or an amorous tongue might.”61 He adds that he does not know how, or in how many languages, “you can translate this word lécher [in French in Venuti’s English translation] when you wish to say that one language licks another, like a flame or a caress.” I do not know either, but Shakespearean English, which welcomes Latin and Romance languages into its body, would surely be one. The Shrew, that is, may be said to play an interactive and indeed erotically inclined host to the guest of the Latin and Italian complex centering on the verb “licere.” This is one of those words Derrida uses to illustrate his contention that each word “carries in its body an ongoing process of translation,” but some words, such as “lécher” and “relevant”—which Derrida takes from Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice—do so more visibly than others.62 Such words have networks of use in which the word “floats between several languages . . . and that merits an analysis that is at once linguistic and sociological, political and especially historical, wherever the phenomena of hegemony thus come to inscribe their signature on the body of a kind of idiom that is European . . . in character” but that may be “spreading universally” in a world in which certain languages have global economic reach.63 From “licere” comes the English word “licit”; moreover, an Italian cousin appears as “lice” (the third person present singular verb form—banish from your mind the image of multiple bugs conjured up by the English noun) in a famous line from Tasso’s pastoral drama the Aminta, which was translated into English by Abraham Fraunce in 1592. The line is “s’ei piace, e lice” (if it pleases, it’s licit), and it is a line I propose not as a certain source for the “Licio” of the Shrew text but rather as a thread in a web of meanings that emerges out of the

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interaction among material texts—in this case, printed ones from the sixteenth century—and a modern reader situated in complex institutional and linguistic ways. The web I am both finding and spinning around the name Licio might include English, Latin, French, and Italian words in the “licit” family. Unlike the proper names defined by grammarians as different from common nouns because the former supposedly point to a single individual, the ostensibly proper name Licio operates promiscuously, pointing to multiple possible referents in precisely the way that the servant named Lytio in Gascoigne’s play The Supposes suggests is possible when he says, in response to a question from his master about why there seem to be two men in that fathermaster’s role: “I cannot tell you what I shoulde say sir, the worlde is large and long, there maye be moe Philganos and moe Erostratos than one, yea and moe Ferrars, moe Sicilias, and moe Cathaneas: peradventure, this is not that Ferrar which you sent your sonne unto [another Suppose].”64 Hortensio’s alias’s textual ancestor or double suggests here that the network in which his name exists is known—and still partly knowable—quite differently to differently educated persons; the network can never be fully grasped—phenomenologically or epistemologically—because we cannot say for sure who makes what intertextual or interlingual connection when. This is true both despite and because of the work generations of editors and scholars have done as they open and close the variable texts of the 1623 Shrew play by standardizing spellings and annotating—or not annotating—formulations that may seem “forward,” “preposterous,” and in need of censorship to some readers. The puns lurking in Hortensio’s assumed name, and in the multiple sources for it, suggest that the network of associations the Licio name calls up, or might call up for different readers and auditors, serves to broach versions of a significant question for upwardly mobile writers, readers, and spectators in Elizabethan England: what are servants allowed to do and be as they cross borders—geographical, linguistic, temporal, sexual—and risk punishment, but also court advancement and pleasure by doing so? Or to what extent are lecherous desires licit, and how can one know without attempting to break some rules? This is the kind of question that another of Hortensio’s close textual cousins poses in act 1, scene 2 of John Lyly’s Midas. Here, two servants named Petulus and Licio debate which of them is the “better man”; Petulus serves a man, and Licio serves that man’s daughter; therefore, says Petulus, “the Masculin gender is more worthy than the feminine, therefore Licio backare.” To this Licio (or rather “Li,” in the text’s speech heading) replies, “That is when

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those two genders are at jarre, but when they belong both to one thing, then—” “What then,” says Petulus—”Then,” retorts Licio, “they agree like the fiddle and the stick.” The dialogue continues, with Licio chastising Petulus for being too saucy a “boy” and then introducing a violent image of censorship: “Lock up your lips or I will lop them off.” This scene is directly echoed in act 2, scene 1 of The Shrew and also has resonant parallels in the home-schooling scene of 3.1, to which we shall shortly return. In line 73 of 2.1, Gremio pretentiously uses a “foreign” expression to show off his (pseudo) knowledge;65 Gremio exclaims, “Baccare! You are marvellous forward,” and his words invite the actor to make a gesture of bodily censorship that consists of pushing Petruccio back. Petruccio replies with comically false deference and very likely, modern editors surmise, with a bawdy pun in his line’s final participle, “O pardon me, Signor Gremio, I would fain be doing” (line 74).66 This exchange between male characters, like that in Lyly’s play, arguably offers a translingual joke on baccare as a word playing on the English word “back” as well as on the very fact of a comic merging of English and Latin letters or sounds in a form that conjures up the same-sex antics—including sadistic punishments—of the Elizabethan schoolroom. If we read Shakespeare’s lines as part of a larger textual field including Lyly’s dialogue between two clever servant boys, one of whom, named Licio, is elsewhere in Lyly’s play called a “page,” it seems likely that baccare comes from the sociolinguistically dense (and to us somewhat foreign) world of bi- or trilingual schoolboy humor, a world where what would later be called high and low cultures promiscuously and even preposterously mix. This is precisely the world in which Hortensio and Lucentio, alias Licio and Cambio, compete for masterly prerogative over their ostensibly female—and temporarily shared—pupil, Bianca. Cambio begins 3.1 by assuming a tone of mastery over his rival; the first line is an insulting alliterative command, “Fiddler, forbear. You grow too forward, sir.” The line recalls Gremio telling Petruccio to back off (as I read “baccare”) in 2.1, and reminds us that Hortensio/Leechio (as I shall henceforth take the liberty of spelling his name) is very much Petruccio’s “man” even though Hortensio, like Lucentio, will eventually be a “loser” in the game of wife commanding when Petruccio is a winner, at least temporarily. As a winner of the play’s concluding wager, which harks back to the Induction Lord’s boasting of successful bets on his hunting dogs, Petruccio fulfills fantasies that are also ascribed to the play’s other suitors: “you are the man / Must stead us all,” as Tranio says in 1.2 (255–56). But none of the aspiring husband/

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masters in the play gains a secure position as master of a household. Petruccio’s win in the play’s famous final scene may depend on Katherina’s agreeing to play a theatrical game with him, as, according to one interpretation of her character, she learns to do in the scene on the road (4.5) where she goes from being Petruccio’s “puppet” to being his fellow actor deceiving a senex figure. While critics, directors, and actors continue to disagree about how to read her infamous final speech declaring wifely obedience, we should not forget that she and Petruccio, in their still unconsummated marital union, both stand to gain economically from winning his wager. Petruccio’s win, however, which seems to indicate his mastery of Katherina’s will, is revealed as temporary in the larger textual arena in which I have been suggesting that we set this play text, for as we have seen, John Fletcher published a “sequel” in 1610 to one or both of the earlier Shrew plays, The Tamer Tamed, in which Petruccio comes on stage as a male character banished from the bed of his (new) wife and humiliatingly demoted from the role of master in his own household. Fletcher’s audience, like Shakespeare’s, included readers who knew that what goes around comes around in comedy: Petruccio was/is a servant in Ariosto’s and Gascoigne’s text about “supposing,” and his rise to mastery can be read as a narrative no more secure, in the end, than Christopher Sly’s, famously left unfinished in the 1623 Shrew text.

Changing Places Act 3, scene 1 of the Shakespearean Shrew text limns and foreshadows some of the dangers lurking for such characters as Sly and Petruccio. The male characters here play roles that stress the ambiguity and lability of the master/ servant dyad. Lucentio and Hortensio, and their theatrically renamed “doubles,” are servants paid to instruct rich men’s daughters, and one, the music master, has already been beaten and humiliated by Katherina. As pedagogues, Leechio and Cambio presumably possess a measure of mastery over their “instruments” of instruction: a lute and a book of Ovidian verse. Bianca, however, their Petrarchan mistress and (they hope) their docile pupil, appears to know at least as much if not more music and Latin as her tutors. A three-way battle of wits ensues, one that looks back at a primal battle of Western culture, that initiated by the theft of a Greek wife, Helen, by Paris, a son of the Trojan king Priam. The figure of the male tutor in this scene, like the figures of the actor and of the translator that the scene also invites us to think about,

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illustrates a series of quick changes from master’s to servant’s position and back again; like Sly the pedlar become a tinker become a lord, the tutors change places but do not necessarily grow rich in their movement. Bianca herself moves in this scene from the high position of desired potential wife (and perhaps also of a “patroness,” as line 5 suggests) to being at least obliquely the butt of bawdy humor “between men” who play with the audience’s awareness that the body beneath the virginal and apparently queenly Bianca’s costume belongs to a boy. The boy’s body arises, as I suggested earlier, despite and because of Bianca’s proclamation that she is “no breeching scholar.” The home-schooling scene suggests how thin and possibly illusory is the line that exists between what Moisan calls shrew “training” and shrew “taming.” The sisters are shown by the play’s metaphors of falcons to be two birds of a feather, although Bianca will imagine herself as a “bird” in a less aristocratic sport than hawking when she speaks to Petruccio in the play’s final scene: as he seems to be coming after her for “a better jest or two,” she asks, “Am I your bird? I mean to shift my bush” (5.2.48). Shifting the metaphor to a sport where the bird is the prey rather than the servanthunter of the master, Bianca makes a bawdy joke about her “bush” and then challenges everyone on stage to pursue her with their bows. But she proves to be a difficult target to hit, in part because she joins with her sister, and with the barely characterized Widow who marries Hortensio, as a version of Ovid’s Penelope when all three are together on stage or page during the final scene. Ovid’s Penelope, taking time off from her weaving and unweaving activities to write a letter of complaint to her absent husband, presents a darkly comic counter to the image of the obedient and socially privileged wife Katherina limns in her famous speech.67 Whereas Penelope’s husband is off having enjoyable adulterous affairs while his wife is unsafe at home, Katherina portrays a wife who lies “warm at home, safe and secure,” while her husband has commit[ted] his body To painful labour both by sea and land, To watch the night in storms. (5.2.154–56) In neither case are husband and wife together in the same space, securing the future through biosocial reproduction. With this aporia in mind, we may also notice that Bianca and the Widow have no chance to speak after Katherina’s last words. Critics, directors, readers, and actors have had wildly different

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opinions about how Katherina’s words should be interpreted, and that, perhaps, is what the play is set up to achieve: a debate, a desire for the story to continue, as indeed it did with John Fletcher’s sequel. But the play is also set up to ask some readers and spectators to think about the audience members who are silent at the end: Bianca and the Widow, who are also figured in and by Penelope.

Penelope in No-Man’s-Land Counterpointing other major scenes of education in the play—Katherina’s rough behavioral modification training in Petruccio’s country house, the later scene of education in humility and /or acting on the road back to Padua, and, arguably, the final scene where Katherina steps into the role of wife-teacher and actor—act 3, scene 1 raises without answering questions about both male and female fantasies of dominion in a space that is fundamentally insecure: a garden within a house within an Italian city that comes to be compared not only to ancient Ithaca but also to ancient Troy, a homeland recalled in Latin words—foreign words—in an English text that also contains not one but two (competing) translations of the original words. The foreign words become the pretext for a courtship resulting in an illicit (but swiftly, fantastically licensed) marriage that proceeds without paternal consent and that leads, ultimately, to the new wife disobeying the new husband and publicly humiliating him in a competition between men in the play’s final scene. Ironically, the foreign words are from a letter by a wife chiding her (long absent and sexually unfaithful) husband, and they serve as the shaky ground, as it were, on which two well-educated English speakers supposedly speaking in Italian engage in a battle of wits. In a further ironic turn, the words that Cambio and Bianca mistranslate concern the fall of a primal patriarchal structure of Western culture—the “lofty palace” of Priam—and the flow of a river—the Simois—through a landscape that now (at the moment in history when the words are imagined as being spoken) belongs to no one, neither the defeated Trojans nor the Greeks, who have (mostly) departed for and even arrived at their homes. It is elegantly apt, therefore, that the fragment of an Ovidian letter included in a Shakespearean play about ongoing battles between persons of different genders and social ranks should be two of the only four lines of Ovid’s poem that are presented as an interpolation, literally, a quotation of an unnamed speaker within the web-like fabric of Penelope’s epistle

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to her absent husband. Moreover, the unnamed man is a complex figure for both a faithful and an unfaithful husband—and, I would argue, for the inability of any single author fully to possess a textual property through translatio imperi et studii. Shakespeare’s young lovers spar with each other by means of a text not only quoted from a Greek warrior in Penelope’s letter as written by Ovid, but in the particular lines cited (and recited), Ovid is himself translating—and altering—a famous textual sequence spoken by Aeneas at Dido’s request in book 2 of Virgil’s epic—before Aeneas has become Dido’s husband (in her view, at least), and before he has abandoned her for Rome. The speaker whom Lucentio takes as his (renewed) starting point for courtship thus stands in for, speaks in the places both of Ulysses and Aeneas, historical enemies cast by Ovid as occupying the same place, as narrators of an ancient story for an audience including a powerful female (Dido, also called “Elissa,” and Penelope); such female figures have their own (somewhat dissonant) stories to tell, which makes the cited textual ground indeed a space of multiple and competing translations. Ovid ventriloquizes or steals Penelope’s words throughout the first poem of the Heroides, but in the two lines Shakespeare’s male tutor chooses to read from the book of Ovidian verse gullibly given to him by Gremio, we hear (see) a “male” voice describing in a mini-ekphrasis an ephemeral picture—traced in wine on a table—of a Trojan “place” that no longer exists in its original form although it exists in the unnamed speaker’s memory. It is reconstituted, but also drastically altered. By not naming the speaker, Ovid makes the lines into a “commonplace,” part of a multilingual cultural inheritance over which battles between men—and between men and women—continued to occur in Ovid’s time and again in Shakespeare’s. Ovid’s Heroides, in which he ascribes to ancient women like Penelope and Dido laments very similar to the kind he penned in his own Tristia bemoaning his unjust exile, were commonly studied by English boys in grammar schools (fi fth form!) and were also licensed, even recommended, reading (as several other of Ovid’s texts distinctly were not) for privileged girls being educated at home, that is, in “private” spaces suited for their social function as wives in training. A female’s education, according to Richard Mulcaster, must be “within limit” because her “end” is marriage, “obedience to her head,” whereas “our” training—that is, men’s—is “without restraint for either matter or maner, bycause our employment is so generall in all things” (Positions, 176). Mulcaster’s neatly gendered ideological division is troubled, however, when he has to admit that some girls are destined for “government” and hence cannot be fully contained

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within the private sphere of the house or, by implication, the straitened role of the obedient wife. By making a pair of lines from Heroides 1.1 the “ground” for a seriocomic replaying of a battle about who will wear the breeches (as it were) in the marriages being generated in the play, Shakespeare intervenes slyly in a cultural debate about the role of women in “government” in both private and public spheres. Although Erasmus considered Ovid’s first Heroides poem well suited for girls’ “private” education—and indeed as “most chaste,” Shakespeare’s play reopens the question about what kind of educational model Ovid is, even or perhaps especially when he writes of Penelope shrewishly chiding her absent spouse.68 Ovid’s poem is obsessed with the uncertainties of culturally transmitted knowledge, including a wife’s knowledge of her husband’s sexual behavior and, by implication, his of hers. Penelope describes her repeated efforts to gain knowledge of Odysseus’s whereabouts since he left Troy years ago, but the “word brought back from Pylos,” for instance, “was nothing sure” (“incerta est fama remissa Pylo”).69 A brief respite from uncertainty occurs when an anonymous person who was once at Troy shows Penelope and her guests what happened; what Ovid gives us is the verbal traces of that scene, not the winedrawings but the accompanying words beginning with a “shifter,” a deictic “here” (hac) that Shakespeare’s text shifts once more in what some modern editors note (but do not theorize) as a textual “corruption”: Ovid’s “hac” becomes “hic” in the English “copy” of the lines. The difference is so slight that the English translation does not register it either in a modern bilingual edition of Ovid such as the Loeb or in modern editions of Shrew, which gives three “hics.” Does this matter? I will argue that it does in the play’s larger reflection on processes, and purposes, of translation. Lucentio/Cambio reads the Ovidian lines in response to Bianca’s question “Where left we last?” indicating that the tutoring and courtship activity have begun in a previous time unavailable to the audience and presumably also to Hortensio/Leechio’s prying eyes and ears. “Here, Madam,” says Cambio, and proceeds to read Ovid’s deictic “here” as paradoxically pointing to a place not here, not in any “present” except that of the (re)reading or enacting of the words on the page: “hic ibat Simois; hic est Sigeia tellus; / hic steterat Priami regia celsa senis” (The Shrew 3.1.27–28). The Latin text, in all editions of Ovid, gives the opening word of each of the three parallel clauses differently: “Hac ibat Simois, haec est Sigeia tellus; / hic steterat Priami regia celsa senis” (my emphasis). The (Shakespearean) English, as I have remarked, simply does not register the change (and neither does the modern English of the Loeb

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translation). Perhaps illustrating a queerly retroactive influence showing the “target” language’s power over the “source” language, the Latin “in” the Shakespearean text removes the slight but significant difference of specifying words too: as translated in the Loeb, and in the notes of modern editions of the Shakespearean play, the lines read: “Here [hic] flowed the river Simois; here [hic] is the Sigeian land; here [hic] stood the lofty palace of old Priam.” In Latin texts of Ovid’s poem, “hac” (an adverb) is what Shakespeare renders as the first “here”; it goes with Simois and means “in this way”;70 in the second instance, “haec” is the Latin original, the feminine singular version of “hic,” and agrees with “tellus,” the feminine noun for earth (and also for the goddess of that name); in the third and last instance, the Latin original is “hic,” the form appearing in all three parallel “places” in Shakespeare’s version of Ovid’s Latin. “Hic” is a common word for “here,” contrasted in some dictionaries to the “less common” “hac”; “hic,” which can also signify “this” functioning as a pronoun, triumphs over the other less common forms. A Latin scholar would know that Ovid’s “hic” is functioning as an indeclinable adverb, not as a pronoun, because if it were the latter part of speech, it would need to be in a feminine form to modify the feminine noun “regia” correctly. In the Shakespearean version of the Ovidian lines, however, rules of gender agreement are loose (as we saw when the feminine “captam” modified the “male” character Lucentio); so at the end of Lucentio’s reading of Ovid’s lines, we cannot be certain whether he is imagining Priam’s palace as the paradoxical deictic “here” of a textual description of a past place now destroyed; or as “this” place, here (there), in Baptista’s house, which Lucentio/Cambio is presently translating into a new version of Priam’s house, with Lucentio/ Cambio playing the role of a Greek bearing gifts, a role like that of Ovid’s Ulysses, whom Penelope justly suspects has been unfaithful in the long years of his voyage from there to here. We have a choice of seeing such details of translational grammar as boring or interestingly boring; if we choose the latter path, we have to ask how and why to ascribe significance to the apparent textual “mistake” in the Shrewtext’s copying of the original Latin “hac” and “haec.” We cannot proceed on the basis of any simple notion of authorial or printerly intentionality, although hovering on the edges of the picture is Emerson’s wry observation that “it is remarkable that we find it so hard to impute our own best sense to a dead author.”71 Bracketing intentionality, I want to suggest that the small changes in “hac” and “haec”—flattening them all to “hic”—may serve for a reader concerned with the “letter” of translation to signify a lack of such concern on the

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part of the set of textual effects we read as a “character” named Cambio/Lucentio, a character posing as a Latin teacher but repeatedly and extravagantly exposing his “true” status as an English-speaking lover manipulating words for his own purposes in a Paduan garden inside an Ovid-loving English lord’s house. For most spectators, whether Elizabethan or modern, Lucentio’s “hics” serve as comic hiccups in a speech that is funny precisely because it is incomprehensible; but for the studious reader of the text, there is another dimension of comedy lurking in the way the “hics” get rid of pesky problems of gender and agreement and, by doing so, underscore Lucentio’s shaky mastery of Latin syntax. He is amusingly careless of the original, even as he makes jokes that might have been fleetingly amusing to his first readers as their pedagogical egos were flattered by translations whose general meaning is already known: Lucentio is wily like a flowing river; his identity (“hic est”) involves his status as son of one Vincentio of Pisa (whom, as we have also learned, never stays in one place but flows like a river); the Sigean land or earth is no foundation for this man’s identity but merely a pretext for his ability to disguise himself to get his interlocutor’s love; that which “stood” here (“hic steterat”) is the virile Lucentio come a wooing, and “Priam” is no longer a king but a servant (“my man Tranio,” who bears his master’s “port”—a complex joke on doubling, since “port” signifies “bearing” as Tranio, in Lucentio’s clothes, signifies Lucentio). The pun on “port” and “bearing” does not for long remain a doublet; it quickly opens to another signification: port as the kind of place where a merchant puts in to rest—and exchange goods—before sailing to another such place. The English word “port” is thus a clever “suppose” or stand-in for “regia”—the Latin name for a noble house, a king’s palace; and in this slyly signaled mistranslation, we are reminded, as Moisan writes, that Lucentio’s very choice of what Ovidian lines to read for his continued “lesson” has a political valence, albeit a debatable one. Does his choice of these Ovidian lines have the effect, as Moisan argues, of “silencing and suppressing a radically different and far unhappier perspective on the domestic arrangement [that] Katherina’s exposition dutifully idealizes” in the play’s final scene, when she describes the husband laboring in his sea-voyaging work while the wife lies “warm at home, secure and safe” (5.2.149–51)? Or does Lucentio/Cambio’s choice of text look ahead to his own inability to master a “disobedient” wife in the play’s final scene? How different is that Bianca from the one shown in 3.1 asserting her refusal to be mastered by her tutors? “I am no breeching scholar in the schools,” she proclaims, using a resonant participle, as I noted above. She goes on in this passage to echo her older sister in a significant way: “I’ll

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not be tied to hours nor ‘pointed times, / But learn my lessons as I please myself ” (3.1.15–18). The lines recall Katherina’s scornful words to her father back in her “shrew” phase: “What, shall I be appointed hours?” (1.1.102). The scene in which Bianca echoes not only Katherina but also Ovid’s Penelope quoting an unnamed man situates us in a cyclical time of ongoing contests for mastery among rivals who may switch genders—on the page— in the process of translation among languages. Let us look once more at Ovid’s lines, this time as “construed” by Bianca immediately after a bawdy exchange between her and Lucentio/Cambio at Hortensio/Leechio’s expense. Eager to get his chance at teaching Bianca “the order of my fingering” (l.60), this suitor has interrupted the Latin lesson to announce that his “instrument’s in tune” (35). Demanding audible proof of the claim, Bianca exclaims, “O fie! The treble jars.” Her line plays metatheatrically on the audience’s awareness of the sliding tones of her own voice, a boy’s rising to figure a girl’s. Lucentio/ Cambio responds with the joke quoted earlier (“Spit in the hole, man, and tune again”), reminding us of the many holes at play in this scene, including that of the woman’s mouth and ears; even hearing such words from her suitors endangers Bianca’s premarital chastity; so does her act of speaking as if she were an English version of a woman already married, a mother, and abandoned by Ulysses. Bianca, however, quickly sets about retuning the “instrument” of Ovid’s lines for her own purposes, with a “treble” better than the music teacher’s; later, she will tell him directly that his lesson of a “gamut,” or scale, which he presents to her as a letter translating the scale’s letters into alphabetic ones glossed with statements about his desire for her love, is unnecessary—“I am past my gamut long ago” (67)—and, moreover, unpleasing to her. She prefers the Latin master’s suit, but only in the form in which she translates it, which differs as much from Lucentio’s translation as it does from a faithful English version of Ovid’s original. Nonetheless, as Heather James has suggested, Bianca’s version of Ovid’s Penelope pays more attention than Lucentio’s does to the syntactic “integrity” of the Latin, and this is significant for the play’s reflection on translation as a mode of discourse somehow in between “old fashions” and “odd inventions.”72 Bianca begins her translation exercise by using subjects and verbs to make her statements, whereas Lucentio used only “neighbor” word pairs—which speaks ill of his ability really to grasp the rules of Latin syntax as different from English, which relies so much more heavily on word order. Moreover, when Bianca uses a single word—regia—to express her desires, she uses it to display her (present) power as a female ruler to tell a suitor to “presume not.” Her ver-

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sion of “regia” counters Lucentio’s interpretation of the word as signaling his power to command a servant (Tranio) “bearing my port.” She takes his claim to rule, as it were, and translates it into her own, which anticipates what she wittily does both in her final translated statement and, later in the scene, in the ironic rationale she gives for preferring Lucentio’s suit (as revised by herself ) to Hortensio’s. Here is her version of Penelope’s web, a weaving of Ovid’s words with her own in counterpoint with the already mixed text previously offered by Lucentio/Cambio: “ ‘Hic ibat Simois,’ I know you not, ‘hic est Sigeia tellus,’ I trust you not; ‘hic steterat Priami,’ take heed he hear us not, ‘regia,’ presume not, ‘celsa senis,’ despair not.” Her English clauses are far from the literal meaning of the Latin, but they are nonetheless figuratively attached to the original in a way that Lucentio’s are not. An always flowing river like Lucentio cannot be known; the “ground” of ancient Troy, read as a trope for this wooing man, cannot be trusted. Bianca’s message is close in spirit to Penelope’s at other points in Ovid’s poem, for Penelope, as we have seen, is deeply concerned about her inability to know her husband’s history in the years since the fall of Troy. In the face of such doubt, Bianca focuses on present danger, in the form of an “internal” audience member, Hortensio (“take heed he hear you not”)—that is, on a blocking figure who is inside the space of the tryst rather than outside it, as are the two figures, Tranio and Gremio, whom Lucentio associates with “Priami” in his version of Ovid’s lines. Finally, in her last two promiscuously mixed statements, “regia, presume not” and “celsa senis, despair not,” Bianca performatively enacts the role of a queen who both distances herself from her lover and bids him stay near in hope of future favors. “Celsa senis” conjoins two Latin adjectives—lofty (or erect) and (of ) old—in a way that gives them new semantic life when they are, in turn, conjoined with the gracious imperative, “despair not.” Words are indeed paired in new ways in both Lucentio’s and Bianca’s constructions of Ovid, and the two different statements Bianca and Lucentio/Cambio make with the help of Ovid’s Penelope—and the anonymous Greek warrior whom she is quoting—create a language game in which Bianca bends but does not wholly break the rules either of the Latin lesson or of the patrilineal order it ostensibly supports. She asserts her prerogative as a female ruler (“ ‘regia,’ presume not”) but agrees to a clandestine marriage that leaves the audience in doubt as to her degree of likeness to the historical Queen Elizabeth, the ancient figure of Penelope— Homer’s patient, chaste wife, Ovid’s doubting shrew—or her own sister Katherina.

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The degree of likeness or unlikeness depends not on substantive similarities but rather on timing, verbal actions, and hermeneutic perceptions. In the eyes of Hortensio/Leechio, whose nickname connotes both lechery and license, as we have seen, while also (additionally) suggesting “lis, litis,” the Latin nominative and genitive forms for a legal controversy or a suit, Bianca starts to look like a poorly trained hawk, one that rebels against her master by failing to seek her true prey and going instead for a “stale”—a decoy pigeon (3.1.84). Editors suggest, indeed, that that word applies to Lucentio as he is seen, at the end of the home-schooling scene, by his disappointed male rival; but Katherina, or the boy playing her, applies the same word to herself in her very first words in the play, words in which she is imagining herself as she is likely seen by others: “I pray you, sir, is it your will / To make a stale of me amongst these mates?” (1.1.157–58). As Karen Newman observes, Katherina plays here “on the meaning of stale as laughing stock and prostitute, on ‘stalemate,’ and on mate as husband.”73 Continuing Newman’s feminist work of opening the compressed “puncept”74 of “stale,” I would like to note that according to the OED, the meaning of “stale” as “decoy pigeon” has a French genealogy (from “estalon”), whereas another set of meanings, from the Old English (Teutonic) intertwines “stale” with “steal” (the two “cannot be completely separated,” write the OED editors). Moreover, the two lines of signification, Teutonic and Romance, as it were, cross and recross historically to produce meanings that associate “decoy” with “thief’s accomplice,” and specifically with that muchused male or female body for sale as a “prostitute.” This meaning in turn mixes with those shades of stale that apply to food, drink, and erotic experiences that are “worn out,” stale in the sense of not fresh, not new. “Stale,” like “lechery,” is clearly part of that transnational kinship group that, as we have seen, interests Derrida in “What Is a ‘Relevant’ Translation?” When Katherina protests vehemently her father’s treating her as a “stale,” she both displays a certain linguistic agency and presses upon readers and spectators the (not new) idea that the “stale” is a phenomenon with multiple parts, signifying in different times and places. Created in part by the reader’s or spectator’s act of “constering,” the “stale” is a queer and labile sign. It resembles translation as I have attempted to trace it here, across and within the shifting, contested borders of an English language: a no-man’s-land that no forces of homeland security can secure or make English only.

Chapter 7

On Contingency in Translation Jacques Lezr a

Here’s how the story goes. Calixto, a young man of good standing in the city, is trying to find a way to make contact with a protected, beautiful young woman he has glimpsed accidentally and then spoken to, while chasing his hawk into an enclosed garden. One of his servants arranges for a notorious go-between to offer her services; when this go-between knocks on the master’s door, another servant announces to Calixto that the first servant, Sempronio, is at the door with an “old bawd hee hath brought along with him.” We are of course in the landscape of Fernando de Rojas’s 1499 work La Celestina, or as James Mabbe’s translation has it, the world of The Spanish Bawd.1 Calixto worries aloud that this serviceable go-between will feel insulted at being called a bawd, puta vieja in Rojas’s Castilian. His servant, Pármeno, answers him: ¿Por qué, señor, te matas? ¿Por qué, señor, te congoxas? ¿E tú piensas que es vituperio en las orejas desta el nombre que la llamé? No lo creas; que assí se glorifica en le oyr, como tú, quando dizen: ¡diestro cauallero es Calisto! E demás desto, es nombrada e por tal título conocida. Si entre cient mugeres va e alguno dize: ¡puta vieja!, sin ningún empacho luego buelue la cabeça e responde con alegre cara. . . . Si passa por los perros, aquello suena su ladrido; si está cerca las aues, otra cosa no cantan; si cerca los ganados, balando lo pregonan; si cerca las bestias, rebuznando dizen: ¡puta vieja! Las ranas de los charcos otra cosa no suelen mentar. Si va entre los herreros, aquello

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dizen sus martillos. Carpinteros e armeros, herradores, caldereros, arcadores, todo oficio de instrumento forma en el ayre su nombre. Cántanla los carpinteros, péynanla los peynadores, texedores. Labradores en las huertas, en las aradas, en las viñas, en las segadas con ella passan el afán cotidiano. Al perder en los tableros, luego suenan sus loores. Todas cosas, que son hazen, a do quiera que ella está, el tal nombre representan. ¡O qué comedor de hueuos asados era su marido! ¿Qué quieres más, sino, si vna piedra toca con otra, luego suena ¡puta vieja!?2 (Rojas 2001, 256–57) You don’t really imagine that the name I used for this one insults her ear? Don’t believe it for a second: she’s as proud of hearing herself called it as you are when someone says: What an accomplished gentleman is Calisto! And what’s more—this is the name she’s known by, and that’s her right title. Say that there’s a hundred women, and someone happens to call out: Puta vieja! Without the least inhibition she’ll right away turn her head and answer happily. . . . If she walks near a pack of dogs, their bark rings out: Puta vieja! If she comes near birds, their song is nothing but; if she happens on a flock, the sheep will baa it out; if near donkeys, their braying says: Puta vieja! Frogs in puddles have nothing else to say. If she strolls among blacksmiths, their hammers speak it out. Carpenters, builders, farriers, tinkers, coopers, every manner of tool forms her name in the air. Carpenters sing it, wool-carders card it, weavers, farmhands in the gardens, in fields, in the vineyards, in the threshing fields, spend their work-time with her. When folks lose at board games, her praises sound. All things that make sound, wherever she happens to be, make out that name. What a cuckold was her husband! What else can I say, but this: if one stone touches upon another, what sounds out is Puta vieja!3 This is grand fun—a rhetorical cascade, an escalation a minore ad maiorem toward the concluding, ringing “if one stone touches another, what sounds out is ‘Puta vieja!’ ” That it is not only grand fun becomes apparent in the course of the work, as the movement of stones and among stones—as for instance when Celestina remarks, “Las piedras parece que se apartan e me fazen lugar que passe”—and the consequences of things accidentally rapping upon stones take on an increasingly sinister quality, to climax with Calixto’s accidental fall from a ladder: Melibea, rather too graphically, tells her father,

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just before dashing herself onto the same stones in imitation of her lover, “De la triste cayda sus más escondidos sesos quedaron repartidos por las piedras e paredes” (he pitcht upon his head, and had his braines beaten out, and dasht in pieces against the stones, and pavement of the streete; 196). It is also a remarkable staging of the problem of translation, taken in a number of its limiting cases: the matter of understanding, as speech, how the mere sound made accidentally by “every manner of tool forms her name in the air,” and, more strangely still, how natural phenomena, like the casual rapping or touching of one stone upon another, name and describe Celestina: “¡Puta vieja!” The lumpy field of early modern translation is bounded by limiting cases—on one side, negative limits, cases of radical asymmetry or downright untranslatability, some of them on display in Pármeno’s lines from La Celestina: the translation of God’s word; the translation of the sovereign’s command; translation from the language of the authorized and authorizing classical tongues; translations of the Aesopian language of beasts; translations from the languages of encroaching foreigners or resistant internal linguistic and ethnic minorities; translations to and from the languages of newly discovered American tribes. On the other side, the field of early modern translation is bounded by fantasies of universal languages and universal communication—again, God’s word, incipient formal languages like mathematics—cases where there would be no need for translation at all. The scene of the exclaiming stones from La Celestina carefully marshals both, often simultaneously, to scandalous effect—negative limits becoming positive ones and vice versa, the utterly foreign sound of the croaking frog suddenly sharing with human speech and with the ringing of hammers a single, rigid referent, as though “¡Puta vieja!” were the single expression that every manner of articulation, intentional or not, linguistic or not, shared, “formed in the air.” Two things about this scenario are scandalous, and they are quite different. The first is signaled by Rojas’s daring translation of Christ’s exclamation to the Pharisees when, in the Gospel of Luke, they ask him to rebuke his disciples for crying “Osanna fili David, benedictus qui venit in nomine Domini!” (Luke 19:40): “And he answered and said unto [the Pharisees], I tell you that, if these should hold their peace, the stones would immediately cry out” (“Magister, increpa discipulos tuos. Quibus ipse ait: Dico vobis, quia si hi tacuerint, lapides clamabunt,” as the Vulgate has it). It is futile to silence my disciples, says Jesus: “the rocks and stones themselves would start to sing Hosanna,” as the rock musical Jesus Christ Superstar famously put it—though in Rojas’s startlingly heterodox translation, rocks, stones, animals, hammers,

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and disciples all sing “¡Puta vieja!” The second occasion for scandal here comes from the strange analogy between modes of expression that this blasphemous syncretism produces: all sounds “formed in air” call out in Castilian Celestina’s name, or rather her eponym, her description and her social function— “¡Puta vieja!” The result is not to grant “all things that make sound, wherever [Celestina] happens to be,” the elevated status of articulated human language, but to point out that human language shares with mere sounds certain irreducibly material aspects, on the one hand a wroughtness that the sounds of artisans’ tools borrow metonymously from the scene of those tools’ instrumental use, on the other hand the quality of accidentality, of contingent occurring on which Rojas’s catalogue concludes: “What else can I say, but this: if one stone touches upon another, what sounds out is Puta vieja!,” or in the Castilian, “¿Qué quieres más, sino, si vna piedra toca con otra, luego suena ¡puta vieja!?” Let us ask four questions straight away. They have much less interest in themselves than in their relation to each other; none of them alone will allow us to approach Rojas’s text, or understand the challenge it poses to our theories and practices of translation, but perhaps their combination will. In the first place, are there early modern theories of translation that could account for Rojas’s translational materialism, or for the scandalous pairing of linguistic materialism with parodic theology in this passage—and if so, what definition of “theory” and of “translation” are we employing to assert that this is so? Second, what is it that these theories, if there are any, or practices or systematic accounts of translation in the period of early modernity, can contribute to contemporary theory of translation? In the third place, what if anything do contemporary theories of translation—theories of translation developed in the wake of Herder, the Schlegel brothers, and the great projects of rational enlightenment; theories of translation that take account of the dynamics of decolonization, of technological innovations, of economic and mediatic globalization—allow us to see about the lexical culture of early modernity that was perhaps not clear in that period? Finally, in what way can theories of translation, or systematic accounts of translation, or descriptions of practices of translation, whether early modern or contemporary, help us to understand the chronological sorts of translation that my first questions envision? These questions operate on different levels. They are genealogical as well as historiographical and methodological questions; their domains shift; they encroach upon each other, implying, presupposing, and inhabiting each other. They express different disciplinary fantasies, agreements, and desires. Address-

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ing them requires us to put in place different protocols for argument, evidence, and verification. My questions presume not just different definitions of translation, but different ways of defining terms in general. We are never only talking about early modern translation, its practices or systematic articulations—we are also talking in translation, that is, performing an act of historico-imaginative reconceptualization of chronologically different cultural practices, amounting to a sort of translation. We are operating from conceptions of translation built about the great factors of modernization— technological shifts, denationalization, globalization, the loss of linguistic diversity, and so on. How we conceptualize what we are doing when we talk about early modern translation is itself a theory of translation; call it a historiographical one, not to be confused with any of the other sorts in this determining, over- and underdetermining circuit. Nevertheless, with the exception of the last of my questions, the stickinesses I raise here would apply to any modestly self-aware form of historiography, which would want to be as clear-sighted as possible about the ways in which its object of inquiry might be the product of institutional and other desires at work at the moment of study, and would want to take account of any deforming debts it might owe, conceptually and methodologically, to that object. But when we ask in what way theories of translation, or systematic accounts of translation, or descriptions of practices of translation, whether early modern or contemporary, can help us to understand historiography, we are making a specific sort of methodological assertion. We are claiming that “translation” does not work only as the object of analysis, a cultural element among others, subject to description and interpretation in the way for instance that the fluctuating price of commodities in the early seventeenth century might be, or in the way that a particular work, whether a building or a poem, might be, or in the way that a practice might be, for instance a devotional practice in flux in the post-Tridentine period. When we ask in what way theories of translation can help us to understand historiography, or to understand a historiographical claim like “Fernando de Rojas’s La Celestina is a modern or modernizing work,” we agree implicitly that historiography works as a sort of translation, and hence that “translation” has a metadiscursive as well as a discursive function when we study early modernity. Pármeno’s marvelous lines seem to provide an incontrovertible example of this folding in of translation’s discursive and metadiscursive functions, since the “translations” of barking, hammering, croaking, speaking, and stones’ knocking into the Castilian “¡Puta vieja!” also serve the heterodox function of commenting upon

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the translation of theological tropes into secular speech, of theological time into human time—and of transferring onto the latter the characteristics of the former—with far-reaching consequences for the theology of translation, and for our conceptions of providence, determination, and freedom. But is this folding of translation upon itself, as a discursive object as well as a metadiscursive syntactical element concerned with its material status, true of early modernity alone, or especially? Allow me to answer this question with an example. It is conventional to locate the emergence of modern Spanish grammar in the work that the great Spanish lexicographer and grammarian Antonio de Nebrija dedicated to Queen Isabel of Spain, in the signal year of 1492, some seven years before Rojas published La Celestina, the Gramática de la lengua castellana. This convention, however, is fairly recent, as the work itself had singularly little practical value, being published in one limited run in 1492, and then not again till the eighteenth century. (This is wildly overstated, in fact, since the work’s influence was profound in humanist circles in Spain and out— its influence is simply not measurable in terms of print runs.) The critical consensus treats the Gramática, rather uneasily, as the anticipatory symptom of modernity precisely—a linguistic and national modernity accidentally underscored by the work’s date of publication, which falls in the year of the expulsion of Spain’s Jews, of the fall of Granada, of Isabel’s patronage of Columbus, and so on, a litany of world-historical events. Nebrija dedicates his Gramática to “la mui alta y assí esclarecida princesa doña Isabel,” (the very high and equally enlightened princess Isabel).4 The dedicatory prologue is of course best known for the famous, famously overused proposition with which Nebrija opens, “que siempre la lengua fue compañera del imperio: y de tal manera lo siguió: que juntamente començaron, crecieron y florecieron, y después junta fue la caida de entrambos”—the proposition that “language was ever the companion of empire, and so follows it that they began together, grew and flourished together, and then declined together” (3). “Siempre la lengua fue compañera del imperio” tends to be trotted out to underscore the imbrication of empires, for instance Spain’s soon-to-emerge empire in the New World, with early national ethnic and linguistic consolidation. And this is of course in part the case, and it is certainly the part most congenial to disciplinary practices that seek in early modernity the devices that consolidate a colonial-imperial regime whose endings, whether in 1898 or in 1975, they diagnose and celebrate. Sure enough, the ethnic-linguistic history that Nebrija tells leads, by historical translationes imperii, from “el anti-

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güedad de todas las cosas: que para nuestra recordación e memoria quedaron escriptas” (5; the greatest antiquity of all things, which remain written for our remembrance and memory), and from the empires of Assyrians, Indians, Sicinians, and Egyptians, he says, to Isabel’s own kingdom. The empire of Spain and Castilian Spanish that Nebrija seeks to describe and help found in 1492 looks within and without, and the project of national-linguistic consolidation is the place where the imperial and the national projects coincide. For at the same moment that Spain initiates the expulsion of its Jews and looks to the West for a trade route to the Indies, seeking the translation of empire across the Atlantic, Spain also, as Nebrija’s text makes clear, begins to look within, to constitute itself as Spain (rather than semi-independent kingdoms allied by a common threat and purpose, the reconquest of Spain) by creating a nation of Castilian speakers composed of Biscayans and Navarrese as well as Aragonese, residual speakers of Arabic, Hebrew, and merely regional languages. “What will this book be for?” the queen had asked him, and, responding to her in Nebrija’s place, or so Nebrija says, the bishop of Avila has answered: Que después que vuestra Alteza metiesse debaxo de su iugo muchos pueblos bárbaros y naciones de peregrinas lenguas: y con el vencimiento aquellos ternían necessidad de recebir las leies: quel vencedor pone al vencido y con ellas nuestra lengua: entonces por esta mi Arte podrían venir en el conocimiento della como agora nos otros deprendemos el Arte de la Gramática latina para deprender el latín. I cierto assí es que no sola mente los enemigos de nuestra fe que tienen ia necessidad de saber el lenguaje castellano: mas los vizcaínos, navarros, franceses, italianos, y todos los otros que tienen algún trato y conversación en España y necessidad de nuestra lengua. (8) That after your Highness had brought under her yoke many barbarian peoples and nations of foreign tongues [peregrinas lenguas], and after these peoples had been conquered they would have to receive the laws that the victor imposes upon the vanquished, and with these laws, our tongue. And then, by means of this my book they will come to understand it, as we now learn Latin from books of Latin grammar. It is true furthermore that it is not only the enemies of our faith who need to know the Castilian language, but also Biscayans, Navarrese, the French, Italians, and all others who have any dealing and conversation with Spain, and need our language.

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But the historico-teleological story that Nebrija’s phrase tells when taken in full, and which forms the core of the balance of the prologue, is much less familiar than its bald beginning. And taken in full, phrase and story do not quite lend themselves to the congenial fantasy they are most commonly made to serve, the story of a self-constituting linguistic-imperial and nationalist project taking on the translated mantle of antique or recent empires after the reconquest of Spain from its Muslim occupiers, then exporting this new hegemonic form westward, and imposing it internally on recalcitrant communities. Or rather, if Nebrija’s prologue does serve as the early record of this constituting device, the conjoining of national and imperial projects by linguistic means, it is on the back of a genuinely complicating factor. In order to assume the translated mantle of empire handed it by Romans, Greeks, Hebrews, Arabs, and so on, Spain and the Spanish tongue, Castilian, must not only stand to these empires in the same relation as each stood to the other— their successor, by virtue of conquest. Spain and Castilian must resemble them in form and custom. Because they shared a common linking of language and empire, Spain and the Spanish tongue can assume, by virtue of their similar linking of language and empire, the roles as imperial languages and state handed them in translation by their predecessors. Isabel’s new kingdom must stand both inside and outside of this translated history and history of the translation of empires: like its predecessors, Spain’s empire emerges primitively in hand with an equally primitive language (“tuvo su niñez en el tiempo de los juezes y reies de Castilla y de León,” writes Nebrija: Castilian “had its childhood in the time of the judges and kings of Castile and Leon”) (5). Spain shows its nascent strength alongside the first great cultural products of and in the language (“començó a mostrar sus fuerças en tiempo del mui esclarecido y digno de toda la eternidad el rei don Alonso el sabio,” writes Nebrija; Castilian “began to show its strength in the time of the very enlightened and worthy of all eternity king, don Alfonso the Wise”) and reaches its maturity in the reign of Isabel, when the combination of the monarch’s labor and divine providence unites “los miembros y pedaços de España que estauan por muchas partes derramados” (6; the members and parts of Spain that were spilt in many places). At this moment, then, if the translation is to stay consistent, Spain will begin its geopolitical decline along with its language. (These are companion and correlative terms, so one could as easily say that the language will begin to decline along with the empire.) And it is at this point that Nebrija, under-

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standably uncomfortable to be seen prognosticating to its monarch the decline of her empire just at the moment of its seeming linguistic consolidation, does three things—none of them consistent with his project so far, and taken together not only subversive in the extreme, but exceptionally modern or even modernizing in their consequences. Most strongly put, one could say that European modernity hinges on these three gestures in translation, these three decisive moves in the theory of imperial-linguistic translation, that we find in Antonio de Nebrija’s 1492 prologue. For, anxious perhaps that the ontogenetics of his historiography guarantees his patron’s decline as well as emergence, Nebrija switches the historiographical register, translating his story into the idiom of providential historiography, or seeking rather to marry or conjugate the two by asserting that Spain enjoys “la monarchía y paz . . . primeramente por la bondad y prouidencia diuina, después por la industria, trabajo y diligencia de vuestra real Majestad” (6; sovereignty and peace first because of divine goodness and providence, and then on account of the care, work and diligence of your majesty). Isabel’s empire will not suffer the decline of previous empires because hers is a specifically Christian one, and she is able to labor in consort with providence to elaborate a state “la forma y travazón del cual assí está ordenada que muchos siglos, iniuria y tiempos no la podrán romper ni desatar. Assí que después de repurgada la cristiana religión: por la cual somos amigos de Dios o reconciliados con él . . . no queda ia otra cosa sino que florezcan las artes del paz” (6; whose form and the workings of which are ordered in such a way that neither the passing of many centuries, nor insults, nor the change of customs will be able to break or untie it. So, after the Christian religion has been cleansed, the religion through which we are friends of God or reconciled with him . . . the only thing left is for the arts of peace to flourish). Thus far, then, an anxious move of supplementation, theology descending to secure the exceptional, almost eschatological frame into which human history is translated by “el cumplimiento del tiempo: en que embió Dios a su unigénito hijo” (the accomplishing of that time, in which God sent his only son). There is nothing terribly remarkable in this, except inasmuch as Nebrija’s story has to this point been, if not exactly a secular one, at any rate a story whose great laws, of emergence, consolidation, and decline, are the laws associated with natural bodies rather than divine ones.5 But in order to make this providential argument, a second one is marshaled alongside it: the argument, as it were, from the book, from Nebrija’s book, and concerning his book’s role in securing that the old compact between state and language will

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not be broken. This is the curious passage in which Nebrija asserts, with a force in which we begin to see why he is so often identified as an early Spanish humanist, the value of his project: I por que mi pensamiento y gana siempre fue engrandecer las cosas de nuestra nación: y dar a los ombres de mi lengua obras en que mejor puedan emplear su ocio, que agora lo gastan leiendo novelas o istorias enbueltas en mil mentiras y errores, acordé ante todas las otras cosas reduzir en artificio este nuestro lenguaje castellano. . . . Por que si otro tanto en nuestra lengua no se haze como en aquellas [griego y latín], en vano vuestros cronistas y estoriadores escriven y encomiendan a inmortalidad la memoria de vuestros loables hechos, y nos otros tentamos de passar en castellano las cosas peregrinas y estrañas, pues que aqueste no puede ser sino negocio de pocos años. I será necessaria una de dos cosas: o que la memoria de vuestras hazañas perezca con la lengua; o que ande peregrinando por las naciones estranjeras: pues que no tiene propria casa en que pueda morar. En la çanja de la cual io quise echar la primera piedra, y hazer en nuestra lengua lo que Zenódoto en la griega y Crates en la latina. (6–7) And because my thoughts and desires have always been set on exalting everything about our nation, and to give the men of my tongue works in which to employ their idle hours with profit, which they now spend reading novels or stories wrapped in a thousand lies and errors, for this reason I resolved, before all else, to bring into useful shape [reduzir en artficio] this our Castilian language . . . for if we do not do this same thing with our tongue, as has been done in Greek and Latin, it will be in vain that your chroniclers and historians will write and consign to immortality the memory of your praiseworthy deeds, as it will be in vain for others of us to try to transport into Spanish things wonderful and strange [las cosas peregrinas y estranas]. For this can only be the task of a few years. And one of two things will necessarily follow: either the memory of your deeds will perish with our tongue; or it will wander lost in foreign lands [que ande peregrinando por las naciones estranjeras]; for it will have no proper home in which to dwell. And into the foundations of this home I wished to set the first stone, and to do for our tongue what Zenodotus did for Greek, and Crates for Latin.

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The second argument, which seeks to understand Nebrija’s Gramática as the vehicle for the empire’s preservation, and Nebrija himself as the providential savior of Spanish history as a result, sits uncomfortably next to the first. The third gesture has to do not with the intervention of providentialism, not with agency and putting Nebrija’s own interventions on a par with the intervention of providence—as though the human writer’s intervention secured the memory of the queen’s deeds from the inevitable drift into oblivion that providentialism also serves to ward against—but with this strange house that Nebrija seeks to build, out of language, for the memory of the queen’s deeds, which will otherwise wander, peregrinar, in strange lands. As the parallelism between the phrases “cosas peregrinas y estranas” and “peregrinando por las naciones estranjeras” suggests, here the memorializing side of Nebrija’s project becomes a means at once of securing the target language into which things wonderful and strange can be transported from other languages, and of ensuring that the queen’s deeds do not exist merely in translation, wandering in foreign languages, but have a proper linguistic home as well. Nebrija is playing on the exquisite double sense of the word “peregrino,” which means, as Sebastián de Covarrubias tells us in his 1611 Tesoro de la lengua, both “el que sale de su tierra en romeria a visitar alguna casa santa, o lugar santo,” a pilgrim who leaves his land in order to journey to some holy house—hence one who wanders far from home; and “cosa peregrina, cosa rara,” a strange or unusual thing.6 The etymology Covarrubias gives for this strange word is “Dixose en Latin peregrinus à peregre, hoc est longe, por andar largo camino” (peregrinus, from the Latin peregre, that is, “far,” because it entails covering a long road). We return to Nebrija’s Gramática. The task of the grammarian, of the prescriptive as well as descriptive grammarian, is, then, to make it possible to translate odd or wandering things, odd or wandering terms, cosas peregrinas, into Spanish from other tongues, into a Spanish tongue that welcomes them into itself; but also to make it possible for Spanish to be translated into other tongues and into a national memory from a place where it is not “strange” itself or strange to itself, not itself peregrina, but at home. Things, cosas, or terms can only be strange and wandering, peregrinas, if they have a home, a grammatical home, in the first instance. But Spanish becomes foreign and goes into translation when it has none. Th is picture of geopolitical wandering, of peregrine and homeless languages secured by the providential will of the humanist grammarian, is on the whole rather confusing, but it is a systematic confusion. In Nebrija,

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translation, the matter of moving “things” or “terms” between natural languages, operates both as a term to describe the things moved and the moving of the things, both the terms and the translation. Translation is both a noun, or a substantive, and a verb, a verbalized noun; it occupies different discursive levels. One would of course be inclined to overlook this conceptual and syntactical slippage or folding of discursive and metadiscursive elements if the author were not so fine a grammarian, so clamorously committed to the regularization of usages, to the normativization of linguistic practice, and hence, one would suppose, deeply averse to these sorts of amphibian terms. In the Gramática, though, the grammatical transference between nouns and verbs for translation, the verbalization of the noun “peregrino” into the form “pereginar,” is the marker of a drift internal to language, to a theory of language that moves from nouns to verbs, from a lexical to a grammatical conceptualization, from names to relations between names. This drift seems on first sight to match, to translate well from the grammatical to the geopolitical domain, the drift of empires that Nebrija is also treating in these lines—the drift of peoples from the enclosure of their borders outward, into commercial and other relations with others, a Babelian dispersal, the movement from localism to the grand grammar of international relations. The difficulties in all this, however, both in the grammatical case and in the case of the geopolitical imaginary that it seems to translate, finally come down to determining, in the first place, which comes first, conceptually as well as historically—the verb or the noun, the local or the global, state or empire; and in the second place, what force or agency compels this drift, grammatical as well as geopolitical, to occur at all. In Nebrija’s prologue, as we have seen, at the moment at which the question of the decline of the empire-language couplet arises, three writing or translating procedures or effects emerge—the strategy of providential historiography; the heroic strategy of the writer who seeks to secure the future of the queen’s memory; and the discursive folding of grammar onto itself at the point of translation. At this crucial spot, translation is at the same time what guards the borders, what keeps “peregrine” things from entering unannounced or untranslated; and the threat to the home, the threat that what is to be preserved within Spain’s national-linguistic borders will find itself, even when it is notionally at home within its own national boundaries, in a peregrine exile, homeless. The humanist function of the heroic grammarian-translator, the providential savior of an empire otherwise doomed to decline, emerges also as the engine of that very decline, of the dispersal or unrooting

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of language. By the same sort of metonymy that informs the displacement of levels between the “peregrine” and the “peregrination,” noun and verb, state and empire, the translator and the translation exchange properties, neither prior to the other, each following the other. Th is moment of exchange, we might say, marks the simultaneous entrance of secular agency into the world of history, and its exit. Secular agency enters the world by an act of providence, which provides the figure of the heroic grammarian whose epic task is to secure the reign of Isabel. Simultaneously, however, providence acts to remove from history the verb, the act by means of which the figure, the subject and the substantive, of the heroic grammarian enters history. The heroic grammarian is providentially called into history, as a figure and an example of secular agency; but his being-called-into-history is itself envisioned, not as, or not only as, an act of providence, but also as mere happenstance, the mere touch of contingent occurring. Act and substance, translator and translation, now touch upon the contingency of mere occurring, upon what La Celestina, Rojas’s remarkable and contemporaneous work, signals by the mere “touching” of stone knocking on stone. Nebrija’s modernity lies in his willingness to entertain this double, contradictory thought about the history he is describing, and about his own relation to that history. We can now see that the etymology that Sebastián de Covarrubias provides for the term governing and incorporating this strange logic, the word “peregrino,” serves in fact to foreclose a range of senses found in Nebrija’s use of the term, and to foreclose more broadly the dangerous, modern logic that Nebrija’s Gramática invents and discloses. For in the Gramática, Nebrija is enacting and expressing, with unsparing clarity and rigor, in the mirror-structure linking the grammatical drift of peregrine translation to the geopolitics of imperial translation, the sense that the term “peregrinus” had in the empire: the foreigner at Rome, the noncitizen among citizens. “Peregrinus” is different, the Calepinus tells us, from the hospes, from the foreigner who comes to a foreign city, qui aliena civitate est, inasmuch as the peregrinus, qui in sua civitate non est, is he who is not in his city, he who is shorn of the positive predicate of being in another, even an alien city, he who is shorn of the positive predicate of inhabiting the alien city: the peregrinus lies within the borders of what he does not inhabit.7 No, like the radically republican citizen that he also figures, Nebrijas’s peregrinus, the figure of the translator, of the translating, and of the translated term, is determined only negatively. This negative determination of the theory and practices of translation, in its grammatical as well as its political and civic senses, almost two hundred years

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before Spinoza, is the hallmark of the modernity that Rojas and Nebrija inaugurate, and which even so unusual a lexicographer as Sebastián de Covarrubias would find too threatening to face entirely. It would require a different sort of writing to recapture this peregrine account of translation, opened briefly at the close of the fifteenth century and displaced and repressed, if not forgotten, over the course of the following century. It would require a writer like Cervantes, and a discursive form like the novel, able to capitalize upon the systematic strangeness of translation, emerging from that systematic, material strangeness, to sound again, in a different vein, stone on stone, letter on letter, the peregrine tones we find in Rojas and in Nebrija. I will close by referring very briefly to a passage from Don Quixote, Nebrija’s and Rojas’s great heir. We know this scene of my story well, too well. It is a story told for us by the great cheerleaders of Spanish convivencia. In this scene, unmistakably, the matter of translation bears the full weight of the ideologies, of the fantasies, of andalusi cohabitation that the confessional Hapsburg state would be busily trying to replace and erase. The story goes like this. A man accustomed to reading all manner of odds and ends, distraught that a book he had been reading dropped off midway, the manuscript apparently lost somewhere in the archives of La Mancha—this man, wandering the old Moorish-Jewish marketplace in Toledo, finds a manuscript destined for recycling in the shop of a silk manufacturer, notes that it is written in Arabic characters, and finds someone who can read and translate the text. It turns out to be the manuscript of the second part, or second sortie, of Don Quixote. This is how the 1620 edition of Thomas Shelton’s translation has it. I draw your attention to the date, and I shall come back to it shortly: Being one day walking in the exchange of Toledo, a certain boy by chance would have sold divers old quires and scrolls of books to a squire that walked up and down in that place, and I, being addicted to read such scrolls, though I found them torn in the streets, borne away by this my natural inclination, took one of the quires in my hand, and perceived it to be written in Arabical characters, and seeing that, although I knew the letters, yet could I not read the substance, I looked about to view whether I could perceive any Moor turned Spaniard thereabouts, that could read them; nor was it very difficult to find there such an interpreter; for, if I had searched one of another better and more ancient language, that place would easily

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afford him. In fine, my good fortune presented one to me; to whom telling my desire, and setting the book in his hand, he opened it, and, having read a little therein, began to laugh. I demanded of him why he laughed; and he answered, at that marginal note which the book had. I bade him to expound it to me, and with that took him a little aside; and he, continuing still his laughter, said: “There is written there, on this margin, these words: ‘This Dulcinea of Toboso, so many times spoken of in this history, had the best hand for powdering of porks of any woman in all the Mancha.’ ”8 This is Cervantes’s Castilian: Estando yo un día en el Alcaná de Toledo, llegó un muchacho a vender unos cartapacios y papeles viejos a un sedero; y, como yo soy aficionado a leer, aunque sean los papeles rotos de las calles, llevado desta mi natural inclinación, tomé un cartapacio de los que el muchacho vendía, y vile con caracteres que conocí ser arábigos. Y, puesto que, aunque los conocía, no los sabía leer, anduve mirando si parecía por allí algún morisco aljamiado que los leyese; y no fue muy dificultoso hallar intérprete semejante, pues, aunque le buscara de otra mejor y más antigua lengua, le hallara. En fin, la suerte me deparó uno, que, diciéndole mi deseo y poniéndole el libro en las manos, le abrió por medio, y, leyendo un poco en él, se comenzó a reír. Preguntéle yo que de qué se reía, y respondióme que de una cosa que tenía aquel libro escrita en el margen por anotación. Díjele que me la dijese; y él, sin dejar la risa, dijo: “Está, como he dicho, aquí en el margen escrito esto: ‘Esta Dulcinea del Toboso, tantas veces en esta historia referida, dicen que tuvo la mejor mano para salar puercos que otra mujer de toda la Mancha.’ ”9 I am hardly the first person to draw attention to this moment, which provides critics like Antonio Medina Molera with evidence that a “mudejarismo cervantino” animates the novel—liberal and capacious in its disordered spirit, modern, an insurgent attack upon “el ideal ascético cristiano viejo”10 —and others like María Rosa Menocal with a symptomatic shorthand for describing the residual traces of Spanish convivencia, the outlines of its shape—a Christian, Muslim, and Jewish cohabitation, uneasily managed to be sure, but successful, in her view, over centuries—now, in 1605, under the most severe

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Inquisitorial pressure, resulting in the expulsion of the Moriscos from Spain some five years after the publication of this scene.11 That the giveaway line here—the line that identifies the manuscript for our narrator—should be the paratextual comment that “Dulcinea had the best hand at salting pork of any maid in La Mancha”—tells us a number of things in this context. It is of course not accidental that it is pork that is being symptomatically produced here, as it is the marker, the dietary shibboleth, separating the three communities in a ritual of dietary exclusion that would make sharing food anything but a communal experience, and would stamp any shared lexicon with division, dissent, and dissimulation—“pork” in one tongue would count, among its principal predicates, “edible,” and in other languages, “not edible.” That a scene coding the transmission of cultural materials among the peoples of the book should turn on the recognition of the external marker of their differences, or one of them—the pig—need not mean that Cervantes is seeking to undercut the sort of transactional copresence of the three religions in this section. This might be easily understood as a dose of regional humor, indicating, as Eric Graf suggests, that the parodic and comedic tone of such episodes betrays a desire for social engineering; they are Cervantes’s abstract ways of unveiling Spanish history as an absurd series of ethnic and/or cultural dialectics: Basque/ Castilian, Moor/Spaniard, Leonese/Carolingian. In the end, Cervantes indicates that to be able to contextualize and to laugh at the tortuous complexity of Spanish history, so as not to become its pathetic protagonist, requires that one actively outmaneuver and defeat the fraudulent ideology of the ethnocentric Spanish national identity and replace it with the hybridized truth of said history—that is, with more historically accurate, less ideal, identities. The identity displacements offered by Cervantes’s vision open the way for the reader to recognize the incredulous and resistant perspective of the native Morisco, who is presently experiencing the ill effects of Spanish nationalism.12 Finally, that what Dulcinea is so good at is the preserving of this pork suggests, with Cervantes’s marvelous and typical humor, something about the preservation of cultural tropes or of historical residue: in the world of Cervantes’s history, historiography, too, is a sort of salting away, for later consumption, of markers of difference rather than community alone.

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Every detail of this famous scene, and of the ones directly preceding it (in which, as Graf suggests, the narrator’s comment that Don Quixote and the Biscayan seem poised to slice each other up as you would cut a pomegranate, “una granada,” is also the gastronomic correlative of the violent exclusion of the Arabs from Spain, of their expulsion, in 1492, from Granada)—every detail of this famous scene is determined and overdetermined by cultural materials of which it is a symptom and a translation. The very accidental nature of the scene, then, is revealed to be ironic, or perhaps compensatory, or even, on a more Straussian note, defensive: nothing is accidental about the scene, or put differently, what appear to be accidental elements of the scene reveal themselves to be necessary and determined, determined for instance by a “nationalist” cultural material in which “pork” is never only pork, but also always a marker of ethnic and religious distinction; a pomegranate always also the symbol of the kingdom of Granada; a silk merchant no doubt ancestrally linking the commodity “silk” to the exotic circuits of Mediterranean trade. Even the location of the market, in Toledo’s Alcaná district, reveals at the level of the name its peregrine genealogy and function. “Alcaná,” Covarrubias tells his readers, some six years after Cervantes publishes part one of Don Quixote, es vna calle en Toledo muy conocida, toda ella de tiendas de merceria: nombre derechamente Hebreo del verbo . . . Chana, que entre otras sinificaciones es vna emere, comprar, y cõ el articulo Arabigo al-Kana, y Cananeo es lo mesmo que mercader, que compra y vende. . . . El padre Guadix dize, que Alcaná es Arabigo de alquina, que vale ganancia. Bien puede ser, pero de la raiz Hebrea ya dicha. Esta calle antiguamente tenian poblada los Iudios tratantes: y en tiempo del Rey don Pedro, sus hermanos d[on] Fadrique, y don Enrique, queriendo encastillarse en la ciudad de Toledo, les resistieron la entrada por la puente de Sanmartin muchos caualleros: pero haziendo la desecha dieron la buelta y vinieron a entrar por la puente de Alcantara, y hizieron gran matança en los Iudios, que passaron de mil personas, y les robaron las tiendas que tenian de merceria en el Alcaná. [Alcaná] is a well-known street in Toledo, lined with shops. The name comes directly from the Hebrew verb chana, one of whose meanings is emere, to buy. With the prefi xed Arabic article it becomes al-Kana; Cananite is the same as “merchant, one who buys and sells.” . . .

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Father Guadix says that Alcaná is an Arabic word, from al-quina, which means “profit.” It could well be, but it derives in any case from the aforesaid Hebrew root. This street was peopled in past times by Jewish merchants. In the time of King Don Pedro, his brothers Don Fadrique and Don Enrique, wishing to take the city of Toledo, were resisted by many knights at the bridge of San Martin. Taking a different route, however, Don Fadrique and Don Enrique went round and entered through the bridge of Alcantara, and slaughtered a great number of the Jews, more than one thousand of them, and stole their shops on the Alcaná. The Christian narrator who bumps into the manuscript, touches upon it as it were contingently, should appear to us contemporary readers but also to Cervantes’s contemporaries to be a comic allegorization of the circumstances of everyday Spanish history in 1605, when it would be impossible not to encounter, among the detritus of Spanish society, as in the lexicon of Castilian, the relics of the Muslim and Jewish past and of the Hebrew and Arabic languages it was trying so hard to repress at other, institutional levels. Under this description, then, Cervantes’s theory of translation appears to us as particularly modern precisely because it is also an exercise, as it were, in the psychoanalysis of culture—an exercise in the exposure or translation of the determinations that underlie a circumstance or an accident of the text, or of a social symptom.13 (What appears accidental, bumping into the presence of Islam or Judaism, Arabic and Hebrew, in a marketplace in Toledo, turns out to be determined: everywhere and necessarily, Islam, Judaism, and Christianity clamorously touch upon each other in 1605, even or especially where this peregrine touch is made to seem the least plausible, the least necessary, the most accidental of circumstances.) But this would of course mean that Cervantes, like Covarrubias, has sacrificed to this culturally deterministic model of translation, however much it may appear to augur a psychoanalytic modernism at odds with other forms of determinism, the very peregrine form of translational modernity that Rojas and Nebrija seem to me to have discovered and disclosed a hundred years earlier. Or perhaps not. For another way of approaching this matter would be to remind ourselves that Shelton’s lines from the 1620 translation are not the first effort made to translate Cervantes’s text into English, though they are the ones that have come down to English speakers, picked up and communicated in editions and adaptations for centuries on. The first edition of Shelton’s trans-

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lation, famously published in 1612 and working from the Brussels edition of Don Quixote, of 1607, had a number of small (and a few gross) errors, and the 1620 second edition of Shelton’s translation introduced quite a few emendations in the original translation. Edwin Knowles, who first studied the two editions comparatively, noted, “The superficial and careless quality of the job as a whole is definitely proved by the many mistakes common to both editions, both in the English per se and in the English as a translation.”14 For this reason, Knowles concludes that “the correcting [in the 1620 edition] was almost certainly not done by Shelton, for none of his mannerisms occur in the variant forms, and in general the new words are more modern English” (262).15 The changes between the 1612 and the 1620 editions are in some cases primarily cosmetic, and some are outright wrong; but others, particularly the changes to the first chapters of Shelton’s 1612 edition, are more substantial, and at times they correct egregious errors. At this juncture, then, in the Alcaná of Toledo, just at the point in Cervantes’s own text where translation—the translation from Arabic script into Spanish—is made to bear the symptomatic and overdetermined weight that I have just been describing, just here where a translator is sought and produced, Cervantes’s translator Shelton originally made quite a different translation from the one that the 1620 edition records. Cervantes’s text, describing the moment when his narrator turns to look for someone who will translate the Arabic characters before him, reads in Castilian “anduve mirando si parecía por allí algún morisco aljamiado que los leyese; y no fue muy dificultoso hallar intérprete semejante, pues, aunque le buscara de otra mejor y más antigua lengua, le hallara.”16 The 1620 version of this passage is “I looked about to view whether I could perceive thereabouts, any Moore turned Spaniard, that could read them; nor was it very difficult to find there such an interpreter; for, if I had searched one of another better and more ancient language, that place would easily afford him” (63). But in Shelton’s first translation, in 1612, “any Moore turned Spaniard” read as “any more translated Spaniard, thereabouts that could read them” (65), with the typesetter conveniently, driven by a typological logic that makes every sort of sense, having left the word “more,” “Moor,” shorn of one of the two o’s it sports in 1620, and headed off by a lowercase m rather than the uppercase one it garners in the corrected edition. A “more translated Spaniard,” in short, a Spaniard “more translated” than the narrator, a Spaniard who has entered more deeply into the field of translation, who has traveled to more languages, across more borders, a more peregrine term, a “more translated Spaniard.”

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One sees why the correction in the 1620 edition is called for: this is a lectio facilior error, almost impossible to spot, pertaining to the phonic register of the word as well as to the visual one. And more: a “more translated Spaniard” makes more sense or at least as much sense, and in certain senses it makes better sense than the more accurate 1620 emendation, and perhaps even than Cervantes’s original Castilian. A “more translated Spaniard” makes more sense not just because the comparative particle “more” makes sense as a way of characterizing any other Spaniard who knew more Arabic than the narrator, hence a “more translated” Spaniard, someone possessed of greater capacity to translate or someone who has himself been translated to more countries and tongues than Cervantes’s narrator—and not only because it introduces the proper name, as it were, of the episode’s action: it is translation that is the tenor of the “Moor turned Spaniard,” of the tropic “turning” or conversion staged in the 1620 translation. The erroneous whiff of Shelton’s “more” is better than Cervantes’s Castilian, or at least as good, precisely because we do not know whether it is a mistake, “more” and “Moor” being, in one respect, phonically at any rate and in the loose typography of the time also visually, in at least this, the seemingly material sense, being at once the same and functionally and semantically entirely different. Shelton’s “more” is at least as good as Cervantes’s original, precisely because its undecidable, seemingly material obscurity, reiterated and repeated across the history of its translations, preserved as it were in linguistic salt by the hand of subsequent translators operating like Dulcinea upon the contested consumable that is Cervantes’s language, reintroduces spectacularly the element of contingency, of aleatory touch, we found in Nebrija and in Rojas. For this translation of the “Moor” into a mere “more” is an extraordinary error to make, but it is not clear whose error it is, Shelton’s or the typesetter’s, and it is not the last time that a translator, even an excellent one, will make a mistake at this point precisely. Tobias Smollett, for example, translates Cervantes’s “morisco aljamiado,” Shelton’s “more translated Spaniard” or “Moor turned Spaniard,” like this: “I was led by this my natural curiosity, to turn over some of the leaves; I found them written in Arabick, which not being able to read, though I knew the characters, I looked about for some Portugeze Moor, who should understand it” (Cervantes 1755, 45).17 Not a “more translated Spaniard,” not a “Moor turned Spaniard,” but a “Portuguese Moor”—an astonishing way to render Cervantes’s “morisco aljamiado.” And yet Shelton, and his typesetter, and Smollett after them had at their disposal at least one source that would have given them the sense of the word “aljamiado”—Perceval

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and Minsheu’s A Dictionarie in Spanish and English, which gives for “Aljama or Alçama” the definition “an assembly of Jewes, or their synagogue” (Perceval), for “Aljamia,” “the Moores call the Spanish toong Aljamia” (Minsheu), and “Aljamiado, made into the Spanish tongue” (Minsheu) (all in Perceval and Minsheu).18 Cervantes’s “aljamiado” is indeed an unusual word, a word in which, on the evidence of Minsheu and Perceval’s dictionary, the three cultures of the book crossed paths, as they do on the Alcaná of Toledo. It is a word that names at the same time “the Spanish tongue,” the “assembly of Jewes, or their synagogue,” and the aljama as Cervantes and Covarrubias would have thought it: as, in the words of Covarrubias’s Tesoro, “ayuntamiento y concejo” (a town council or congregation), the administrative unit into which the morisco populations were organized in the course of the sixteenth century in Spain. Covarrubias’s definition of the term recalls that the philologist Diego de Vrrea traced the word’s etymology to “Geamiun, del verbo gemea, que vale ajuntar, y puede ser Hebreo de alliam, . . . iam, vale mar, y congregacion de aguas: y metaforicamente congregacion de gentes, de donde se pudo dezir aljamia” (Geamiun, from the Arabic verb gemea or jemayaa, which means “to gather together,” and which may in turn derive from the Hebrew alliam, iam, which means “sea,” and gathering of waters, and metaphorically the gathering of peoples). And Covarrubias concludes revealing, by means of a different etymology, what we, and Cervantes, and in their symptomatic errors many years later Cervantes’s translators as well, realize, record, repeat: that aljamia and aljamiado are not just discursive terms in translation, but also and inseparably names for the resistant materiality of translating terms, that is, discursive as well as metadiscursive operators. Covarrubias concludes his definition of aljama recollecting that for Juan López de Velasco, “aljama” comes from “al, y jamaha lenguaje escuro en Hebreo,” from “al and Jamaha, Hebrew for ‘obscure language.’ ” Cervantes’s novel captures narratively and turns to extraordinary advantage Nebrija’s peregrine linguistic “obscurity.” Don Quixote—and, in complexly irreconcilable ways, the novel’s translations as well—wander, peregrine, spreading narrative functions and their associated evidentiary paradigms and protocols for veridification across narrative voices and languages in translation among each other. Think of the novel’s Castilian narrators; of Cide Hamete Benengeli, the morisco aljamiado who translates the lost and recovered manuscript; of the Hebrew language whose greater “antiquity and perfection” still haunt the Alcaná in Toledo and despite or because of its absence can be read on every page of Don Quixote—this systematic

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confusion of languages and levels of expression capitalizes upon and generates the peregrine wandering with which this first novel of modernity recaptures and rethinks the drama of contingent translation radically set forth in Rojas’s La Celestina at the dawn of the print age. In its translators’ overdetermined, excessively motivated errors, in the symptomatic errors we detect at  the moment when Cervantes’s true subject matter emerges, when the peregrine obscurity of translation is itself named, we read, accurately to the symptomatic sense of Cervantes’s work if also entirely falsely, entirely inaccurately, the political shape into which translational modernity can gather its late subjects.

Chapter 8

The Social and Cultural Translation of the Hebrew Bible in Early Modern England: Reflections, Working Principles, and Examples Naomi Tadmor

Around the year 1667, an Englishwoman sat down to design a work of embroidery. Leafing through pictures and sample books, she selected several images, traced the outlines on a stretched piece of fabric, and chose the colors and materials to be employed. This woman’s identity remains unknown; however, her work can tell us something about Bible translation and the relationship between sacred contexts and texts (see Figure 13). The central figure—resembling King Charles I or Charles II—was in fact an image of King Solomon.1 He is depicted, typically, as the font of justice: in this case he is standing in judgment over the two mothers in the proverbial trial.2 The figure to the left is the true mother, kneeling before a cavalier, holding the swaddled baby. Above her is probably the false mother, with suggestively painted cheeks and a rich yet immodest dress: she is lifting her dress to expose her petticoat and feet (while her legs are showing through), which accentuates her audacity and conveys the ultimate exposure of her falsehood.3 The kneeling figure at the front is Pharaoh’s daughter, rescuing a swaddled baby Moses from the river Nile; another Moses is seen upstream. The Puritanical-looking woman to the left of the composition is a typical Hagar, holding her son Ishmael by the hand, about to go into exile. Her banishment is

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Figure 13. Panel with biblical vignettes. Copyright © The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Art Resource, NY.

reflected in her departure from the composition, which also symbolizes the triumph of the New Testament over the Old.4 Further to the right is an image of Rebecca, giving Abraham’s steward water to drink from a jug on which the date 1667 is embroidered. These images represent a form of cultural translation. All the figures are clad in contemporary seventeenth-century clothes. They appear alongside other conventional images such as the hunting scene, formulaic representations of fauna and flora, and the country house, where the faces of the maker of the embroidery and her husband are seen peering through the window. These were, moreover, familiar images. They can be found in embroidery manuals, and generally follow the illustrations in contemporary Bibles. Evidently it was usual for people in the seventeenth century—in England, as indeed elsewhere in Europe—to imagine biblical figures as contemporaries and to transpose them from the biblical past to contemporary settings.5

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The question to pursue here is whether the same could be done with words. Was it the case that the translated biblical text, too, had undergone a process of transposition to contemporary settings? The answer I wish to explore is—by and large—yes.6 Similar processes of translation can be identified in the textual renditions of the English Bible, and indeed in a lineage of English versions leading to the King James Version. However, because of the sacred nature of the text these processes were both complex and constrained. The next section of this chapter outlines nine working principles, which, collectively, can help us understand aspects of the translation processes of early modern English Bibles: from William Tyndale’s seminal translation (New Testament 1525, Old Testament 1530) to the companies of translators working on the King James Version (published 1611: the lineage of cardinal versions is listed below). A great deal has been written on the theory and practice of biblical translation over the centuries.7 English Bibles, and in particular the King James Version, have been studied in detail.8 The early modern scholarly world from which these translations have sprung cannot possibly be covered in this context. It would be useful, however, to step back from the programmatic and scholarly debates and attempt to distill a number of key practices and working principles that guided early modern translators as they went about their work, and thereby also to point out some of their complexities and contradictions. The brief third section then proceeds to offer examples of translations. In the fourth and final section, the demonstration takes the form of a case study, focusing in particular on notions of office and rule as manifested in biblical translations.9 The Lineage of Cardinal English Biblical Versions 1. Wycliffite Versions (Early Version c.1384, Late Version c.1395, based on the Vulgate) 2. Tyndale (New Testament 1526, Five Books of Moses 1530, from the original tongues) 3. Coverdale (1535, based on Tyndale and on other sources) 4. Thomas Matthew (1537, including Tyndale’s printed translations and his unpublished drafts) 5. Great Bible (1539, based on Tyndale and other sources) 6. Geneva Bible (1560, from the original tongues and drawing mainly on Tyndale / Thomas Matthew) 7. Bishops’ Bible (1568, subsequently revised, and drawing mainly on the Great Bible and the Geneva Bible)

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8. Rheims-Douai (New Testament published 1582, Old Testament completed 1609–10, based on the Vulgate) 9. King James Version (1611, from the original tongues, based on the Bishops’ Bible, with comparisons to 2–6, and even 8) • Studying English biblical versions, particularly from Tyndale’s version onward, nine working principles can be distilled. Their manifestations and relative balance vary. Taken together, however, they can explain translation strategies and even lexical choices, as well as challenges facing the translators, for some of the principles could be incompatible. First and foremost, English translators from the late medieval through the early modern period (who were almost invariably clerics) believed as a matter of course that the Bible is the word of God, and that it is therefore crucial that it should be rendered accurately. Ideally, as the single most important English translator, William Tyndale, explained, it should be conveyed “worde for worde.” Not only the literal message was important; the very order of the words contained divine “grace a[n]d swetnesse, sence and pure vnderstandinge” that should be conveyed as best as possible.10 As Dr. Miles Smith said in the introduction to the King James Version: “we desire that the Scripture may speake like it selfe, as in the language of Canaan.”11 Second, as the Bible was the living word of God, however, it was also taken as given that its holiness would transcend any mortal rendition and any vernacular habitus—a working principle that immediately opened the door to adaptation. Miles Smith explained this, too, in the translators’ introduction to the King James Version: “The very meanest translation of the Bible in English, set foorth by men . . . containeth the word of God, nay, is the word of God.” Just as “the Kings Speech, which hee vttered in Parliament, being translated into French, Dutch, Italian, and Latine, is still the King’s Speech.”12 Third, it was also believed—again, following Tyndale—that the English tongue had a unique affinity with the Hebrew. Both languages lack prominent grammatical cases, which meant that their syntax (which, unlike Latin, say, is not strongly based on inflection) was perceived as highly congenial for translation, as Tyndale firmly asserted: the “manner of speakynge” in Hebrew and English, he explained, is “both one.” “A thousande partes better maye it [the Bible] be translated in to the english then in to the latyne.”13 Whereas in English a word-for-word translation may be possible, as if following a straight

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line, in Latin one would need to “seke a compasse” to make sense of the grammatical maze. The presumed special relationship between Hebrew and English was perceived as a divine sign that the translation is important and desired by God, for all languages were created by God.14 Fourth, while early modern Protestant translators made it their mission to study Hebrew and to return to the original text, they were nonetheless profoundly schooled in the Latin, which they read and wrote since childhood as well as—if not better than—their mother tongue, and indeed continued to use for scholarly if not liturgical purposes.15 This meant that however much they engaged with the original text of the Hebrew Bible, they often remained rooted in the Vulgate, which they held in great reverence.16 The Latin Vulgate therefore continued to play a key role as a mediating text in all early modern English Bible translations, Catholic as well as Protestant, as also seen in what follows. Fifth, as devout Christians of their era, translators habitually read the Scriptures backward, from the New Testament to the Old, to highlight the connections between the two, rather than starting from the ancient text and working forward, as the present-day philological logic might suggest. This, too, could affect lexical choices. This theological rather than philological logic made perfect sense in the culture of the time and was indeed required. The translators of the King James Version were instructed explicitly: “When a word hath diverse significations, that to be kept which has been most commonly used by the most of the Ancient Fathers, being agreeable to the property of the place, and the Analogy of Faith.”17 In some cases the New Testament was also translated first, which either confirmed or challenged notions of agreement.18 In any event, renditions of the Hebrew text in the New Testament stood before key translators as they went through the chronologically earlier Hebrew text. Sixth, all early modern biblical translations—and translators—were working with an awareness of their predecessors, starting from Wycliffe and Tyndale and leading to the King James Version. Tyndale knew the Wycliffite version but did not follow it, whereas all Protestant versions—to a greater or lesser extent—followed Tyndale (as noted earlier). The King James translators, in particular, were instructed to use certain earlier versions as the basis for translation and comparison (including versions 2–7 listed earlier).19 Most translations of the English Bible were therefore by definition revisions, as the introduction of the King James Version piously confirmed: their aim was “not to make a new Translation, nor yet to make of a bad one a good one . . . but to make a good one better, out of the many good ones.”20

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Seventh, the aim of most translators was not only to render the Bible into the vernacular but to contribute to its broad dissemination. Pioneering translators—from Erasmus and Tyndale to Coverdale—wished that one day a plowboy would be able to cite the word of God in his native tongue, and a spinning woman would hum it as she worked.21 They would no doubt have been pleased with the devout familiarity with the text demonstrated by the embroiderer of the biblical vignettes in Figure 13. Eighth, when the literary or devotional contexts required, translators therefore habitually split semantic fields and conveyed one Hebrew word with the use of several English words, or, conversely, conveyed several words in the original with the use of single English words, as the case arose. This practice was explained programmatically in the introduction to the King James Version, yet its broader application, and implications, deserve closer attention. Finally, the ninth principle concerns the very definition of translation. One synonym of the verb “to translate” in early modern England was indeed the (by now rarely used) verb “to English”—which also helps us to understand the translation mission. As the Bible was rendered into the vernacular, subtle and overt Englishing had taken place—unintended, sometimes inevitable, yet intended, too.22 Celebrations of the four hundredth anniversary of the King James Version, which took place in 2011, highlighted the genius, the beauty, and the remarkable accuracy of “the Word of God in English.”23 Textual fidelity, however, as discussed here, was at least to an extent a matter of choice, if not a matter of policy and ideology. This leads to the next section, which focuses on examples of Englishing. Starting from general examples, I will proceed to a detailed case study, highlighting the ways in which concepts of government and rule were rendered in English Bibles, with particular reference to the key word “prince.” • Diverse transpositions in the meanings of biblical words are well known and widely recorded. Adam and Eve famously appear in the Geneva Bible wearing “breeches” (Gen. 3:7).24 In one version “high priest” is described as “hed bischop”; “wise men” are called “wizards”; and “gentiles,” redesignated as “hey[the]ns,” are glossed in a side note: “strangers,” such as those called by the Greeks “barbarous” and by “our old Saxons . . . welschmen.”25 Already in the Wycliffite Bible, the word “cider” (“sidir”) appeared to designate strong

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drink, perhaps better to explain the text to the people of Hereford, where the “Cider Bible” is still kept.26 When Tyndale notably insisted on using “love” rather than “charity,” “elder” instead of “priest,” or “congregation” instead of “church,” he was willing to risk his life.27 Biblical dictionaries reveal, moreover, how numerous ancient words were prone to shifts, including important terms and mundane words devoid of any heavy theological baggage. Several types of spaces, for example, are described in English Bibles as “chamber,” and canopy as “closet,” thus invoking familiar architectural settings.28 Kesef was at times rendered not as “silver” but as “money,” better to depict economic transaction.29 The hunted meat provided by Esau is specifically identified as “venision.”30 The English rebel Absalom is caught not among the tangled twigs of the Mediterranean terebinth but in the majestic branches of an oak, itself a symbol of English monarchy.31 In other contexts birds and insects are given English names: no fewer than five different biblical birds, for example, are identified as “owl.”32 My book The Social Universe of the English Bible shows how common terms of social description were familiarized in an English context. The word ’ishah, for example, was translated either as “woman” or “wife,” although the Hebrew original spelled out no distinction between the two, as early modern scholars were aware. References to the “taking” of women were expressed in terms of marriage, invoking contemporary notions of monogamy (whereas the word “marriage” as such does not appear even once in the original text of the Hebrew Bible). In a similar way, the Hebrew “love thy friend” or “thy fellow man” is rendered “love thy neighbour,” a crucial concept in the early modern “politics of the parish.”33 This takes us to our particular case study concerning terms of office and rule and the translation history of the biblical term “prince.” • In January 1649, King Charles I prepared himself to die. Defeated in war and condemned by a section of his own Parliament, he put his faith in the power of the word to advocate his cause. His book of last meditations, Eikon basilike, was disseminated on the very same day of his execution.34 The word “prince” featured in this text as a key term: the king employed it to refer to himself, his heir, and monarchs in general. The prince’s rule was presented as paramount and anchored in biblical directives. Rebellion against the prince was likewise mentioned with reference to the Bible and compared to the rebellion of Korah, who tumbled into the bottomless pit together with his clan,

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and was buried alive as a divine punishment for raising his head against his “prince,” Moses.35 Indeed, English Bibles (and most importantly the King James Version, commissioned by Charles’s father) left no room for doubt that the Old Testament polities were headed by “princes” and that princely rule was therefore of an unquestionably ancient and holy provenance. The patriarch Abraham was designated as a “prince.”36 His grandson Jacob was blessed as a “prince.”37 The lands Egypt, Tyrus, and Meshech (to mention but a few) were all said to be ruled by “princes.”38 These, in turn, had underneath them an array of dignitaries: dukes, lords, captains, lieutenants, even sheriffs. The word “prince” thus made its appearance 364 times in the King James’s Old Testament, with additional 59 mentions in the notes.39 But if one turns to the Hebrew Bible itself, one cannot but wonder to what extent such representations of the biblical polities and their princely rule were accurately rooted in the original text. The gaps between the ancient formulations and their English renditions are telling, as the examples just mentioned already suggest; but when it comes to princely rule, these gaps are startling, for the term “prince” has in fact no root as such in the Hebrew Bible itself. Let us look closely at this translation case. It was usual in biblical translations—as just suggested—to render complex Hebrew words with the use of more than one equivalent; conversely, it was not unusual to group together several Hebrew words under a single English term. But in the case of the word “prince,” the gaps are wide. “Prince” consists of an amalgamation of at least fourteen different Hebrew words,40 including (1) nasi’ (literally the exalted one); (2) sar (he who has rule or might);41 (3) nagid (leader, the one at the front);42 (4) nadiv (generous, noble); (5) nasikh (anointed);43 (6) aḥashdarpanim (Persian governors); (7) ḥashmanim (possibly ambassadors?);44 (8) kohanim (priests);45 (9) seganim (local governors);46 (10) partamim (Persian nobles); (11) qatzin (chief, perhaps judge);47 (12) rav (chief, commander, in compound titles); (13) razon, rozen (king, ruler, or judge);48 (14) shalish (literally the third in place or command).49 In traversing this varied linguistic terrain, English translators were leaning on ancient traditions. Most of the Hebrew words rendered in English Bibles as “prince” were already grouped together in the Greek Septuagint under the word archôn and in the Vulgate under princeps. Such, for example, was the case of nasi’ in Gen. 25:16; sar in Num. 21:18; and nasikh in Ezek. 32:30. In some contexts, usages of “prince” had also acquired a devotional significance that made them hard to change, such as sar-shalom, rendered as “Prince of

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Peace,” and understood as referring to Christ.50 Similarly, the understanding of kohen as “minister,” “priest,” and “prince” was important for tying together Ps. 110, for example, and the New Testament Epistle to the Hebrews (and thus also for linking ideas of clerical and princely rule).51 The translators of the King James Version were explicitly instructed not to change “ecclesiastical words” such as these.52 But in diverse other contexts, they evidently allowed themselves to shift away from the Greek and Latin traditions and introduce both differentiation and uniformity. The broad semantic field of the classical terms was divided up: the higher ranking archōn or princeps was often named “prince”; others were differentiated as “captains”; still others were defined by other terms.53 Yet alongside these, a variety of high-ranking officers, designated in the Greek or Latin texts by several terms, were also reclassified as princes.54 And so ḥashmanim in Ps. 68 was translated as “princes,” although the Septuagint rendered them as equivalent to “ambassadors,” and the Vulgate as legati.55 In Isa. 40, rozen was translated as archōn in the Septuagint, as secretorum scrutatores in the Vulgate, yet as “prince” in English. In the King James Version’s book of Genesis, Abraham’s designation as “prince” follows the Latin princeps, yet departs from the Greek, where he was designated basileus, namely, “king.”56 Designations of “prince” thus appeared in consecutive English versions with diverse variations until they finally were consolidated in the King James Version. On the whole, between Tyndale’s seminal translation of 1530 and the King James, the number of “princes” in English Bibles had also increased. Tyndale’s first rendition of the Hebrew Pentateuch contained only few usages of “prince.” Faithful to his mission to translate the Bible into everyday terms, Tyndale steered away from the Latinate vocabulary and preferred simple Saxon words. He also consciously avoided terms that could be associated with the power structures of the Church. And so his translation of the Pentateuch contained fewer than two score usages of “prince.” One term that he used instead was the tribal formulation “chief lord.”57 In the course of time, however, the Latinate idiom made its way back into the English Bible, and the number of “princes” increased. The Great Bible of 1540 contained 251 usages of “prince”; the Thomas Matthew Bible, 279.58 The Catholic Rheims-Douai version, published later with a strong emphasis on the Vulgate, had 917 mentions of “prince” in the text and notes. This already exceeded the number “princes” in the late medieval Wycliffite Bible, which, like the Catholic version, was based on the Vulgate, and in which the mentions of “prince” amounted to 766. In the King James Version, as just noted, usages

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Figure 14. The word “lords” is crossed out and “princes” inserted above the line, in preparation for the King James Version. Bishops’ Bible, Bib. Eng. 1602 b. 1, at 1 Sam. 18:30. The Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford.

of “prince” stabilized at a total of 423: fewer than half their number in the Douai version, yet about 50 percent more than in Thomas Matthew’s Old Testament, based on Tyndale.59 In some biblical books the differences were particularly striking: Tyndale’s version of the book of Numbers had a total of eleven mentions of “princes”; the King James had fifty.60 Figure 14 shows one case where the word “lords” is crossed out and “prince” is inserted instead. Figure 15 shows the full page, while Figure 16 displays another page for comparison. These images are taken from the only remaining working copy of the King James Version, assembled probably in advance of a general meeting, and kept at the Bodleian Library. The original text for revision is the Bishops’ Bible, itself based on earlier traditions. These pages demonstrate also the extent to which the King James Version was a revision rather than an original translation. From the textual point of view, the effect of this large and overall increasing use of “prince” was to flatten the undulating terrain of the original text and instill instead a false sense of uniformity. Diverse forms of government were equated and presented alike as if they pertained to “princely” rule. Differences between large- and small-scale government, for example, were thus brushed over, as were differences between local and central government, formal and informal government, and even highly structured imperial rule. And so the heads of the Israelite clans (nasi’, rosh),61 the primordial chiefs of the Ishmaelite dynasty (nesi’ im),62 the rulers of the Philistine cities (sarei Pelishtim),63 the ministerial elite of the Judean kingdom (sarim),64 the high commanders of the Babylonian Empire (ravei melekh Bavel),65 the chief ministers

Figure 15. The entire page, illustrating to what extent the King James Version’s revisions retained here the text of the Bishops’ Bible. The Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford.

Figure 16. An example of a more heavily revised page. The Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford.

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and satraps of the Persian Empire (sarei ha-melekh ha-partamim)66 —all these were equally named as “princes.” The result of this amalgamated use was that it also instilled in English Bibles a sense of chronological consistency, for it postulated no difference at all between archaic terms, say, and postexile usages. Complex geological layers of the ancient Scriptures that spanned centuries of history and included many foreign influences were thus washed out. At the same time, this simplified English idiom helped to establish in the translated Bible a strong familiar resonance, not unlike the idiom employed at that time in other popular genres, which told stories about princes, such as The . . . most famous and renowned historie of the illustrious & excellently accomplished Prince Oceander (published anonymously in 1600), or The . . . history of . . . Euordanus Prince of Denmark With . . . Iago Prince of Saxonie: and . . . theyr seuerall fortunes in loue.67 Significantly, this broad and overall increasing use of “prince” also served to present an array of biblical offices as if they were—or could be—a matter of sovereign and hereditary rule. The primary English sense of “prince” was sovereign ruler, especially monarch.68 Already under the Roman Empire, princeps had come to denote the presumptive heir to the throne.69 In the processes of biblical translation, the semantic range of the word “prince” was thus broadened to include not only monarchs and sovereign rulers but other offices. Yet the meanings of words reflected on one another, which meant that an array of biblical “princes” could be—and indeed were—seen as if they were endowed with a quality of monarchical rule. This was further intensified in many interpretations and notes. In the Great Bible, for instance, the heads of the Israelite tribes were presented as “prynces” ruling over their territories.70 The Geneva Bible struggled with the princely rule of Jacob’s son Judah as he was not firstborn, but conventionally explained that he ruled as “prince” because he was to be the forefather of Christ.71 The contemporary Catholic Bible explains that “the first borne were both Priestes and Princes”; and so “Monarchical succeßion” descended through each and every one of the biblical patriarchal families.72 Moreover, English Bibles created the impression that the term “prince” was not only authentically scriptural but widely prevalent. The overall effect was to create an English biblical idiom which, unlike the original, could be interpreted as having enhanced monarchical connotations. A biblical hierarchy of office could be understood in terms of a contemporary monarchical hierarchy; at the same time, a contemporary state order could be seen—or presented—as if it were rooted in the Bible itself.

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Thus, for example, contemporary treatises highlighted the rule of the “prince”; sermons and homilies preached obedience to the prince, anchored in the Bible.73 The official Elizabethan homily on obedience asserted that “readyng of the holye scripture” we “fi nde in almoste infi nite places” that “kynges and princes” do “raigne by Gods ordinaunce, and that subiectes are bounden to obey them.”74 The message was reiterated: from royal proclamations to popular ballads. The story of Korah was read out as a warning every Sunday after Easter, as a part of the church order, established since 1570, and with pious exhortations promoting loyalty to the “prince.”75 After the Restoration, many returned to cite it with renewed vigor.76 Representations of the Stuart monarch as Solomon, as seen in the embroidery with which we started, followed a similar reason. And so, when Charles I issued his last words on the importance of “princes” and the sin of rebellion against princely rule, saturated with biblical examples, and likened his rebellious subjects to “Korah and his complices,” who turned against Moses and God, he was leaning on an ancient, strong, and extremely broadly circulated interpretative tradition, which outlived him. The biblical language of office and rule, constructed in the processes of translation, had evolved by that time to become a sacred idiom in its own right. It was enshrined in official notices and scholarly treatises, didactic homilies, conduct manuals, and popular ballads, as well as of course the English Bible itself. It shaped the vernacular Bible, embedded it with many meanings, and made its polities appear more familiar and near. Employed in the name of the monarch, as it was in 1649, it delivered a strong message, the provenance and resonance of which have been explored here. But this was not the only line of interpretation. The king’s critics knew their Bible equally well, if not better. The great profusion of biblical “princes” led men such as Oliver Cromwell— and subsequently Hobbes and Locke—not to regard each and every “prince” as if he had monarchical power, but rather to doubt whether monarchy itself was no more than one of a number of divinely ordained, yet ultimately changeable, forms of government. As the pioneering translators had predicted, the sacred word, widely disseminated in its “Englished” form, could not be controlled by any earthly prince.

Chapter 9

Conversion, Communication, and Translation in the Seventeenth-Century Protestant Atlantic Sar ah Rivett

On June 13, 1791, Thomas Jefferson sat with two old women of the Unquachog tribe in Brook Haven, Long Island, to transcribe a brief vocabulary list of their language. According to Jefferson, the women were among only three living members of the tribe who could still speak their native tongue. Moved by the imminent loss of this thread of human history, he recorded his list on the back of an envelope. Jefferson’s linguistic gesture follows from his own sentiment expressed in Notes on the State of Virginia (1788) of the “lamentable” fact that more Indian languages had not been recorded before what he perceived as the inevitable time when native tribes would “extinguish.” In the decade to follow, Jefferson issued a standard broadside containing a vocabulary list for philosophers and statesmen to carry throughout their travels in order to collect similar lists from Algonquian and Iroquoian language groups, including the Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek, Mahican, and Nanticoke.1 Language, Jefferson argued in Notes on the State of Virginia, would be the best way to study “the derivation of this part of the human race.” By establishing the innate capacity for greatness and the unrealized potential of North America’s indigenous populations through language, Jefferson hoped to launch an empirical counterpoint to the Comte de Buffon’s natural history of the inferiority of American species.2 Jefferson’s efforts culminated in one of the central organizing missions of the American Philosophical Society (APS) in

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its founding decades: to collect and record the languages spoken by the natives as part of an antiquarian investigation into the rich, ancient history of North America’s past. Peter Du Ponceau, who joined the APS in 1791 and then became its president in 1827, greatly expanded the scope of this Jeffersonian project. He used a manuscript archive of vocabularies collected by Jefferson and John Heckewelder as a basis for his own philological discoveries.3 Du Ponceau envisioned the indigenous languages of North America as contributing greatly to the burgeoning field of comparative linguistics. The manuscript vocabularies thus constituted an archive that could go far in establishing the American sciences on an international scale.4 This APS effort fulfilled a specific purpose in the early years of the new republic. Indian vocabularies created an archive of natural history from which Anglo-Americans felt they could distinguish their land and cultural heritage from European precedent. Additionally, Indian words were believed by some to contain the resonance of a sacred essence that would scientifically confirm a link between biblical and natural history, between the Mosaic account of the history of the human race and the anthropology of American aborigines. This connection provided powerful justification for Anglo-Americans as the rightful inheritors of the divine promise scripted onto the continent of North America.5 This Jeffersonian project of collecting Indian vocabularies was, in many ways, specific to the demands of the early republic and early national periods when forging a new concept of nation depended on establishing U.S. linguistic practices as well as origins. If Noah Webster’s Grammatical Institute of the English Language (1783) and American Dictionary (1828) sought to establish the resonance and currency of the present-day English spoken on the North American continent, Jefferson’s and Du Ponceau’s study of indigenous languages established a national archive of the past. Records of indigenous words came to be used strategically, either in the service of justifying government policies of removal (through suppositions of the languages’ inherent savage qualities) or for the scientific purpose of proving the greatness of past civilizations on the North American continent.6 At the time that he recorded the Unquachog vocabulary in 1791, Jefferson began a new national history of linguistic relations with American Indian tribes, but he also stood at the culmination of a long colonial history of linguistic encounters in which missionaries sought to redeem indigenous languages with a fervor commensurate with their aim of saving savage souls.

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Across a broad geographical expanse from Mexico City to New France, Moravian, Protestant, and Jesuit missionaries as well as travelers and fur traders had been recording the languages of Native Americans for over two hundred years.7 Much of the motivation for these translation efforts was functional. European settlement in the New World depended on an ability to communicate with native tribes for purposes of diplomacy and trade. Sermons preached in Algonquian or catechisms translated into Iroquois dramatically increased the scope and effectiveness of evangelical efforts. New World language encounters were a transnational phenomenon in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, extending from the print production of the Doctrina Cristiana in Nahuatl in 1560s Mexico City to the carefully composed Abnaki and Iroquois dictionaries by French missionaries in the Great Lakes region and Acadia around the turn of the eighteenth century.8 With the framework of this transnational scope in mind, this chapter focuses on Anglo-Protestant missionary linguistics. While relatively minor in their breadth in comparison to the French and Spanish, seventeenth-century Anglo-Protestant missionary linguistics were both bound up in the currents of Atlantic intellectual history and ultimately generative of practices of translation particular to the colonial context of North America. In contrast to the French Jesuits, who became well versed in recognizing and addressing linguistic difference, Protestants believed that the process of translation, from oral to written and then of Christian text into Massachusett, would make words increasingly transparent, gradually revealing more evidence of God. In the 1660s and 1670s, primarily led by the efforts of John Eliot, Anglo-Protestants attempted to implement a plan for conversion through the costly print production of an Indian Library of Christian-Massachusett texts.9 This plan led not only to financial ruin; its limited evangelizing efficacy soon became apparent, as the work that went into translating the Bible into Massachusett far outweighed the number of natives who were in fact converted through their reading of the text.10 One of the most famous texts in the Indian Library, Mamusse wunneetupanatamwe up biblum God, is a complete translation of Scripture into Massachusett, the ancient Wampanoag tongue. It survives today as a momentous and paradoxical artifact: it is both the first Bible printed in America and the thickest description of a language that died as a consequence of European contact.11 The Eliot Bible reflects the complex process of erasure through preservation that characterized Anglo-Protestant practices of missionary linguistics

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and translation.12 In their attempt to achieve the sola scriptura ideal among a community of “Praying” Massachusett natives, the missionaries confronted the translational limits of sola scriptura head on: words were not transparent vessels of the spirit, but rather human constructs. The desire for transparency led to the proliferation of material representations of the word and the construction of an archive as tantalizing historical evidence of an encounter that conveys the convergence of two worldviews that nonetheless preserves very little of the integrity of the original native voice. • Beginning with the fabled “lost colony” of Roanoke, Virginia, the success of English settlement in the New World was integrally linked to learning the language of America’s native inhabitants. Thomas Harriot, the mathematician who wrote A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia (1588), developed a phonetic alphabet of the Algonquian spoken in Virginia and North Carolina that he hoped could be universally extended to Algonquian language groups spoken throughout the eastern seaboard of North America. Little is known about this manuscript, which was destroyed in a fire. Only the title remains as an elusive catalogue record: An Universal Alphabet containing six and thirty letters, whereby may be expressed the lively image of mans voice in what language soever; first devised upon occasion to seek for fit letters to express Virginian speech. In composing this alphabet, Harriot did not use Roman characters to express the sounds that he heard. Instead, he recorded sounds phonetically through a new system developed by the English spelling reformer John Hart as a means of figuring out how to record and print vernacular dialects.13 The title reveals something of Harriot’s understanding of the relationship between oral and written language. His alphabet was designed to contain universal symbols that could organize and adequately represent the diverse aural quality of Virginian speech. Visual character representation would encapsulate more than one sound so that the alphabet as a whole could be universal in scope. Given the failure of this first English colony, it seems unlikely that Harriot’s manuscript enjoyed wide circulation as the practical tool for which it was intended. For those who did see the manuscript, the unfamiliar representations of Algonquian letters likely registered more as curiosities than as vehicles for trade and diplomacy. However, recorded commentary on Harriot’s universal alphabet came later in the seventeenth century, not from travelers,

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missionaries, or colonists to the New World, but rather from mathematicians, philosophers, and linguists. The linguist and mathematician John Pell reportedly told John Aubrey that the alphabet Harriot had contrived for the “American language” looked like devils. By contrast, Francis Lodwick developed his own “Universal Alphabet” in 1686 and advocated the usefulness of his system for missionaries to North America, inspired by Harriot’s early attempt to universalize letters.14 This response to Harriot’s alphabet indicates the divided perspective that Europeans brought to native tongues. These letters were either signs of the devil or vehicles for accessing divine truth. Either the languages of North America were irreparably fallen, or they could be redeemed and placed back into a system of symbolic importance that carried the hope of bringing both the infidels and those responsible for their souls closer to God. This was as much a philosophical problem of the revelatory capacity of language as it was a missionary struggle. Studies of indigenous languages subsequent to Harriot’s followed the establishment of permanent English colonies on the eastern seaboard of North America. In his 1634 publication, New Englands Prospect, William Wood described the natives he encounters in New England as a “cruel and bloody people,” displaying the most horrific and savage behavior toward their neighbors, such as “slaying men,” “ravishing women,” and cannibalism. Wood built a theory of an impoverished intellect and a savage demeanor out of his observations of a depleted language that “is only peculiar to themselves.” It does “not incline to any of the refined tongues,” and the Indians are “strangers to Arts and Sciences . . . unacquainted with the inventions that are common to a civilized people.” Whereas the title of Harriot’s manuscript implied some sense of the expandable capacity of Virginian speech into a universal alphabetical system, Wood refuted this idea of human universalism completely. He rejected the argument that some of his contemporaries had made that the Indians “might be of the dispersed Jews, because some of their words be near unto Hebrew.”15 For Wood, Indian language was irreparably fallen, hard to learn, and enclosed upon itself, yielding no capacity for redemption. Indian grammar measures the Indian mind in New Englands Prospect. In his account neither is worth knowing, much less recording beyond a rudimentary list of vocabulary words. Soon after the publication of William Wood’s Prospect, a counternarrative emerges in opposition to Wood’s conception of savage indigenous words. Roger Williams, John Eliot, John Cotton, Jr., and Experience Mayhew studied, recorded, and carefully preserved Indian languages not only for

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contemporary evangelical purposes but also to create an archive of Americana designed to confirm their own sense of New World providential design. In his inaugural study, A Key into the Language of America (1643), Williams tells the reader that he has found “great affinity” between the Narragansett language spoken on Rhode Island and Greek. Through this link to linguistic antiquity, Williams presented the “Narragansett Dialect” as having an expansive and portable quality that could be of “great use in all parts of the country.” Williams cautioned that his Key could be misread as a dictionary or grammar, when really he intended it to be an “implicit Dialogue” between English and Narragansett, between the piety of his English brethren and the Christianity that was naturally discoverable among the Indians “in wilde America.”16 The Key begins with the following declaration: “This Key, respects the Native Language of it, and happily may unlock some Rarities concerning the Natives themselves, not yet discovered.”17 Through the metaphor of a key unlocking the undiscovered, Williams draws upon the lexical system for intuiting God in nature developed by the Czech philosopher Jan Comenius in the 1640s.18 Comenius taught that language could be used as a vehicle for accessing divine essence. For Comenius, revelation occurred by way of a linguistic system, or a “universal language,” that followed a one-to-one correspondence between language and nature. Th rough the proper use of this isomorphic structure, language would bring all humans in contact with the mysteries of the divine. Ultimately, Comenius promoted a pansophic vision for religious harmony through a universal character that could “renew contact with divine harmony in the universe.”19 The generic design of the Key as an “implicit dialogue” called upon the presumably English reader to renew his or her own faith, to see the possibility for this divine harmony through the encounter with the native other as a mirror image of Christian faith embodied within the Narragansett word. This universal harmony unfolds as Williams presents a favorable link between Narragansett humanity—specifically the emotion displayed through their capacity for grief—and the quality of their words. Grammar organized the implicit dialogue between the English reader of the Key and the naturally discovered faith of the Narragansetts. Williams derived this structure from the Cambridge Platonist philosophers Samuel Hartlib and Hezekiah Woodward, who popularized Comenian theory in England. In A Light to Grammar (1641), Woodward explains that the proper usage of grammar has the capacity to “spiritualize the senses” and bring them in touch with “higher things” and religious truths.20 Williams, who believed

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ardently in the supernatural truths discoverable in the natural habitat of the New Canaan, adapted this grammatical theory to the particular case of America, making a claim for the sacred and secret contents of Indian languages.21 As such, Williams’s Key sets the stage for a sweeping history of language encounters by claiming that both the land and its inhabitants contain the potential for recapturing something rare, wonderful, and original in Native American words. Following the publication of Williams’s Key, missionary linguists continued to combine theological purpose with philosophical inquiry. AngloAmerican missionaries developed their own linguistic practice based on a Protestant millennial frame and the fragmented philosophical context of midseventeenth-century England. Two competing threads of seventeenth-century language philosophy can be loosely categorized through the mystical approach that Jacob Boehme, Francis Mercury van Helmont, and Jan Comenius inherited from Plato’s Cratylus and the understanding of language as composed of arbitrary signs, which, through a philosophical arc from Francis Bacon to Robert Boyle to John Locke, sought to limit and define the role of language more precisely. The latter group questioned ideas about language as a hermeneutic key to nature and nature’s correspondent referent in the invisible world.22 The divergent views represented by these two threads fueled intellectual debate as well as competing impulses on how to implement divergent understandings of language in practice. This debate corresponded to the dramatic rise in linguistic activity in North America in the mid- to late seventeenth century. Missionaries sought to preserve Indian languages in part as a contribution to an empirical account of the mystical quality of words in philosophical circles. In ascribing empirical value to Indian words as visible signs, missionaries also sought to foretell a millennial history unfolding in North America. Efforts of Protestant missionaries were closely aligned with mystical ideas about language circulating in England and on the European continent. The Protestant mind-set of sola scriptura blended seamlessly with the Comenian vision for a single, ideal language where words precisely defined their nominata. As defined in the Panglottia (1660), Comenius’s goal was to repair the ruins of Babel by restoring language from its fallen status to a purer connection between the word, the thing signified in nature, and its correspondent referent in the invisible world. For Comenius and other mystical linguists of the seventeenth century, such as Samuel Hartlib and John Dury, the ultimate goal of language reform was that as words became more closely aligned with

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their natural and divine referents, language would become increasingly transparent. Seventeenth-century theologians believed that all languages had fallen away from the Edenic ideal represented by Adam’s power to name, where sign and referent shared a seamless semiotic link and a common essence.23 Following the destruction of Babel, words became imperfectly joined to their referents. Matching the visual or auditory signifying entity to the mental or material signified image depended, from Babel forward, on arbitrary systems of representation. Ancient as well as early modern theologians and philosophers struggled to understand and at times overcome three major world historical consequences that resulted from this myth of linguistic fragmentation: irreparably fallen human speech fell short of adequately representing the visible world of nature; words resembled but could no longer act as metaphysical keys to the invisible world of God; and nations would not understand the “meaning” of each other’s “voice” (1 Corinthians 14.11). By the 1640s and 1650s the Puritan mission finally gained momentum— nearly two decades after the settlement of the Massachusetts Bay Colony. Missionaries caught the millennial fervor of the Hartlib circle’s mystical theories of language as well as Manasseh Ben Israel’s attempt to locate the lost tribes in his Hope for Israel, first printed in 1650. The Hope for Israel was published the same year as the first edition of Thomas Thorowgood’s Jews in America, a text based largely on Eliot’s epistolary reports. In Jews in America, Eliot makes two substantial claims for the messianic potential of Puritan evangelization: that the Massachusett language approximated Hebrew, and that the North American natives were descendants of the ten lost tribes. Building their own pansophic vision for Christian universalism, Puritan missionaries believed that the Christian translation of indigenous words could assuage the curse of Babylonian Confusion. Each instance of Christian conversion narrated by an Indian proselyte in a redeemed Algonquian tongue would bear witness to the descent of the Holy Spirit. Eliot’s New World program of missionary linguistics thus set a philosophical debate in an evangelical context, aspiring to restore the lost language of Babel through the re-Christianized Algonquian utterances of Massachusett proselytes. He sought to disentangle native tongues from what was perceived as a syntactically convoluted and fallen state of linguistic primitivism by imposing an orthography and discerning a grammar that would reconstitute the indigenous words spoken in North America, newly rendering them as signs infused with divine light and thus as adequate marks or evidence for verifying the Christian conversion of native proselytes.

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Spending two winters in the wigwams of Massachusett Indians in Natick, Eliot learned Algonquian in 1643, the year Williams published the Key. By 1646, Eliot began preaching in Massachusett with the aid of a native interpreter who was a captive from the Pequot War of 1637.24 He spent the 1660s and 1670s building upon the epistemological potential that Williams saw in Indian grammar by translating and printing a number of Christian texts into Massachusett. These texts included the New England Primer, Richard Baxter’s Call to the Unconverted, and Thomas Shepard’s Sincere Convert. Eliot imported the London printer Marmaduke Johnson for help with this and appointed a native translator known as James the Printer. The business of translation was a complex and time-consuming endeavor. First, Algonquian had to be translated from an oral to a written language through a simple list of words and expressions recorded in missionary notebooks. From this rudimentary sketch, Eliot began to compile his Indian grammar. Eliot dedicated Indian Grammar to Robert Boyle in order to present it for “public use” whereby it could contribute to research for a new, universal language to call forth the secrets of the divine.25 In 1662, the Puritan mission became incorporated as the New England Company for the Propagation of the Gospel, with Boyle as its appointed governor. Boyle took particular interest in John Eliot’s translation project. In 1664, Boyle asked Eliot to develop an Indian grammar by “reducing language into rule.”26 The idea behind this request was that Algonquian had no grammatical rules of its own but that it could be made to comply with a preexisting syntax of linguistic organization. In doing so, Eliot thought that he had discovered something of tremendous value to both missionaries and natural philosophers: not only were the American Indians one of the ten lost tribes; they spoke a biblical language that had been lost in the fall of Babel and that more closely approximated Hebrew than even Greek or Latin.27 In a letter to Eliot complimenting the missionary on his work, Boyle specified his desire, on behalf of the commissioners of the New England Company in London, that the Indians retain their own native tongue. Eliot developed his Indian Grammar, first published in 1666, shortly after his translation of the Bible into Massachusett for a first edition published in 1663. Indian Grammar conveys Eliot’s theory of translation. He writes, “Grammar is the Art or Rule of speaking. There are two parts of Grammar: 1. The Art of making words. 2. The Art of ordering words for speech.” For Eliot, “art” and “rule” are interchangeable because the rule is the substance of speech. His succinct introductory statement is indebted to the Puritan plain style

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insistence that speech should be pure rather than artful, as well as to the Protestant belief that the integrity of the scriptural Word was not lost through translation.28 This translation theory guided his work on the Indian Primer, first printed in Cambridge in 1669. The Primer enacted a transformation at the level of language acquisition itself with the aim of reconfiguring the mind of the native proselyte as a tabula rasa, ready to receive the salvific light of Christ in the moment of conversion. Unselfconsciously redacting Massachusett into specific arrangements of alphabetical writing, the Primer sought to make the word on the page transparent such that it seamlessly conveyed universal Christian truths. Eliot published Mamusse wunneetupanatamwe up biblum God and the Indian Primer with the hope that both texts would sanctify Algonquian, that is, regenerate the fallen language of a lost people with new sacred power. Eliot’s Indian Bible was part of the biblical translation effort developed by the Royal Society in an effort to connect the universal language movement with indigenous tongues where the spread of the gospel was taking hold. While Eliot prepared the Indian Bible in Massachusetts, Robert Everingham secured funds for three thousand copies of a Gaelic translation of the New Testament, first printed in 1681 and distributed in Ireland and Scotland. Comenius also instigated a program to translate the Bible into Turkish.29 These projects involved the combined study of known languages from the ancient world with what natural philosophers believed to be the languages lost in the fall of Babel. Royal Society papers contain several examples of “specimens” of Scripture in Hebrew, Latin, and Arabic designed to decode and illuminate the hidden meaning within the text.30 Members of the Royal Society studied the ancient languages to aid in this project of biblical translation. The goal of the universal language movement was to collect all of the languages of the world, compare the ancient to the newly discovered, and develop a linguistic idiom that would be intelligible to all. New England missionaries captured this pansophic vision in their evangelical practices through descriptions of the power of spoken Algonquian among Richard Bourne’s Masphee proselytes in Plymouth, the Wampanoags preaching on Martha’s Vineyard, and the Massachusetts in John Eliot’s Praying Towns. According to one account, Eliot “begins his prayers in the Indian’s language.” Then the son of Waban, one of the more active native proselytes, read the Proverbs from Eliot’s Indian Bible, “which [according to one account] had been printed & was in the hands of the Indians.”31 A native named Job prayed for half an hour in “the Indian Language” and then preached from

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Hebrews 15:1. Several natives stood up and read from the Primer or from Eliot’s Bible. In these missionary scenes, the aural quality of a divinely redeemed Algonquian tongue lifted the sacred essence from the Algonquian words printed in Eliot’s library as a universalizing Protestant spirit descended. Eliot’s theory of the Algonquian Indians as one of the ten lost tribes was always contested and all but abandoned in 1670, but not before catching the attention not only of Boyle but of other members of the Hartlib circle as well. John Dury, a Calvinist preacher in Scotland and a close friend of Samuel Hartlib’s, became fascinated with the Massachusett word “waban,” which the English translated as wind and which was also the name of a famous native preacher in Natick who converted several Indians. Dury wrote a letter to the New England ministers in which he explains an important connection between waban and the prophetic wind in Ezekiel 37. Th is, Dury writes, is “ground for a very weighty thought; that that portion of Scripture should be first of all opened to them, which clearly foretold the conversion of Israel, i.e., the 10 Tribes universally understood, and peculiarly meant by the name or notion of Israel.”32 Dury interprets both the Massachusett word and the individual who bears its name as a type of millennial promise. Elaborating on this connection in his correspondence with Samuel Hartlib, Dury envisioned New England evangelism as an index of the pansophic Christianity promoted through Comenius’s writings. Letters written between Dury, Hartlib, and the Puritan minister John Davenport in New Haven also espoused Eliot’s theory of the ten lost tribes, believing that both the conversion of American Indians and the study of their language would bring about the second coming.33 Read through the reverse angle of the native perspective, the word “Waban” was anything but the closed hermeneutic system that Dury and his contemporaries desired it to be. As the Indian proselytes listened to Eliot preach on Ezekiel 37—as he often did—they began to view their own native leader, Waban, as someone endowed with a special capacity to heal. This placed him on a level equal if not superior to Eliot himself. Ezekiel’s valley of dry bones was a resonant passage for native audiences because it carried the literal meaning of healing from physical sickness as well as the spiritual prophecy of healing the sick soul. Waban attained his authority within a Christian cosmos while also maintaining the power of the Spirit Healer within more traditional indigenous systems of belief. This discrepancy between Anglo and indigenous perspectives on the translational implications of the native word was certainly one reason for the

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gradual disintegration of the Protestant mission in the 1670s. By 1669, only seven short years after the New England Company’s formation, the unpublished letters between Boyle and Eliot reveal the investments to be unfruitful if not disastrous. Boyle laments that very few ministers in succeeding generations were qualified to carry on Eliot’s linguistic work. Letters from New England struggle to paint the “discouraging . . . state of religion” in the best possible light.34 The Indian Primer displays the pedagogical approach used to teach native children Christianized Algonquian. Indigenous words are unselfconsciously redacted into specific arrangements of alphabetical writing. A description of lowercase and capital letters introduces the reader to the typeface intended to be the medium through which Massachusett natives would read Christian texts. These lessons culminate with the Lord’s Prayer, which is translated directly so that each English word has an explicit corresponding word in Algonquian. Through the Primer, Eliot sought to ameliorate the previous decade’s failures by attaching a secure evangelical homiletic to each linguistic sign. He sought to enact a transformation at the level of language acquisition. Eliot’s final missionary tract, Indian Dialogues (1671), suggests that this evangelical homiletic was not as effective in conveying a secure meaning as Eliot intended it to be. A native teacher within the Indian congregation explains that “the Book of God is no invention of English-men, it is the holy Law of God himself, which was given unto man by God, before English-men had any knowledge of God.” The native teacher describes the Bible as a repository of ancient Christian wisdom, bespeaking a truth that transcends national as well as linguistic affiliation. Within the Christian-Massachusett community, the Bible represented the greater truth of a universal spirit.35 • At the turn of the eighteenth century, empiricism and natural philosophy presented additional challenges to translational notions of language as revealed knowledge on multiple fronts. John Locke’s Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1691) made a watershed case for words as mere human constructs, thus altering the tenability of the universal language movement and previous conceptions of words as keys to the invisible realm. While Francis Bacon and Thomas Hobbes had made contributions toward this separation before him, Locke definitively decoupled the “nominal essence” of the word from real

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essence, highlighting the discrepancy between human ideas of things and the things themselves. In place of ideas of language as having scriptural origins, the Essay united the study of language with the study of human thought and understanding rather than with divine revelation. This transference in the object of knowledge challenged the prevailing prior belief that language could be redeemed to achieve a real connection to the divine through a restored semiotic order.36 To what extent did Locke hear the same savage sounds as the missionaries, prompting his own formulation of the gap between words and ideas? Elsewhere in his Essay, Locke refers to American Indians as “Naturals” who, having no “universal principles” or “general propositions . . . impressed” upon their minds, can be used effectively as a sort of ideal tabula rasa. Where universal principles are more suited to “artificial argument,” Locke finds the thought processes that take place in the “Huts of the Indians” conducive to the discovery of Truth.”37 Even as Lockean linguistics foreclosed the possibility of a seamless connection between words and things, Locke himself imagined some redemptive possibility that might be acquired in the huts of Native Americans as a population where the purity of the word as an avenue to truth might be reclaimed. Following the tremendous pressure that new natural discoveries were placing on biblical history, natural historians around the turn of the eighteenth century began to position primitive civilizations from antiquity as central to British national identity and the natural history of the world. In The Primitive Origin of Mankind (1675), Mathew Hale struggled to place the discovery of the American Indians and their disparate languages within his Mosaic history while trying to steer clear of the theory that there were men before Adam, or pre-Adamites. The Welsh philosopher and keeper of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford, Edward Lhwyd, sought to establish affinities between the “language of the Americans and those of the ancient British.” He believed that such affi nities would prove a “scriptural account” of history by demonstrating common human origins. Yet America, meaning the continent of North America as it was figuratively conceived in the minds of early eighteenth-century philosophers, had a precarious position in the early Enlightenment rescripting of the links among language, human origins, and the Bible. Evidence from America was not always so seamlessly assimilated into early Enlightenment natural history. In a 1712 letter to Royal Society member John Woodward, for example, Cotton Mather offers high praise for Woodward’s Natural History of the Earth, but laments that America’s “subterraneous

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curiosities” were not included.38 North America presented a wealth of natural and linguistic curiosities, but indigenous languages did not ultimately accord with British natural philosophers’ goal of making the local Anglo-Saxon history the prime beneficiary of the new Mosaic history. Early Enlightenment language philosophes built upon an early seventeenth-century precedent: Richard Verstegan’s Restitution of Decayed Intelligence, which went into multiple publications over the seventeenth century. Verstegan identified the Anglo-Saxon race as descendants of the Celts, and Celtic as the original language spoken before the fall of Babel. The Breton language philosopher Paul Yves Pezron reformulated this mode of inquiry in his five-volume work, The Antiquities of Nations, first published in English in 1706. Pezron begins by relating the beginning of nations to the tenth chapter of Genesis and describing the dispersal of people and tongues prior to linguistic confusion. The remaining volumes substantiate this narrative through the “historical, chronological, and etymological discoveries” of ancient Britain. Pezron positions himself as exposing a hidden history. The “secret recesses of antiquity” have come to him in a form of philosophical revelation. The “Great Nations,” he tells us, “are never thoroughly known, unless you ascend to their very Spring and Original.” Pezron seeks to repair the Genesis story by going to its source in the Gaulish (or Gallic) and Celtic languages. These languages, according to Pezron, are the original spring of Greek, Latin, and German. As the mother language of Brittany and Wales, Celtic links these two places while anchoring Britain as one of the more ancient nations in the world.39 As an early attempt to marry natural history with biblical time, Pezron’s work succeeded through its afterlife in multiple editions but largely failed as a serious philosophical work.40 Lhwyd sought to improve upon the empirical soundness of the new sacred history through a more in-depth study of primitive languages. In a letter to one of his correspondents, Lhwyd confesses his belief that “languages are in a great measure the keys of knowledge.”41 As the most palpable living evidence of the history of human origins, Lhwyd proposed the study of language as essential to understanding Scripture as well as divine and natural law. Lhwyd gathered information for a tome titled Archeologia Britannica, the first volume of which was published in 1707. The volume compared vocabularies of Irish, Breton, and Cornish and then used these vocabularies to discuss etymology as a way of understanding population dispersal. His aim was to add to the literature of British antiquities an account of the “Original Language” spoken by the land’s original inhabitants.42

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In their correspondence, David Malcolme and Lhwyd identified St. Kilda, a cluster of six islands in the Outer Hebrides, as an ideal place to study language in its ancient shape. They claimed that language retained its primitive purity in St. Kilda in “much in the same Way and Manner as it has happened in America.” Lhwyd identified the empirical promise of the “interior parts” of each “country,” which were “inhabited” by “the old Natives.” Inland spaces retained their ancient purity due to their distance from seacoasts where “European Strangers” had brought the language of a distinctly postlapsarian modern world. The native inhabitants of St. Kilda, like the native inhabitants of America, retained an alphabet that through its very shape and sound came closer the center of creation.43 Yet general analogies are where Lhwyd’s interest in America ends. His goal was to achieve a greater understanding of Britain’s “own ancient Language.” The chronology of the world, the dispersal of people, and the framework of biblical time are central to Lhwyd’s work but secondary to his design for the Archeologica Britannica. The Archeologica Britannica focused on local and national history. It charts the names of “Towns, Castles, Villages, and Seats of the Nobility” as well as “Notable Mountains, Rivers, Lakes, Barrows, Forts and Camps” through the names passed down from antiquity. Lhwyd’s research depended on extensive collaboration.44 Lhwyd circulated a standard broadside titled Parochial Queries (1696) that functioned as the basis of his Archeologia Britannica.45 By circulating the Queries, Lhwyd sought to “spare himself the Labor of Traveling the Country” (although he did embark on his own journey through Wales, Cornwall, and Brittany from 1699 to 1700). Copies of the Queries were sent to every parish in Wales and were completed by local gentry. The languages of North America were largely excluded from this network of Anglo-language philosophers. Unhappy with this form of philosophical exclusion, Cotton Mather did easily cede the temporal depths of geographical primitivism to the British Isles. Placing himself in line with Herodotus, Mather wrote the Magnalia Christi Americana to establish the relevance of the Puritan errand to the eighteenth century. Devoting the first of six volumes to colonial “Antiquities,” he positions the wilderness of America as the location of providential fulfillment. In Mather’s own memorable phrase: “I write the Wonders of the christian religion, flying from the Depravations of Europe to, the American St[r]and.”46 A decade after he wrote the Magnalia, and only one year before he became an elected member of the Royal Society in 1713, Mather joined the transatlantic conversation about Christian antiquity with his own

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evidence of Mosaic history discoverable in America. In a letter to Woodward, Mather informs the author of the Essay Towards the Natural History of the Earth of the centrality of America to this history. Consider the “giants” referenced in Genesis 6:4, he tells Woodward, who roamed the earth before the flood. Now, if “undoubted ruins and remains of those Giants be found under the earth, among other subterraneous curiosities,” this would confirm Mosaic history. America—and specifically New England—was precisely the place to find such curiosities. Mather explains that reports already exist from Pliny and others.47 His aim is not to showcase the novelties of the New World but rather to supplement them with reports from antiquity. In so doing Mather affirms the truth of Mosaic history in much the same way that Lhwyd did for the British Isles. Toward the end of his life, Mather felt disappointment that his efforts had not been satisfactorily received by his transatlantic correspondents. In 1724, he wrote a letter to John Woodward and James Jurin criticizing ideas of Anglo-Saxon purity: “Now what is become of the Britons? And how many nations have their Blood running in the veins of A True Born Englishman. But then how remarkable have the English lost everywhere and undone themselves by Intestine Divisions. There cannot be a juster or a more lasting Brand upon us than this: They are a divided People; Their quarels and factions exceed what is ordinarily to be found in other nations.”48 Mather positions America as a refuge from this national division and strife. He describes a plantation system of settlement that is still alive and well. While the Indians are “intolerably lazy,” according to Mather, they model an agrarian society that can be easily emulated and improved upon by the English who may “come hither & laboring as they do in England, presently grow rich and outstrip the natives.” Mather’s letter foreshadows nineteenth-century replacement theories of an Anglo-American civility capitalizing on an indigenous past of unrealized potential. He also draws upon earlier promotional literature of America as a space of spiritual renewal. Like the Celtic, Gallic, and Cornish studied by Lhwyd’s circle, American Indian languages ultimately proved a compelling resource for repositioning America’s place within early Enlightenment efforts to mold evidence from that natural world into a biblical frame. It would take a hundred years before the American Philosophical Society would develop a project similar to Lhwyd’s in tracing the “structure and forms of the Languages of the Aboriginal Nations of America” as evidence of a new national identity.49 Yet early eighteenth-century missionary linguistics were precursors of this national project,

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first inaugurated by Jefferson in the 1780s. In each case, American Indian languages were believed to convey information not only of human history but also of the past unity of time and place in an increasingly fragmented modernity. Experience Mayhew was one of the first Anglo-Protestant missionaries to recognize this indigenous linguistic potential. Having learned the Indian language as a child on his father’s Martha’s Vineyard mission, Mayhew knew Wampanoag as well as his own mother tongue. He insisted upon a distinct system of signification and a structural analogy across most of the Indian languages spoken from Canada to Virginia. On the one hand, Mayhew is Lockean in his descriptions of the arbitrary and social construction of words. On the other hand, he uses these structural analogies to claim that these disparate populations “speak what was Originally one and the same Language.”50 Condensed within this word, “originally,” is a claim to the lost language of Eden coupled with a sense of temporal displacement. The Indians actually living on Martha’s Vineyard, like the inhabitants of  St.  Kilda, represented an original linguistic purity as a vestige of the biblical past. Mayhew constructed Algonquian words as an ancient Christian archive and thus a rich source of philosophical, scientific, and aesthetic potential. Through his work and that of subsequent generations, Indian grammars remained repositories for religious knowledge on the peripheries of the AngloProtestant world even as the human sciences developed and increasingly relegated the Algonquian people to a primitive past beyond redemption. In Verstegan’s words, Algonquian words restituted the decayed intelligence of an ancient past that contained sacred meaning only as an archaeological remnant of Mosaic history.

Chapter 10

Full. Empty. Stop. Go.: Translating Miscellany in Early Modern China Carla Nappi

Paper Bones: An Introduction The building was crumbling, its rooms were drafty, and it was full of bodies. Some bodies belonged to the Siamese translators: they had faces with eyes and noses and ears, heads with hair, lipped mouths full of teeth and tongue. They were skin-covered, some fat and some slender, each bearing chests and backs and hands and feet. They were full of flesh and bones, hearts and intestines, blood and gall, strength and qi. The Mongolian translators had other kinds of bodies: in addition to all the parts of their colleagues from Siam, their guts were packed with livers and lungs and spleen, muscle and marrow. A spine held them up from forehead to foot, and they used their fists and palms to write pages full of terms for the parts of their feet. Each layer of their hearts had its own name, as did each expression of their faces. They dripped with liquids: sweat, phlegm, and tears. They could be exhausted, ill, or poisoned, and might be blind, deaf, or bald. Some walked with a limp. Their cheeks and throats were dimpled and whiskered, and large teeth poked out from their mouths. The bodies of the Persian translators were made of language, thoughts, and movements along with limbs and organs. Their various parts had yin and yang aspects; they could cough, cry, and fall ill; and they had hair on their faces and temples.

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Despite their differences, the bodies described above all shared something in common: they were made not of flesh but of inked and gridded paper. Each corpus has been pieced together from the terms in the Human Body category of a series of topically arranged bilingual glossaries that were produced, studied, and used at the imperial Translators’ College (Siyi guan)1 from the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries in China. The translators lived together, worked together, and puzzled through the claims and categories of foreign scripts together. They collectively formed the backbone of one of the most fascinating and little-known translating bodies in early modernity, and this chapter is devoted to introducing you to them, to their work, and to one of the most interesting aspects of their practice. The aims of this chapter are threefold. First, it will open a window into the lives and spaces of the men who worked at the Translators’ College from its founding in 1407 to its closing in 1748. After establishing that background, it will proceed by attempting to place dictionaries, lexicographical texts, and bilingual materials into the field of what we talk about when we talk about Chinese literary production. Working from that expanded definition of the literary field, the chapter will finally turn to a focus on miscellany in the history of textual production and translation, arguing that miscellany was not simply a literary genre or category, but was the basis of a practice that was central to the arts of translation in early modern China. We will consider how that practice animated the linguistic space of translators, and how it changed from Ming to Manchu imperial rule. After excavating the bodies and products of the translators of the college, we will attempt to reanimate them.

Ink and Blood: The Translators’ College In Mongolian they were called qi-ta-ti.2 In Persian they were called hei-ta-yi.3 In Tibetan they were called gu-mi.4 In Uighur they were called qi-da-qi-shi.5 In Jurchen they were called ni-ha-nie-ma.6 In Baiyi they were called liu-qie.7 For the Yongle Emperor (r. 1402–24), they were the Hanren, the Chinese subjects of the Great Ming dynasty, and they were his people.8 It was the fifth year after Yongle had won the throne in a bitter battle against his nephew, the

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erstwhile Jianwen Emperor. He was in the midst of a campaign to subjugate Annam (in modern Vietnam), and the army he had sent into the territory had captured a defiant local ruler and was proceeding to annex the land for the Ming (1368–1644). The Muslim eunuch admiral Zheng He (1371–1433) had just returned from the first voyage of his “treasure fleet” after setting out in 1405. He arrived at court laden with gifts, envoys, and stories from the many foreign states his troops had visited (Champa, Sumatra, Malacca, and India among them), as well as one particularly nasty pirate who had been causing some trouble.9 Yongle rewarded the military commander and his men before immediately hatching plans for their next assignment to the south, as well as an extended campaign against the Mongols to the north. The Ming was vast, as were the imperial desires of its ruler, and it was impossible to maintain official communications within and beyond its territory using only the Chinese language. Thus, to protect and expand the Great Ming organism, in this fifth year of his reign Yongle created another body.10 The new Translators’ College was to be part of the Hanlin Academy, a prestigious government institution for scholar-officials.11 It had eight bureaus, each devoted to a foreign script of diplomatic or strategic importance: those listed earlier as well as Burmese and Sanskrit. Yongle directed the Board of Rites to choose students from the Imperial Academy (Guozijian) and teachers from a pool of local interpreters who were native or fluent speakers of the relevant languages, and charged each bureau with creating a collection of paired Chinese-foreign documents and a glossary of terms arranged in topical categories: Time and Calendrics, Birds and Beasts, Precious Objects, and so on. In addition to its seaborne and overland armies, the empire would now have battalions of words to dispatch, neatly ordered troops in rows and columns, each maintained by professors leading squadrons of students. While initially planned as diplomatic and strategic tools for imperial rule, the texts and their creators became much more than that. Together, the glossaries diagrammed the linguistic corpus of the empire: its eight arms and eight hands each busily scrawled a foreign script in the ink that dripped through its veins. Its mouth was full of tongues, and its insides were stuffed with organs from Mongolian, Tibetan, Persian, and other bodies. Its skin was patterned in one hundred colors, and its fingers held the stems of one hundred different flowers. In time, it would grow new arms that wrote new words in new languages. In time, it would prove difficult to feed and nearly impossible to control. In time, it would need to be beheaded. For now, however, it embodied

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the promise of a multilingual China and the dreams of its ambitious and demanding father.

Minds and Memories: The Tasks of the Translators The brainchild of Yongle had matured into a troubled adolescence in the decades after his death. Though it had initially been under the jurisdiction of the Hanlin Academy, by the sixteenth century the college was not located anywhere near that prestigious institution: instead, it occupied twenty rooms just outside the eastern stone wall of the city (Dong’an shimen). The first thirty-eight students who were chosen by the Imperial Academy studied in what was, by all accounts, a rather dilapidated bunch of leaky rooms. The court had approved renovations and in 1542 allowed the college to move closer to the center of the imperial action, just outside the eastern entrance to the Forbidden City and a stone’s throw from the academy itself.12 The original bureaus (Mongolian, Persian, Tibetan, Uighur,13 Jurchen, Baiyi,14 Burmese, Sanskrit) were now supplemented by additional ones dedicated to Babai (a script used in what is now Yunnan) and Siamese. The college, devoted primarily to written translation, was one of two major organs of translation in early modern China. The other, which was responsible for oral translation, was the Interpreters’ Station (Huitong guan).15 In addition to serving as a main terminal of the postal system, the station was a kind of guest house where foreign tributary envoys were obliged to remain during their time at the capital.16 Established at the beginning of Yongle’s reign, it functioned both as a hostel for the envoys and as the main agency responsible for looking after them and making sure they did not get into too much trouble. Roughly four hundred employees of the station fed and housed the foreign men. They also managed their trade activities, ensuring that the foreigners sold their articles according to official regulations and did not attempt to traffic in contraband materials such as weapons or history books.17 About sixty men were employed at the station as full-time interpreters of a different range of languages than those of the college, including Korean and Japanese. (Since diplomatic communication with those two areas could be conducted in written Chinese, no bureaus devoted to them were necessary at the scriptfocused college.) By the late sixteenth century, most envoys would stay no longer than a month or two at the station and then be on their way.18 While

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some of them described their quarters in glowing terms, mentioning brocade slippers and satin sheets, Matteo Ricci wrote of his 1601 stay at the station that these “detention houses” were “more like sheep stalls than rooms in which human beings are supposed to live.”19 By the late sixteenth century, there were several means of entry for a student who wanted to enroll in language classes at one of the Translators’ College bureaus. Some managed to buy or bribe their way in. Others secured a place through an entrance examination, though officials complained that the substance of the entrance exams often bore little or no relation to the language work that examinees undertook as students of the college. Still others won places as student-translators thanks to blood ties to current translator-officials at the college. Some of these men (and they were, by all accounts, all men) were native sons of the regions whose language they translated. Others had parents or relatives who had originally hailed from beyond the Ming frontiers, but many did not. The professors of translation employed by the college were also a mixed lot. A century after its founding by Yongle, many positions had become hereditary: when an instructor died, his son often took over his job. Otherwise, the ranks of language instructors were filled from the pool of students studying at each bureau. Students were typically examined every three years, at which point they either failed (but could retake the test twice more during the regular three-year cycle before being ejected from the college) or were rewarded with a promotion. After three of these tests, or nine years of training, a student was qualified as an instructor. Other instructors were native speakers recruited from within the empire or abroad. These included professors who were for all intents and purposes kidnapped into service: the instructors at the Siamese Bureau, for example, were retained at the Ming court in 1578 after a long and frustrating series of diplomatic exchanges between Siamese envoys bringing documents to court in scripts illegible to Ming officials. Some instructors were originally students who had worked their way up the professional ladder through examinations and other accomplishments. The Mongolian Bureau student Wang Zilong, for example, was repeatedly promoted and eventually gained a position at the Court of the Imperial Stud. This was prompted after distinguishing himself while still a twenty-two-year-old student as the replacement for a translator-official at the college who in 1608 had refused to go to a border station to inspect the documents brought by a Mongol tribute mission.

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By the time Wang Zongzai (Presented Scholar [jinshi] degree awarded 1562) became director of the Translators’ College in 1578, the personnel were seriously depleted. Twelve years earlier the Muslim, Tibetan, and Uighur bureaus each had only one or two instructors and no students; the Mongol and Jurchen bureaus had only four translator-officials each. The instructors of the Baiyi and Sanskrit bureaus had died some time earlier and never been replaced, and the Burmese official who had taken office in 1505 was reportedly completely senile.20 Seventy-five new men were then appointed to correct the loss, but by 1578 only fifty of them remained.21 There were also more nefarious examples of professorial ineptitude. According to a popular story, in the early days of the college one Qin Junchu (1385–1441) faked his way through the imperial exams and into a position as Sanskrit Bureau translator by memorizing or sneaking a copy of a sutra into the exam, copying it out in Sanskrit, and attaching it to the end of his exam paper. His deceit was not discovered until a century after his death, when instructors wanted to compile a Sanskrit glossary. They consulted the text compiled by Qin during his days teaching at the bureau, expecting it to contain translations of pertinent terms and ideas ordered in topical categories,22 and found only a recopying of a Buddhist sutra. Qin left no other work that gave any sense that he knew anything of the language he was teaching other than how to reproduce the look of the letters.23 Though positions at the college were neither glamorous nor terribly prestigious, colleagues could be unreliable, the facilities were in constant need of repair, and there was little cash available to do anything about it, it was not entirely a bad gig. Students were housed and clothed and received a modest salary, with their transportation to the college paid and their tax burdens sometimes forgiven. As they passed their examinations and were promoted, their allowances and salaries went up as well. As long as they were actively studying and not sick or otherwise absent, they received quantities of silver, cash, fuel, and silk according to rank.24 (This was, of course, in principle: in fact, many students and officials were often absent and found ways to claim their allowances anyway.) The translator-officials did receive regular rations of white and glutinous rice, salt, meat, and wine. A significant part of the way students at the college learned foreign scripts and languages and thus became translator-officials and instructors was with the aid of study materials produced by and for them. Among the most important of these materials were glossaries. Each language bureau at the college

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produced and studied a bilingual glossary in Chinese and foreign script, organized according to topical categories. The categories were largely consistent across the texts from each bureau: Heavenly Bodies and Phenomena (tianwen); Geography and the Land (dili); Buildings ( gongshi); Time and Calendrics (shiling); Numbers and Counting (shumu); Types of People (renwu); Human Affairs (renshi); Human Body (shenti); Birds and Beasts (niaoshou); Flowers and Trees (huamu); Implements (qiyong); Clothing ( yifu); Food and Drink (yinshi); Precious Objects (zhenbao); Colors (shengse);25 Writing and Records (wenshi); and Locality ( fangyu). The Human Body section, to take one example, was typical of these categories in that the vocabulary and level of detail included in the section could vary dramatically across languages. We encountered some of this at the outset of the chapter, looking briefly at the degree to which the Siamese, Mongolian, and Persian glossaries differed in their presentations of the body and its parts. A section for Commonly Used Terms (tongyong) functioned as a miscellaneous grab bag of words that did not fit elsewhere, and we will look more closely at that section later. Not all of the categories existed in all of the glossaries, and their order varied. Some special categories were included in individual bureaus’ glossaries: the Tibetan instructors added a section for Aromatic Drugs (xiangyao) and one for Classical/Religious Terminology (jingbu), for example. However, for the most part this was the expected map of important foreign knowledge as instantiated in its envoys and official documents.26 The items in the glossaries most likely came from official documents submitted to the court. Each glossary page had columns (usually four) of paired terms that sometimes related to each other, with the entries in each topical category often beginning with the most simple and familiar and ending with specialized terminology that was specific to the documents in a particular script. Readers would begin at the top right of each page and read down each column until arriving at the left edge and turning to the next set of words. For each entry, the translators provided three components: a word in foreign script, a translation into Chinese, and a Chinese transliteration of the way the foreign term sounded. Some glossaries were clearly the work of several people, with at least one responsible for each script. In general, it seems that the scripts were written at different times, and likely by different hands. There were also glossaries for the Interpreters’ Station; being intended for spoken conversation, they included only Chinese transliterations of foreign terms, without foreign scripts.27 The terms were most likely sourced from what

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were perceived to be commonly used terms in conversations with individuals from each linguistic region that sent ambassadors and merchants to the Ming and Qing courts. They were typically organized according to the same categories as the Translators’ College texts, though some editions contain additional rubrics. One Korean (Chaoxian) glossary, for example, contains a section for the names of the heavenly stems and earthly branches ( ganzhi), and one for the names of diagrams from the Classic of Changes ( guaming).28 Some included multiword phrases on human affairs that would ostensibly have been of use to foreign envoys staying at the hostel: That’s ugly. I’m drunk!29 Thus the interpreters of Jurchen at the station could consult the handbook for instructions on how to direct Jurchen-speaking envoys in practical matters for navigating the roads: The water is too deep for vehicles to pass through.30 Do not sit down on the street leading to the imperial palace.31 They learned to chat about the weather: It rains day after day. The wind is like an arrow. The moon is so bright it is like daytime. Go to court when the moon has set.32 They learned pattern sentences in Jurchen that were ostensibly useful in matters of court etiquette: When it is time to kowtow, kowtow. When it is time to bow, bow. When it is time to rise, rise.33 The glossary armed them with lists of envoy no-no’s when granted an official audience at court: The laws are severe. Do not look up. Do not move. Do not cough. Do not steal. Do not gorge yourself on wine and meat. He who goes against the heavens is doomed.34 The glossary also aided interpreters as they sent the envoys on their way back home: When you return you must not do anything bad! From now on, bring good horses. Don’t worry. The court will reward you well.35 These sorts of conversational phrases were usually not included in college glossaries. In addition to the glossaries, translators at the college produced other materials for aid in translation. Along with manuals for learning and producing the alphabets of foreign scripts such as Persian, Mongolian, and ‘Phags-pa (designed to be a unified script for the realm of Khubilai Khan and based on Tibetan letters), these included compilations of paired memorials and poems intended to aid in their practice, which was based in part on memorizing vocabulary. Students were responsible for learning, and in principle were periodically examined on, the most commonly used terms in whichever glossary they worked with. Aside from Sanskrit verses that were (like the other extant materials from that bureau) actual Buddhist texts, most of the bilingual poems composed by the bureaus were likely created by teachers and students as learning exercises.36 Each bureau composed two examples of verse in five- or

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seven-character units. Each word was rendered both in Chinese and in foreign script with a Chinese gloss, with a complete Chinese-only version of the poem also provided as a reference.37 Some students and instructors at the Siamese Bureau, for example, wrote a ditty that helped them remember basic terms like moon and mountain, person and plant, and hot and cold. Other student-instructor teams wrote similar poems, often with very similar vocabulary, though the repetition of terms in some of the verses hints that some of the bureau translators were either using repetition as a learning aid or prioritizing breadth of vocabulary less than their peers. For the most part, these were not particularly attractive literary works, but they served the purpose of helping students become salaried translators. Whatever the form that the translators’ pedagogical aids took, the inclusion of pertinent vocabulary was paramount; most of the extant texts from the bureaus take the form of the topically organized glossaries discussed earlier. The main categories of vocabulary terms (Heavenly Bodies and Phenomena, Geography and the Land, and so on) each began with the most commonly used terms in that category, and these terms are fairly consistent across the different languages. In addition, each of the glossaries concluded with a section for commonly used terms that did not comfortably fit into another category. The latter essentially created a miscellany in each language. Depending on what the translators had chosen to include under the previous headings in the text, the contents of each miscellany could vary considerably, from basic terms like yes and no, easy and difficult, or true and false, often in paired opposites; to the qualities of objects and people, like full and empty; to a useful set of basic actions: to stop and go, to have and have not, to listen and look, to laugh and cry. Rather than representing a coherent body of commonly used words and phrases in Chinese or in the foreign language, the contents of these miscellanies seem instead to represent the most common concepts needed by translators who moved between languages. In a sense, the terms were landmarks in a third linguistic space, one that emerged from and transcended either of the languages being translated to or from. We might consider this third space of negotiation the translator’s space. If extant study aids are any indication, the most diligently studied and actively used manifestation of this knowledge, and the form that lived most indelibly in the memories of the translators, was the body of commonly used terms in the first lines of each category, and in the entirely of the last category. Considered together, they form a metalanguage of miscellany.

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Through the work of the translators at the Translators’ College in early modern China, miscellany was transformed from a noncategory or incidental afterthought into a powerful functional and epistemic tool. Given that, might there be a role for the miscellaneous in theorizing early modern translation and its texts?

Cells and Organs: Translating the Miscellaneous The miscellaneous has a history. Despite that, composing anything like a complete or global history of miscellany (of et cetera, of that which does not fit, of the leftover, of the unclassifiable) is likely an impossible task. Instead, the remainder of this chapter will attempt to briefly use our very local case study to recreate the practice of constructing and translating miscellany as a way to add another dimension to the more general history of the classification and translation of knowledge in early modernity. The goal is to try to get at the importance of a practice of miscellany to the work of translators in early modern China. We can use the glossaries, then, to relate one moment in a broader history of the miscellaneous. The concept of the miscellaneous as a genre, a sensibility, or a mode of writing or organizing information has been discussed in various ways by scholars of Chinese literary history. Much attention has been paid to genres of writing that can collectively (in at least some instantiations of their form) be translated as “miscellanies,” especially collections of jottings including biji (notebooks).38 Scholarship on miscellany in China tends to emphasize the importance of categories and taxonomy, focusing on the ways that jottings flout conventions of scholarly taxonomizing within a particular text and paying special attention to analyzing the importance of categorization within the works themselves. A handful of texts have been singled out for special attention in this context,39 with many scholars emphasizing the importance of notions of the strange or uncanny in motivating the inclusion of accounts in such compilations, and with some scholars focusing on diversity and categorycrossing in the inclusion of material in collections of jottings.40 The miscellany as textual genre (be it in the form of jottings or xiaoshuo [small writings]) is often characterized by the form of the text, which can be understood (in many instances of the genre) as a kind of collection. The objects collected (or recollected) might include stories, the author’s own personal notes or recollections,

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or tidbits from the author’s wanderings through some sort of a textual archive.41 In many cases, the things collected are brief and heterogeneous, and resist comfortable categorization.42 Though much of this characterization has been based on texts of miscellany (especially biji) as they are instantiated in a genre, these features might also illuminate other forms of textual miscellany that are not so generically defined. In moving from a consideration of miscellany as a textual genre to exploring it as an aspect of literary and epistemic practice, the history of translation provides a compelling space. Early modern translators’ practices, and certainly as undertaken by translators working in Chinese and based in eastern Eurasia, were concerned with finding and creating equivalences of terms, sounds, and ideas. When we consider the history of translation, we try to understand how translators negotiated and moved between categories and terms in different languages in order to create those equivalences. What we often overlook is the role played by the epistemic tools that allowed translators to transcend or work beyond categories, despite the fact that these tools were often crucial to their daily practice. Miscellany, I will argue here, was one of those tools. In the case of the college translators examined here, the miscellaneous functioned in two distinct ways. First, it motivated the ways that the material included in the glossaries was categorized, and gave compilers a way to include material that did not fit strictly into existing categories. In this sense, it was embodied in the miscellaneous character of the concluding “commonly used terms” in most of the glossaries. Here, the nature of the miscellaneous was that which was remarkable and worthy of attention, but which did not fit comfortably into existing labels, and it could range from very simple pairs of basic but crucial concepts, many of which were used in the bureau study-poems, to more complex phrases. On another level beyond that of any individual translator or compiler, a sense of the miscellaneous emerges from the ecology of concepts across the topical categories of the glossaries: Human Body, Birds and Beasts, and so on. As briefly described above, terms within these individual categories were typically ordered from the most common and mundane at the beginning of a category to the most specialized at the end. If we compare the glossary entries in any of the categories across languages and bureaus, the largest degree of commonality tends to be seen among the early sections of each of the glossary categories. Though I do not want to specify or individuate a specific number of terms that make up this set of most com-

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mon words in each category across languages, we can think of the collective sum of these terms as another form of the miscellaneous, consisting of knowledge and terminology commonly invoked by translators regardless of the language or script they worked in. As these glossaries formed the backbone of the set of terms and concepts they used to move between languages, we can start to see how the import of the miscellaneous, conceived in this way, might have informed their practice. Second, and in addition to serving as a category in the glossaries and motivating the inclusion of vocabulary therein, the miscellaneous also played another vital role in the practice of the translators. To understand how this worked, we need to look briefly at the mechanics of translating a document at the college. Though the historical record of the daily practices of college translators is fragmentary at best, the translation of documents at the college was most likely a three-step process, and was a collaboration, in some cases, at every stage.43 First, a document arrived at court and was sent to the college for translation. A translator at the appropriate bureau then created a Chinese version, which might be a lengthy and detailed rendering, or simply a digest of the material containing the central names and subjects in the original text. The Chinese version was then retranslated into the original language. The sets of document study guides that were composed for students of the different bureaus of the college consisted, then, of paraphrased Chinese digest-versions of memorials paired with retranslations into the original script.44 This represented the kind of work that the translators would be expected to do in the field and at their desks. Since part of the training for translators involved learning how to write abbreviated Chinese paraphrases of the original foreign texts, and then to create a back-translation into the original language, students in principle had to learn a core set of basic concepts that made sense in both languages, and that they could use to summarize material and move back and forth between languages. The translators’ preoccupation with and focus on common terms created a linguistic space above those of the Chinese or foreign scripts: in addition to their use as study guides, the glossaries and poems and sets of memorials helped translators conceptually rise out of the documents they translated, enough to summarize and paraphrase texts from both languages using a common, core set of ideas represented on the pages of the study guides. These pages mapped a third linguistic and conceptual realm for college translators, as well as functioning as a technology that both emerged from and could be

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used to conduct the translation work they needed to do. The miscellany was thus a kind of pidgin linguistic space, a bridge across languages.

Embodying Miscellany: A Conclusion In Chinese they were Manzhou. In Tibetan they were Manyadzu. In Uighur they were Manju. In Mongolian they were Manju.45 And as of 1599, when Nurhaci commissioned two scholars to create a script of their own, and 1632, when his successor demanded reforms that made it possible for that script to actually represent the sounds of their speech, the force that would overthrow the Ming and found a new dynasty had been fully translated into the Manju, or Manchu, people.46 This new era would be marked by a new script, a new language transformed from Jurchen, and a new identity. Early and mid-Qing rulers created a bilingual Chinese-Manchu bureaucracy, a corpus of Manchu literature, an infrastructure that included the option for civil examinations in Manchu, and a formalized examination system for bilingual Chinese-Manchu training. Education was reformed to ensure that officers could function in Chinese, Manchu, and Mongolian, and new literatures were created in Mongolian, Manchu, and Tibetan. The empire was translated anew. While the previous dynasty’s Yongle Emperor had founded a college to expand and control his empire through its written corpus, the Qing Qianlong Emperor (r. 1735–96) magnified that polylingualism to the entire body of the state. Qianlong’s grandfather, the Kangxi Emperor (r. 1661–22), had sponsored the creation of the Imperially Commissioned Definitive Manchu Dictionary (in Manchu Han i araha manju gisun i buleku bithe; in Chinese Yuzhi Qingwenjian). Published in 1708, it was continually revised and issued in various editions along with numerous other bi- or trilingual dictionaries and compilations throughout the eighteenth century.47 Manchu became the head language and the basis for organization, and the semantic categories of previous Chinese-headed glossaries were reformulated in favor of Manchu categories. Knowledge was restructured as a result. Multilingualism was a symbolic marker of Qianlong’s claim to universal rule, and he both demanded and patronized multilingual training in his of-

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ficials. Toward the end of his reign, Qianlong’s multilingual empire was rendered in visually striking terms, as he commissioned the most ambitious dictionary project in Qing history. Building on and expanding from the Kangxi-era text, on each of its nearly five thousand pages the Imperially Commissioned Manchu Dictionary in Five Scripts (Han-i araha sunja hacin-i hergen kamciha Manju gisun-i buleku bithe, or Yuzhi wuti Qingwenjian) rendered five major languages of diplomatic importance to the Qing: Manchu, the head language, along with Mongolian, Chinese, Tibetan, and Uighur, with the pronunciation of the last two glossed with Manchu script.48 More than mere pedagogical aids, these dictionaries were symbols and effectors of new ways of visualizing, knowing, talking, and writing about the earth, the heavens, and the bodies within them. There was now no need for a separate college, since new and more elaborate organs of translation were being created throughout the court. In a 1748 decree Qianlong beheaded Yongle’s multilingual monster, absorbing the Translators’ College into the Interpreters’ Station to create a single entity that largely served the role that the station had served in the Ming, and ordered a general revision and reordering of its glossaries. In Chinese the new institution was called the Huitong Siyi guan, and in Manchu the Acanjime isanjire tulergi gurin-i bithe ubaliyambure kuren.49 By this point, translation work was spread throughout the state apparatus. At the new Huitong Siyi guan, Qianlong concentrated study and translation into just a few bureaus: the Baiyi Bureau for Southeast Asian languages and the Xiyu Bureau for Central Asia, with a Xiyang Bureau for European languages and perhaps a Babai Bureau for Yunnanese dialects added somewhat later.50 Each bureau was to create a set of dictionaries whose terms were reorganized according to the categories in the contemporary Tibetan glossary, and revision was to be accomplished by scholars who were actually proficient in each of the languages, including those living in Qing borderland zones. Qianlong likely kept the station-college around at least in part for symbolic purposes.51 It was an icon representing Qing control over foreign relations and foreign lands, much as the written page became an icon of the richness and reach of the Qing state: the image of many scripts on a single page (or a painting, or a stone inscription) transformed a many-headed polylinguistic hydra into Qianlong’s single-headed being, whose many eyes and mouths shared one face and spoke many languages simultaneously.52 The point of this concluding foray into the later history of the college and its role in translation in early modern China is simple, but crucial and often

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overlooked: to study translation in Chinese history is not, and cannot be, to study translation solely to and from the Chinese language. With Manchu rule, the needs of the state and the languages of its many voices (both diplomatic and quotidian) were importantly different from what they had been in the Ming. Mongolian and Uighur were crucial to diplomatic affairs in a new way; Manchu became a vital language of the training and practice of translators and of foreign affairs of the Qing state; and European languages were incorporated more substantively into translators’ texts. With the incorporation of Manchu primers, dictionaries, and translation manuals into the pedagogical technology of translation, the practices and textual topography of translation were also transformed. The topical categories, content, and arrangement of glossaries and dictionaries could now be based on Manchu vocabulary and concepts rather than Chinese. The training of translators took different forms with different emphases than it had under Ming rule. The consequences of this transformation for the history of miscellany remain to be explored: the incorporation of Manchu and the rampingup of the importance of Mongolian and Uighur as diplomatic languages of the empire changed the spaces of translation. New vocabularies were to be negotiated, new categories of knowledge and terminology to be reconciled, and new contours of the quotidian to be navigated in dialogues based on commonly used terms and the miscellaneous. The bodies of translators changed with the Qing Empire along with the bodies being translated: not only did new corporeal adjectives, vocabulary, and concepts enter the translators’ work with the rise of Manchu as a language of scholarly and diplomatic negotiation,53 but Manchu, Uighur, and Mongolian also brought new bodily terms for plants, animals, and other natural objects.54 In looking specifically at the role of the miscellaneous in the practice of early modern translation in China, this chapter has attempted to begin a larger conversation that incorporates China into a more multisited and globally informed history of translation. My hope is that focusing on larger conceptual themes of potentially translocal relevance is one way to begin this broader conversation. As we do this, however, it is important to remember: early modern China was not just written, spoken, and translated in Chinese. To get at the complexity of translation in early modernity and to unearth the buried bodies of the translators and their practices, we must keep in mind that the body of a historical “China” is a hybrid and Frankensteinian creation stitched together from many languages, peoples, and empires. And yet, it is alive, and it speaks to us. We need only to listen, and to be prepared to translate.

Chapter 11

Katherine Philips’s Pompey (1663); or the Importance of Being a Translator Line Cottegnies

It is all too easy to overlook Katherine Philips’s translation of Corneille’s La Mort de Pompée today, in spite of the existence of digital editions. Neither of her two Corneille translations (Pompey, first published in 1663, and Horace, in 1667) was included, for instance, in George Saintsbury’s frequently reedited collection, Minor Poets of the Caroline Period.1 In the only scholarly edition of her Collected Works to date, the translations were lumped together in the third and final volume, edited in 1993 by Germaine Greer and Robert Little—an edition published with a small press and now out of print.2 Only in Paula Loscocco’s recent facsimile edition was the translation of Pompey placed at the beginning, according to chronological order. For Pompey was in fact Philips’s only published book before she died in June 1664. The play was published in April 1663 by John Crooke, first in Dublin, where five hundred copies were printed—an edition so successful that it soon sold out3—and then in London two months later. Katherine Philips’s important correspondence with Sir Charles Cotterell (the King’s Master of Revels, and himself a translator) was published in 1705 as Letters from Orinda to Poliarchus. The correspondence shows that the publication of the Corneille translation was for her an extremely important move in her career as a published poet, a point that Peter Beal has amply made in In Praise of Scribes.4 More importantly, it was of vital importance for her thinking about poetry and translation. Over a period of a year and a half, in her Letters, Philips constantly refers to Pompey.5 She comments on three aspects

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of her translation: first, on the circumstances around the play’s lavish production in February 1663 on the occasion of the opening of the newly built Smock Alley Theatre in Dublin, where she stayed for a year, having accompanied her newly married friend Anne Owen, secondly, on the circulation of manuscript and print copies, which she obviously tried to disseminate among elite circles.6 Finally, she reflects on the literary aspects of her text, in particular by comparing it with a rival translation published in 1664 under the title Pompey the Great by a group of “wits” that included Edmund Waller, Lord Buckhurst, Sir Charles Sedley, Sidney Godolphin, and Sir Edward Filmer.7 Philips’s version, in fact, was circulating in manuscript as early as January 1663, and after being performed in Dublin in February 1663 it was performed in London in January 1664 at the Duke’s Theatre.8 Critics have abundantly discussed the importance of the play as a social and political event involving the aristocratic Anglo-Irish elite in Dublin.9 Roger Boyle, first Earl of Orrery, appointed Lord Justice of Ireland in 1660, had drawn up the Act of Settlement, but only after supporting Cromwell in the 1650s. His patronage of Katherine Philips was clearly part of his strategy to assert himself as a leading member of the Anglo-Irish aristocracy in Dublin and to cultivate Charles II’s favor. Orrery had seen the reopening of the theaters in London in August 1660, and sought to make of Dublin a refined cultural center worthy of the new regime, as a mark of his loyalty. Only in February 1662, he had presented a heroic tragedy, The Generall, to Charles II, and the play, which circulated in manuscript, was first performed privately in Dublin in 1662 only a few weeks before Pompey, under the title Altamira.10 For Philips, whose husband had been a regicide even though she remained a staunch royalist, translating Pompey for such a choice elite society was also highly meaningful. In fact, the choice of Corneille’s Pompey made perfect sense, with its emphasis on the punishment of treachery and its plea for royal forgiveness.11 Philips’s translation has thus often been read as a comment on the politics of reconciliation enforced by Charles II after the Restoration,12 whereby the upwardly mobile Philips was presenting herself as “the best advocate as a much-needed Restoration accord.”13 Although a mere visitor and outsider in Dublin, she was thus thrown into a very prominent position by being ostensibly commissioned to write this play for a public performance, an event that was likely to enhance her reputation as an author at a time when she was preparing a volume of her poetry for publication.14 Without ignoring the political implications of Pompey and the highly meaningful circumstances of its production, this chapter aims, however, at shifting the terms of the debate slightly back on issues of translation

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and on Philips’s politics of translation. I would like to suggest a complementary perspective to these by offering a close reading of Pompey that attempts to place the play in the context of the contemporary debates about translation in order to assess its originality. As is well known, Philips’s Pompey is the first tragedy entirely in heroic couplets, as well as the first play written by a woman, ever to be performed on an English stage. In Letters from Orinda to Poliarchus, Philips seems to have thought the work “not inferior to any thing she ever writ” (Letters, 110). As most of her poetry is also written in rhyming couplets, it is tempting to look at this translation both as a site of literary experimentation and as a channel for self-promotion. The letters show an author very conscious about issues of translation. Philips was most probably conscious that by translating a French tragedy she was emulating Mary Sidney Herbert, who had authored the first translation of a French tragedy ever to be published in England, Antonius, by Robert Garnier, as early as 1592.15 Mary Sidney Herbert had meant to reform the English stage by emulating an alternative model to that of the sensational tragedy that was dominant in England at the time. She was also making a political statement about the contemporary situation by translating a play about the civil wars of Rome at a time of political turmoil in both France and England.16 It is therefore not fortuitous that Philips too turned to France, and to Corneille, at a time when English drama was in the process of reinventing itself. These were years of intense interest for French contemporary literature in England, partly fueled by the recent continental exile of many royalists. Philips was also close to a circle of intellectuals who thought a great deal about translation, including Abraham Cowley, for instance, or Cotterel himself, and the Earl of Roscommon, who was among those who supported her in Dublin (and wrote the prologue for Pompey) some twenty years before publishing his famous Essay on Translated Verse. In this chapter, I shall situate Philips’s Pompey in the context of contemporary debates about translation. As will become apparent, by translating Pompey, Philips takes a stance in the debate about the “new way of translating” hailed by John Denham, and more particularly the “libertine” mode of translation, as Cowley names it, two concepts that had been theorized in the 1650s. • Pierre Corneille’s La Mort de Pompée (originally published 1644) seems to have become extremely topical in the early 1660s in England, which might also

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explain Philips’s choice of Pompey for the opening of the new Smock Alley Theatre in Dublin in February 1663. The theater was run by John Ogilby, himself a translator and the Master of the Revels for Ireland. In her Letters Philips gives us some clues as to the circumstances leading to the translation of this play: “By some Accident or another my Scene of pompey fell into his Hands, and he was pleas’d to like it so well, that he sent me the French Original; and the next time I saw him, so earnestly importun’d me to pursue that Translation, that to avoid the Shame of seeing him who had so lately commanded a Kingdom, become a Petitioner to me for such a Trifle, I obey’d him so far as to finish the Act” (66). After reading one scene, then the whole of act 3, the Earl of Orrery prevailed upon her, she claims, to translate the whole play, which she did in two months; meanwhile he pushed for the play to be produced in John Ogilby’s new theater, even subsidizing the costumes.17 Philips also wrote songs which were set to music, to be used as interludes between the acts, while Ogilby added dances.18 As Nancy Maguire has argued, these spectacular elements push Corneille’s tragedy toward tragicomedy and also introduce anachronistic references to the monarchy in a play about the Roman republic.19 Of all the French authors of the period, Corneille was the most popular in England, with thirteen translations published between 1637 and 1671; as a point of comparison, only a couple of Racine’s plays were translated in the century. Corneille had appealed to the high-mindedness and the “feminism” fashionable at the court of Henrietta Maria with his early tragicomedies.20 As Sophie Tomlinson points out, Philips’s interest in Corneille might have stemmed first from “the popularity of the language during the Caroline reign, and the ideas or conventions that captured her interest, such as pastoral, idealized friendship and female heroism, [which] were all part of the literary sensibility fostered by Henrietta Maria.”21 We know, again from the letters, that Philips was fluent in French—as were most ladies and gentlewomen who had received an education—and we know that she attended Mrs. Salmon’s finishing school. She was also very interested in French literature in general, especially romances and poetry of the period. John Davies dedicated a volume of the translation of La Calprenède’s Cleopatra to her.22 Her own translation of Saint-Amant’s “La Solitude,” which was published alongside the French text in the 1667 edition— a bold invitation to compare her version with the original— shows her competence and flair as a translator. Corneille had also been extremely popu lar in France in the 1640s and 1650s, before he was eclipsed by the success of Racine and Molière. He would naturally have been considered the greatest French contemporary

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playwright by a generation of royalists who had been in exile on the continent precisely during those years. Philips’s Pompey was important as the first translation of a French neoclassical drama to appear on the stage in England, thus “inaugurating the discourse of English translation as an act of cultural supremacy,” in Hero Chalmers’s words, but also naturalizing a new style for the English audience.23 Orrery himself, who acted as Philips’s patron in Ireland, was instrumental in promoting the new genre of the heroic tragedy with his play Altamira, privately performed in Dublin in 1662. The choice of Corneille’s play was key as the prototype of the kind of drama that aristocratic literati imagined for the new era. The Pompey episode was also a popular one, often used as an admonition against the dangers of civil war, as has already been pointed out. Katherine Philips could have read Thomas May’s 1627 translation of Lucan, but episodes from the civil wars of Rome and their aftermaths had already been tapped extensively for the English stage. Earlier in the century there had been a whole constellation of interrelated plays that dealt with the episode of Caesar’s rise to power and the end of the Roman republic, both in France (with Etienne Jodelle, Robert Garnier, Pierre Corneille, and Charles Chaulmer, among others) and in England.24 The episode of the Roman civil wars naturally took on a new topicality in the 1640s, which was a decade of political upheavals in both countries. Abraham Cowley thus used Lucan as the basis for his incomplete epic, The Civil War, in which Pompey was identified with Charles I. With La Mort de Pompée, Pierre Corneille had meant to reflect on the specter of civil war during Louis XIV’s minority, while settling his scores with Richelieu, who was alluded to in the play in the character of the bad counselor, Photinus. It is easy to see why the play would have appealed to authors, spectators, and readers of the Restoration, who could see the political relevance of civil war settlements in the context of Charles II’s politics of clemency. In Letters from Orinda to Poliarchus, Philips reports Orrery’s praise of Charles II’s magnanimity (74). This encourages us to make a connection between Philips’s choice of Corneille’s Pompey and the timing of the play. For in Corneille’s play, Caesar is a magnanimous hero, repeatedly asserting how he would in fact have forgiven Pompey if the latter had not been basely murdered by the Egyptians before he could show his generosity.25 Yet Corneille’s version of the episode is far from straightforward: to begin with, in spite of the title, Pompey does not feature in the play, even if his gory head seems to haunt the whole tragedy. Moreover, Caesar, for all of his apparent generosity, is depicted as an ambivalent figure whose outrage at his rival’s death appears fairly

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contrived when it is reported by a witness in act 3, scene 1.26 Finally, and this is something which Corneille feels it necessary to justify in the “Examen” added to the 1660 edition, his Cleopatra is primarily a creature of political ambition, before being a lover: “Je ne la fais amoureuse que par ambition, . . . je trouve qu’à bien examiner l’histoire, elle n’avait que de l’ambition sans amour.”27 The emphasis on a passion considered more noble than love— especially illegitimate love—was a way for Corneille to solve the question of decorum, and this is an emphasis that probably made the play appealing to a Restoration public. • While political interpretations of Philips’s Pompey are perfectly valid in their own right, they tend, however, to overlook, or underestimate, the mediating process of translation. In fact, what have been taken as political or ideological statements of Philips herself can often be attributed to translation choices— if not originally to Corneille himself. It is necessary now to look more closely at her strategy as a translator to assess her “politics of translation.” Philips’s views about translation have often been neglected, perhaps because her claims to modesty have been taken a touch too seriously. Read in conjunction with her version of Pompey, her remarks about translation in Letters from Orinda to Poliarchus reveal a degree of sophistication, as well as familiarity with the terms of the current debates: “I think a translation ought not to be used as Musicians doe a Ground, with all the liberty of descant, but as Painters when they coppy, & the rule yt I understood of translations . . . was to write to Corneille’s sence, as it is to be supposd Corneille would have done, if he had been an Englishman not confind to his lines, nor his numbers (unless we can doe it happily) but always to his meaning . . . where the Originall appears in its own true undisfigured proportion, & yet beautify’d with all the riches of another tongue.”28 Translation is no “descant,” a word referring to musical improvisation or counterpoint,29 but “as painters when they copy.” The image of the artist as a copier of Nature suggests the idea of transposition of one kind of reality into another order, of one culture and language into another. Translation must aim for the spirit of the text rather than the letter. The terms of the debate are quite conventional here. At first sight, Philips seems to side with “the new way of translating,” freer than ad verbum, which Denham had described in 1656 in his discussion of the appropriateness of “naturalizing” Virgil:

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I conceive it a vulgar error in translating Poets, to affect being Fidus Interpres; let that care be with them who deal in matters of Fact, or matters of Faith: but whosoever aims at it in Poetry, as he attempts what is not required, so he shall never perform what he attempts; for it is not his business alone to translate Language into Language, but Poesie into Poesie; and Poesie is of so subtle a spirit, that in pouring out of one Language into another, it will all evaporate; and if a new spirit be not added in the transfusion, there will remain nothing but a Caput mortuum, there being certain Graces and Happinesses peculiar to every Language, which gives life and energy to the words . . . ; and therefore if Virgil must needs speak English, it were fit he should speak not onely as a man of this Nation, but as a man of this age.30 This is the kind of translation Ménage had called “belle infidèle,” in reference to Perrot d’Ablancourt, a form of translation that had gained ground in England in the seventeenth century. Cowley also calls it the “libertine way of rendring foreign Authors” in his preface to the Pindarique Odes— which Philips had most probably read31— and it is also, incidentally, the kind of translation that John Ogilby himself had produced with his own version of Virgil’s Aeneid years before he found himself in the position of staging Philips’s Pompey in Ireland.32 Yet her attitude to translation is more complex than it seems: her Letters show her rereading her text critically, recording variants or changes that she wants made to the printed text. Philips’s remarks may be a response to Denham’s call for the translation of “poesie into poesie,” for she appears to be concerned about the elegance and exactitude of her version. In the Letters, she repeatedly asks Cotterell, who served as a go-between with the printer, to make changes to the manuscript. She worries over, for instance, whether “heaven” and “power” should be two-syllable words (123), or comments on her infelicitous use of the word “effort” as a rhyme for “support” (98), asking for suggestions for improvement. Although the printed version sadly does not record any of these suggestions, the Letters show a keen desire to turn her translation of Corneille into poetry. It would be wrong, however, to assume that Philips advocates free imitation or paraphrase. If we leave aside the admittedly huge liberties she took with the text by interpolating songs and dances into Corneille’s high-minded tragedy, most probably imposed by the circumstances of the Dublin performance, she proves a fairly responsible translator, defending a certain ethics of translation. When comparing her own version with that of the contemporary

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rival translation of Pompey, she is finally led to pronounce against the freer kind of translation: “I have seen the second and fourth Acts of pompey that was translated by the Wits, and have read and consider’d them very impartially; the Expressions are some of them great and noble, and the Verses smooth; yet there is room in several places for an ordinary Critick to shew his Skill. But I cannot but be surpriz’d at the great Liberty they have taken in adding, omitting and altering the Original as they please themselves. This I take to be a Liberty not pardonable in Translations, and unbecoming the Modesty of that Attempt” (Letters, 178). What she invokes here is an ethic of the translation that implies “modesty,” understood as a form of decorum and a sense of responsibility toward one’s source. It is perhaps no coincidence that for Philips the qualities of a good translation should be beauty (smoothness), modesty, and decorum, for, incidentally, all these were considered essential qualities for a gentlewoman. Katherine Philips’s theory of translation can thus be described as fundamentally gendered, as a way of revising what had largely been until then a male-dominated theoretical discourse.33 Conversely, she blames Waller and his collaborators for showing a total disrespect for the text, and in this she was perceptive, for her rivals did not hesitate to leave out whole passages, shortening Corneille’s very long speeches or interlarding them with other characters’ invented interjections, and more generally introducing new lines as they saw fit, with a view to making the dialogues more lively and more interactive.34 Their translation of Pompey the Great is, moreover, far from consistent, since every act was done by a different hand. The result is perhaps more dramatic than the original, and perhaps fitter for the English stage, where the toleration for very long speeches was fairly low, but it is a far cry from Corneille. As Katherine Philips concludes, “this way of garbling Authors is fitter for a Paraphrase than a Translation” (Letters, 179)—using “paraphrase” here where Dryden would later use the term “imitation.”35 But Philips goes further in her assessment of the rival translation, and again her comments shed light on her own ethics and practice as a translator. In the passage quoted earlier, she expresses her admiration for what she sees as an ideal style, described as “great,” “noble,” and “smooth,” qualities that in many respects apply to her own version of Pompey, as well as to her own poetry. “How smooth, clear, full, and rich your verse doth flow” ran the praise of her anonymous admirer Philo-Philippa.36 Philips’s translation is in fact characterized by a form of stylistic “ennobling,” as will become apparent. As a poet herself, she feels that the other translators produced bad verse37: “But having assum’d so great a Licence I wonder their Verses are any where either flat

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or rough, which you will observe them not seldom to be; besides their Rhymes are frequently very bad, but what chiefly disgusts me is, that the Sence most commonly languishes through three or four Lines, and then ends in the middle of the fifth. For I am of Opinion that the Sence ought always to be confin’d to the Couplet, other wise the Lines must needs be spiritless and dull” (Letters 179). Her main objection here concerns the use, or misuse, of the rhyming couplet. What she objects to is the abuse of enjambments, a syntactic profuseness that could be described as almost Miltonic. This she sees as incompatible with the natural rhythm of Corneille’s thought, which was expressed in packed alexandrines. Philips clearly sees the heroic couplet here as a consistent unit of thought, and this is something that she in fact practiced in her own poetry. This defense of the heroic couplet as fitter to express the energy of the original thought might seem paradoxical to us today, but it is fascinating to realize that Philips obviously saw the metrical constraint as meaningful and productive.38 It also shows that her thoughts on translation can never be separated from her concerns about poetry. • In contrast with the translation of Waller and his collaborators, Philips’s version of Corneille remains fairly close to the original, except for the notable addition of the interludes required for the production. But her priority is clearly stylistic clarity: she is seeking regularity, one idea per couplet, often at the expense of the variations of the French source. It is not rare for her to change the order of the arguments, for instance, or to ignore expressive stylistic effects, such as repetitions, enumerations, or anaphorae, in order to make the text more elegant or smoother than the original. The result is often harmonious metrically and rhythmically perhaps, but it can also be bland, for the constraint of the rhyming couplet occasionally overrules the expressive effects sought after by Corneille himself.39 One example of this stylistic ennobling on Philips’s part can be found in the opening scene. Ptolemy comments on Pompey’s flight after Pharsalia: “Il fuit, et dans nos ports, dans nos murs, dans nos villes; / Et contre son beau-père Caesar ayant besoin d’asiles. . . .” Philips translates this as “He in our Ports chooses his last Retreat; / And wanting Refuge from a Foe so Great. . . .”40 This is a fairly free translation. She gets rid of the enumeration and leaves out the pathos created by the accumulative effects of the anaphorae, also adding an intensifying adjective (“so great”), just to keep to the rule of the two-line unit— although the rhyme is an off rhyme (retreat/

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great) (CWKP, vol. 3:6). Philips, like Corneille, hardly ever uses enjambments. In contrast, Waller’s version of the same passage, although faithful to the expressive enumeration and perhaps bolder in English as a result, flows over two lines: “The vanquish’d Pompey to our Ports, our Walls, / Our Court approaching for a refuge calls” (Waller et al., Pompey the Great, 2). This version also does an injustice to the original text in a different way by getting rid of Caesar altogether. Philips’s tendency to flatten out the stylistic or expressive energy of the French often runs against the theatricality of the French source: she tends to be blind to the order of the arguments in the original, which usually obeys a dramatic and visual rationale, whereas her own logic is primarily poetic. “Qui punit le vaincu ne craint point le vainqueur” is thus translated by Philips as “They fear no Conquerour, who the Conquer’d strike,” while Waller has, more correctly in view of Corneille’s dramatic logic, “Who Kills the Conquer’d, Gains the Conqueror.”41 Philips’s pursuit of harmony and elegance as a priority can thus lead to a dilution of the dramatic force. Because her primary criteria are smoothness and regularity, her translative strategy is not always consistent— she retains some of Corneille’s original stylistic effects, such as repetitions or parallelisms, but leaves some out, as she finds fit, in order to contain the thought within the bounds of the line unit.42 Th is pursuit of elegance above all goes together with her research of a heightened decorum. Philips erases references to specific family links, for instance, which Corneille uses abundantly throughout the play; these were used most particularly to highlight the proximity of the two protagonists, by reminding his spectator and reader that Pompey was in fact, by virtue of his marriage to Caesar’s daughter Julia, Caesar’s son-in-law. Philips seems to have judged these references not lofty enough— too bourgeois, perhaps, for a tragedy— and she consistently drops them, as in the first example mentioned earlier.43 This heightened decorum can also be perceived in the treatment of the body in the text. Pharsalia’s “mountains of dead men” (“montagnes de morts”; my translation) in the original text thus become “Those Slaughter’d heaps” (CWKP, vol. 3:5), where the transferred epithet makes the image somewhat less concrete, and less violent. Waller simply has “heaps of the slain” (Waller et al., Pompey the Great, 1). Corneille then goes on to describe the rotting corpses, talking about the “rotting trunks” of the dead (“troncs pourris”), which he borrows from Lucan. Philips chooses instead a Latinate noun which tends to make it more abstract, talking collectively about “their Putre-

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factions” instead (CWKP, vol. 3:5). On one level this could be read as a strategy of detour to avoid too direct a reference to headless corpses, which would necessarily have reminded the spectator and reader of Charles I’s beheading; but there are other instances in the play where Philips shows a contrary impulse, by adding pointed references to the regicide. It is clear that Pompey’s head is simultaneously a source of fascination and abhorrence to her. Pompey’s potential association with Charles I is reinforced by the almost systematic use of “great” as a qualifier, even though it is not present in the French; and at one point Pompey’s severed head even becomes “the great head” (CWKP, vol. 3:42), for simply “cette tête” (Théâtre, 536) (“this head”). In act 5, scene 1, the faithful servant Philippe reports his discovery of Pompey’s discarded body, which he identifies precisely because of its missing head: Philips’s version highlights the missing head by mentioning it twice, with a repetition of the adjective “headless” (absent in the source), with first “the Headless Trunk” (CWKP, vol. 3:75) for “le tronc” (Théâtre, 557), and then again a few lines down “a headless Carkass” (CWKP, vol. 3:75), where Corneille simply has “un tronc dont la tête est coupée” (Théâtre, 557; literally “a trunk whose head is cut off ”). At the same time, the idea of the headless carcass probably seemed too graphic for comfort for Philips, and she simply leaves out the fact that Philippe grabs it to take it out of the water: “je m’y jette, et l’embrasse, et le pousse au rivage” (Théâtre, 557; literally “I jump in, and embrace it [the body], and push it towards the shore”) thus becomes “I to it leap’d, and thrust it to the banks” (CWKP, vol. 3:75). “Embrasser” (which does not mean “to kiss” here, but “to embrace”) suggests an intimate physical contact with the maimed corpse, which Philips simply leaves out. The anonymous admirer of Philips, Philo-Philippa, astutely praised her translation as “to just decorum fit.”44 In some cases, in fact, it becomes difficult to distinguish between Philips’s political intention and her desire for poetic decorum—which alone should incite us to use allegorical, political interpretations of the play with caution. When Philips repeatedly leaves out references to “le peuple” (the people), for instance, it is not necessarily out of antipopular sentiment, but rather, it seems to me, to fulfill a fairly exalted sense of what tragic decorum was about, by focusing on characters with a higher status. In translating “the despair of peoples and princes” (“le désespoir des peoples et des princes,” Théâtre, 514), for instance, she obliterates the reference to the people, only mentioning “those kings” (CWKP, vol. 3:8). But when Cleopatra refers to “ce people insolent” (this insolent people) who rebelled

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against her father, Philips interjects an unmistakable reference to the “rebellion,” although the people themselves are subsumed into the all-encompassing, collective term “rebellion”: Quand ce people insolent qu’enferme Alexandrie Fit quitter au feu roi son trône et sa patrie. . . . (Théâtre, 521) When none that bold Rebellion could withstand, Which rob’d our Father, of his Crown and Land The injur’d King forsook his Native Shoar. . . . (CWKP, vol. 3:17) For once, and this should alert us because it is infrequent, Philips turns two French lines into three—an unusual moment of amplification— and her indignation seems almost palpable. The king, who is only “injur’d” in the English version, leaves his native shore, as in the French, but Philips adds emphatically that he is “rob’d” of his land. The allusion to Charles II, forced into exile, seems transparent. In fact, Philips had already compared him to Pompey in “On the 3rd of September, 1651,” a poem about his flight from England.45 She also introduces a line that alludes to the failure of the king’s supporters to fight the “rebellion” (“none that bold Rebellion could withstand”), which indirectly inscribes the ghostly presence of the hapless royalists into the text. To conclude, political allusion can be derived from Philips’s version, but it is framed by her observance of poetic decorum and by her translative strategy. • What I have described as Philips’s heightened sense of decorum also applies to the treatment of feelings in the play. In fact, in the Letters Philips claims to have been attracted to the play first because of the third act, “the most noble and best written in the French” (179). There are three high points in act 3: scene 2, where Caesar discusses the clemency he would have shown his rival had he been given a chance; scene 3, a “love scene” between Cleopatra and Caesar; and finally, scene 4, where Cornelia is given her great speech. It is not difficult to see why Philips could have been attracted to the character of the virtuous wife and widow, Cornelia, whose sublime notion of faithfulness to Pompey does not preclude a form of admiration for his great enemy, the gen-

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erous Caesar. The character of Cleopatra, however, seems to have caused Philips some concern. As Corneille’s “Examen” reveals, the French playwright himself was anxious enough about the potential immorality of the adulterous affair between Cleopatra and Caesar to depart from his sources by stressing Cleopatra’s status as an ambitious queen: “Je ne la fais amoureuse que par ambition . . .” (Théâtre, 508). Philips seems to have felt a similar unease. She first downplays the physical attraction of Cleopatra, by translating the word “appâts” (or charms), which is repeatedly used to designate her beauty. As a consequence, Caesar is made, more tamely, to praise her “bright Eyes” (CWKP, vol. 3:45) instead of her “divins appâts” (divine charms). This damps down and trivializes Caesar’s passion for Cleopatra. Yet the main issue remains the adulterous nature of their relationship. In act I, scene 3, Cleopatra retraces the history of Caesar’s infatuation with her and attributes it to “this little of beauty which heaven gave her and made her eyes bright”: . . . moi déjà dans un âge Où ce peu de beauté que m’ont donné les cieux D’un assez vif éclat faisait briller mes yeux. César en fut épris, du moins il feignit de l’être Et voulut que l’effet le fît bientôt paraître. (Théâtre, 521, 1644 variant) One would expect Philips to go along with this strategy of Corneille’s, but in fact she does the exact opposite by stressing Cleopatra’s brazenness instead: . . . I was in a Age, When Nature had supply’d my Eyes with Darts, Already Active in subduing hearts. Caesar receiv’d, or else pretended love, And by his Actions, would his Passion prove. (CWKP, vol. 3:17–18) She discards the French Cleopatra’s declarations of modesty by suppressing all the modifiers (“the little of beauty,” “fairly dazzling,” “at least”). Her own Cleopatra comes across as sure of her sexual power, active in “subduing hearts.”46 She is described as bold and immodest, unashamedly discussing Caesar’s love, even calling it “his passion” (which was simply implied in the French), which results in emphasizing Cleopatra’s looseness. Philips uses a similar strategy

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again in act 2, scene 1, when Cleopatra is boldly made to discuss the divorce that would be necessary for Caesar and herself to get married: Le divorce, aujourd’hui si commun aux Romains, Peut rendre en ma faveur tous ces obstacles vains: César en sait l’usage et la cérémonie; Un divorce chez lui fit place à Calphurnie. (Théâtre, 526) This is dodgy enough in the French, but Philips’s Cleopatra comes across as even more immodest, by brutally admitting to her “desires” and frankly envisaging the “removal” of Calphurnia, Caesar’s official wife:47 But a Divorce, at Rome so common now, May remove her, and my desires allow. Caesar’s experience him to that may lead, Since ’twas Calphurnia’s Passage to his bed. (CWKP, vol. 3:25) If we think about the French context of the classical tragedy, where decorum was key, the “passage to Caesar’s bed” (an addition of Philips’s) can be considered as a complete breach of decorum. Sophie Tomlinson writes that “the ritualizing of the relationship between Cleopatra and Caesar liberates Philips from the scandalous associations of history’s ‘harlot queen,’ allowing her to explore more fully Cleopatra’s political ambition and agency.”48 It seems to me, however, that while also emphasizing Cleopatra’s political ambition, Philips offers a tendentious interpretation of Corneille’s original text by emphasizing Cleopatra’s brazenness rather than tamping it down. We clearly see here Philips contradicting her own sense of decorum to offer a more clear-cut portrait of Cleopatra as a lost woman, in contradistinction to the virtuous Cornelia. • In this chapter I have tried to contextualize Philips’s practice and theory as a translator. I have neglected the original songs that she adds for the occasion, because they have been studied elsewhere.49 My reading proceeds from an initial dissatisfaction with some of the political readings of the play, which sometimes overlook the complexity of Philips’s attitude toward translation. We learn from Letters from Orinda to Poliarchus that Katherine Philips was

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extremely anxious to beat her rivals to the press with this play—which she did—and that she knew it would enhance her public fame as a poet. The letters also reveal that for her, translating, far from being an ancillary task, was the work of a serious poet with her own agenda, first the defense of the heroic couplet for the stage, and then the promotion of a poetic of smoothness and regularity. By looking at the text closely, we also see the translator at work, negotiating her way between the extremes of literalism and imitation and constantly making compromises. All in all, she strikes for a middle way, a mitigated form of free translation, guided by what she sees as her responsibility toward the original text, but also her (shall we say target-oriented?) responsibility toward the audience for whom she was forging a new idiom. In this respect, she must be seen as a critical member of the circle that included translators like Sir Richard Fanshawe, Abraham Cowley, or John Denham, but also as a source of inspiration for the young Earl of Roscommon, as well as, perhaps, for John Dryden’s “translation with a latitude.”

Chapter 12

Translating Scottish Stadial History: William Robertson in Late Eighteenth-Century Germany László Kontler

The work I have had in preparing this new edition of Robertson’s History of Charles V has not been very agreeable. To compare an already existing translation line by line with the original, in order to be convinced of its accuracy; to alter a deficient phrase in a period while retaining the idiom already used, instead of deleting it altogether; to be ceaselessly alert, in order to avoid being led astray by the old translation and becoming familiar with its defects to such a degree as to overlook them; all this costs more trouble than a new translation would require. I do not flatter myself that I have noticed everything that could have been improved, and would hardly ever again undertake such a task, which causes more difficulties than it would seem at first sight.1

Anybody familiar with the frustrating side of editorial work can only sympathize with the sentiments expressed in these sentences by Julius August Remer, the editor of the 1779 second German edition of William Robertson’s History of Charles V. What makes this complaint peculiar is that its author shortly earlier had spoken very highly about its target: “The translator, the late councilor Mittelstedt had too much wisdom and common sense, and was too proficient in both languages . . . to produce a translation that is not faithful,”

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and the “excellent book” only needed to be supplemented with a handful of notes in order to improve its accuracy.2 Nevertheless, just over a decade later Remer decided to revise the second edition, too. The revision concerned especially the book’s celebrated introductory volume, A View of the Progress of Society in Europe, from the Subversion of the Roman Empire, to the Beginning of the Sixteenth Century: in the 1792–96 German edition its structure and organizing principles became radically transformed, and its size was substantially expanded. The resulting differences of meaning reflected the character of the intellectual environment, the personality and the limitations of the stature of the new author, as well as the natural language and the academic idiom spoken by him. This phenomenon is by no means unfamiliar from histories of translation and reception in the early modern period.3 Yet, among many similar cases, the complex trajectory of Robertson’s works in late eighteenth-century Germany stands out as a litmus test of the possibilities and the limits of intellectual transfer via interlingual translation of important and popular texts, and commentary on them within the enlightened “republic of letters.” William Robertson (1723–91)4 wrote some of the historical best sellers of the eighteenth century, and his thought developed in close dialogue with the foremost thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment, including David Hume, Adam Smith, John Millar, Adam Ferguson, and Henry Home, Lord Kames. He was also historiographer royal for Scotland, as well as an uncontested leader of the Scottish Presbyterian Kirk and principal of the University of Edinburgh—a “moderate” establishment public figure, and a participant in some of the most interesting intellectual innovations in the rising social and human sciences. His works on themes from national, European, and global history addressed major questions of the Enlightenment as an intellectual movement which embraced the whole spectrum of efforts to confront the challenges of commercial modernity, and of the erosion of the Christian and republican ethical foundations of Western societies from the late seventeenth century to the era of the French Revolution—at least those segments of the spectrum that were not confined to a mere repudiation or negation of these challenges. How is it possible to alleviate the religious and political conflict inspired by the extremes of “superstition” and “enthusiasm” that had marred the social and political atmosphere of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries? How is it possible to accommodate commerce, which had become inevitable and indispensable for modern societies, but equally inevitably reinforced the self-regarding impulses inherent in human nature, with the

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moral imperatives of cooperation, sympathy, and public spirit in human collectives? How is it possible to enshrine the dignity of man in constitutions that also allow for strong government and stability? These and a great many other questions defined themes, fields, and pursuits in eighteenth-century intellectual inquiry that were central to what we know as the Enlightenment: religious toleration and the “natural history” of religion, political economy and conjectural history, natural jurisprudence and moral psychology, and so forth. The answers to these questions were diverse, and this is what introduces plurality amid unity in the Enlightenment.5 The answers implied in Robertson’s contributions to the enlightened “narratives of civil government” (John Pocock) and “cosmopolitan history” (Karen O’Brien)6 were conceived from the vantage point of one of the most influential men in an economically and politically—but especially culturally—ever more robustly emerging “minor partner” within a composite monarchy, itself struggling with challenges of arising as a leading imperial power in commercial and military terms between the 1750s and the 1790s, a period coinciding both with Robertson’s activity as a historian and the heyday of the Scottish Enlightenment. The main historical themes presented by this vantage point were the internal dynamics of the Anglo-Scottish union, the phenomenon of international competition and balance of power within the European commonwealth recognized as a system of states, and the broadening global interface between the civilization peculiar to this system and its counterparts in other continents now opening themselves to the gaze of Europeans. In The History of Scotland (1759), Robertson sought to show how and why Scotland, although already making its appearance on the horizon of European history by the sixteenth century, did not share in processes that were taking place elsewhere, such as the curtailing of feudalism, which in Scotland was in effect postponed until the union with England. By doing so, he attempted to refocus Scottish historiography, to supersede its shallow ancient constitutionalism, insularity, and the partisan debates between the adherents and adversaries of Mary, Queen of Scots, and endeavored instead to place Scottish history on the map of Europe. The chief ambition of The History of Charles V (1769) was to show how Europe in the same period experienced the trials of absolutism, universal monarchy, and religious wars—before high-taxing territorial monarchies maintaining large standing armies could have become internally mitigated by checks and balances and externally by balance of power, and the idea of toleration reconciled people to religious plurality. Robertson then explored the ties forged

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through commercial and cultural exchange as well as imperialism between Europe and the rest of the globe (History of America, 1777; An Historical Disquisition Concerning the Knowledge Which the Ancients Had of India, 1791) in terms that, while certainly “Eurocentric,” were marked by a great deal of sensitivity toward cultural difference as well as empirical richness and theoretical sophistication. In the latter regard it must be added that while the writing of history was, both for Robertson himself and his environment, still conceived as a literary pursuit as well as a form of political discourse, he was a pioneer in grafting on it the qualities of a field of inquiry with the claims of a scientific discipline, anxious as he was to cultivate it with the methodological tools provided by the new “science of man” that was becoming an Edinburgh trademark during his lifetime. The “eighteenth-century Scottish inquiry,” as it has come to be known in scholarship, focused on the dynamics and paradoxes of the emerging European modernity witnessed by the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and combined political economy with moral psychology in attempting to explain “commercial sociability.” Its analysis of various (historically experienced and existing) patterns of the production and consumption of goods, and the concomitant sociocultural relations, led Smith, Hume, and their colleagues to the recognition that while the market economy gave new stimuli to the inherent selfishness of human beings, preserved and even enhanced inequalities, and created conditions that set limits to the exercise of traditional civic virtue, it also generated a level of affluence unattainable in other societies. Thanks to this and the accompanying legal and institutional developments, the “violent passions” of mankind (at least in the advanced parts of Europe) were on the way to being conquered (commerce presenting more peaceful means of obtaining necessities than war), and people’s manners were becoming more “refined,” “polite,” and “civil”: in other words, they were given the opportunity of discovering new paths to virtue. To the extent that this was a discourse vindicating modernity (though there were skeptical voices, too), it was to some extent the self-congratulation of the cultural and social elite of an emerging imperial province. More important for current purposes, it had an important historical dimension: the understanding of the present of “commercial society” depended on the documentation of humanity’s progress through stages (“stadial” progress), defined in terms of the prevailing “mode of subsistence” at any given time, from hunting-gathering through cattle breeding (pasturing) and farming to the rise of the division of labor and the appearance of exchange between agriculturalists and industrialists.

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“Manners” was an absolute key word in the vocabulary employed by the authors writing in this tradition: denoting the unwritten ethical and aesthetic standards of intercourse among human beings, the rudeness or refinement of manners faithfully mirrored the primitive simplicity or the complexity of the economic foundations of any given society, and also had a bearing on the legal arrangements that determined the possibilities and limitations of political freedom. Closely wedded to the eighteenth-century invention of “humanity” as a subject of inquiry, this enterprise had a comparative and global horizon, even proposing to fill the gaps of empirical research data with “conjectures” ventured on the basis that among societies which have attained the same stage of progress in the earlier-mentioned sequence, demonstrable similarities in one dimension of human existence establish a high likelihood of similarities in others.7 To speak with Robertson, “a tribe of savages on the banks of the Danube must very nearly resemble one upon the plains washed by the Mississippi . . . the disposition and manners of men are formed by their situation, and arise from the state of society in which they live.”8 As elsewhere in Europe, but perhaps even more enthusiastically, Robertson’s combination of narrative and philosophical (stadial and conjectural) history met widespread response in contemporary Germany. All of his books (both the English editions and the German translations) were almost immediately reviewed in important journals.9 Translations appeared just a few months after the publication of the originals in each case (some of them in several versions simultaneously by different hands, others being revised again and again during the course of several decades).10 German authors exploring similar themes demonstrated a keen awareness of the work of Robertson, referring to it and engaging with it critically. The fact that amid this extensive attention, the amount of impact Robertson had in Germany, especially on the character of German historical studies, remained rather limited, is all the more noteworthy, and by itself indicative of the complexities of intellectual communication and reception in the Enlightenment. These complexities can be examined on several levels, both in general terms and by reference to the particular texts of Robertson. First, it is instructive to recall the approach to the Enlightenment in regional perspective, and the role of Edinburgh and Göttingen as “cities of Enlightenment”11 with a special status on the British and German intellectual and cultural scene, respectively, and in the European network of communicating enlightened knowledge. Most of the individuals involved in the German reception of Robertson’s works as translators, reviewers, or independent authors who were

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regarded as the Scottish historian’s counterparts cultivated more or less intimate ties with the University of Göttingen. The list includes former students and professors of various faculties, as well as their friends and family members. Göttingen was the geographic focus and intellectual hub of much Robertson-related activity in the period, a natural home for the reception of an author whose oeuvre, personality, and career stand for much that was distinctive about the Edinburgh Enlightenment. Both Edinburgh and Göttingen were medium-sized urban centers and seats of prestigious universities with tightly knit academic communities, modernized curricula, and scholars of international renown, a combination that represented a considerable appeal far and wide. The two cities were also alike in their capacity to exploit strategic advantages in their cultural-intellectual emulation with regional rivals (Glasgow, Aberdeen, St. Andrews, and Halle and Jena, respectively), and in regard of the integrity they maintained vis-à-vis metropolitan centers of the broader cultural area (London and Berlin). Differences must be mentioned, too. These include the fact that, in addition to the academic elite, Edinburgh also had sizable elite groups in the legal, military, and ecclesiastical professions to an extent with which Göttingen could not compete. To some extent at least this may have been due to the fact that in the latter there were no traditions of a national capital, even though both universities were closely integrated with the establishment of the day. The stimuli deriving from Edinburgh’s identity as representing a Scottish Lowland culture, dramatically wedged between the underdeveloped Highlands and a dynamic England, were also lacking in the German town. Nevertheless, in addition to the parallels mentioned previously, the library resources of the University of Göttingen, together with the unique mechanism provided by the review journal Göttingische Anzeigen von gelehrten Sachen for the wider dissemination of knowledge accumulated on the library’s shelves, offered opportunities as well as incentives for a substantial critical reception of an author like Robertson.12 Altogether, in view of the amalgam of commonalities as well as differences, the two cities constitute an ideal unit of comparison, both as a background through which Robertson’s reception could be approached, and as a topic in its own right that can be better understood in light of that reception. Next, as a disciplinary context, differences of perspective in the process of “translating” Robertson arose from the different modes of historical inquiry, and the differences in its place on the map of learning, tied up with its different public-political valence, in eighteenth-century Scotland and Germany.

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Thus, a brief examination of the sociocultural practices of historical knowledge constitutes yet another level of analysis. In both cases, history was cultivated predominantly in order to show how the present arose from the past, and, consequently, how the nature of the present—and the future—can be better understood through the study of the past. What was different was the present, or rather the vision of the present, and its aspects, which history was expected to highlight. These stakes were “enlightened” in both cases, concerned as they were with the growth and the chances of political stability, denominational peace, legal security, and material improvement. For many eighteenth-century Germans, such chances seemed to be predicated to a considerable extent on the specific structure of the Holy Roman Empire of the German nation, as it became consolidated, indeed enshrined, after the traumas of the Th irty Years’ War, in the peace settlement of Münster and Osnabrück in 1648. As a smaller-scale counterpart of Robertson’s modern Europe, the Westphalian system was conceived as one of the equilibrium of larger and smaller states within Germany, characterized by the plurality of political and religious establishments, for which the existence of an “imperial constitution” that eschewed universal monarchy and vested the composite parts of the assemblage with considerable powers to provide for the civil, spiritual, and material well-being of their subjects was deemed essential.13 From Robertson’s continent-wide preoccupations, it followed that the assumptions of large-scale sociological analysis underlay most of his works, and history’s closest neighbor disciplines were the Edinburgh-style sciences of man. While the latter were also emerging in Germany, the main genres in which history was cultivated there—whether Landesgeschichte, Reichshistorie, or Universalgeschichte—had their gaze on public law and the state sciences.14 The demand for both an anthropological perspective informed by the rising sciences of man and a literary quality in historical work came to Germany with a phase displacement,15 while the early signs of the emergence of the “critical-philological method” made Robertson’s somewhat cavalier treatment of the sources a target of criticism even among sympathizers of his grand design. Next to such local, professional, and academic contexts, one needs to turn to the specific problem of translation as the “construction of comparables.” The transformations that Robertson’s texts underwent in the process of translation arose not only from intended interventions by consciously acting agents, but also from the differences of the linguistic and conceptual tools at their disposal.16 If the capacity of language to provide tools for the competent user to attain specific goals is asserted in the act of translation, its character as a

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paradigm imposing constraints by defining the range of what is capable of expression can also be fruitfully studied in the rich history of Robertson’s German reception. This aspect of the level of exploring “transmission through translation” brings us to the consideration of the compatibility of the conceptual apparatus, together with the coherence of the vocabulary employed to give expression to this apparatus, that was available for Robertson in his contemporary Scottish setting on the one hand, and for his German interlocutors on the other hand. Coping with the vocabulary of Scottish stadial history proved to be a tall order for each of them. The logic of this type of historical discourse heavily depends on the consistent relational use of a few organizing concepts. According to this framework of analysis, in proportion as men start exerting their “industry” (in the sense of a diligent exertion of their powers) on the manufacturing of sophisticated products (that is, “industry” in a different sense) and a division of labor arises, they enter into “commerce,” in the sense of intercourse aimed at the exchange of commodities, which nurtures “commerce” in the sense of intercourse aimed at the exchange of ideas and sentiments between them. In the course of this process their “manners” (the ethical and aesthetic standards that regulate human relationships) become “polished,” which in turn results in increasingly enlightened and stable forms of “policy” and “polity.” Indeed, no translator could have coped with the difficulty that the semantic content of Handel and Handlung —employed to render “commerce”—is confined to trade in the more technical sense, and thus they do not automatically evoke the association with sociability;17 or that Sitten has a more pronounced ethical overtone than “manners,” in which the elements of custom and aesthetic qualities are equally emphatic.18 The case of “industry” was the opposite of “commerce.” Although the term Industrie in this period to some extent still retained its early modern ambiguity and continued to denote the propensity to assiduous application as well as actual manufacturing activity, this was precisely the age when its meaning became increasingly confined to the latter, and the former sense was usually rendered by Fleiß, gewerbsamer Fleiß, or erfinderischer Fleiß.19 Even more serious was the embarrassment which the terms “polished/ polite” and “police/policy” caused the German translators. To the eighteenthcentury British mind, both expressions were vaguely linked to the idea of the polis and were related to the intercourse of the citizens in their private and public capacities, respectively, also suggesting that a bridge existed between these two spheres. To achieve the same effect, similar terms of classical

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derivation would have been needed, but the ones existing in the contemporary German vocabulary were not very helpful. As a translation of “polished,” some of the translators experimented with polizirt, imported from French in the sixteenth century,20 but they mainly used geschliff en, gebildet, or gesittet. These terms revolve around the notions of Sitten, which has already been mentioned, and Bildung, in which—according to an authoritative contemporary treatment by Moses Mendelssohn—culture and enlightenment, the practical and the theoretical perfection of man are combined, and which is possessed by a nation in proportion with the harmony between its social condition and the calling of man.21 In Johann Gottfried Herder’s influential texts, from the letters on recent German literature (1767–68), to the Auch eine Philosophie der Geschichte zur Bildung der Menschheit (1774), to the Ideen zur Philosophie der Geschichte der Menschheit (1784), the field covered by Bildung is successively expanded to embrace the entire historical process of the formation and successive improvement of natural, mental, and spiritual phenomena.22 Here we have a term that had increasingly “public” overtones in Germany during this period. Nevertheless, Robertson’s argument is still diluted, first, because the concepts employed by him are encapsulated in a far more comprehensive notion, and, second, because none of the terms used by the translators are suitable for establishing the etymological link supposed in contemporary English between the standards of spontaneous human interaction (politeness) and the organized forms to which such interaction gives rise (policy/the polity). As for Polizey, the translators must have realized that its traditional early modern meaning of administration, regimentation, ordering, and control by the magistrate in general (which was anyway not quite the same as “policy”) was during their lifetime undergoing a change and became increasingly confined to the maintenance of the internal security of the state. Though it was used occasionally, preference was with a wide variety of terms as they suited the particular context: Regierung (government), Einrichtung (institution), Staatskunst (statecraft), Staatsverfassung (constitution), even Staatswirtschaft (national/state economy). The translators’ inability—or one should say, impossibility—consistently to reproduce the tightly knit clusters of terms that in Roberston’s texts constitute an etymological chain had serious consequences. First, it put the whole stadial logic at risk, and might even result in its complete demise. Second, it was likely to obliterate the ways in which this logic underpins the meaning of the narrative, and, by implication, ultimately jeopardize the full import of the narrative itself.

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In addition to the uncertainties arising from such constraints inherent in the tools available in the natural languages involved in the process of translation, the Germany of the Aufklärung was a veritable battleground of rival theories and methods of translation, which by then had a respectable pedigree, but received further impetus from circumstances peculiar to the eighteenth century. The Enlightenment saw the rise of multilingual modernity, a process to which the aims of translation related in ambivalent ways. On the one hand, its cosmopolitan notions of progress, freedom of thought, universal humanity, and critical reasoning proved to be eminently translatable, and translations became, more than ever before, vehicles of passing on, and communication about, information and ideas. On the other hand, but linked with the growing concern with such communicative functions, this emerging European translation culture not only served to bind together individual national cultures, but also helped to emphasize their differences.23 In other words, the appropriative functions of translation retained their importance— ironically, most forcefully in situations when the imperative of “faithfulness” to the source text was most keenly emphasized. A case in point is the German reaction to the more “aggressive” French practices of appropriative translation, which culminated in Herder, but was in a broad sense embedded in the whole tradition going back to Luther, and its more immediate antecedents included Leibniz’s claim that the richness or poverty of a language shows itself in the way good foreign books are translated into it: that one is the richest which is capable of literal translation.24 This was the logic behind the determination to seek and find the most faithful equivalent of the foreign word and phrase in the mother tongue—very frequently a highly creative pursuit, but transforming the target language instead of the source text—as a means of the expansion (Erweiterung) of the linguistic space (Sprachraum) available for cultural expression. The poet Friedrich Gottlieb Klopstock saw the significance of translation in these terms;25 and when Goethe proposed that the highest stage or the last “epoch” in the history of translation is the one “where one would like to make the translation identical with the original, so that one is not instead of the other, but in place of the other,” he traced a development away from the kind of translation which only receives the foreign text without doing violence to the receiving language toward one which allows the source language to affect the target language.26 This is also what Herder had in mind when he quoted Thomas Abbt approvingly and added his own observations. “The true translator has a higher intention than that of making foreign books intelligible

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to his readers . . . this intention is none other than that of fitting to his mother language excellent thoughts according to the example of a more complete and perfect language. . . . Such a language already represents to us in a clear way many concepts for which we have to look for words, and presents these concepts in such juxtapositions that we develop a need for new connections.”27 It was the prospect of elevating the vernacular culture that led both Herder and Goethe to employ the metaphor of a journey in the course of which one becomes enriched precisely through getting “reconciled to the condition” of the foreign author. Friedrich Schleiermacher’s famous recommendation to “leave the author in peace” is already within reach from this position.28 On the other hand, however, one should also note a vigorous survival of the tradition of les belles infidèles, the “beautiful unfaithful” of the French baroque:29 the extremes to which the eighteenth century went in the propagation of domesticating translation could be illustrated by countless examples. One of the most striking may be William Guthrie’s preface to his translation of Cicero’s Orations (1741). Guthrie thought that it was “the habitual Acquaintance with the Manner which characterizes his Original, that alone can give [the translator] any success in his Attempts to translate,” and therefore he should “make it his business to be as conversant as he cou’d in that Study and Manner which comes nearest to what we may suppose his Author, were he now to live, wou’d pursue.”30 In the given case, Guthrie chose to do this as the Gentleman’s Magazine’s reporter of debates from the British Parliament, where he assumed to have found the contemporary equivalent of the Roman Senate, and sought to conceive how some great MP would formulate and express Cicero’s thought. Such practices received, retroactively, the stamp of theoretical authority in one of the most remarkable full-length treatments of translation theory, Alexander Fraser Tytler’s Essay on the Principles of Translation in 1791,31 and were widely pursued across continental Europe, too. Christian Garve, the eminent German translator of Roman and Scottish works from Cicero to Ferguson in the latter eighteenth century, was equally profoundly aware of the nature of the choices at stake, and made no secret of the fact that loyalty to his readers, or what he saw as their best interest, for him took precedence over that to the authors quoted and translated.32 In this perspective, shared by many in contemporary German translation culture, the boundaries between faithful translation and adaptation were dim; dropping chapters and inserting prefaces, notes, or appendixes in order to explain or challenge the author’s meaning was not only common, but even required as a means to make the foreign text more accessible to the German

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reader. Besides the obviously felt needs of a different cultural environment and the dubious status of translation between piracy and independent achievement, this was due to the fact that publishing a text was considered to enhance the reputation of the publisher in proportion to the element of originality contained in it. Therefore, Julius August Remer, when he expressed his pretensions to surpass his model, Robertson—politely and awkwardly in the 1778 preface to the Geschichte Kaiser Carls des Fünften, and boldly and uncompromisingly in 1792—could only expect to meet the approval of the audience he addressed. The main target of his creative interference with Robertson’s text was the first volume, the philosophical sketch of European sociocultural development over the millennium separating the fall of Rome and the accession of the book’s protagonist. As a result of Remer’s interventions—changing the order of chapters, adding new sections (mostly on issues on German history), eliminating Robertson’s structural distinction between the main text and the “proofs and illustrations”—a new book emerged, twice the size of the original, which may indeed be viewed as a mere excuse for expressing the new author’s opinions. This was all the more the case as Robertson’s strongly materialist system of causation also fell victim to the transformation of the text: in Remer’s presentation, race and ethnicity (the Germano-Celtic spirit) are invested with significant explanatory powers, and the refinement of the spirit precedes that of matter. In this sense, a strong family resemblance can be demonstrated between him and writers whose methodological and theoretical approach to history contradicted that of Robertson, and whose works, on the evidence of the catalogue of his private library, he must have known quite well: Robertson’s fellow Edinburgh historian Gilbert Stuart (a self-professed rival of the principal) and the Göttingen scholar Christoph Meiners. And, perhaps most importantly, unlike in the case of the first translators and editors of the same text around 1770, in the 1790s it was possible for Remer to have recourse to Herder’s idea of the Volksgeist or “national spirit” as enunciated in This Too a Philosophy of the History of Mankind of 1774 and the Ideas on the Philosophy of History of Mankind of 1784.33 But besides the intellectual allegiances that played a part in the content of these transformations, the very fact that Remer embarked of them is noteworthy as pointing to a different level of analysis in translation history: the character, the belongings, and the specific endeavors and agendas of the individuals involved in the process of reception. Most of these individuals derive their significance from representing sociocultural types. Remer,34 professor of

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state sciences at the once prestigious but now somewhat declining University of Helmstedt, is the type of the provincial scholar for whom the engagement with the text was an exercise in emulation. While his library in particular testifies to the remarkable breadth of his intellectual horizon and his erudition, as an author (mainly of university textbooks) Remer was more representative of the accomplished artisan than the artist of genius. He possessed a fine sense of relevance and a fair ability to summarize and synthesize, but little sensitivity for nuances of meaning, and still less elegance of style. This, however, also meant accessibility: it was precisely on account of his average character or typicality that Remer and his likes could play an immense role in shaping the dominant modes of thinking in the confined universe of the German small town or province. At the same time, in the succession of prefaces and remarks placed in the notes with which he equipped Robertson’s text, one may recognize a voice of growing self-confidence, supported by climbing into ever more respectable academic and administrative positions. This was a characteristic combination on the contemporary public scene in Hanover and elsewhere in Germany, where university professors became almost automatically appointed Geheimer Rat. By virtue of his own record of scholarly contributions as well as his visible social advance, Remer could well have felt entitled to assert an independence from his source, besides (or, in many cases, precisely because of ) the meticulous care he in general devoted to its proper rendering. Performing this exercise on one of the international historical best sellers of the time was also a strategy calculated to further consolidate his own status and credentials in the academic community and his wider social world: he must have wished to benefit from Robertson’s fame while taking pride in an “original” achievement that could be considered his own. Were it not for this ambition, it would be puzzling that in his revision of the book no reference at all is made to the already eventful history of the book in German—a history in which he played an important role himself. There were, however, also other “types” active on the stage of the late eighteenth-century German reception of Robertson’s works, in whose case the dynamics arising from personal stakes operated very differently. The attitude of the translators of The History of America and the Historical Disquisition on . . . India was a combination of respect for and detachment from the text, but this approach can be traced back to different motivations in each case. Before establishing himself as a bookseller in Mainz in 1784, Johann Friedrich Schiller had lived for several years in London, where he did some professional translation, in the sense of merely or mainly doing it for money. Besides The

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History of America, he translated Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations (later overshadowed by Christian Garve) and the work of Robertson’s namesake, deputy keeper of the records of Scotland, on ancient Greece.35 The professional attitude for him also implied, as explained in the preface to his rendering of Smith’s work, becoming thoroughly acquainted with the particular discipline and its terminology.36 Nevertheless, he was aware that he could not be considered a true expert scholar. For this reason, and because in his case the intellectual benefit to be drawn from the work of a translator came second to financial gain, he simply did not care to amend actual or supposed lapses or errors. Moreover, he was not strictly scrupulous in his care for authenticity when he encountered difficulties. A contrary case is the renowned natural and social philosopher—companion of his father, Johann Reinhold Forster, as naturalist on James Cook’s second voyage, and later “Jacobin” revolutionary—Georg Forster,37 who certainly conceived of Robertson’s Historical Disquisition as an intellectual challenge, but in a way quite differently from Remer. Far from considering the book flawless—especially from the vantage point of German culture, partly on account of the latter’s keen attention to philological accuracy and pedantic detail, and partly because of Robertson’s neglect of a respectable corpus of German scholarship in the field—he still thought that its merits made it deserving of careful attention, and committed himself to preserving the argument in all of its shades as accurately as possible. At least one important key to his remarkable success was the cultural-intellectual attitude of self-reflexive cosmopolitanism, which he shared with the Scottish historian and which led both of them to display a positive cultural tolerance and empathy toward Indian civilization (in Forster’s case, also demonstrated by his translation of Śakuntalā, the ancient Indian drama by Kālidāsa). The unlikely affinity between the establishment moderate Robertson and the restless Forster points to the often discussed issue of unity versus diversity in the Enlightenment, and suggests that the differences that separated such figures did not inexorably divide enlightened opinion until the French Revolution fell into the Terror.

Coda: Translating Cervantes Today Edith Grossman

It’s impossible to say a thing exactly the way it was, because what you say can never be exact, you always have to leave something out, there are too many parts, sides, crosscurrents, nuances; too many gestures, which could mean this or that, too many shapes which can never be fully described, too many flavors, in the air or on the tongue, half-colors, too many. —Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid’s Tale

Translation is a strange craft, generally appreciated by writers (with a few glaring exceptions, like Milan Kundera, whose attack on his French translator was so virulent that it achieved a sour kind of notoriety), undervalued by publishers (translators’ fees tend to be so low that agents generally are not interested in representing them), trivialized by the academic world (there are still promotion and tenure committees that do not consider translations to be serious publications), and practically ignored by reviewers (astonishingly, it is still possible to find reviews that do not even mention the translator’s name, let alone discuss the quality of the translation). It is an occupation that many critics agree is impossible at best, a betrayal at worst, and on the average probably not much more than the accumulated result of a diligent, even slavish familiarity with dictionaries, even though bringing a text over into another language has a long and glorious history. It can boast of illustrious practitioners ranging from St. Jerome, to the translators at the court of King James, to

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Charles Baudelaire and Ezra Pound, and it is undeniably one of the characteristic, defining activities of the European Renaissance. As Robert Wechsler tells us in Performing Without a Stage: Translators could be much more clearly artists at a time when their role was the same as the author’s: to entertain, to express, to expand their art and their language. Translation in Renaissance Europe was not a palliative for the disease of monoglotism, as it is today; it was a part of literature, a part of the passing of literary traditions and creations from language to language, and a part of the often conscious creation of modern vernacular languages that was central to the cause of the Reformation, religiously and politically.1 But you have all heard the canard, and may even have repeated it once or twice: Robert Frost allegedly defined poetry as the thing that gets lost in translation, an observation as devastating—and, I believe, as false—as the thundering Italian accusation, made respectable by age but for no other reason that I can think of, that all translators are traitors (traduttore = traditore). If one disavows the proposition that professional translators are acutely and incurably pathological, the obvious question is why any sane person would engage in a much-maligned activity that is often either discounted as menial hackwork or reviled as nothing short of criminal. Certainly, for most of us who do, neither fame nor fortune is a serious motivation for so underpaid and undersung an enterprise. Something joyous and remarkable and intrinsically valuable in the work must move us to undertake it, for I can think of no other profession whose practitioners find themselves endlessly challenged to prove to the world that what they do is decent, honorable, and, most of all, possible. Over and over again, at conferences and in interviews, we are compelled to insist on what is hideously referred to as the “translatability” of literature, called on to assert the plausibility and value of translation, challenged to defend our very presence as the intermediary voice between the first author and the readers of the second version of the work—that is, the translation. As Clifford Landers of the American Translators Association once said, many reviewers write as if the English text had somehow sprung into existence independently. What these same reviewers do would be iniquitous if it did not have its own kind of lunatic humor: they are very fond of quoting from the translated text in order to praise the author’s style without once mentioning the fact that what they are citing is the translator’s writing—unless, of course, they do not like

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the book or the author’s style, and then the blame is placed squarely on the shoulders of the translator. “Seamless” (or its comrade-in-arms “able”) is probably the highest praise most translations can receive from most critics, who are chary with adjectives—or words of any kind, for that matter—when it comes to describing the work of a translator. Let me give you an admittedly acerbic translation of the damnation concealed in their faint praise: “able” is valued because it is a short word that takes up very little room when space is at a premium; “seamless,” I believe, actually refers to the properly humbled and chastised state of invisibility into which a translator mercifully chooses to disappear; “mercifully,” because although translation is grudgingly admitted to be an unfortunate, regrettable necessity that may even be crucial to the transmission and communication of culture (sadly, not even the most gifted and exceptional students of languages can read every written language that has ever existed in the world), translators are expected to self-destruct as if we were personally responsible for the construction of the Tower of Babel and its dire consequences—the confusion of tongues—for our species. One must always take the work seriously, never oneself, but that kind of humility smacks of Uriah Heep insisting far too often on the unassuming servility of his character as he rubs his hands, rounds his shoulders, and formulates his criminal, devious plans. How, then, are we to speak with intelligence and insight and discernment of translation and its practitioners? In an essay titled “The Misery and Splendor of Translation,” the Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset called translation a utopian enterprise, but, he said, so too is any human undertaking, even the effort to communicate with another human being in the same language. According to Ortega, however, the fact that they are utopian and may never be fully realized does not lessen the luminous value of our attempts to translate or to communicate: “Human tasks are unrealizable. The destiny of Man—his privilege and honor—is never to achieve what he proposes, and to remain merely an intention, a living utopia. He is always marching toward failure, and even before entering the fray he already carries a wound in his temple.”2 In translation, the ongoing, absolutely utopian ideal is fidelity. But fidelity should never be confused with literalness. Literalism is a clumsy, unhelpful concept that radically skews and oversimplifies the complicated relationship between a translation and an original.

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The languages we speak and write are too sprawling and too unruly to be successfully contained. Despite the best efforts of prescriptive entities ranging from teachers of developmental composition insisting on proper style, good grammar, and correct punctuation, to the French government resolutely attempting to control and ultimately reduce the words and phrases imported into the national speech, living languages will not be regulated. They overflow even the most modern and allegedly complete dictionaries, which on publication are usually at least twenty years out of date; they sneer at restriction and correction and the imposition of appropriate or tasteful usage, and they revel in local slang, ambiguous meaning, and faddish variation. Like surly adolescents, they push against limits imposed by an academic or sociopolitical world they never made, and are in a state of perpetual rebellion. They are clearly more than accumulations of discrete lexical items, suitable formulations, or acceptable syntax, and the impact of their words is variable, multifaceted, and resonant with innumerable connotations that go far beyond first or even fourth and fifth dictionary definitions. A single language, then, is slippery, paradoxical, ambivalent, explosive. When one tries to grasp it long enough to create a translation, the Byzantine complexity of the enterprise is heightened and intensified to an alarming, almost schizophrenic degree, for the second language is just as elusive, just as dynamic, and just as recalcitrant as the first. The experience of plunging into the maelstrom of signification and intention that whirls and boils between them as we attempt to transfer meaning between two languages, to hear the effects, the rhythms, the artfulness of both simultaneously, can verge on the hallucinatory. Languages, even first cousins like Spanish and Italian, trail immense, individual histories behind them, and with all their volatile accretions of tradition, culture, and forms and levels of discourse, no two ever dovetail perfectly or occupy the same space at the same time. They can be linked by translation, as a photograph can link movement and stasis, but it is disingenuous to assume that translation, or photography for that matter, is a representational, imitative art in any narrow sense of the term. Fidelity is the noble purpose, the utopian ideal, of the literary translator, but let me repeat: faithfulness has little to do with what is called literal meaning. If it did, the only relevant criterion for judging our work would be a mechanistic and naïve one-for-one matching of individual elements across two disparate language systems. This kind of robotic pairing does exist and is scornfully mocked as “translatorese,”

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the misbegotten, unfaithful, and often unintentionally comic invention that exists only in the mind of a failed translator and has no reality in any linguistic universe. A wonderful depiction of this misshapen idiom can be found in one of my favorite cartoons, in which a bewildered translator asks a disgruntled author, “Do you not be happy with me as the translator of the books of you?” If translators do not match up a series of individual elements and simply bring over words from one language to another, using that legendary linguistic tracing paper, then what do translators translate, and what exactly are they faithful to? Before I continue, I want to underscore a self-evident point: of course translators scour the dictionary—many dictionaries, in fact—and rummage diligently, sometimes frantically, through thesauruses, and encyclopedias, and histories as well, for definitions and meanings. But this kind of lexical search and research, accompanied by many consultations with infinitely patient friends who are native speakers of the first language, and preferably are from the same region as the first author, is a preliminary activity associated with the rough draft, the initial step in a long series of revisions. Completing this preliminary stage is surely a sign of basic competence, but it is not central to the most important and challenging purposes of translation. What I am about to say directly contradicts Vladimir Nabokov’s literalist theories of what a good translation should be, concretized in his practically unreadable English version of Eugene Onegin. I believe Nabokov was a brilliant novelist but a dismal translator: his notion of literal correspondences between languages—a surprisingly pedantic posture for so energetic, accomplished, and adventurous a writer—seems to me like something one might find down a rabbit hole or on the other side of a looking glass.3 One need only consider the plodding opening to his version in verse of the novel that is a monument of Russian literature: My uncle has most honest principles: when taken ill in earnest, he has made one respect him and nothing better could invent. To others his example is a lesson; but, good God, what a bore to sit by a sick man both day and night, without moving a step away!

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To my mind, a translator’s fidelity is not to lexical pairings but to context— the implications and echoes of the first author’s tone, intention, and level of discourse. Good translations are good because they are faithful to this contextual significance. They are not necessarily faithful to words or syntax, which are peculiar to specific languages and can rarely be brought over directly in any misguided and inevitably muddled effort to somehow replicate the original. This is the literalist trap, because words do not mean in isolation. Words mean as indispensable parts of a contextual whole that includes the emotional tone and impact, the literary antecedents, the connotative nimbus as well as the denotations of each statement. I believe—if I did not, I could not do the work—that the meaning of a passage can almost always be rendered faithfully in a second language, but its words, taken as separate entities, can almost never be. Translators translate context. We use analogy to re-create significance, searching for the phrasing and style in the second language which mean in the same way and sound in the same way to the reader of that second language. And this requires all our sensibility and as much sensitivity as we can summon to the workings and nuances of the language we translate into. To balance the clear presumption of my criticizing Nabokov’s theories of translation, I would like to cite John Dryden. In the preface to his translation of Ovid’s Epistles, published in 1680, he called literal translations “servile,” and then, in his conclusion, Dryden articulated, in perfectly eloquent language, his surprisingly modern approach to the issue of the translator’s obligations: “A translator that would write with any force or spirit of an original must never dwell on the words of his author. He ought to possess himself entirely and perfectly comprehend the genius and sense of his author, the nature of the subject, and the terms of the art or subject treated of. And then he will express himself as justly, and with as much life, as if he wrote an original: whereas he who copies word for word loses all the spirit in the tedious transfusion.”4 Some time ago, when Gregory Rabassa was translating García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, he was asked by an exceptionally unintelligent interviewer if he knew enough Spanish to translate the novel. Rabassa’s glorious response was that this was certainly the wrong question. The real question, he said, was if he knew enough English to do justice to that extraordinary book. I am not sure how the benighted interviewer replied: one hopes with stunned silence. According to Ben Belitt, the important American translator and poet, Jorge Luis Borges had some extremely personal and very eccentric ideas about

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how he should be translated into English, his grandmother’s native language. As cited in Wechsler’s book, Belitt recounts: “If Borges had had his way— and he generally did—all polysyllables would have been replaced [in English translation] by monosyllables. . . . People concerned about the legitimacy of the literal might well be scandalized by his mania for dehispanization. ‘Simplify me. Modify me. Make me stark. My language often embarrasses me. It’s too youthful, too Latinate. . . . I want the power of Cynewulf, Beowulf, Bede. Make me macho and gaucho and skinny.’ ”5 Borges also reportedly told his translator not to write what he said but what he meant to say. How can any translator ever accomplish what Borges requested? Is that not the province of gifted psychics or literary critics? Yes on both counts, but I will address only the issue of the second group. By now it is a commonplace, at least in translating circles, to assert that the translator is the most penetrating reader and critic a work can have. The very nature of what we do requires that kind of deep involvement in the text. Our efforts to translate both denotation and connotation, to transfer significance as well as context, mean that we must engage in extensive textual excavation and bring to bear everything we know, feel, and intuit about the two languages and their literatures. Translating by analogy means we have to probe into layers of purpose and implication, weigh and consider each element within its literary milieu and stylistic environment, then make the great leap of faith into the inventive rewriting of both text and context in alien terms. And this kind of close critical reading is sheer pleasure for shameless literature addicts like me, who believe that the sum of a fine piece of writing is more than its parts and larger than the individual words that compose it. I have spent much of my professional life, not to mention all those years in graduate school, committed to the dual proposition that in literature, as in other forms of artistic expression, something more lurks behind mere surface, and that my purpose and role in life was to try to discover and interpret it, even if the goal turned out to be utopian in the sense suggested by Ortega y Gasset. I think this kind of longing to unravel aesthetic mysteries lies at the heart of the study of literature. It surely is the essence of interpretation, of exegesis, of criticism, and of translation. Yet now I feel obliged to confess that I am still mystified by the process of dealing with the same text in two different languages, and have searched in vain for a way to express the bewildering relationship between translation and original, a paradoxical connection that probably can only be evoked metaphorically. The question that lurks in the corners of my mind as I work and

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revise and mutter curses at any fool who thinks the second version of a text is not an original, too, is this: What exactly am I writing when I write a translation? Is it an imitation, a reflection, a transposition, or something else entirely? In what language does the text really exist, and what is my connection to it? I do not mean to suggest that a translation is created with no reference to an original—that it is not actually a version of another text—but it seems clear that a translated work does have an existence separate from and different from the first text, if only because it is written in another language. I do not have a grand, revelatory solution to the puzzle, even though essays like this one make an attempt to resolve the conundrum, but I think authors must often ask themselves the same question that is so difficult to articulate, must often see themselves as transmitters rather than creators of texts. The figure of the muse as an inspiring presence is too ubiquitous, and too universal, for this not to be true. I have often wondered why something as profoundly personal as creating literature should be seen so often as ultimately inspired by an “other,” an external figure, perhaps an “original,” and I have been intrigued by the idea that literary language may, in fact, be a form of translation. And here I mean translation not as the weary journeyman of the publishing world but as a living bridge between two realms of discourse, two realms of experience, and two sets of readers. • Octavio Paz, the Nobel Prize–winning Mexican writer, begins his essay “Translation: Literature and Literalness” with the sentence “When we learn to speak we are learning to translate.”6 He states that children translate the unknown into a language that slowly becomes familiar to them, and that all of us are continually engaged in the translation of thoughts into language. Then he develops an even more suggestive notion: no written or spoken text is “original” at all, since language, whatever else it may be, is a translation of the nonverbal world, and each linguistic sign and phrase translates another sign and phrase. And this means, in an absolutely utopian sense, that the most human of phenomena—the acquisition and use of language—is, according to Paz, actually an ongoing, endless process of translation, and by extension, the most creative use of language—that is, literature—is also a process of translation: not the transmutation of the text into another language but the transformation and concretization of the content of the writer’s imagination into a literary artifact. As many observers, including John Felstiner and Yves

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Bonnefoy, have suggested, the translator who struggles to recreate a writer’s words in the words of a foreign language in fact continues the original struggle of the writer to transpose nonverbal realities into language. In short, as they move from the workings of the imagination to the written word, authors engage in a process that is parallel to what translators do as they move from one language to another. If writing literature is a transfer or transcription of internal experience and imaginative states into the external world, then even when authors and readers speak the same language, writers are obliged to translate, to engage in the immense, utopian effort to transform the images and ideas flowing through their most intimate spaces into material, legible terms to which readers have access. And if this is so, the doubts and paradoxical questions that pursue translators must also arise for authors: Is their text an inevitable betrayal of the imagination and the creative impulse? Is what they do even possible? Can the written work ever be a perfect fit with that imaginative, creative original when two different languages, two realms of experience, can only approximate each other? To follow and expand on the terms of this analogy, a literary text can be thought of as written in what is called, clumsily enough, the translation language, or target language, even though it is presented to readers as if it were written in the original, or source language. If the work is successful, it is read as “seamless” (the description that strikes terror in the hearts of all translators), but here the word means that when readers hold the work of literature in their hands, it has at last cut free and begun a life independent of the original— independent, that is, of the simultaneous internal states, the concurrent acts of imagination that initiate the writer’s creative process. Language as the external artifact created by the writer needs metaphor to express the same internal states and acts of imagination that inspire the work, yet always looming in the background of all literary endeavor, establishing a gloomy, compelling counterpoint to the utopian model, is Flaubert’s melancholy observation: “Language is like a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, while all the time we long to move the stars to pity.” These kinds of considerations and speculations and problematic questions are always in my mind whenever I think about translation, especially when I am actually engaged in bringing a work of literature over into English. They certainly occupied a vast amount of mental space when I agreed to take on the immense task of translating Don Quixote, but only after I had repeatedly asked the publisher if he was certain he had called the right Grossman, because

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my work as a translator had been focused on contemporary Latin American writers, not giants of the Renaissance in Spain. Much to my joy, he assured me that in fact I was the Grossman he wanted, and so my intimate, translatorial connection to the great novel began. But there was more: hovering over me were dark sui generis clouds of intense trepidation, vast areas of apprehension and disquiet peculiar to this project. You can probably imagine what they were (just think what it would mean to an English-Spanish translator to take on the work of Shakespeare), but I will try to clarify a few of them for you. There were the centuries of Cervantean scholarship, the specialized studies, the meticulous research, the untold numbers of books, monographs, articles, and scholarly editions devoted to this fiction-defining novel and its groundbreaking creator. Was it my obligation to read and reread all of these publications before embarking on the translation? A lifetime would not be enough time to do this scholarly tradition justice, I was no longer a young woman, and I had a two-year contract with the publisher. There were other translations into English—at least twenty, by someone’s count—a few of them very recent, and others, like Tobias Smollett’s eighteenth-century version, considered classics in their own right. Was it my professional duty to study all of them? Before I took on the project, I recalled having read Don Quixote at least ten times, as a student and as a teacher, but always in Spanish except for my first encounter with the novel, in Samuel Putnam’s 1948 translation, when I was a teenager. I had read no other translations since then. Was I willing to delay the work by years to give myself time to read each English-language version with care? To what end? Did I really want to fill my mind with the echoes of other translators’ perceptions and interpretations? Then there was the question of temporal distance, a chasm of four centuries separating me from Cervantes and the world in which he composed his extraordinary novel. I had translated complex and difficult texts before, some of them exceptionally obscure and challenging, in fact, but they were all modern works by living writers. Would I be able to transfer my contemporary experience as a translator to the past and feel some measure of ease as I brought the Spanish of the seventeenth century over into the English of the twentyfirst? As a student I had spent a good number of years studying the prose writers and poets of the Spanish Golden Age, Cervantes among them, with some of the most erudite specialists in the field, but was this sufficient preparation for undertaking the translation of a book that has the hallowed stature of a

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sacred text? Would my efforts—my incursions into the sacrosanct—amount to blasphemy? What was I to do about the inevitable lexical difficulties and obscure passages? These occur in prodigious numbers in contemporary works and were bound to reach astronomical proportions in a work that is four hundred years old. Normally when I translate I dig through countless dictionaries and other kinds of references—most recently Google—for the meaning of words I do not know, and then my usual practice is to talk with those kind, patient, and generous friends who are from the same country as the author, and preferably from the same region within the country. As a last step in my lexical searches, I generally consult with the original writer, not for the translation of a word or phrase but for clarification of his or her intention and meaning. But Don Quixote clearly was a different matter: none of my friends came from the Spain of the early seventeenth century, and short of channeling, I had no way to consult with Cervantes. I was, I told myself in a tremulous voice, fervently wishing it were otherwise, completely on my own. Two things came to my immediate rescue: the first was Martín de Riquer’s informative notes in the Spanish edition of the book I used for the translation (I told García Márquez, whose Living to Tell the Tale I worked on immediately after Don Quixote, that Cervantes was easier to translate than he was because at least in a text by Cervantes there were notes at the bottom of the page). Riquer’s editorial comments shed light on countless historical, geographical, literary, and mythical references, which I think tend to be more obscure for a modern reader than individual lexical items. Throughout his edition, Riquer takes on particularly problematic words by comparing their renderings in the earliest translations of Don Quixote into English, French, and Italian, and I have always found this—one language helping to explicate another—especially illuminating. The second piece of invaluable assistance came from an old friend, the Mexican writer Homero Aridjis, who sent me a photocopy of a dictionary he had found in Holland when he was a diplomat there: a seventeenth-century Spanish-English dictionary first published by a certain gentleman named Percivale, then enlarged by a professor of languages named Minsheu, and printed in London in 1623. The dictionary was immensely helpful at those dreadful times when a word was not to be found in any of the dictionaries I own. I do not mean to suggest that there were no excruciatingly obscure or archaic phrases in Don Quixote—it has a lifetime supply of those— but despite all the difficulties, I was fascinated to realize how constant and steady Spanish has remained over the centuries (as compared to English, for

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example), which meant I could often use contemporary wordbooks to help illuminate a seventeenth-century text. I wondered, too, if the novel would open to me as contemporary works sometimes do, and permit me to immerse myself in the intricacies of its language and intention. Would I be able to catch at least a glimpse of Cervantes’s mind as I listened to his prose and began to live with his characters, and would I be able to keep that image intact as I searched for, and hopefully found, equivalent voices in English? On occasion, at a certain point in the translation of a book, I have been lucky enough to hit the sweet spot, when I can begin to imagine that the author and I have started to speak together—never in unison, certainly, but in a kind of satisfying harmony. In those instances it seems as if I can hear the author’s voice in my mind speaking in Spanish at the same time that I manage to find a way to speak the work in English. The experience is exhilarating, symbiotic, certainly metaphorical, and absolutely crucial if I am to do what I am supposed to do—somehow get into the author’s head and behind the author’s eyes and re-create in English the writer’s linguistic perceptions of the world. And here I must repeat Ralph Manheim’s observation comparing the translator to an actor who speaks as the author would if the author could speak English—a difficult role, and arduous enough with contemporary writers. What would happen to my performance when I began to interpret the work of an author who wrote in the seventeenth century—and not just an ordinary author but the remarkable man who is one of a handful of splendid writers who have determined the course of literature in the Western tradition? Despite all those years of study I mentioned earlier, I am not a Golden Age specialist: Would I be able to play the Cervantean part and speak those memorable lines, or would the entire quixotic enterprise close down on its first night out of town, before it ever got to Broadway? Would I, in short, be able to write passages that would afford English-language readers access to this marvelous novel, allow them to experience the text in a way that approaches how readers in Spanish experience it now and how readers experienced it four hundred years ago? These were some of the fears that plagued me as I prepared to take on the project, but the prospect was not entirely bleak, dire, and menacing, of course. The idea of working on Don Quixote was one of the most exciting things that had happened to me as a translator. It was a privilege, an honor, and a glorious opportunity—exhilarating, overwhelming, and terrifying. At this point I had the exchange with Julián Ríos that I mention in my translator’s note to

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Don Quixote. I told Julián about the project, and about the apprehension I felt, and he told me not to be afraid because, he said, Cervantes was our most modern writer. All I had to do, according to Julián, was translate Cervantes the way I translated everyone else, meaning the contemporary authors whose works—Ríos’s included—I had brought over into English. As I said in the note, this was “a revelation; it desacralized the project and allowed me, finally, to confront the text and find the voice in English”—in other words, Julián’s comments permitted me to begin the process of translation.7 In the back of my mind was the rather fanciful notion that if I could successfully translate the opening phrase—probably the most famous words in Spanish, comparable to the opening lines of Hamlet’s soliloquy in English, or, in Italian, the inscription over the gate to Hell envisioned by Dante in the Commedia, and known even to people who have not read the entire work—then the rest of the novel would somehow fall into place. The first part of the sentence in Spanish reads: “En un lugar de la Mancha, de cuyo nombre no quiero acordarme . . .” I recited those words to myself as if they were a mantra, until an English phrase materialized that seemed to have a comparable rhythm and drive, that played with the multiple meanings of the word lugar (both “place” and “village”), and that echoed some of the sound of the original: “Somewhere in La Mancha, in a place whose name I do not care to remember . . .” It felt right to me, and with a rush of euphoric satisfaction I told myself I might actually be able to translate this grand masterpiece of a book. Another major consideration was the question of which edition of Don Quixote to use for the translation. As with any classic work, there are many beautiful and valuable editions of the book; despite the mean-spirited speculation of one reviewer, whose name I do not care to remember, I did know about the highly acclaimed recent edition by Francisco Rico, but as I have already indicated, for reasons both critical and sentimental I decided to use Martín de Riquer’s earlier one. Based on the first printing of the book, it includes all the oversights, lapses, and slips in Part One that Cervantes subsequently tried to correct, and to which he refers in Part Two, published ten years later. I have always loved the errors in the first printing and been charmed by the companionable feeling toward Cervantes that they create in me. Someone—one of the book’s translators, I think—called Don Quixote the most careless masterwork ever written, and I thought it would be a shame if my translation lost or smoothed over or scholarshipped away that enthusiastic, ebullient quality, what I think of as the creative surge that allowed Cervantes to make those all-too-human mistakes and still write his crucially

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important and utterly original book. I am not suggesting, by the way, that Cervantes was a primitive savant or a man not fully conscious of the ramifications and implications of his art. He was, however, a harried, financially hard-pressed, overworked man. Conventional wisdom informs us that even Homer nodded, and as every writer knows, in the urgency of getting a book into print, the strangest mistakes appear in the oddest places. I decided, too, that I was not creating a scholarly work or an academic book, and therefore I would not peruse and compare editions—no more than I would begin my work by checking on how other translators had done theirs. And yet, despite my lack of academic intention, pretension, and purpose, for the first time in my translating career I chose to use footnotes, many of them based on the notes in Riquer’s edition, and the others the result of my seemingly endless perusals of encyclopedias, dictionaries, and histories. These notes, which I wanted to be as unobtrusive and helpful as possible, were not meant as records or proofs of scholarly research but as clarifications for the reader of possibly obscure references and allusions—the kinds of clarifications made necessary in a contemporary version of the novel by external factors such as the passage of time, changes in education, transformations in the reading public, and the cultural differences between the United States in the twenty-first century and Spain in the seventeenth. There was no reason I could think of for an intelligent modern reader to be put off by difficulties in the text that were not intended by the author. For instance, the ballads or romances cited so frequently in Don Quixote by the characters, and by Cervantes himself in the guise of the narrator, were common knowledge at the time, familiar to everyone in Spain, including the illiterate. For a modern reader, however, especially one who reads the book in translation or is not conversant with the rich Spanish ballad tradition, the romances are unfamiliar, perhaps exotic, even though they are utterly unproblematic in the intention and structure of the novel. The same is true of allusions to figures and events from the history of Spain—not obscure in and of themselves, but probably not known to most contemporary readers of Don Quixote, regardless of the language in which they read it. For instance, in the course of the novel, Cervantes mentions wellknown underworld haunts, famous battle sites and fortresses in North Africa and Europe, popular authors, and major military figures of the sixteenth century. These were the kinds of references that I did my best to explain in the notes. Cervantistas have always loved to disagree and argue, often with venom and vehemence, but I concluded that my primary task was not to become

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involved in academic disputation or to take sides in any scholarly polemic but to create a translation that hopefully could be read with pleasure by as many people as possible. I wanted English-language readers to savor its humor, its melancholy, its originality, its intellectual and aesthetic complexity; I wanted them to know why the entire world thinks this is a great masterwork by an incomparable novelist. In the end, my primary consideration was this: Don Quixote is not essentially a puzzle for academics, a repository of Renaissance usage, a historical monument, or a text for the classroom. It is a work of literature, and my concern as a literary translator was to create a piece of writing in English that perhaps could be called literature too. Finally, my formal apology. I would like to cite the last paragraph of my translator’s note: “I began the work in February 2001 and completed it two years later, but it is important for you to know that ‘final’ versions are determined more by a publisher’s due date than by any sense on my part that the work is actually finished. Even so, I hope you find it deeply amusing and truly compelling. If not, you can be certain the fault is mine.”8 To this I should add a phrase attributed to Samuel Beckett: “Next time I’ll have to fail better.” That is all any of us can do.

Notes

Introduction 1. We will use both “Renaissance” and “early modern” in this introduction. In brief, we use “Renaissance” to refer broadly to the intellectual, artistic, and cultural movements associated with that term, and “early modern” to refer to social, economic, and political structures and change from roughly 1400 to 1700. We recognize the difficulties and limitations of both terms. See, for example, Margaret L. King’s discussion in The Renaissance in Europe (London: Lawrence King, 2003). 2. Fascinating work has been done over the past decade in translation studies in the Renaissance, especially focused on a single national language or literature. Two such excellent recent monographs are Alison Cornish, Vernacular Translation in Dante’s Italy: Illiterate Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), and Massimiliano Morini, Tudor Translation in Theory and Practice (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006). Peter Burke’s volumes—both written and edited—encompass a broad linguistic and disciplinary range; thus see the coedited (with R. Po-chia Hsia) Cultural Translation in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007) as well as Languages and Communities in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004) and Lost (and Found) in Translation: A Cultural History of Translators and Translating in Early Modern Europe (Wassenar: Netherlands: NIAS, 2005). For two recent wide-ranging essays on the theory and practice of early modern translation, see Theo Hermans, “The Task of the Translator in the European Renaissance,” in Translating Literature, ed. Susan Bassnett (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1997), 14–40, and László Kontler, “Translation and Comparison: Early Modern and Current Perspectives,” Contributions to the History of Concepts 3 (2007): 71–102. 3. Friedrich Schleiermacher, “On the Different Methods of Translating,” trans. Susan Bernofsky, in The Translation Studies Reader, ed. Lawrence Venuti, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2004). 4. Borrowing from Schleiermacher in the introduction to their collection of essays, Nation, Language, and the Ethics of Translation, ed. Sandra Berman and Michael Wood (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2005), 5. 5. Jerome, “Letter to Pammachus,” trans. Kathleen Davis, in The Translation Studies Reader, ed. Lawrence Venuti (New York: Routledge, 2000), 23.

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6. Jacques Derrida, “Qu’est-ce qu’une traduction ‘relevante’?,” Quinzièmes Assises de la Traduction Littéraire (Arles: Actes Sud, 1999), translated by Lawrence Venuti as “What Is a ‘Relevant’ Translation?,” Critical Inquiry 27, no. 2 (2001): 174–200. 7. Samuel Weber, Benjamin’s Abilities (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2008), 29. 8. Shakespeare satirizes Evans’s insular pedagogical practice divorced from experience and his naïve, instrumental understanding of the relation of signifier and signified, as recent work by Lynn Enterline, Shakespeare’s Schoolroom: Rhetoric, Discipline, Emotion (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), Jeff Dolven, Scenes of Instruction in Renaissance Romance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), and others suggests, but these lines betray a naïve understanding of translation as well. 9. This also reflects the common European practice of “double translation,” as discussed in William Miller’s “Double Translation in English Humanistic Education,” Studies in the Renaissance 10 (1963): 163–74. For a recent discussion of this passage and of other such examples, see Kathryn Vomero Santos’s doctoral dissertation, “Staging Translation in Early Modern English Drama,” New York University, September 2013. 10. On unequal translation patterns see Lawrence Venuti, The Scandals of Translation: Towards an Ethics of Diff erence (New York: Routledge, 1998). 11. The Oxford History of Literary Translation in English, vol. 2, 1555—1650, ed. Gordon Braden, Robert Cummings, and Stuart Gillespie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 8. 12. See the Renaissance Cultural Crossroads Project on translation at Warwick University: http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/ren/projects/culturalcrossroads/. 13. Alessandro Braccesi (1445–1503) was also known as Alessandro Bracci; he referred to himself in his Latin writings as Alexander Braccius. In addition to translating Pius II’s Historia de duobus amantibus, here discussed, and Appian’s histories, he wrote several volumes of Latin verse as well as a canzoniere in the Italian. For details of his life and work, see the biography written for the Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani (now at www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/allesandro-braccesi) by Alessandro Perosa, while a recent exhibit catalogue, Art and Love in Renaissance Italy, ed. Andreas Bayer (New York: Metropolitan Museum, 2008), features several pages on the Pius II translation (198–203). 14. “Bene è vero che io non ho observato loffitio di fedele traductore: ma per industria ho lassate molte parti indietro, lequali mi sono parse poco accommodate al dilectare; & in luogo di quelle ho inserto contraria materia per continuare tutto il processo della historia con cose piacevoli & iocunde. Et nel fine dove lauctore pone lamorte duno delli amanti con amarissimi pianti io mutando la tristitia in guadio lasso luno & laltro coniuncto per matrimonio & pieni di somma letitia. Ne pero negherei che lauctore non habbi scripto ogni cosa con singulare prudentia & doctrina. . . . Ma considerando io che benche molte varie sieno le historie & infiniti li exempli che insegnono questo medesimo: nientedimeno tanta esser la forza di questa perturbatione: & tanto vincere in noi ogni ragione che nessuno è suto [stato] sì cauto o saggio: il quale sene sia potuto difendere, & che niun

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rimedio o precepto da torre ? . . . Essendomi a dunque exercitato in questa traductione & compositione amatoria per mio sollazo; & pensando alla conditione depresenti tempi noiosi & gravi per diverse cagioni: pero ho iudicato farti cosa grata in qualche parte . . . che alcuna cosa piu non desidero che satisffare al tuo exquisissimo ingegno”; I due amanti (Florence: Paciani, 1500), 115v-116r, probably the sixth edition of this extremely popular work. Braccesi made some small changes to the prologue, noted later in this chapter, in the course of the revisions. 15. Thus the “presenti tempi noiosi & gravi per diverse cagioni,” cited earlier, was changed from “tempi noiosi e gravi per più rispecti et specialmente per la alteratione et spavento che ne dà la peste”; cited in Perosa, Dizionario Biografico degli Italiani. 16. Bayer, Art and Love in Renaissance Italy, 198. 17. “Credo che non riprenderai questo mio consiglio quando legerai la latina originale sciptura / perche troverrai in molti luoghi cose tanto meste e piene di llamenti che non possino dilectare; ma nessuno è di core si lieto che ratristare non facessino”; I due amanti, cited earlier. 18. Quoted in Danielle Clarke, “Translation and the English Language,” in Braden, Cummings, and Gillespie, Oxford History of Literary Translation, 2:17. 19. The pun is an allusion to Sir John Harington’s Orlando furioso in English Heroical Verse, Canto 28, the canto of the “host’s tale” about women’s perennial infidelity; the citation itself is not from the translation but from Harington’s later A new discourse of a stale subject, called the Metamorphosis of Ajax (London: Richard Field, 1596), 77. Th is moment in which Harington goes on to speak of the “Knavish tale” of the host has been addressed recently by Joshua Samuel Reid, “The Gender Dynamics of Ariosto’s Tales of Women in Elizabethan England” (paper presented at the April 2013 Renaissance Society of America Conference in New York); Anne Lake Prescott, Imagining Rabelais in Renaissance England (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1998), 122; and Jason Scott-Warner, Sir John Harington and the Book as Gift (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 35. 20. Comment made during the session of the Renaissance Society of America Conference at which Reid presented his paper, April 2013. 21. For Harington’s own “Preface, or Rather a Briefe Apologie of Poetry,” in which he defends his translation of the Orlando furioso, see the recent edition of the translation by Robert McNulty. 22. See S. K. Barker and Brenda M. Hosington, eds., Renaissance Cultural Crossroads: Translation and Print Culture in Britain, 1473–1640 (Leiden: Brill, 2013), and the electronic database of the Humanities Research Institute, http://www.hrionline.ac.uk. 23. Thomas Greene, The Light in Troy (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1982), 42. 24. Paul Ricoeur, On Translation, trans. Eileen Brennan (New York: Routledge, 2006), 37. 25. Belén Bistué’s recent book, Collaborative Translation and Multi-version Texts in Early Modern Europe (Surrey, England: Ashgate, 2013), shows how team translation and multilingual translation practices prompted calls like Bruni’s for a single translator with

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knowledge of both languages, “source” and “target,” and fostered the theoretical dream of a single, univocal translation text. 26. De recto interpretation, paragraph 14, in the edition of Paolo Viti (Sulla perfetta traduzione [Liguori: Naples, 2004]), 84 (Tylus translation, with thanks to Andrew Romig). 27. On Bruni’s Latin translations, see Paul Botley, Latin Translation in the Renaissance: The Theory and Practice of Leonardo Bruni, Giannozzo Manetti, and Desiderius Erasmus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). 28. See the essays in the cluster “Latin and Vernacularity in Fifteenth-Century Italy” by Andrea Rizzi and Eugenio Refini in I Tatti Studies 16 (2013) on the uses of Latin in Renaissance Florence. 29. In the only English translation of the text to date, James Hankins writes, “The best translator will turn his whole mind, heart, and will to his original author and in a sense transform him.” We are choosing to follow instead the recent Italian translation by Paolo Viti, which adheres more closely to the sense of the passage, with its analogy of someone who copies a painting and “thinks not of what he is doing himself but of what the other had done”; The Humanism of Leonardo Bruni, ed. James Hankins (Tempe, Ariz.: Arizona Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1987), 220. For a recent essay on Bruni and his notion of the translator as someone who is carried away (rapitur) by the power of the original’s speech, see Timothy Kircher, “Wrestling with Ulysses: Humanist Translations of Homeric Epic Around 1440,” in Neo-Latin and the Humanities: Essays in Honour of Charles Fantazzi, ed. Luc Deitz, Timothy Kircher, and Jonathan Reid (Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies, 2014). 30. See Le monolinguisme de l’autre ou la prothèse de l’origine, Jacques Derrida’s meditation on linguistic and cultural identity, in which he considers the paradox “I have but one language—yet that language is not mine,” or in a different formulation, “One never speaks but one language / one never speaks only one language,” translated by Patrick Mensah as Monolingualism of the Other, or, The Prosthesis of Origin (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1998). 31. See Seniles 5:2, in which Petrarch writes Boccaccio that he used to “devote all his time to vernacular pursuits since Latin had been so highly polished by ancient talents that now my resources, or anyone else’s, can add very little”—suggesting that there was a sense of completion to Latin letters that would, in effect, minimize any inevitably belated writings. But he goes on: “On the other hand, this vernacular writing, just invented, still new, showed itself capable of great improvement and development after having been ravaged by many and cultivated by very few husbandmen.” Hence Petrarch helped to lay “the foundations of that edifice,” as he compares the fledgling vernacular to a building, but realizes quickly that “it was a waste of effort to build on soft mud and shifting sand, that I and my work would be torn to shreds by the hand of the mob.” So he abruptly changed his mind, taking another path that was “straighter and higher.” He ends by saying that “those brief and scattered vernacular works of my youth are no longer mine”; having been relentlessly copied and dispersed, “they have become the multitude’s.” From the translation of Aldo Bernardo, Letters of Old Age, vol. 1 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1992), 157–58.

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32. See the penultimate letter of the Seniles 17:4, for both the translation itself and for Petrarch’s comments on the translation (in which he invokes, among others, Horace’s platitude on literal translation (“nec verbo verbum curabis reddere fidus / interpres”). For a reading of the letter, see Jane Tylus, “Petrarch’s Griselda and the Sense of an Ending,” in Inventing a Path: Studies in Medieval Rhetoric in Honor of Mary Carruthers, ed. Laura Iseppi (Nottingham: Brepols, 2013): 391–420. 33. Walter Ong, Fighting for Life: Contest, Sexuality, and Consciousness (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1981). 34. Mikhail Bakhtin wrote extensively as to how the monolingual culture of the Greeks was brought into contact with the “other” Rome: both informing late Greek poetry—like Lucian’s—and giving Rome a richness and creativity as well as a fi rm sense of place which the Greeks lacked. On Rome’s challenging Greek’s “monoglossisa,” see The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays (Austin: University of Texas Press Slavic Series, 1982). 35. Epistle II.3, lines 55–63; in the translation of Smith Palmer Bovie in Horace, Satires and Epistles of Horace (Chicago: Phoenix, 1959), 273. The origins of Horace’s simile may be from Virgil’s Aeneid 6:309–10 (“thick as the leaves of the forest that at autumn’s first frost drop and fall,” where Virgil is speaking of the throngs of those who have died too young clustering near the banks of the Acheron), but Horace is the one who applies the falling leaves to words. The translation is that of H. R. Fairclough, revised by G. P. Goold, in the Loeb Virgil (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006). 36. See, among other texts, Jill Kraye, “Lorenzo Valla and Changing Perceptions of Renaissance Humanism,” Comparative Criticism 23 (2001): 37–55. 37. Bruce M. Metzger and Bart D. Ehrman, The Text of the New Testament: Its Transmission, Corruption, and Restoration, 4th ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 102. 38. Burke, Languages and Communities, chap. 2. 39. Marjorie O’Rourke Boyle, Erasmus on Language and Method in Theology (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1977), 32–33. 40. Warren Boutcher, “The Renaissance,” in The Oxford Guide to Literature in English Translation, ed. Peter France (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 45. On translation and the dissemination of knowledge, see Harold J. Cook and Sven Dupré, eds., Translating Knowledge in the Early Modern Low Countries (Berlin: LIT Verlag, 2012). 41. Clarke, “Translation and the English Language,” 17. 42. See the opening chapter of De vulgari eloquentia where Dante distinguishes between the vernacular tongue, learned “without any rule,” and the “secondary speech, which the Romans called grammar [grammaticus]. And this secondary speech the Greeks also have, as well as others, but not all”; in Classical and Medieval Literary Criticism: Translations and Interpretations, ed. Alex Preminger et al. (New York: Ungar, 1974), 412–13. 43. For a nuanced critique of the triumphalist argument concerning the “rise of the vernaculars,” see Burke, Languages and Communities, chap. 3. 44. On the sixteenth- and seventeenth-century Bibles of northern Europe, see Jaroslav Pelikan, The Reformation of the Bible / The Bible of the Reformation (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1996).

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45. See André Lefevere, “Translation: Its Genealogy in the West,” in Translation, History, and Culture, ed. Susan Bassnett and André Lefevere (London: Pinter, 1990), 14–28. 46. Terence Cave, The Cornucopian Text: Problems of Writing in the French Renaissance (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979). 47. Burke, Languages and Communities. On publishers’ shrewd manipulation of Latin and various vernaculars, and their entrepreneurial commissioning of selective translation to accommodate differing Catholic and Protestant markets, see Michiel van Groesen, “Entrepreneurs of Translation: Latin and the Vernacular in the Editorial Strategy of the De Bry Publishing House,” in Cook and Dupré, Translating Knowledge, 107–28. 48. On translation in early modern Spain, see a number of the essays in José Maria Pérez Fernández and Edward Wilson-Lee, eds., Translation and the Book Trade in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). 49. Guglielmo Cavallo and Roger Chartier, eds., A History of Reading in the West, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1999), 279. See also D. F. McKenzie, Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). 50. See Robin Myers, Michael Harris, and Giles Mandelbrote, eds., Fairs, Markets and the Itinerant Book Trade (Newcastle: Oak Knoll Press; London: British Library, 2007). 51. Henri Estienne, “Nundinarum Francofordiensium seu Francofordiensis emporii Encomium,” trans. and ed., with an introduction by James Westfall Thompson, in The Frankfort Book Fair (Chicago, 1911; repr., New York: Burt Franklin, 1968), 171. 52. See Graham Rees and Maria Wakely, Publishing, Politics, and Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009). 53. John L. Flood, “ ‘Omnium totius orbis emporiorum compendium’: The Frankfurt Fair in the Early Modern Period,” in Myers, Harris, and Mandelbrote, Fairs, Markets and the Itinerant Book Trade, 16. 54. On cultural “trade imbalances,” see Venuti, Scandals of Translation. 55. Jonathan Goldberg, Writing Matter: From the Hands of the English Renaissance (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1990). 56. Gayatri Spivak argues against this proposition, for in her view it overlooks the cultural authority of classical texts as cultural capital, but she does not address the issue of vernacular translation in the early modern period. “The Politics of Translation,” in Outside in the Teaching Machine (New York: Routledge, 1993), 191. 57. Recent work on women’s various roles in early modern translation in England includes Margaret Hannay, Silent But for the Word: Tudor Women as Patrons, Translators, and Writers of Religious Works (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1985); Tina Krontiris, Oppositional Voices: Women as Writers and Translators of Literature in the English Renaissance (London: Routledge, 1992); and Deborah Uman, Women as Translators in Early Modern England (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2012). 58. From the dedication to John Florio’s translation of Montaigne’s Essayes (London, 1603).

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59. For a critique of the way in which commentators have too often accepted Florio’s judgment, despite counterevidence, see Jonathan Goldberg, Desiring Women Writing: English Renaissance Examples (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1997). 60. See the work of the late Maria Rosa Menocal with respect to Don Quixote’s addressing the issue of “mistranslation” in book 1, chap. 9; The Ornament of the World (New York: Little, Brown, 2002), 250–51. The extent to which the chivalric epic emerges from a series of supposed (mis)translations goes back at least to Ariosto and Boiardo. 61. See Bistué, Collaborative Translation and Multi-version Texts. On the dragoman’s activities, see E. Natalie Rothman, “Interpreting Dragomans: Boundaries and Crossings in the Early Modern Mediterranean,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 51, no. 4 (October 2009): 771–800.

1. Tr ansl ating the L anguage of Architecture My thanks to Professor John McDiarmid for his comments on early drafts of this chapter. 1. In this shift, an influential text has been Michel De Certeau, L’ invention du quotidien (Paris: Union Générale des Éditions, 1980). 2. Carl Adolf Schmidt, Die Reception des Römischen Rechts in Deutschland (1868; repr., Leipzig: Zentralantiquariat der DDR, 1969); Paul Laband, Rede über die Bedeutung der Rezeption des römischen Rechts für das deutsche Staatsrecht (Strasbourg: University of Strasbourg, 1880); Max Herrmann, Die Reception des Humanismus in Nürnberg (Berlin: Wiedemann, 1898). 3. Aby Warburg, The Renewal of Pagan Antiquity: Contributions to the Cultural History of the European Renaissance (Los Angeles: Getty Research Institute, 1999); some of the essays in this collection go back to the early 1900s. 4. Peter Burke, The Fortunes of the Courtier: The European Reception of Castiglione’s Cortegiano (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1995); Stefan Schuler, Vitruv im Mittelalter: Die Rezeption von “De Architectura” von der Antike bis in die frühe Neuzeit (Cologne: Böhlau, 1999); Sydney Anglo, Machiavelli: The First Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005); Terence Cave, ed., Thomas More’s “Utopia” in Early Modern Europe (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2008). 5. Thomas DaCosta Kaufmann, Court, Cloister, and City: The Art and Culture of Central Europe, 1450–1800 (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1995); Peter Burke, The European Renaissance: Centres and Peripheries (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998); Peter Elmer, Nick Webb, and Roberta Wood, eds., The Renaissance in Europe: A Cultural Enquiry (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2000); Robin Kirkpatrick, The European Renaissance, 1400–1600 (Harlow: Longmans, 2002). 6. Michel Espagne and Michael Werner, eds., Transferts: Les relations interculturelles dans l’espace franco-allemand (XVIIIe et XIXe siècle) (Paris: Éditions Recherche sur les

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civilisations, 1988); Robert Muchembled, ed., Cultural Exchange in Early Modern Europe, 4 vols. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). 7. Edward Evans-Pritchard, Social Anthropology (London: Cohen and West, 1951); Gisli Pálsson, ed., Beyond Boundaries: Understanding Translation and Anthropological Discourse (Oxford: Berg, 1993). This approach to the Renaissance is followed by some contributors to Stephen Milner and Stephen Campbell, eds., Artistic Exchange and Cultural Translation in the Italian Renaissance City (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004). 8. Peter Burke, “Cultures of Translation in Early Modern Europe,” in Cultural Translation in Early Modern Europe, ed. Peter Burke and R. Po-chia Hsia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 7–10. 9. John Summerson, The Classical Language of Architecture, rev. ed. (London: Thames and Hudson, 1980). 10. Carlo Cipolla, “The Diff usion of Innovations in Early Modern Europe,” Comparative Studies in Society and History 14 (1972): 48; John M. Ziman, “Ideas Move Around Inside People,” in Puzzles, Problems, and Enigmas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 259. 11. On Bourdieu’s debt to Panofsky, see the former’s introduction to Erwin Panofsky, Architecture gothique et pensée scholastique (1951), trans. Pierre Bourdieu (Paris: Seuil, 1967). 12. Kaufmann, Court, Cloister, and City, 52. 13. Don McKenzie, Bibliography and the Sociology of Texts (London: British Library, 1986); Gérard Genette, Seuils (Paris: Seuil, 1987); Roger Chartier, Inscrire et eff acer: Culture écrite et literature (XI–XVIIIe siècle) (Paris: Gallimard, 2005). 14. Jean Guillaume, ed., Les traités d’architecture de la Renaissance (Paris: Picard, 1988); Vaughan Hart and Peter Hicks, eds., Paper Palaces: The Rise of the Renaissance Architectural Treatise (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1998); Alina  A. Payne, The Architectural Treatise in the Italian Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). 15. Carol Krinsky, “78 Vitruvius Manuscripts,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 30 (1967): 36–70; cf. Kenneth  J. Conant, “The After-Life of Vitruvius in the Middle Ages,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 27 (1968) No. 1  March: 33–38; Pier Nicola Pagliara, “Vitruvio, da testo a canone,” in Memoria dell’antico nell’arte italiana, 3 vols., ed. Salvatore Settis (Turin: Einaudi, 1984–86), 3:7–85; Ingrid Rowland, “Vitruvius in Print and in Vernacular Translation,” in Hart and Hicks, Paper Palaces, 105–21; Eelco Nagelsmit, “Visualizing Vitruvius,” in The Transformation of Vernacular Expression in Early Modern Arts, ed. Joost Keizer and Todd Richardson (Leiden: Brill, 2011). 16. Anthony Grafton, Leon Battista Alberti: Master Builder of the Italian Renaissance (New York: Hill and Wang, 2000). 17. Leonbattista Alberti, L’architettura, trans. Pietro Lauro (Venice: Vaugris, 1543); idem, L’architettura, trans. Cosimo Bartoli (Florence: Torrentino, 1550). 18. Goujon’s note to the reader at the end of Vitruvius, Architecture, trans. Jean Martin (Paris: Barbè, 1547).

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19. Vitruvius, Architettura, trans. Cesare Cesariano (Como: Gottardo da Ponte, 1521); Vitruvius, De architectura, ed. Guillaume Philandrier (Rome: Dossena, 1554); Vitruvius, De architectura, ed. Daniele Barbaro (Venice: Marcolini, 1556). Cf. Frédérique Lemerle, Les annotations de Guillaume Philandrier sur le “De architectura” de Vitruve (Paris: Picard, 2006); Louis Cellauro, “Daniele Barbaro and His Venetian Editions of Vitruvius of 1556 and 1567” (PhD thesis, University of London, 1996). 20. Bernardino Baldi, De verborum vitruvianorum significatione (Augsburg: Praetorius, 1612). 21. Vitruvius, De architectura, ed. Giovanni Giocondo (Venice: Tacuino, 1511). Cf. Lucia A. Ciapponi, “Fra Giocondo of Verona and His Edition of Vitruvius,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 47 (1984): 72–90. 22. Burke, Fortunes of the Courtier. 23. Nigel Llewellyn, “Diego de Sagredo,” in Guillaume, Les traités, 295–306. 24. Agustín Bustamante and Fernando Marías, “La révolution classique: De Vitruve à l’Escorial,” Revue de l’Art 70 (1985): 29–40. 25. Heinrich Roettinger, Die Holzschnitten zu Architectur und zu Vitruvius Teutsch der Walther Rivius (N.p., 1914); Hanno-Walter Kruft, Geschichte der Architekturtheorie von der Antike bis zur Gegenwart (Munich: Beck, 1985); A. Bustamante, “Los grabados del Vitruvio Complutense de 1582,” Boletín del Universidad de Valladolid, Seminario Estudios de Arte 55 (1989): 273–88. 26. The Spanish Vitruvius of 1582 took two illustrations from Fra Giocondo, four from the Barbaro edition, and ten from the Como edition of 1521: Bustamante, “Grabados,” 281–82. The 1648 edition of Delorme’s Architecture included plates from Italian and French translations of Vitruvius and also from Serlio: Anthony Blunt, Philibert de l’Orme (London: Zwemmer, 1958), 108n; cf. Jean-Marie Pérouse de Montclos, “Les éditions des traités de Philibert de l’Orme au XVIIe siècle,” in Guillaume, Les traités, 355–65. 27. Pier Nicola Pagliara, “Antonio de Sangallo,” in Guillaume, Les traités, 179–206. Cf. L. Pellecchia, “Architects Read Vitruvius: Renaissance Interpretations of the Atrium of the Ancient House,” Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians 51 (1992): 377– 416; M. L. Gatti Perer and A. Rovetta, eds., Cesare Cesariano e il classicismo di primo Cinquecento (Milan: Vita e Pensiero, 1996). 28. Erwin Panofsky, “Artist, Scientist, Genius,” in Wallace Ferguson et al., The Renaissance: Six Essays, new ed. (New York: Harper, 1962), 128, 131, 136. 29. L. A. Capponi, “Fra Giocondo da Verona and His Edition of Vitruvius,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 47 (1984): 72–90; Vincenzo Fontana and Paolo Morachielli, eds., Vitruvio e Raff aello: Il “De architectura” di Vitruvio nella traduzione inedita di Fabio Calvo Ravennate (Rome: Officina, 1975), 32. 30. John Newman, “Inigo Jones’s Annotations,” in Guillaume, Les traités, 439. On the problem, Bernardino Baldi, Scamilli Impares (Augsburg: Praetorius, 1612). 31. Francis W. Kent, Lorenzo de’ Medici and the Art of Magnificence (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), 37. 32. Bustamante and Marías, “La révolution classique,” 31.

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33. This copy is now in the Biblioteca Nacional of Madrid: ibid., 33, while Jones’s books are now in the library of Worcester College, Oxford. 34. Burke, European Renaissance, 10–11. 35. Blunt, Philibert de l’Orme, 7. 36. Roger Doucet, Les bibliothèques parisiennes du XVIe siècle (Paris: Picard, 1956). 37. Françoise Bardon, Diane de Poitiers et le mythe de Diane (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1963). 38. Mark Girouard, Rushton Triangular Lodge (London: English Heritage, 2004). 39. Mark Girouard, Robert Smythson and the Elizabethan Country House, 2nd ed. (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1983), 88. 40. Chapter 6 in the Loeb edition, but chapter 5 in the Fensterbuch edition and chapter 8 in the Italian, French, German, and Spanish translations. 41. Quoted in Eric Mercer, English Art, 1553–1625 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1962), 77. 42. Johannes Bettray, Die Akkomodationsmethode des Matteo Ricci in China (Rome: Universitas Gregoriana, 1955). 43. Anthony Pym, “Negotiation Theory as an Approach to Translation History: An Inductive Lesson from 15th-Century Castille,” in Translation and Knowledge, ed. Yves Gambier and Jorna Tommola (Turku: Grafia Oy, 1993), 27–39; Umberto Eco, Mouse or Rat? Translation as Negotiation (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1993). 44. David Howarth, Lord Arundel and His Circle (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1985); Christy Anderson, Inigo Jones and the Classical Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 59. 45. Anderson, Inigo Jones, 236n46. 46. Gordon R. Batho, “The Wizard Earl of Northumberland, an Elizabethan ScholarNobleman,” Historian 75 (2002): 19–23. 47. Anderson, Inigo Jones, 60, 71. 48. Konrad Ottenheym, “A Bird’s-Eye View of the Dissemination of Scamozzi’s Treatise in Northern Europe,” Annali di Architettura 18–19 (2006–2007): 187–98. 49. Girouard, Robert Smythson, 50–74; idem, “Thynne, Sir John (1512/13–1580),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/27421. 50. C. E. Challis, “Sharington, Sir William (c.1495–1553),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/25205. 51. Mary Dewar, Sir Thomas Smith: A Tudor Intellectual in Office (London: Athlone Press, 1964), 122; Stephen Alford, Kingship and Politics in the Reign of Edward VI (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 85–87; idem, Burghley: William Cecil at the Court of Elizabeth I (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2008), 35; Paul Drury, Hill Hall: A Singular House Devised by a Tudor Intellectual (London: Society of Antiquaries, 2009), 266, 269, 272. 52. John Summerson, “John Thorpe and the Thorpes of Kingscliffe,” Architectural Review, November 1949, 291–300. On the roof of Kirby Hall, Mercer, English Art, 46. 53. Anne Overell, Italian Reform and English Reformations, c. 1535–c. 1585 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), 91.

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54. Robert Tittler, Nicholas Bacon: The Making of a Tudor Statesman (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1976). 55. Ian Blanchard, “Gresham, Sir Thomas (c. 1518–1579),” Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/11505. 56. Jonathan Woolfson, Padua and the Tudors (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998). 57. Quoted from the Thynne archives in Girouard, “Thynne, Sir John.” 58. Cecil to Throckmorton, October 12, 1559, from Calendar of State Papers Foreign, Elizabeth, vol. 5 (London: Public Record Office, 1867), 34. 59. Summerson, Architecture in Britain, 1530–1830 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991), 8th ed., 47, 56; Jean-Marie Pérouse de Montclos, Philibert de l’Orme, architecte du roi (Paris: Mengès, 2000), 214. 60. Quoted in Tittler, Nicholas Bacon, 66. 61. Ernst H. Gombrich, “The Leaven of Criticism in Renaissance Art,” in Art, Science, and History in the Renaissance, ed. Charles S. Singleton (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1967), 3–42; cf. Joseph Rykwert, “On the Oral Transmission of Architectural Theory,” in Guillaume, Les traités, 31–48. 62. Louis Callebot and Philippe Fleury, eds., Dictionnaire des termes techniques du “De Architectura de Vitruve” (Hildesheim: Ohms, 1995). 63. However, arquitraves occurs circa 1560 in the annotations to Alberti discussed earlier. Llewellyn, “Diego de Sagredo,” 297. 64. Noël Du Fail, Les baliverneries et les contes d’Eutrapel, 2 vols. (Paris: Lemerre, 1894), 2:160 (in the chapter “De la moquerie”).

2. Tr ansl ating the Rest of Ovid 1. Niall Rudd, “Pyramus and Thisbe in Shakespeare and Ovid,” in Shakespeare’s Ovid: The Metamorphoses in the Plays and Poems, ed. A. B. Taylor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 125. Overviews of Ovid and the English Renaissance are provided by Colin Burrow, “Re-embodying Ovid: Renaissance Afterlives,” in The Cambridge Companion to Ovid, ed. Philip Hardie (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 301–19, and Heather James, “Ovid in Renaissance English Literature,” in A Companion to Ovid, ed. Peter E. Knox (Oxford: Blackwell, 2009), 423–41. On English translations of Ovid during the period, see Stuart Gillespie and Robert Cummings, “A Bibliography of Ovidian Translations and Imitations in English,” Translation and Literature 13 (2004): 207–18; Christopher Martin, “Translating Ovid,” in Knox, Companion to Ovid, 469–84; and the coverage by different contributors in The Oxford History of Literary Translation in English, vol. 2, 1550–1560, ed. Gordon Braden, Robert Cummings, and Stuart Gillespie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), 174–79, 209, 220–25. 2. Even there I ignore Ibis, though it was Englished twice during our period, in 1569 and 1658, the latter effort with very extensive annotations; but see Jennifer Ingleheart, “ ‘I shall be thy devoted foe’: The Exile of the Ovid of the Ibis in English Reception,” in Two

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Thousand Years of Solitude: Exile After Ovid, ed. Jennifer Ingleheart (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 119–34. 3. I rely here on this volume for the Latin text of these poems: Tristia, Ex Ponto, ed. and trans. A. L. Wheeler, rev. G. P. Goold (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988); translations, except as indicated, are my own. 4. See Richard F. Thomas, “The Streets of Rome: The Classical Dylan,” in Reception and the Classics: An Interdisciplinary Approach to the Classical Tradition, ed. William Brockliss, Pramit Chaudhuri, Ayelet Hainson Lushkov, and Katherine Wasdin (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 134–59. 5. Reprinted in T. W. Baldwin, William Shakspere’s Small Latine & Lesse Greeke, vol. 1 (Urbana, Ill.: University of Illinois Press, 1944), 111–12. 6. Ibid., 1:115–16, with extensive particulars in the pages that follow. 7. On this translation see Liz Oakley-Brown, “Elizabethan Exile After Ovid: Thomas Churchyard’s Tristia,” in Ingleheart, Two Thousand Years of Solitude, 103–17. 8. I find myself unexpectedly disagreeing here with Martin, who thinks Saltonstall does a better job catching the gravitas of the originals: “At its best, the translator’s choppy manner mirrors the brokenness of Ovid’s lamentations”; Ovid in English (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1998), 148. The effect here seems to me more like clumsiness—never an “Ovidian” trait, even in passages of emotional distress—than skill. 9. Zachary Catlin, trans., Publ Ovid. De Tristibus: or, Mournefull Elegies (London, 1639), 2 (translating Tristia 1.1.15–16). 10. Ibid., 36 (translating Tristia 2.543–46). 11. Henry Vaughan, Olor Iscanus (London, 1651), 34 (corresponding to Epistulae ex Ponto 3.7.17–18). 12. Ibid., 33. 13. See for instance Raphael Lyne, “Love and Exile After Ovid,” in Hardie, Cambridge Companion to Ovid, 288–300, and Ingleheart, Two Thousand Years of Solitude. 14. I quote Shakespeare from The Complete Works: Original-Spelling Edition, Stanley Wells and Gary Taylor, general editors (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986). 15. Jonathan Bate, Shakespeare and Ovid (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), 94–95. 16. I cite the texts from Steven W. May, The Elizabethan Courtier Poets: The Poems and Their Contexts (Columbia, Mo.: University of Missouri Press, 1991), 318–19. 17. Catlin, Publ Ovid, 10 (translating Tristia 1.3.81–86). 18. On the handling of this term by the poem’s various English translators, see Joshua Scodel in The Oxford History of Literary Translation in English, 2:224. 19. Thomas Churchyard, trans., The First Bookes of Ovids De Tristibus (London, 1572), fol. 5r. 20. Wye Saltonstall, trans., Ovids Tristia (London, 1633), sig. B6r. 21. George Gascoigne, “The Adventures of Master F. J.” (1573); A Hundreth Sundrie Flowres, ed. G. W. Pigman III (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 214. 22. Patrick Cheney, Marlowe’s Counterfeit Profession: Ovid, Spenser, Counter-Nationhood (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997); see especially 31–48.

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23. Ibid., 44. 24. Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Obras completas, intro. Francisco Monterde (Mexico City: Porrúa, 1989), 844; she cites the line in Spanish in one of her verse romances (p. 43; poem no. 33 in the standard numbering). Juana is not misremembering the line but quoting a frequently printed variant with manuscript authority. Philip Sidney quotes the same variant in his Apology for Poetry to characterize the kind of dangerous facility that leads to shallow poetry: “so is oure braine delivered of much matter which never was begotten by knowledge”; Elizabethan Critical Essays, ed. G. Gregory Smith, vol. 1 (London: Oxford University Press, 1904), 195–96. 25. The story is told effectively and in detail by Octavio Paz, Sor Juana, or, The Traps of Faith, trans. Margaret Sayers Peden (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1988), 389–470. 26. I use the text and translation in Petrarch’s Lyric Poems, ed. and trans. Robert M. Durling (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1976). 27. See Metamorphoses 7.20–21: “uideo meliora proboque, / deteriora sequor.” On the further Renaissance fortunes of this particular tag, see Braden, “Shakespeare’s Petrarchism,” in Shakespeare’s Sonnets: Critical Essays, ed. James Schiffer (New York: Garland, 1999), 177–78, 181. 28. On this reference and the Tristia, see Baldwin, William Shakspere’s Small Latine, 2:428–29. 29. Exemplorum gratia: Leonard Barkan, The Gods Made Flesh: Metamorphosis and the Pursuit of Paganism (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1986), 288; Sarah Annes Brown, The Metamorphosis of Ovid from Chaucer to Ted Hughes (London: Duckworth, 1999), 84; Raphael Lyne, “Ovid, Golding, and the ‘Rough Magic’ of The Tempest,” in Taylor, Shakespeare’s Ovid, 161.

3. Macaronic Verse, Plurilingual Printing, and the Uses of Tr ansl ation 1. My working definition here is “a poem using words or parts of words in more than one language.” For additional definitions and discussion relevant to medieval macaronics, see Elizabeth Archibald, “Tradition and Innovation in the Macaronic Poetry of Dunbar and Skelton,” Modern Language Quarterly 53, no. 1 (1992): 126, 128. Thanks to Marie Hause, Jacob Gibbons, Amber Pepe, and Meaghan Brown for research assistance. All translations are mine unless otherwise noted. 2. Massimo Scalabrini, “The Peasant and the Monster in the Macaronic Works of Teofilo Folengo,” Modern Language Notes 123, no. 1 (2008): 179–91. Scalabrini quotes from four editions, from 1517 to 1552 (179n1), among the many available. 3. On Middle English prose macaronics, see Siegfried Wenzel, Macaronic Sermons: Bilingualism and Preaching in Late Medieval England (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994). On medieval macaronic verse, see, among others, Archibald, “Tradition and Innovation”; Robert Taylor, “Barbolexis Revisited: The Poetic Use of Hybrid Language

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in Old Occitan / Old French Lyric,” in The Centre and Its Compass: Studies in Medieval Literature in Honor of Professor John Leyerle, ed. Robert A. Taylor et al. (Kalamazoo: Western Michigan University, 1993), 457–74; Alexandre Leupin, Barbarolexis: Medieval Writing and Sexuality (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989); Bruce A. Beatie, “Macaronic Poetry in the Carmina Burana,” Vivarium 5 (1967): 16–24; Andrew Breeze, “The Instantaneous Harvest and the Harley Lyric Mayden Moder Milde,” Notes and Queries 39, no. 2 (1992): 150–52; Christopher M. Cain, “Phonology and Meter in the Old English Macaronic Verses,” Studies in Philology 98, no. 3 (2001): 273–97; Nancy  P. Pope, “An Unlisted Variant of Index to Middle English Verse No. 2787,” Notes and Queries 28, no. 3 (1981): 197–99. 4. For details see my “Public Sphere / Contact Zone: Habermas, Early Print, and Verse Translation,” Criticism 46, no. 2 (2004): 207–22. Among the major projects excavating the central role of translation is the Renaissance Cultural Crossroads Project, Warwick, UK (see http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/ren/projects/culturalcrossroads/). 5. Paruus Catho, trans. Benedict Burgh (Westminster: Caxton, [1476] [STC 4851], [1477] [STC 4850], and 1483 [STC 4852]), is attributed to Daniel Church but is certainly not Cato’s. The “Salue Regina,” formerly attributed to Lydgate, was printed in at least four editions of Lydgate’s Stans Puer ad mensam (Westminster: Caxton, [1477?] [STC 17030]; London: Wynkyn de Worde, 1510 [STC 17030.5], ca. 1520 [STC 17030.7]; J. Redman, before 1540 [STC 17030.9]). Images of most of these editions are available on Early English Books Online (EEBO) at this writing. Other versions and other macaronics to Mary are known but exceed my scope here. 6. In A comedy concernynge thre lawes, of nature Moses, & Christ, corrupted by the sodomytes. Pharysees and Papystes (Wesel:  D. van der Straten / Nicholaum Bamburgensem, [1538? i.e., 1548]; London: T. Colwell, 1562). 7. This riotous poem’s seriousness has perhaps been underestimated, though recent work has begun to reevaluate it. See Archibald, “Tradition and Innovation,” and the fine edition by Priscilla Bawcutt, The Poems of William Dunbar, 2 vols. (Glasgow: Association for Scottish Literary Studies, 1998), 1:89–92, 2:329–32. Macaronics’ way is serio ludens. 8. London: [H. Denham for W. Brome,] 1584. Reprinted as Scot’s Discovery of Witchcraft (London: Richard Cotes, 1651; E. Cotes, 1654), and The Discoverie of Witchcraft (London: A. Clark, 1665). 9. With the term “visible,” I mean to adapt Lawrence Venuti’s concept of the invisibility of the translator and to use visibility as its inverse corollary; visibility would encompass all of the evidences and traces of foreignness to be seen or heard in a translated text. In other words, where most translations absorb, filter, or appropriate the foreign, aiming to tone down visibility, plurilingual printed texts (macaronic poems included) are overt, textual contact zones. I would distinguish visibility in translation from something we might instead call residue, following from Ong’s notion of oral residues in written texts—the resistant yet not perfectly visible traces of the foreign that become evident only upon investigation and reflection. Visibly foreign elements are immediately noticeable to the reader or hearer of a text as foreign, and with residues, offer valuable clues about the

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relationship between the two languages and cultures involved. See my “Visibility Now: Historicizing Foreign Presences in Translation,” Translation Studies 5, no. 2 (2012): 189– 200; and Venuti, The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation (London: Routledge, 2008). 10. Changes in literacy following the introduction of printed books is a topic about which there is more speculation than hard research; but see Eve Sanders and Margaret Ferguson, “Literacies in Early Modern England,” Critical Survey 14, no. 1 (2002): 1–8; Nicholas Orme, Education and Society in Medieval and Renaissance England (London: Hambledon Press, 1989); Douglas A. Kibbee, For to speke Frenche trewely: The French Language in England, 1000–1600; Its Status, Description, and Instruction (Amsterdam: J. Benjamins, 1991); Ian Frederick Moulton, ed., Reading and Literacy in the Middle Ages and Renaissance (Turnhout: Marston, 2004); David Cressy, Literacy and the Social Order: Reading and Writing in Tudor and Stuart England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980); Heidi Brayman Hackel, Reading Material in Early Modern England: Print, Gender, and Literacy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Margaret Ferguson, Dido’s Daughters: Literacy, Gender, and Empire in Early Modern England and France (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003); the essays in D. A. Trotter, ed., Multilingualism in Later Medieval Britain (Cambridge: Brewer, 2000); and especially Warren Boutcher, “ ‘A French Dexterity and an English Confidence’: New Documents on John Florio, Learned Strangers and Protestant Humanist Study of Modern Languages in Renaissance England from c. 1547 to c. 1625,” Reformation 2, no. 2 (1997): 39–102; most pointedly on 47, 49, 50–52, 93–98. 11. Lotte Hellinga provides the relevant updates to Duff in Printing in England in the Fifteenth Century: E. Gordon Duff ’s Bibliography with Supplementary Descriptions, Chronologies, and a Census of Copies (London: Bibliographical Society and British Library, 2009), 21–22, 76, 205–6, 219, 222, and 228. 12. Here Caxton is using two of his early typefaces, 2* and 4*, but often in sixteenthcentury multilingual printing, English is presented in black letter and Latin in roman. Because many Bibles and royal proclamations were printed in black letter, the type accumulates associations with authority. Stephen Galbraith argues that black letter came to be so strongly identified with “Englishness” that it was called “English type” by the end of the century, almost the national typeface; “ ‘English’ Black-Letter Type and Spenser’s Shepheardes Calender,” Spenser Studies 23 (2008): 13–40. Guyda Armstrong challenges this view in “Coding Continental: Information Design in Sixteenth-Century English Vernacular Language Manuals and Translations,” Renaissance Studies 29.1 (2015): 78-102. 13. In addition to the central question of how language difference is to be deployed as a poetic resource, macaronic poems raise broader questions about, among other things, whether the visibility of language difference in Latin-English macaronics relates to the Grammarians’ Wars of the 1520s and/or to the changing state of bilingualism in England. 14. Caxton sets a title inside small crosses and leaves two-line-height space for hand rubrication of the initial S. In 1510, De Worde marks the title with a printed paraph, as he often did, and the poem is no longer “An holy Salue regina in englissh” but now “The salue regina in Englysshe,” the definite article suggesting that this is the well-known poem.

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15. The standard edition of the Comedy is Peter Happé, The Complete Plays of John Bale, 2 vols. (Cambridge: Brewer, 1986). Katherine Brokaw cites these lines from King Johan and explains the crucial role of music and musical adaptation in Bale’s thinking and theater; this “Song” is no afterthought. Brokaw, “Music and Religious Compromise in John Bale’s Plays,” Comparative Drama 44, no. 3 (Fall 2010): 325–49. 16. Bernard Ward, “The Benedictus (Canticle of Zachary),” The Catholic Encyclopedia, vol. 2 (New York: Robert Appleton, 1907). The Benedictus, the Nunc dimittis, and the Magnificat are the three major canticles (Luke 1:68–79). 17. Outside the scope of this chapter would be close comparisons of versions in Sarum-rite horae and primers printed before 1536, Cranmer’s Prayer Book of 1549, and the 1552 Book of Common Prayer. The Benedictus does not appear in the 1544 Exhortation and Litany. 18. The Douay-Rheims Bible (1584) translates the Benedictus as follows: “Blessed be the Lord God of Israel; because he hath visited and wrought the redemption of His people: And hath raised up an horn of salvation to us, in the house of David his servant: As he spoke by the mouth of his holy prophets, who are from the beginning: Salvation from our enemies, and from the hand of all that hate us: To perform mercy to our fathers, and to remember his holy testament, The oath, which he swore to Abraham our father, that he would grant to us, That being delivered from the hand of our enemies, we may serve him without fear, In holiness and justice before him, all our days. And thou, child, shalt be called the prophet of the Highest: for thou shalt go before the face of the Lord to prepare his ways: To give knowledge of salvation to his people, unto the remission of their sins: Through the bowels of the mercy of our God, in which the Orient from on high hath visited us: To enlighten them that sit in darkness, and in the shadow of death: to direct our feet into the way of peace.” 19. John Stephen Farmer, ed., Dramatic Writings [by John Bale] (Guildford, UK: C. W. Traylen, 1966). On the Benedictus, see 345–46. 20. The false date of publication, 1538, would have been just after Edward’s birth, October 12, 1537, but the postaccession date of 1548 makes better sense of the epithet “Kynge Edward.” 21. Marie Hause reports: “The poem appears in all editions and issues of The Mirror for Magistrates: 1559, 1563, 1571, 1574, 1575, 1578 (reissued once), 1587, 1609–10 (reissued twice in 1619, twice in 1620, and once in 1621). It also appears in Skelton’s Here after foloweth certaine bokes (1545?, 1554, and 1563?) and in his Pithy pleasaunt and profitable works (1568). It appears in Niccols’s 1609–10 edition, and presumably appears when that edition is reissued twice in 1619, twice in 1620, and once in 1621. The poem also appears in STC 22598 (1545?) and STC 22599 (1554). So: fourteen times in the Mirror in various editions and issues, and four times in Skelton editions,” personal correspondence, 2012. There is no doubt the poem was widely read; macaronics were not then the rarities they are now. 22. W. S. Merwin uses the refrain “ecce in pulvere dormio” (“behold, I sleep in dust”) in his “Into the Still Hollow,” a seven-stanza fallen-estates poem, and Anthony Hecht’s powerful “Death the Poet” uses it.

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23. One Old French–Occitan macaronic treats a nymphomaniac nun who enters a monastery but is not satisfied by eighty monks and asks for a hundred. Misogyny and anticlerical satire work together in such poems. See Gerald Bond, “The Last Unpublished Troubadour Songs,” Speculum 60 (1985): 844–48; reproduced in Taylor, “Barbarolexis,” 472. Archibald notes that while “macaronic verse is surprisingly common in Middle English Lyrics” (129), bawdy, “humourous, and parodic” macaronics are less common in medieval English than in French; 131n14. Still, bawdy macaronics are not uncommon in English print and in foreign printed (or attributed) books. Examples are the strange Floia attributed to “Gripholdus Knicknackius” ([Germany?]: n.p., 1593); the treatment of homosexuality attributed to Camillo Scroffa, I Cantici di Fidentio Glottochrysio et di Jano Argyroglotto (N.p., 1586); the Cantico Reprehensibile De Sier Alessio De I Disconzi A Selin Imperator De Tvrchi ([Venetia]: n.p., [1572]). In England, many macaronics, some bawdy, were reprinted through the seventeenth century: Nugae Venales (seven editions between 1642 and 1689); Henry Bold’s varying Poems lyrique, macaronique, heroique, &c. (London: For Henry Brome, 1664); or John Allibond’s university-affi liated Rustica Academiae Oxoniensis (1648 and 1700 editions). 24. “Inducas / in temptationibus,” “lead into temptation,” parodies the Lord’s Prayer’s “and lead us not into temptation.” This poem, all in black letter, uses indentation to highlight language difference. Christmas carolles newely inprynted ([London]: Rychard Kele, [1545?]), seems to be a reprint of serious, sacred carols followed by additional bawdy poems/carols, found on A.ii[v] and following, interspersed with sacred carols. 25. Editorial correspondence, January 25, 2012. 26. Or in the Maitland MS, “I Maister Walter Kennedy.” There is some formal and textual variation among the four known witnesses; see Bawcutt, ed., Poems, 1:89–92. But in terms of the visual signals on the printed page, STC 7350, ca. 1507, features a format allongé page in an early black-letter typeface that makes no distinction between Latin and English lines in the poem. Nor does a related item, STC 7348, The Flyting of Dunbar and Kennedy (Edinburgh: Chepman and Myllar, ca. 1508). 27. The stanza reads: “In faith, I cannot tell truly where I was born, but by my troth I find that I am devil incarnate.” 28. For Scot, see note 8. 29. The cagey thief/priest Sir John perhaps has an untraced ancestor in a Tudor interlude, Johan Johan and Hys Wyf Tyb (Rastell, 1535), which John Heywood translated from the French sexual farce Jehan Jehan; see A. E. B. Coldiron, English Printing, Verse Translation, and the Battle of the Sexes, 1476–1557 (Aldershot, Hants., UK: Ashgate, 2009), 173– 91; and Richard Axton and Peter Happé, eds., “Johan Johan,” in The Plays of John Heywood (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 1991), 75–92. 30. Pagination in this work is notoriously difficult; the pages show 265–66, but the EEBO images numbered 147–48 show barely legible quire signatures. 31. This work’s mise-en-page and typeface strategies are outside the scope of this chapter. In sum, the main text is in black letter with most proper names in roman; the quoted poem here features English lines in roman, Latin lines in italic, and marginalia in roman,

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but this plan varies throughout the work; the work could be said in a larger sense to be heavily macaronic since so many passages juxtapose English and Latin prose and verse. 32. To whom we owe a large debt: John Scattergood, ed., John Skelton: The Complete English Poems (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1983); Greg Walker, “ ‘Ordered Confusion’? The Crisis of Authority in Skelton’s Speke, Parott,” Spenser Studies: A Renaissance Poetry Annual 10 (1992): 213–28; David Carlson, ed., “The Latin Writings of John Skelton,” special issue, Studies in Philology 4 (Fall 1991); Simon Brittan, with a most superior reading of Speke, Parott, in “Skelton’s ‘Speke Parott’: Language, Madness and the Role of the Court,” Renaissance Forum: An Electronic Journal of Early Modern Literary and Historical Studies 4, no. 1 (1999): 1–15. 33. See, for instance, “In dulce iubilo.” Most of the carols in Kele, Christmas carolles (cited in note 24), or in A caroll of huntynge (London: de Worde, 1521), or in [Christmas Carols] ([Southwark: P. Treveris, 1528?]) are of this sort. Macaronics composed in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries often aim at harmony and unity; more printed (i.e., later) macaronics seem more broadly agonistic. This apparent trend is not a fi xed rule, and in any case only reflects extant copies; what has not survived might give a different picture. 34. Jean Braybrook, “Rémy Belleau’s Macaronic Poem, De Bello Huguenotico, and the French Wars of Religion,” in Poets and Teachers: Latin Didactic Poetry and the Didactic Authority of the Latin Poet from the Renaissance to the Present, ed. Philip Hardie and Yasmin Haskell (Bari: Levante, 1999), 189, 192. On code-switching, see Penelope GardnerChloros, Code-Switching (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), and the essays in Leslie Milroy and Pieter Muysken, eds., One Speaker, Two Languages: Cross-Disciplinary Perspectives on Code Switching (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). 35. Mario Pozzi, “Teofilo Folengo e le Resistenze alla Toscanizzazione Letteraria,” in Lingua, Cultura, Societá: Saggi sulla Letteratura Italiana del Cinquecento, Contributi e Proposte 1 (Allesandria: Edizione Dell’Orso, 1989), 137–55. 36. Braybrook, “Rémy Belleau’s Macaronic Poem,” 189–190. The Baldus and the De Bello of Belleau (even macaronic titles may pun) are still the best-known continental examples, though many others were printed, beginning with Tifi Odasi’s Macaronea (1488– 89), and including Antoine de Arena’s Maygre Entrepriza Catoliqui Imperatoris (1537; ed. Norbert Bonafous, Aix: Makaire, 1860). The nineteenth-century vogue resulted in many editions and reprints of early macaronics such as Unio, Sive Lamentatio Hibernica, Poema Macaronico-latinum: And An Ode to Peter Pindar (London: Bunney and Gold, 1801); Carminum rariorum macaronicum delectus (Edinburgh: Ramsay & Co., 1813); Octave Delpierre, Macaronéana . . . (Brighton, UK: G. Gancia, 1852); H. B. Wheatley, Of Anagrams . . . (Hertford: S. Austin, 1862); Maccheronee di cinque poeti italiani del secolo XV (Milan: G. Daelli, 1864). 37. Paul Zumthor, “Un problème d’esthétique médiévale: L’utilisation poétique du bilinguisme,” Le Moyen Âge 66 (1960): 301–36 and 561–94; for a psychoanalytic approach to similar questions, see Leupin, Barbarolexis. 38. Taylor, “Barbarolexis Revisited,” 461. Taylor reminds us that Occitan was the “higher” language, associated with lyric, and Old French the lower, associated with narrative (460). On contre-texte, see p. 468.

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39. On Charles’s macaronics, see John Fox, “Glanures,” in Charles d’Orléans in England, 1415–1440, ed. Mary-Jo Arn (Woodbridge, UK: Boydell and Brewer, 2000), 89–108. Charles d’Orléans, father of Louis XII, was held prisoner in England for twenty-five years after the battle of Agincourt. During his captivity he wrote French lyrics and also some sixty-five hundred lines of skillful English poetry, now MS Harley 682, the first singleauthor English lyric sequence. A large, bilingual (French-Latin) vellum codex, Grenoble MS 873, was made by his secretary Astesano; on MS 873, see A. E. B. Coldiron, Canon, Period, and the Poetry of Charles d’Orléans: Found in Translation (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2000), 112–44. 40. Archibald, “Tradition and Innovation,” explores the medieval poetic backgrounds and the macaronics of Skelton and Dunbar, creating a taxonomy of how English medieval macaronic verse works (p. 18). Her four categories are Latin refrains or burdens; regularly alternating Latin lines, half-lines, or stanzas; randomly inserted Latin words, phrases, or lines; and blocks of Latin lines that do not conform to a standard verse pattern. The English medieval macaronic tradition also includes prose, songs, and verse, and a thriving line of Latin-English sermons, aimed, according to Wenzel, Macaronic Sermons, at a late medieval bilingual discursive community (see “Bilingualism in Action,” 105–29, on the status of late medieval Latin and English). 41. “The Mediated Medieval and Shakespeare,” in Shakespeare, Pasts and Presents, ed. Helen Cooper, Peter Holland, and Ruth Morse (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). Like much early printed translation, macaronics raise questions of periodization, a separate topic. 42. Trotter, Multilingualism; Jocelyn Wogan-Browne, ed., Language and Culture in Medieval Britain (Woodbridge, UK: York Medieval, 2009). On the aureate line, Archibald (“Tradition,” p. 130, n.12) reminds us that Patrick Diehl “sees aureation as a natural development from macaronic verse: ‘As the vernaculars sought to make themselves as much a grammatical as Latin, it was natural that they should move from juxtaposing Latin with themselves to an effort to annex it’ (p. 166),” citing Diehl, The Medieval European Religious Lyric (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985). 43. Marie Hause, however, finds that they do not turn up much in the Private Libraries in Renaissance England. 44. Full discussion of the patterns of printing and translation that reveal the foundational foreignness of English literary nationhood is beyond my scope here but forms the subject of my Printers Without Borders: Translation and Textuality in Renaissance England (Cambridge University Press, 2015). A version of this chapter will appear in part there.

4. Erroneous Mappings 1. Pliny the Elder, Natural History, trans. H. Rackham (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press / Loeb Classical Library, 1942), book 4, paragraphs 88–89, 186–88. 2. In his book on Renaissance translation theory and practice, Włodzimierz Olszaniec calls the Renaissance an “epoch of translations” (epoka przekładów). Włodzimierz Olszaniec,

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Od Leonarda Bruniego do Marsilia Ficina: Studium renesansowej Teorii i Praktyki Przekładu (Warsaw: Instytut Filologii Klasycznej UW, 2008), 22. 3. Tom Conley argues that “writings can be called ‘cartographic’ insofar as tensions of space and of figuration inhere in fields of printed discourse.” Tom Conley, The SelfMade Map: Cartographic Writing in Early Modern France (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 3. 4. See Riccardo Maisano and Antonio Rollo, eds., Manuele Crisolora e il ritorno del greco in Occidente (Atti del convegno Internazionale, Napoli, 26–29 giugno 1997) (Naples: n.p., 2002). 5. See Mariarosa Cortesi, “La tecnica del tradurre presso gli umanisti,” in The Classical Tradition in the Middle Ages and Renaissance: Manuscript Discoveries, Circulation and Translation, Proceedings of the First European Science Foundation Workshop on “The Reception of Classical Texts,” Florence, June 26–27, 1992, ed. Claudio Leonardi and B. Munk Olsen (Spoleto: Centro Italiano di Studi sull’Alto Medioevo, 1995). 6. Ptolemy’s Geography circulated in Arabic translations throughout the Middle Ages, and Arab and Muslim scholars and navigators created Ptolemy-based maps much earlier than their European counterparts. For a modern edition, see Ptolemy, Geography, trans. Joseph Fischer, ed. Edward Luther Stevenson (New York: Cosimo Classics, 2011). For the theoretical chapters of the Geography, see J. Lennart Berggren and Alexander Jones, eds., Ptolemy’s Geography: An Annotated Translation of the Theoretical Chapters (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000). Chrysoloras most probably bequeathed the manuscript of Ptolemy’s Geography to his former student Pala Strozzi upon his death in 1415. Paul Botley, Latin Translation in the Renaissance: The Theory and Practice of Leonardo Bruni, Giannozzo Manetti, and Desiderius Erasmus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 14 [note]. 7. The author of numerous books on astrology, astronomy, cosmology, and geography, Ptolemy was known in medieval Europe for his Almagest, a description of the heavens, and Tetrabiblos, a tract on astrology. His treatise on optics was known “only sporadically in the fifteenth century and was quickly eclipsed by the more theoretically exhaustive theories of Al-Hazen.” See Sean Roberts, Printing a Mediterranean World: Florence, Constantinople, and the Renaissance of Geography (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2013), 21. 8. David Woodward, Maps as Prints in the Italian Renaissance: Makers, Distributors and Consumers (London: British Library, 1996), 15. 9. In John W. Hessler, A Renaissance Globemaker’s Toolbox: Johannes Schöner and the Revolution of Modern Science, 1475–1550 (Washington, D.C.: Library of Congress, 2013), 31. 10. According to Paul Botley, “in October 1405, in a letter to Niccoli from the papal court at Viterbo, Bruni recorded his intention to prepare a version of Ptolemy’s Geographia. He asked Niccoli to send him the Greek text and that part—eam particulam—which Chrysoloras had already translated. In fact Jacopo Angeli, who had had a Greek manuscript of the work since 1400, eventually completed the translation [no later than 1409].” Botley, Latin Translation in the Renaissance, 13–14.

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11. See Sebastiano Gentile, “Emanuele Crisolora e la Geografia di Tolomeo,” in Dotti bizantini e libri greci nell’Italia del secolo XV (Atti del Convegno Internazionale, Trento, 22– 23 ottobre 1990), ed. M. Cortesi and E. V. Maltese (Naples: D’Auria Editore, 1992), 307. 12. See James Hankins, “Ptolemy’s Geography in the Renaissance,” in The Marks in the Fields: Essays on the Uses of Manuscripts, ed. Rodney G. Dennis and Elizabeth Falsey (Cambridge, Mass: Houghton Library Department of Printing, 1992), 118–27. Reprinted in Hankins, Humanism and Platonism in the Italian Renaissance, vol. 1, Humanism (Rome: Edizioni di storia e letteratura, 2003), 457–68. Future references to this book are from this edition. 13. While it is not entirely clear why Bruni abandoned this particular translation project, it is well known that Bruni and Angeli were competing for the position of apostolic secretary to Pope Innocent VII—a post that Bruni won after a literary contest with his rival Angeli. Bruni’s letter to Niccoli shows, according to Paul Botley, that “shortly after taking up his new position in the papal court, and with his command of Greek now assured, Bruni was looking for a substantial text to Latinise.” Botley, Latin Translation in the Renaissance, 13–14. 14. Today the manuscript is in Cambridge, Massachusetts, at Harvard University, Houghton Library, MS Typ 5. For a description of the manuscript see Hankins, “Ptolemy’s Geography in the Renaissance,” 457. 15. Ibid., 459. 16. Ibid., 458–59. 17. “Vt autem ea quae ab illo absoluta diuino quodam ingenio sunt cum nostris etiam habeatur, in latinum ipsa curaui transferre sermonem.” 1v–2r. See ibid. 18. Ibid., 459. 19. Hankins, “Chrysoloras and Humanism,” 246. 20. The maps were added, as James Hankins observes, “through the combined efforts of Francesco di Lapacino and Domenico di Lionardo Boninsegni, both members of the circle around the bibliophile Niccolò Niccoli.” Hankins, “Ptolemy’s Geography in the Renaissance,” 458. It was specifically in Florence that the development of techniques to represent three-dimensional space on two-dimensional surfaces and to construct Ptolemaic mapmaking models first began to thrive. 21. Samuel Y. Edgerton and other scholars have argued that the Florentine cartographer Paolo dal Pozzo Toscanelli, a close associate of both Brunelleschi and Alberti, was the person most likely to have introduced the Florentine artists to Ptolemy’s techniques. Edgerton, “Alberti’s Colour Theory: A Medieval Bottle Without Renaissance Wine,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 32 (1969): 109–34. Quoted in Hankins, “Ptolemy’s Geography in the Renaissance,” 460–61. 22. Roberts, Printing a Mediterranean World, 22. 23. See ibid., 23–24. Roberts notes that “Popes Sixtus IV and Alexander VI, Federico da Montefeltro, the Medici, Matthias Corvinus, and the Angevin kings of Naples all possessed manuscripts of the Geography produced by Florentine scribes and illuminators.” Ibid., 23.

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24. While most scholars consider the Codex Vaticanus Urbinas Graecus 82, today in the Vatican Library, as the primary source for research on the Geography, the so-called Codex X from the second half of the thirteenth century, known as the Vaticanus Graecus 191, “is of particular significance, because it contains many local names and coordinates that differ from the other manuscripts mentioned above, and which cannot be explained by mere errors in the tradition. Unfortunately, none of the coordinates from . . . this codex were ever copied.” Florian Mittenhuber, “The Tradition of Texts and Maps in Ptolemy’s Geography,” in Ptolemy in Perspective: Use and Criticism of His Work from Antiquity to the Nineteenth Century, ed. Alexander Jones (Dordrecht: Springer, 2010), 96. 25. Mittenhuber, “Texts and Maps in Ptolemy’s Geography,” 104. 26. Jonathan M. Bloom, “Lost in Translation: Gridded Plans and Maps Along the Silk Road,” in The Journey of Maps and Images on the Silk Road, ed. Philippe Forêt and Andreas Klapony (Leiden: Brill, 2008), 90. 27. Ibid. 28. Ibid. 29. Ibid., 90–91. 30. Ibid. 31. Nicolaus Germanus also created lavish maps for the first Italian translation, in verse, of Ptolemy’s Geography by Francesco Berlinghieri, Septe giornate della Geografia (The seven days of Geography), written in terza rima and published in 1482 in Florence. See Roberts, Printing a Mediterranean World, 25. 32. According to Ptolemy, “European Sarmatia is terminated on the north by the Sarmatian ocean adjoining the Venedicus bay and by a part of the unknown land. . . . The terminus of Sarmatia, which extends southward through the sources of the Tanais river is 64° 63°. It is terminated in the west by the Vistula river and by that part of Germania lying between its source and the Sarmatian mountains but not by the mountains themselves. . . . Sarmatia is divided by other mountains, which are called Peuce mountains . . . , Amadoci mountains . . . , Bodinus mountains . . . , Alanus mountains . . . , Carpathian mountains as we call them . . . , Venedici mountains . . . , Ripaei.” Ptolemy, Geography, trans. Edward Luther Stevenson, book 3, chap. 5, 79. 33. Ancient geographers and historians thought that rivers necessarily had sources beneath mountains. Aristotle thus defined mountains not only as a natural boundary in themselves, but also as a site generating rivers, which, in turn, function as natural markers of territorial divisions. Already the Greek historian Hecataeus of Miletus located in Periegesis the sources of rivers beneath the Riphean Mountains creating a powerful and authoritative hydrological and orographic landscape that persisted in time and that was considered authoritative and true until the Renaissance period. See O. A. W. Dilke, Greek and Roman Maps (London: Thames and Hudson, 1985), 57. According to Marica Milanesi, the ancient belief that rivers necessarily originate beneath mountains was challenged only in the eighteenth century. For Renaissance geographers, “big rivers emptying into the Northern coast of the Black Sea had to originate in large lakes or preferably in big and faraway mountains. Until the nineteenth century, no Mediterranean people conceived of the origin of a river—be it big or small—differently. It was only Alexander von Hum-

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boldt who, upon his return from the plains of the Orinoco, demonstrated, around 1820, that a big river can also originate in the imperceptible undulations of a plain.” Marica Milanesi, “Il confine degli Urali: Un’invenzione geopolitica,” Limes: Rivista italiana di geopolitica 1 (1994): 110. My translation. 34. Maciej Miechowita, Chronica Polonoru[m] (Kraków: Hieronimus Wietor, 1519). 35. Miechowita’s Tractatus was published in 1583 in the second volume of Giovanni Battista Ramusio’s Navigazioni e viaggi in an Italian translation by Annibal Maggi. See Giovanni Battista Ramusio, Navigazioni e viaggi, 6 vols., ed. Marica Milanesi (Turin: Einaudi, 1978–88). 36. The Tractatus was printed in Latin in 1517, 1518, 1521, 1532, 1537, 1542, 1555, 1582, 1588, and 1600. It appeared in German translation in 1518 and 1534 and in Polish in 1535, 1541, and 1545. It was published in Italian in 1561, 1562, 1584, 1606, and 1634, and in Dutch in 1563. See Marshall T. Poe, “A People Born to Slavery”: Russia in Early Modern European Ethnography, 1476–1748 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2000), 37. The Dutch translation of Miechowita’s treatise is included in Die Nieuwe Weerelt der Landtschappen ende Eylanden, die tot hier toe allen ouden weerelt bescrijveren onbekent geweest sijn, trans. Cornelis Ablijn (Antwerp: Van der Loe, 1563), a Dutch translation of Simon Grynaeus and Johann Huttich’s travel anthology Novus orbis regionum (1532), where Miechowita’s treatise had already been published. 37. Hajdukiewicz contends that Głogow’s commentary contains references to Brazil. I was unable to find Głogow’s specific references to Brazil or the New World more generally. See Leszek Hajdukiewicz, Biblioteka Macieja z Miechowa (Wrocław: Zakład Narodowy Imienia Ossolińskich, 1960), 152, and Elizabeth Armstrong, Before Copyright: The French Book-Privilege System, 1498–1526 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 190. 38. See Franz Laubenberger, “The Naming of America,” Sixteenth Century Journal 13, no. 4 (1982): 91–113. 39. Furthermore, Wapowski contributed to the 1513 Strassburg Waldseemüller edition of Ptolemy’s Geography. Czesław Chowaniec points out that “Wapowski arrived [in Rome] in 1505 from Bologna. . . . He stayed for several years at the court of the Holy See, where, about 1506, he worked at his map of the Jagellonian States, making of course use of Cardinal Nicolas de Cuse’s map, produced about the middle of the 15th century and printed in 1491. . . . Beneventano made the map of Central Europe using Wapowski’s MS. [manuscript] as a source of information for completing his representation of the territory of Jagellonian Poland. Waldseemüller integrally reproduced Wapowski’s map [in his 1513 edition of Ptolemy’s Geography], mechanically abridging a part of it in the west.” Czesław Chowaniec, “The First Geographical Map of Bernard Wapowski,” Imago Mundi 12 (1955): 63. 40. See Marco Beneventanus and Giovanni Cotta, eds., In Hoc Operae Haec Contine[n] tur Geographia Cl. Ptholemaei (Rome: Per Bernardinu[m] Venetu[m] De Vitalibus, 1507). 41. Stobnica’s volume also contained an abridged version of Piccolomini’s De Asia, Isidore’s Sirie compendiosa descriptio, Paulus Osorius’s Africe brevis descriptio, and Anselm’s Terrae sancte & Urbis Hierusalem apertior descriptio. See Jan ze Stobnicy, Introductio in

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Ptolomei Cosmographiam cum longitudinibus & latitudinibus regionum & civitatum celebriorum. Epitome Europe Enaee Silvii (Kraków: Hieronim Wietor, 1519). For information about the New World available in Poland in the first decade of the sixteenth century, see Janina E. Piasecka, “Polskie zabytki geograficzne dotyczące Ameryki,” Czasopismo geograficzne 63, no. 1 (1992): 85–90. 42. “Ptolomeo aliisque vetustioribus ignotas”; Jan ze Stobnicy, fol. 5. “Epitoma Europe Enee Silvii, paucis quibusdam in ea de partibus nostrae Sarmaciae immutatis”; Ze Stobnicy, Introductio, fol. 5. 43. “Ptolomeo aliisque vetustioribus ignotas”; Ze Stobnicy, Introductio, fol. 5. “Epitoma Europe Enee Silvii, paucis quibusdam in ea de partibus nostrae Sarmaciae immutatis”; Ze Stobnicy, Introductio, fol. 5. 44. For a detailed description of Waldseemüller’s map, see John W. Hessler, The Naming of America (Washington, D.C.: Library of Congress, 2008), esp. 18–25. 45. Marica Milanesi prefers the term “synthetic map,” since “the term transition implies the existence of a unidirectional flow from one condition to another (for instance, from ancient to modern), and thus a progression or regression which is not recognisable in the history of ancient cartography.” Marica Milanesi, “A Forgotten Ptolemy: Harley Codex 3686 in the British Library,” Imago Mundi 48 (1996): 45. For the term “transitional map” see David Woodward, “Medieval Mappaemundi,” in The History of Cartography, vol. 1, Cartography in Prehistoric, Ancient, and Medieval Europe and the Mediterranean, ed. J. B. Harley and D. Woodward (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 286–370, esp. 314. 46. Milanesi, “Forgotten Ptolemy,” 45. 47. Hessler, Renaissance Globemaker’s Toolbox, 59. 48. “Trium insuper partium terre priscis note cognitionem Ptolomeus tradidit in 26 tabulis, quarum decem sunt Europe, quattuor Aff ricae & uodecim Asiae,” Ze Stobnicy, “De Partibus Terrae,” n.p. 49. “Alia quarta pars ab Americo Vesputio sagacis ingenii viro, inventa est, quam ab ipso Americo eius inventore amerigen quasi americi terram sive americam appellare volunt”; Ze Stobnicy, “De Partibus Terrae,” n.p. 50. Piccolomini’s De Europa was first published in a critical English edition by Nancy Bisaha in 2013. See Aeneas Silvius Piccolomini, Europe (c. 1400–1458), trans. Robert Brown, intro. and annotations by Nancy Bisaha (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2013). 51. “Apenninus Italiam omnem intersecat, illic per Histriam & Dalmaciam usque in Peloponesum & in Thraciam altissima iuga decurrunt, et inter Rhenum ac Danubium dorsum assurgit, quod ex Alpibus derivatum per Germaniam Sarmaciamque dilapsum, supra fontes Tanais ad Rhypheos montes attingit & per illos Caucaso iungitur ex inde per Caspium Antitaurum denique Taurus ipse comprehenditur. Ultra quem regnare magnum Antiochum Romani permisere, ex quo fit ut totius continentis una montium series intelligatur, quamvis plerisque in locis tumor non satis appareat”; in Ze Stobnicy, Introductio, fol. 26v. See also Piccolomini, Cosmographia Pii Papae in Asiae & Europae eleganti descriptio, ed. Geoff roy Tory (Paris: Apud Collegium Plesseiacum, 1509), 5.

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52. Hessler, Renaissance Globemaker’s Toolbox, 19. On Johann Schöner’s 1515 globe, see Chet van Duzer, Johann Schöner’s Globe of 1515: Transcription and Study (Philadelphia: American Philosophical Society, 2010). 53. “Montes Alpium tres ramos extendunt. Quorum primus per Sveviam, Boemiam, Slesiam, usque Poloniam extenditur, ubi Carpatus, lingua vero vernacula Krumpach dicitur, & sic continuando progreditur per Russiam, ubi Rhipheus dicitur perpetuo ventorum flatu gaudens.” The second ramification of the Alps extends “per Helvetiorum territorium,” and the third is the Appeninus, which traverses Italy. See “De Europeae provintiis,” in Schöner, Cosmographia (Nuremberg: Johannes Stuchssen, 1515), fol. 18. 54. Maciej Miechowita, Tractatus de duabus Sarmatijs Asiana et Europiana et de contentis in eis (Kraków: Johannes Haller 1517), n.p. 55. In a reference to Miechowita, who had derived the toponym “Polonia” from pole, the Polish word for field, Abraham Ortelius opens his description of Poland by claiming that “Polonia, quae a planitie terrae, (quam ipsi vernacule etiamnum Pole vocant) nomen habet, vasta Regio est.” Abraham Ortelius, Theatrum orbis terrarum (Antwerp: Aegidius Coppenius Diesth, 1570), 44. 56. Siegmund von Herberstein, Rerum Moscovitarum comentarii (Vienna: n.p., 1549). 57. Before von Herberstein, the Swedish bishop and geographer Olaus Magnus, whose brother Johannes corresponded with Miechowita immediately after the publication of the treatise, relied on the Tractatus for his in-depth description of northern Europe, Sea Map and Description of Northern Regions (1539). See Poe, “A People Born to Slavery,” 33. 58. See Konstanty Zantuan, “The Discovery of Modern Russia: Tractatus de duabus Sarmatiis,” Russian Review 27, no. 3 (1968): 328. 59. I do not concur with Zantuan, for whom Miechowita’s Tractatus signifies “a victory of Renaissance empirical experience over the traditional classical knowledge.” Zantuan, “Discovery of Modern Russia,” 330. 60. “Quare ut haec & complura alia in Sarmatijs contenta, tue doctissime presul amplitudini vera veraciter enarrarem. Subsequentem tractatum de duabus Sarmatijs ab antiquoribus minus cognitis nominibus, quibus temporibus nostris nominantur. Tibi domino et patrono meo semper colendissimo, scribere breviuscule, ut res expostulabit, ad incitandum alios, qui maiora noverunt, & elegantiori stilo scribere facile poterunt curabo. Utque sicut plaga meridionalis cum gentibus adiacentibus oceano usque ad Indiam, per regem Portugalie patefacta est, Sic plaga septemtrionalis cum gentibus oceano septemtrionis imminentibus, & versus orientem spectantibus, per militia et bella regis Polonie aperta, mundo pateat et clarescat”; Miechowita, Tractatus de duabus Sarmatiis, dedicatory epistle to Stanislaus Turzo, n.p. My translation. 61. Manuel I (1469–1521), king of Portugal 1495–1521. 62. In the quoted passage earlier, Miechowita uses three other words, besides aperta, that denote disclosure and openness: patefacta, aperta, pateat, and clarescat. Patefacio means “to make visible, reveal, uncover, lay bare,” “to make or lay open, to open,” and, more specifically, “to open the way as a discoverer or pioneer; to be the first to find.” Pateo denotes “to stand open, lie open, be open,” especially in the context of doors, gates, and buildings. It

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further means “to stretch out, extend; to be accessible, attainable.” Of a road and of a space, it signifies “to offer unimpeded passage” and “to extend in space, stretch or spread out.” See Oxford Latin Dictionary, 1996, s.v. “patefacio,” and Harper’s Latin Dictionary (New York: American Book Co., 1907), s.v. “patefacio” and “pateo.” 63. Interestingly, in his later “Discorso sopra varii viaggi per li quali sono state condotte fino a’ tempi nostri le spezierie e altri nuovi che se potriano usare per condurle,” Giovanni Battista Ramusio would take up Miechowita’s focus on Europe’s northeast and discuss how traditional passages to India “by way of the Red Sea” [“per la via del mar Rosso”] have been foreclosed. Alluding to the rise of the Ottoman Empire and the “great transformations of both religions and Signorie” [“mutazioni grandissime e delle religioni e delle signorie”] in recent history, Ramusio emphasizes the potential of Europe’s and Asia’s north to guarantee the flow of intercontinental transactions and the transfer of merchandise. While the Portuguese, a constant reference for Ramusio, have chosen to take “la via del ponente, circondando tutta l’Africa, per la virtu e industria de’ gran capitani delli serenissimi re di Portogallo,” the hitherto foreclosed Northern Hemisphere could be opened up for the European navigators. In this endeavor, the Polish king would have a clear advantage. See Ramusio, “Discorso,” in Navigazioni e viaggi, ed. Marica Milanesi, vol. 2 (Turin: Einaudi, 1978–88), 981–82. Sebastian Münster and Abraham Ortelius relied on Miechowita’s specific information about Europe’s East when publishing the Cosmography (1544) and the Theatrum orbis terrarum (1570), respectively. The atlas of the “geographicus regius,” as Ortelius was named by the Spanish king Philip II, was a major cartographic work, continuously expanded, updated, and translated into numerous European languages. 64. Ortelius does not mention the Riphean and Hyperborean Mountains, and when quoting his sources for his information on Poland, Russia, Lithuania, and Tartaria, Ortelius explicitly mentions Miechowita: “You [reader] have a lot about these regions from Maciej Miechowita, in his book on the Sarmatias, in Albert Krantz’s description of Vandalia, and [Antonio] Bonfini’s De rebus Hungaricis [= Hungaricarum Rerum Decades]. Yet everything has been best described by Marcin Kromer in his Chronica Poloniae and in Sigismund von Herberstein’s [Rerum] Moscoviticarum commentarii. See also Sebastian Münster.” “Plura habes de his Regionibus apud Mathiam à Michou, in libello de Sarmatiis, Alb[ertum] Crantzium in descriptio Wandaliae, Bonfinium de rebus Hungaricis. Sed omnium optime eas descripsit Martinus Cromerus in Chronico [sic!] Poloniae, & Sigismundus ab Herberstain in suis Moschoviticis Commentariis. Vide & Seb[astianum] Munsterum.” Ortelius, Theatrum, 44. 65. Ortelius, Theatrum, n.p. 66. Ibid. 67. The divergent use of the words “orbis” and “mundus” in early modern cartography and literature is the focus of Ayesha Ramachandran’s forthcoming book, “The Worldmakers: Global Imagining in Early Modern Europe” (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2015), forthcoming. 68. Abraham Ortelius, Album amicorum [facsimile], ed. Jean Puraye (Amsterdam: A. L. Van Gendt, 1969), fol. 70v.

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69. Jean-Marc Besse talks about a “visibilité nouvelle du monde.” Jean-Marc Besse, Les grandeurs de la Terre: Aspects du savoir géographique à la Renaissance (Lyon: ENS Éditions, 2003), 274. 70. Quoted in ibid. My translation. 71. As Van Aecken argues, one no longer needs to travel around the world: a careful look at Ortelius’s cartographic Theatrum provides the same sensations and pleasures as circumnavigating the globe. See Besse, Les grandeurs de la Terre, 275. 72. Tom Conley, “Putting French Studies on the Map,” Diacritics 28, no. 3 (1998): 23–24. 73. J. P. Harley, “Silences and Secrecy: The Hidden Agenda of Cartography in Early Modern Europe,” Imago Mundi 40 (1988): 58. Already Homer’s description of Odysseus’s meandering itineraries constituted a cartography marked by nonknowledge, especially if one focuses on Odysseus’s proper name, which in Greek means “no one.” As Michel Serres has argued, “nemo” turns into “the subject of knowledge, the subject of the voyage.” Michel Serres, “Jules Verne’s Strange Journeys,” Yale French Studies 52 (1975): 181. 74. Harley, “Silences and Secrecy,” 58. 75. The skeleton was a popular simile from the Middle Ages to the Enlightenment period to describe the continuity of mountain chains. In his entry for “mountain” in Diderot and d’Alembert’s Encyclopedia (vol. 10, 1751–65, 672), D’Holbach argued that mountains can be compared to bones, since they bear the world just as bones support the human body. See Bernard Debarbieux, “Mountains: Between Pure Reason and Embodied Experience,” in High Places: Cultural Geographies of Mountains, Ice and Science, ed. Denis Cosgrove and Veronica della Dora (London:  I.  B. Tauris, 2009), 93. See also Bernard Debarbieux and Gilles Rudaz, Les faiseurs de montagne: Imaginaires politiques et territorialités, XVIIIe–XXIe siècle (Paris: CNRS, 2010). 76. Debarbieux, “Mountains,” 93. 77. Gilles Deleuze, “Desert Islands,” in Desert Islands and Other Texts, 1953–1974, trans. Michael Taormina (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2004), 10–12. 78. Don Spain, The Six-Inch Lunar Atlas: A Pocket Field Guide (Dordrecht: Springer, 2009), 199.

5. Taking Out the Women 1. Anne Lake Prescott, “Th rough the Cultural Chunnel: The (Robert) Greeneing of Louise Labé,” in Opening the Borders: Inclusivity in Early Modern Studies; Essays in Honor of James  V. Mirollo, ed. Peter  C. Herman (Newark: University of Delaware, 1999), 133. 2. See Gérard Genette, Palimpsestes: La littérature au second degré (Paris: Seuil, 1982), translated by Channa Newman and Claude Doubinsky as Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997), ix. 3. Adrienne Rich, “When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-vision,” in On Lies, Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose, 1966–1978 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1979), 35; quote

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from p. 35. Julie Sanders refers to both Genette and Rich in the introduction to her thoughtful and useful Adaptation and Appropriation (London: Routledge, 2006). 4. Robert Greene, Gwydonius: The Carde of Fancie (London: William Posonby, 1584), sig. A1. 5. Robert Greene, The Debate betweene Follie and Love, in Gwydonius, T1/69. A nineteenth-century edition is in Alexander Grosart, The Life and Complete Works in Prose and Verse of Thomas Greene (London: Huth Library, 1881–86, 15 vols. repr., New York: Russell and Russell, 1964), 4:197–223. Prescott points out (“Th rough the Cultural Chunnel,” 134) that translations of texts whose authors’ names were unmentioned were not unusual in early modern publishing; Greene may have seen the Débat in a 1578 edition of Daphnis and Chloé (Paris, 1578) in which the author is identified only by the initials L. L. L. 6. Lori Humphrey Newcomb, “ ‘Social Things’: The Production of Popular Culture in the Reception of Robert Greene’s Pandosto,” ELH 61, no. 4 (1994): 757. She continues, “He was a pioneer in discovering the possibilities for planned popularity, and in recognizing the nature of the book as commodity.” 7. For an incisive analysis of the context in which Greene wrote to appeal to women but also claimed to be embarrassed about doing so, see Lori Humphrey Newcomb’s chapter “Social Things: Commodifying Pandosto,” in her Reading Popular Romance in Early Modern England (New York: Columbia University Press, 2001), especially 104–16. On Greene’s use and satire of euphuism, see the introduction by Carmine Di Biase in her edition of Gwydonius (Ottawa: Dovehouse, 2001), 26–31. 8. On Mamillia as an example of a book presented as written for women readers, and on others of Greene’s books that make such an appeal, including The Mirrour of Modestie, see Newcomb, Reading Popular Romance, 41–47. See also Di Biase’s introduction, p. 46, however, on what she takes as literary imitation in Greene rather than deep misogyny, though her conclusions about his courtship of a female audience (46–51) are contradicted by Newcomb’s more recent position. 9. Robert Greene (R.G., Maister of Artes), The Mirrour of Modestie (London: Imprinted by Roger Warde, 1584), a3. 10. Newcomb, Reading Popular Romance, 46–47, citing Juliet Fleming, “The Ladies’ Text,” in Sexuality and Gender in Early Modern Europe: Institutions, Texts, Images, ed. James Turner (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 158–59. 11. For a discussion of the genres in addition to drama incorporated into Labé’s text, including Erasmian satire, see Deborah Lesko Baker, Louise Labé: Complete Poetry and Prose (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 26. She makes the point that the speeches of Labé’s gods up until the final debate are “theatrical dialogues” (33). Quotations from the Débat are from Baker’s edition, which reproduces François Rigolot’s now standard French edition, Oeuvres complètes: Sonnets, élégies, “Débat de Folie et d’Amour,” poésies, 2nd ed. (Paris: Flammarion, 2004), and from Baker’s translation on facing pages. For the purposes of this comparison, I sometimes revise her lively and enjoyable English in a more literal direction. 12. Prescott makes the same conjecture about Posonby’s motives (“Through the Cultural Chunnel,” 136).

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13. Rainer Schulte, “A word approximates its synonym without ever replacing it. . . . A cultural situation—whether in the realm of social, ethical, educational, legal or political realities—never finds its exact equivalent in another country”; introduction to The Craft of Translation, ed. John Biguenet and Rainer Schulte (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), xiv. I add to Schulte’s list of realities that of gender in writing and reading. 14. For an early study of Jean de Tournes, see A. Cartier et al., Bibliographie des éditions des De Tournes, imprimeurs lyonnais (Paris: Bibliothèques Nationales de la France, 1937), vol. 2. 15. For further comments on the Erasmian elements in Le Débat, see Rigolot, Oeuvres complètes, 11. 16. Janet Levarie Smarr, Joining the Conversation: Dialogues by Renaissance Women (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005), 15–16. 17. Labé’s family and the gossip about her were first researched by Charles Boy, Oeuvres de Louise Labé (Paris: Lemerre, 1887), vol. 2, and by Jean Tricou, “Louise Labé et sa famille,” Bibliothèque d’ humanisme et Renaissance 4 (1944): 60–104. 18. On Lyon as a city where a relatively porous social structure enabled a writer like Labé to rise to public success, see Natalie Zemon Davis, “Publishing and the People,” in Society and Culture in Early Modern France (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1975), 85–86. Earlier and later analysts of Labé’s social position are Fernand Zamaron, Louise Labé, dame de la franchise (Paris: Nizet, 1968), 62–88, and Karine Berriot, Lousie Labé: La Belle Rebelle ou le François nouveau (Paris: Seuil, 1985). 19. On Jean de Tournes, see Cartier et al., Bibliographie des éditions des De Tournes, vol. 2. 20. On Greene’s free-floating literary career, see Richard Helgerson, The Elizabethan Prodigals (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), 80–81. 21. Charles W. Crupi sifts through gossip versus verifiable details of Greene’s life in his Robert Greene (Boston: Twayne, 1986), chap. 1. See also Helgerson, Elizabethan Prodigals, 80–81. 22. “Greene’s Newes from both heaven and hell” [Barnabe Rich?], from Newes and Funeralls, A4v, quoted in Crupi, Robert Greene, 14. On this and other “ghost” texts supposedly by Greene published after his death, see the discussion in Newcomb, Reading Popular Romance, 70–76. 23. Helgerson, Elizabethan Prodigals, 95. 24. Prescott, “Through the Cultural Chunnel,” 137. 25. In the introduction to their edition of Pernette Du Guillet’s Rymes (Paris: Champion, 2006), Christian Barataud and Gabrielle Trudeau present a useful clarification of the mix of love theory in lyrics published in Lyon in the 1540s and 1550s. On this line as Pauline, see Rigolot, Oeuvres complètes, 13–14. 26. Prescott, “Through the Cultural Chunnel,” 137. 27. Rigolot, Oeuvres complètes, 86n1. 28. Marie-Madeleine Fontaine, “Politique de Louise Labé,” in Louise Labé 2005, ed. Béatrice Alonso and Eliane Viennot, Collection “L’École du genre,” no. 1 (Saint-Etienne:

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Publications Universitaires de Saint-Etienne, 2004), 233–44; Berriot, La Belle Rebelle. See also Zamaron, Louise Labé. 29. For a summary of this event, see Andrew Gurr, The Shakespearean Stage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 42–43. 30. For this suggestion, see Rigolot, Oeuvres complètes, 72n1. Rabelais may also be a source for Folie’s remark that the world needs risk takers as well as “Monsieur le sage,” “the wise man [who] will have all the time in the world to go and plant cabbages” (104). Though this is a proverbial phrase, one recalls the sensible cabbage planter, down to earth even in a fantastic situation, who greets the astonished author when he has been swallowed up into Pantagruel’s mouth (Pantagruel, chap. 31). 31. On the likelihood that Greene died in a stranger’s house, begging his estranged wife for money, see Crupi, Robert Greene, 27–28. 32. Donald Frame, “Pleasures and Problems of Translation,” in Biguenet and Schulte, Craft of Translation, citing an unnamed first user of the term, 85.

6. Tr ansl ation and Homel and Insecurity in Shakespeare’s The Taming of the Shrew 1. I take the adjective “malleable” from Barbara Hodgdon’s superb introduction to her edition of The Taming of the Shrew for the Arden III series (London: Methuen Drama, Bloomsbury, 2010), 35. All quotations are from this edition unless otherwise indicated. I follow Hodgdon’s spellings of the main characters’ names, which are variably rendered in early texts and paratexts, except when I quote modern critics who have chosen a different spelling. For Hodgdon’s rationales for her decisions about “Petruccio” and “Katherina,” see Shrew, 135–36. I have consulted a number of other modern editions and have benefited particularly from the notes and contextual materials provided by Frances E. Dolan, who uses a text established by David Bevington in her edition of The Taming of the Shrew: Texts and Contexts (London: Bedford / St. Martin’s, 1996). 2. Quintilian, De Instituio Oratorio 8.6.vi. 3–7, in the Loeb Classical Library bilingual edition, trans. H. E. Butler, 4 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1922), 3:303. 3. “Meta” in Greek has been translated as “beside,” “with,” “among,” “adjacent,” “beyond,” and “after,” the latter preposition alluding to the influential placement of Aristotle’s Metaphysics after the Physics in the canonical arrangement of his works at least as old as Andronicus of Rhodes (fl. 60 bce). “Beyond,” in the sense of “higher,” “more general,” “in a position to reflect on,” has become a dominant modern meaning and underpins the transformation of the Greek prefi x into a multilingual adjective and even a proper name: Meta: Journal des traducteurs / Meta: Translators’ Journal is the bilingual title of a journal published in Montreal. In the case of Aristotelian “metaphysics,” as in the cases of many translations, spatial or temporal secondariness does not necessarily determine value: Aristotle called the subjects of metaphysics “first philosophy,” whereas he called the study of nature “second philosophy” (Metaphysics 1037a15). Douglas Robinson, interestingly but en-

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igmatically, translates “meta” as “change”: see his book The Translator’s Turn (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991), 138. 4. I refer to the First Folio text because the Arden, like other modern editions, does not retain the speech prefi x “begger [sic].” See The Taming of the Shrew, in Mr William Shakespeare’s Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies, a facsimile edition prepared by Helge Kökeritz (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1954), 208. 5. Julia Reinhard Lupton, Thinking with Shakespeare: Essays on Politics and Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), 62. 6. Hodgdon, introduction to The Taming of the Shrew, 120. 7. For an excellent orientation to the different ways in which critics have understood this speech, see Lupton, Thinking with Shakespeare, 62, and Dolan, introduction to Taming of the Shrew, 32–33, and ibid., “The Household,” 218–19; Hodgdon provides a rich account of both the critical and the performance history of interpreting Katherina’s “speech of submission” in her introduction to The Taming of the Shrew, especially 120–31. 8. See James M. Marino, Owning William Shakespeare: The King’s Men and Their Intellectual Property (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011). 9. Quoted from the official government website, http://www.dhs.gov/about-dhs. See the part of the mission statement devoted to “secur[ing] our borders.” 10. For valuable discussions of the vexed relation between the 1623 play and the 1594 text printed under the title A Pleasant Conceited History of the Taming of A Shrew, see Hodgdon, introduction to The Taming of the Shrew, 7–38; Marino, Owning William Shakespeare, 48–74; and Leah Marcus, Unediting Shakespeare (New York: Routledge, 1996), 101–31; this chapter revises and expands her “The Shakespearean Editor as Shrew Tamer,” English Literary Renaissance 22 (1992): 177–200. Hodgdon, Marcus, and Marino offer bracingly skeptical views of the relation of these two plays and of critical efforts to “secure” the 1623 text—widely seen as the better play on aesthetic grounds—for an “early” William Shakespeare; critics have resorted to the stratagem of imagining a Shakespeare-authored “ur text” to counter the idea that the anonymous A Shrew might have been written by Shakespeare (along with others in his company) and then served as a “source” for The Shrew. At different moments in their history as theatrical and print “properties,” each play has been interpreted as a translation of the other. The relation between the two plays is indeterminate, in my view, and thus has been felt to be threatening to Shakespeare’s authority as a national figure and as a singular “owner” of texts printed under his name. For critiques of the modern construction of authorship as it applies to early modern playwrights, see Jeff rey Masten, Textual Intercourse: Collaboration, Authorship, and Sexualities in Renaissance Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), and Queer Philologies: Sex, Language, and Aff ect in Shakespeare’s Time (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, forthcoming). See also Paul Werstine, “Close Contrivers: Nameless Collaborators in Early Modern London Plays,” in Elizabethan Theater, ed.  A.  L. Magnusson and  C.  D. McGee (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2002): 15:2–20. Hodgdon adopts a new editorial approach to the two plays by including a facsimile of the sole surviving copy of the 1594 text in her edition. A Shrew was “reprinted in 1596 and re-entered in the Stationers’ Register”—the licensing record of the London guild of booksellers,

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printers, and other book workers—in 1607, along with texts of Romeo and Juliet and Love’s Labors’ Lost. Hodgdon thinks it likely that “the play available on London’s bookstalls from 1594 to 1623 was A Shrew (11), though some version of The Shrew was probably also being performed by Shakespeare’s company. 11. David Simpson, Situatedness, or, Why We Keep Saying Where We’re Coming From (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2002), 20. 12. John T. Hamilton, Security: Politics, Humanity, and the Philology of Care (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2013). Hamilton also contributed the entry on securitas for the Dictionary of Untranslatables, 936–38. 13. Walter Benjamin, “Edward Fuchs: Collector and Historian,” in One-Way Street and Other Writings, trans E. Jephcott and K. Shorter (1979), as cited by Tejaswini Niranjana, Siting Translation: History, Post-Structuralism, and the Colonial Context (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 110–11. 14. Cited and translated from Hamilton, Security, 256, from Plessner’s “Die Aufgabe der Philosophischen Anthropologie” (1937). Hamilton also discusses Plessner in the entry on “securitas” in the Dictionary of Untranslatables, 937. 15. Simpson too asks why some words receive scare quotes; see Situatedness, 31; for Locke’s valuing of the nonreferential preposition, see Margaret Ferguson, “Syntax, Poetic,” in The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry, 4th ed., ed. Roland Greene (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2012), 1402. 16. On this problem, see Francis E. Dolan, True Relations: Reading, Literature, and Evidence in Seventeenth-Century England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), 26. See also Kevin Sharpe’s discussion of a skeptical critical stance toward evidence, which “has as its first meaning ‘clearness,’ ‘obviousness,’ and derives from the Latin videre . . . which means to see, to perceive,” in Reading Revolutions: The Politics of Reading in Early Modern England, 26, as cited in and discussed by Dolan, True Relations, 18. 17. Quoted from the reprint of Jakobson’s article in The Translation Studies Reader, 2nd ed., ed. Lawrence Venuti (New York: Routledge, 2004), 139. Note that Jakobson performs “intralingual” translation by giving us three alternative formulations in English for each of his three types of translation. 18. Jacques Derrida, L’oreille de l’autre, 1982, trans. Peggy Kamuf in a book that expands on the original under the title The Ear of the Other: Otobiography, Transference, Translation, ed. Christie McDonald (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1988), 100; Jacques Derrida, Apories, trans. Thomas Dutoit (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1993), 10. See also Derrida, “What Is a ‘Relevant’ Translation?,” trans. Lawrence Venuti in Venuti, Translation Studies Reader, 423–46, esp. 430, on Jakobson’s inter/intra linguistic distinction. 19. See for example Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, translator’s preface to Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), ix–lxxxvii; and Barbara Johnson, “Taking Fidelity Philosophically,” in Diff erence in Translation, ed. Joseph Graham (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1985), 142–48. 20. For valuable analyses of this scene of a servant’s “misprision” of his master, see Amanda Bailey, Flaunting: Style and the Subversive Male Body in Early Modern England

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(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2007), 55–57; and Thomas Moisan, “ ‘Knock Me Here Soundly’: Comic Misprision and Class Consciousness in Shakespeare,” Shakespeare Quarterly 42, no. 3 (Fall 1991): 276–90. 21. Bailey, Flaunting, 55. 22. See Gina Bloom, Anston Bosman, and William West, “Ophelia’s Intertheatricality, or, How Performance Is History,” Theatre Journal 65 (2013): 165–82. 23. George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie, book 3.4, facsimile of the 1589 ed., intro. by Baxter Hathaway (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 1970), 156. See also Paula Blank, Broken English: Dialects and the Politics of Language in Renaissance Writings (London: Routledge, 1996); and Lynne Magnusson, Shakespeare and Social Dialogue: Dramatic Language and Elizabethan Letters (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014). 24. Gordon Williams, A Glossary of Shakespeare’s Sexual Language (London: Athlone Press, 1997), 298. 25. Cited from the facsimile edition prepared by Helge Kökeritz, The Taming of the Shrew (see note 4). 26. See Williams, A Glossary, 122. Editors of modern editions aimed at student/teacher consumers do not include such philological speculation about Sly’s first verb; therefore, an archaic or dialectal but nonetheless native meaning becomes foreign to modern Anglophone readers through forces of time and editorial decorum. All editorial practices are also inflected by economic issues having to do with the play’s continuing status as a “movable” property or a “comoditie,” as one of the actors in A Shrew describes the genre which, along with the “Tragicall,” is available for purchase by the Lord. Here and elsewhere, I cite A Shrew from the facsimile copy in appendix 3 of Hodgdon’s edition of The Taming of The Shrew; the “comoditie” appears on page 347 of her edition. 27. Compare Sly’s homosocial insult to the one Petruccio’s servant Curtis gives to Grumio in 4.1: “Away, you three-inch fool, I am no beast”; though the slur may pertain to Grumio’s height, as Hodgdon notes, Grumio interprets it as an insult to his penis. For the ways in which earlier editors attempted to “avoid indecency” in their glosses on the exchange, see Hodgdon’s note to 4.1. 23–25, p. 241. 28. Christopher Fitter, Radical Shakespeare: Politics and Stagecraft in the Early Career (New York: Routledge 2012), 131. 29. A. L. Beier, Masterless Men: The Vagrancy Problem in England, 1560–1640 (London: Methuen, 1985), xxii. 30. Patricia Fumerton, Unsettled: The Culture of Mobility and the Working Poor in Early Modern England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 26. See also Linda Woodbridge, Vagrancy, Homelessness, and English Renaissance Literature (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001); and Paul Slack, “Vagrants and Vagrancy in England, 1598–1664,” Economic History Review, 2nd ser., 27 (1974): 360–79. 31. Beier, Masterless Men, 96. 32. See Hodgdon, The Taming of the Shrew, appendix 3, 394. 33. Sly’s description of his career (Induction 2.16–19) parodies the idea that a person born poor can improve his fortunes through “education” or “transmutation,” the latter term signifying the kind of transformation or translation offered—fantasmatically—by

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and in the theater. Sly’s “transmutation” involved his leaving the marginally legitimate work of “card-maker” (if that is indeed a job in the wool industry as opposed to a rogue’s job of setting up card games for money) for the job of a very low-status member of the London entertainment business. 34. Benveniste, Le vocabulaire des institutions indo-européennes, vol. 1, Économie, parenté, société (Paris: Editions de Minuit, 1969), 92. My translations. For a brilliant analysis of the economy of the gift, see Scott Cutler Shershow, Th e Work and the Gift (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). 35. Jacques Derrida, Of Hospitality: Anne Dufourmantelle Invites Jacques Derrida to Respond, trans. Rachel Bowlby (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2000), 157n2. 36. Benveniste, Le vocabulaire des institutions indo-européennes, 95. 37. “Paucas pallabris, let the world slide. Sessa!” says Sly to the Hostess, having just announced that his family came to England with “Richard Conqueror” (Induction 1.4.5); his corruption of the Spanish “pocas palabras” (few words) and his pompous use of a term probably derived from the French “cessez” (stop) but since then appropriated for aristocratic English sports such as hunting and fencing, where it assumes an altogether different meaning as a “cry of encouragement,” add to the drama’s comic effects without causing too much mental labor for contemporary readers or audience members. My glosses borrow from Hodgdon’s on this passage, 140n5. 38. The quotation is from Tylus’s translation of the Italian version of Bruni’s text, Sulla perfetta traduzzione [De interpretatione recta], ed. Paoli Viti (Naples: Liguori, 2004). For an English translation, see Bruni, “On Correct Interpretation,” trans. Gordon Griffiths, James Hankins, and David Thompson in The Humanism of Leonardo Bruni (Binghamton, N.Y.: Medieval and Renaissance Texts and Studies, 1987). 39. See Tylus, “No Untranslatables!,” in Dictionary of Untranslatables, 1153. For a wideranging discussion of cognates for “translate” in early modern English texts, see Patricia Parker, Shakespeare from the Margins (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 116– 20 and passim. Thomas Cooper’s definition from his Thesaurus Linguae of 1565 is “a translation, or bringing from one to an other. . . . The taking of goods from the right owners, and giuing them to others. . . . The . . . remouing of the faulte from one to an other. The transferring or the translating of one worde.” Cited from the digitized version of Cooper’s Thesaurus by the Archimedes Project (http://archimedes.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/cgi-bin/archim/dict/hw?step=list;id=d002;max=100). Cooper’s list of words beginning with the prefi xes “tra” (as in “traduco,” “To translate out of one tongue into another”) and “trans” (as in “transfiguro,” “To . . . turne one shape into another”) includes “Tranio, A seruaunts name in Plautus.” In The Taming of the Shrew, Tranio is Lucentio’s servant who dons his clothes and seems to turn into him so perfectly that Baptista asks Tranio to rehearse the part of bridegroom with Bianca after Petruccio rudely leaves the wedding feast with Katherina. Shakespeare uses the noun “translation” only once. 40. Bruni, “On Correct Interpretation,” 228. 41. Roger Ascham, The Scholemaster, ed. Lawrence V. Ryan (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1967), 14–15. Cited and discussed in Jeff Dolven, Scenes of Instruction in Renaissance Romance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 43–44.

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42. See Dolven, Scenes of Instruction, 44; for further discussion of “double translation,” see Parker, Shakespeare from the Margins, chap. 4; on parodies of humanist education in Shakespeare, see ibid., 130. 43. See Patricia Parker, “Construing Gender: Mastering Bianca in The Taming of the Shrew,” in The Impact of Feminism in English Renaissance Studies, ed. Dympna Callaghan (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 193–201. See also Lynn Enterline’s brilliant analysis, “The Cruelties of Character in The Taming of the Shrew,” in Shakespeare’s Schoolroom: Rhetoric, Discipline, Emotion (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), chap. 4; and Katherine A. Sirluck, “Patriarchy, Pedagogy, and the Divided Self in The Taming of the Shrew,” University of Toronto Quarterly 60, no. 4 (Summer 1991): 419–34. Some critics have argued that Shakespeare takes humanist pedagogy “straight” in the representation of Petruccio’s “education” of Katherina. See Dennis S. Brooks, “ ‘To Show Scorn Her Own Image’: The Varieties of Education in The Taming of the Shrew,” Rocky Mountain Review of Language and Literature 48, no. 1 (1994): 7–32. 44. Thomas Moisan, “Interlinear Trysting and ‘Household Stuff ’: The Latin Lesson and the Domestication of Learning in The Taming of the Shrew,” Shakespeare Studies 23 (1995): 100–19. See also Patricia B. Phillippy’s analysis of Turberville’s translation of the Heroides in “ ‘Loytering in Love’: Ovid’s Heroides, Hospitality, and Humanist Education in The Taming of the Shrew,” Criticism 40, no. 1 (Winter 1998): 27–53; Moisan remarks that the Heroides are recommended reading for both “callow youth[s]” and for female students, in contrast to the Amores and Ars amatoriae, which many humanist scholars regarded as likely to corrupt the minds of young girls. Erasmus indeed singles out Heroides I as “most chaste” in his colloquy, A Mery Dialogue, Declaringe the Propertyes of Shrowde Shrewes, and Honest Wyves, which has been cited as either a source or an analogue for The Shrew; George Turberville, “To the Reader,” in The heroycall epistles of . . . Publius Ouidius Naso, in English verse (London: Henrie Denham, 1567), n.p. or signature; I quote from the STC copy of the second edition, 18939, British Library, and am indebted to Phillippy for leading me to this text. I am also indebted here and throughout this chapter to Moisan’s argument for a generally “parasitic” relation between the educational and the domestic spheres in the Shakespearean Shrew. 45. Bélen Bistué, Collaborative Translation and Multi-version Texts in Early Modern Europe (Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2013), 1. 46. Few modern editors gloss this line as an allusion to Ovid’s Tristia, the series of elegies in which he lamented his exile and begged the emperor to allow him to return from banishment on the Black Sea; but Heather James remarks the allusion and ties it to Touchstone’s invocation of “the most capricious poet honest Ovid . . . among the Goths,” with a bilingual pun on goats (“capri” in Latin) (As You Like It 3.3.5–6). See James, “Shakespeare’s Learned Heroines in Ovid’s Schoolroom,” in Shakespeare and the Classics, ed. Charles Martindale and A. B. Taylor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2004), 66– 85; quotation from 81. 47. For the idea of the scene as a “fulcrum,” see Margaret Maurer, “Constering Bianca: The Taming of the Shrew and The Woman’s Prize, or The Tamer Tamed,” Medieval and Renaissance Drama in England 14 (2001): 186–206.

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48. For a discussion of this “foreign” sexual counterplot, both derived from Ariosto and Terence’s Eunuch, see Keir Elam, “The Fertile Eunuch: Twelfth Night, Early Modern Intercourse, and the Fruits of Castration,” Shakespeare Quarterly 47, no. 1 (Spring 1996): 1–36; and Patricia Parker, “Mastering Bianca,” 208n17. 49. See Laurie Maguire, “Cultural Control in The Taming of the Shrew,” Renaissance Drama 26 (1995): 89. 50. In a striking exception to the general rule of humanist anti-beating discourses, Mulcaster argues that the rod “may no more be spared in schools than the sworde may in Princes hand.” Moreover, he adds, “For the private, whatsoever parents say, my ladie birchely will be a guest at home, or else parents shall not have their wills” (270.7). See also Positions, 155, where Mulcaster worries about those parents who are “ticklish” about schoolmasters beating children and suggests that such parents constitute a threat to the monarchy. Mulcaster’s views contrast with those of Erasmus, who famously inveighed against the more brutal practices of his contemporary and precursor schoolmasters in his De pueris instituendis; for a discussion of this contrast, see Richard Halpern, The Poetics of Primitive Accumulation, 25-28. For the feminization of the “birch,” see Wendy Wall, Staging Domesticity: Household Work and English Identity in Early Modern Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 239n59; see also Alan Stewart, Close Readers: Humanism and Sodomy in Early Modern England (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1997), 99. Mulcaster’s editor, William Barker, argues that “Lady Birch” is the common expression for a form of punishment given by males to males; presumably punishment by a (symbolic) female to the male buttocks would intensify the humiliation (446, note to 270.7). Wall also directs our attention to Thomas Tusser, who suggests that the wife had hands-on interaction in managing servants. He warns the maid that the mistress may “uncover [her] bare” if she fails to rise early: “Maides, up I beseech yee / Least Mistress doe breech yee” (Five Hundreth Points of Good Husbandry (1573, rpt. Five Hundred Points of Good Husbandry [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984, 162], cited in Wall, 260, n. 55.). Thanks to Fran Dolan for help in my research on the “Lady Birch.” In this much discussed “feminization of the birch,” Mulcaster metaphorically sends the schoolmaster into the private sphere as a guest the hosts may not welcome. 51. 3.1.39; see Hodgdon’s note on this line, Shrew, 22. For a similar association of ideas, see Henry VI, Part 2, 3.1.288: “a breach that craves a quick expedient stop!”; see also Dolan’s discussion of disputes between spouses and between masters and servants in chapter 3 of Marriage and Violence: The Early Modern Legacy (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2008), “Fighting for the Breeches, Sharing the Rod: Spouses, Servants, and the Struggle for Equality.” On “breaching” as a semantic cluster in Shakespeare’s plays, see Parker, Shakespeare from the Margins, 140–42, 152–53 and passim. 52. See Dolan’s notes to this passage in her edition of Shrew; she reads “counterfeit assurance” as “pretended betrothal agreement”; see also Lorna Hutson’s illuminating discussion of both Lucentio’s and Petruccio’s innovative versions of the “clandestine marriage”—arguably, “not in itself very subversive of social norms,” since English communities “had, for hundreds of years, found that the ambiguous position in law of the secret con-

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tract enabled both the control and accommodation of matches made against the wishes of kin”; The Usurer’s Daughter: Male Friendship and Fictions of Women in Sixteenth-Century England (London: Routledge, 1997), 218–19. Hutson draws a useful contrast between Lucentio’s and Petruccio’s marriages, with the former’s moving “in the traditional direction from clandestinity into community control,” while the latter’s, “far more subversively, goes the opposite way,” with the “disguise” of “openness” (219). I would argue that insofar as both marriages are textually represented as belonging to the brides as well as to the bridegrooms, both show a type of “contract” that cannot be wholly secured by husbandly or fatherly agency. 53. Ariosto’s verse version from 1509 was so popular that he rewrote it in a longer prose version; for a discussion of both, see Ludovico Ariosto, Supposes, trans. George Gascoigne, ed. with an introduction by Donald Beeker, annotations by John Butler (Ottawa: Dovehouse Editions, 1999). 54. The theme of the dubious patriarchal “line” is pursued also in 3.1 when Bianca expresses her scholarly doubt that “Aeacides / Was Ajax, call’d so from his grandfather” (49–51). She debates the meaning of a line that follows hard on the heels of the two lines actually quoted in Latin in the Shakespearean text; Ovid’s poem locates “Aecides” in relation to “Ulysses,” but does not specify whether the former warrior is Ajax or Achilles. Bianca’s “mistrust” of Cambio’s certainty about male lineage is justified, as Patricia Parker has persuasively argued, because in the Iliad, Ajax famously loses an argument with Ulysses about his (Ajax’s) “right” to inherit the armor of Achilles, a right that depends crucially on his claim to the name Aecides. The name, like the patrimonial “line,” is subject to debate, and Bianca’s doubt “translates” the old debate on the Homeric battlefield into a new textual venue with open margins. She prefers the reading given by another English translator of Ovid’s Heroides, George Turberville, to the reading maintained by Lucentio/ Cambio. Turberville renders Aeicides as “Achylles” in his 1567 translation of Heroides, as Parker notes; for a fuller discussion, see her “Mastering Bianca in The Taming of the Shrew,” esp. 204 and 209nn18–20. 55. As Vanda Zajko remarks, Tranio persuades Lucentio to substitute Ovid (of the Amores) for Aristotle when he first arrives in Padua; see “Petruchio is ‘Kated’: The Taming of the Shrew and Ovid,” in Martindale and Taylor, Shakespeare and the Classics, 37. 56. For a discussion of the pun in relation to ongoing critical debates about tropes and about translation, see Margaret Ferguson, “Fatal Cleopatras: Puns in Shakespeare’s Poetry,” in The Oxford Companion to Shakespeare’s Poetry, ed. Jonathan Post (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 77–94. 57. Barbara Hodgdon, “Plot Inconsistencies and the ‘Hortensio Problem,’ ” 316. 58. See Richard Hosley, “Sources and analogues of The Taming of the Shrew,” Huntington Library Quarterly 27, no. 3 (1964): 289–308. 59. Ibid., 305. 60. See Hodgdon’s note on the nicknames in her discussion of “Hortensio” in the “List of Roles,” 136–37 in Shrew. 61. Jacques Derrida, “What Is a ‘Relevant’ Translation?,” 424.

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62. Ibid., my emphasis. 63. Ibid., 429, my emphasis. 64. Cited from Geoffrey Bullough, Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, vol. 1 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1957), 141. 65. See Moisan, “Interlinear Trysting,” 110, on Gremio’s use of “baccare” as a “stock piece” of “faux Latinity” aimed at asserting “the dignity of his age and wealth against the importunate advances of Petruchio, who has jumped the courtship queue in his haste to claim Katherina.” See also Parker, Shakespeare from the Margins, 25. 66. For the sexual pun in “doing,” see Hodgdon’s note on 2.1.74. 67. For an important discussion of the play’s transformation of the wife from a productive member of a household into a luxury item like the “kates” (dessert cakes) to which Petruccio compares the female he insistently calls “Kate,” see Natasha Korda, Shakespeare’s Domestic Economies: Gender and Property in Early Modern England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002), 52–75. 68. On Ovid as an educational model, see Phillippy, “ ‘Loytering in Love’ ”; Heather James, “Ovid in Renaissance English Literature,” in A Blackwell Companion to Ovid, ed. Peter E. Knox (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 423–41; James, “Shakespeare’s Learned Heroines”; Vanda Zajko, “Petruchio Is ‘Kated’: The Taming of the Shrew and Ovid,” in Martindale and Taylor, Shakespeare and the Classics, 33–47. 69. Ovid, Heroides and Amores, 2nd ed., trans. Grant Showerman (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1977), I.64, pp. 14–15. 70. At first glance, or if one is in a hurry to get to one’s “real” task, as Lucentio/ Cambio evidently is, one might read “hac” as the feminine ablative singular of “hic,” the pronoun, and just decide that the generic masculine form will do (hic). In performance, the lines can be very funny, like hiccups. 71. From Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks, vol. V, 1835–1838, ed. Merton M. Sealts (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 1965), 226. See also Hugh Kenner, The Counterfeiters. An Historical Comedy (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1968), for a witty entrée to analyzing modes of rhetorical condescension one often finds in criticism of dead writers. 72. James, “Shakespeare’s Learned Heroines,” 70. 73. Karen Newman, Fashioning Femininity and English Renaissance Drama (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 40. 74. This is Gregory Ulmer’s apt term—see his “The Puncept in Grammatology,” in On Puns: The Foundation of Letters, ed. Jonathan Culler (London: Basil Blackwell, 1988): 164–90.

7. On Contingency in Tr ansl ation I am delighted to acknowledge the insightful questions and comments I received during earlier presentations of this chapter, which helped me to focus and shift the argument. Except where indicated, the translations are my own.

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1. Fernando de Rojas, The Spanish bavvd, represented in Celestina: or, The tragickecomedy of Calisto and Melibea, trans. James Mabbe (London: Printed by I[ohn] B[eale], 1631), 14. 2. Fernando de Rojas, La Celestina: Comedia o tragicomedia de Calisto y Melibea, ed. Peter  E. Russell (Madrid: Castalia, 2001), 256–57; a useful companion edition is Tragi/Comedia de Calisto y Melibea, ed. Fernando Caltalapiedra Erostarbe (Kassel: Reichenberger, 2000). The translations are mine except where indicated. 3. This is Mabbe’s translation of the passage: “Sir why doe you vexe your selfe? why grieue you? Doe you thinke, that in the eares of this woman, the name, by which I now call her doth any way sound reproachfully? Beleeue it not. Assure your selfe, she glories as much in this name, as oft as shee heares it, as you do, when you heare some voyce, Calisto to be a gallant Gentleman. Besides, by this is she commonly called, and by this Title is shee of all men generally knowne. If she passe along the streetes among a hundred women, and some one perhaps blurts out, See, where’s the old Bawd; without any impatiency, or any the least distemper, shee presently turnes her selfe about, nods the head, and answers them with a smiling countenance, and cheerefull looke. At your solemne banquets, your great feasts, your weddings, your gossippings, your merry meetings, your funeralls, and all other assemblies whatsoeuer, where there is any resort of people, thither doth shee repaire, and there they make pastime with her. And if shee passe by where there be any dogs, they straightway barke out this name; If shee come amongst birds, they haue no other note but this; If she sight vpon a flocke of sheepe, their bleatings proclaime no lesse; If she meet with beasts, they bellow forth the same: The frogges that lie in ditches, croake no other tune; Come shee amongst your Smithes, your Carpenters, your Armourers, your Ferriers, your Brasiers, your Ioyners: why, their hammers beate all vpon this word. In a word, all sorts of tooles and instruments returne no other Eccho in the ayre; your Shoomakers sing this song; your Combe-makers joyne with them, your Gardeners, your Plough-men, your Reapers, your Vine-keepers passe away the painefulnesse of their labours, in making her the subject of their discourse; your Table-players, and all other Gamesters neuer lose, but they peale foorth her prayses: To be short, be she wheresoeuer she be, all things whatsoeuer are in this world, repeate no other name but this: O what a deuourer of rosted egges was her husband? What would you more? Not one stone that strikes against another, but presently noyseth out, Old whore” (14–15). Stephen Gilman, The Art of “La  Celestina” (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1956), argued that in these lines Rojas is borrowing from Petrarch’s preface to De Remediis utriusque Fortunae II. Alan D. Deyermond acknowledges the Petrarchan influence in his The Petrarchan Sources of “La Celestina” (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1975),

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64–66, but points out that these sorts of lists are conventional in late antiquity and early modernity, and argues against a direct borrowing here. 4. Antonio de Nebrija, Gramática de la lengua castellana, ed. I. González-Llubera (London: Oxford University Press, 1926), 3. 5. For a view of the ideology of historiography under the Hapsburgs, see Richard L. Kagan, Clio and the Crown: The Politics of History in Medieval and Early Modern Spain (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009). 6. Sebastián de Covarrubias, Tesoro de la lengua castellana española (Madrid: Luis Sánchez, 1611). 7. Ambrosius Calepinus, Ambrosii Calepini Dictionarii Octolingvis Altera Pars  (Lugduni: Prost, 1647). At http://diglib.hab.de/wdb.php?dir=drucke/kb-40-2f2&pointer=259. 8. Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, The Second Part of the History of the Valorous and Witty Knight-errant Don Quixote of the Mancha, trans. Thomas Shelton[?] (London: Ed. Blount, 1620). 9. Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, Don Quijote de la Mancha, ed. Francisco Rico (Barcelona: Crítica–Biblioteca Clásica, 1998). 10. Antonio Medina Molera, Cervantes y el Islam: El Quijote a cielo abierto (Barcelona: Ediciones Carena, 2005), 84. 11. Maria Rosa Menocal, The Ornament of the World: How Muslims, Jews, and Christians Created a Culture of Tolerance in Medieval Spain (Boston: Little, Brown, 2002). A more nuanced review of the place of aljamiado literature in Spain was already available in Luce López Baralt, “Crónica de la destrucción de un mundo: La literatura aljamiadomorisca,” Bulletin Hispanique 82, nos. 1–2 (1980): 16–58. Treatments of Cervantes’s reference to this morisco aljamiado include Monika Walter, “La imaginación de moro historiador y morisco traductor: Algunos aspectos de la ficticia autoría en el Don Quijote,” in “Bon compaño jura di!”? El encuentro de moros, judíos y cristianos en la obra cervantina, ed. Caroline Schmauser and Monika Walter (Frankfurt am Main: Vervuert; Madrid: Iberoamericana, 1998), 35–49. More recently, Nuria Martínez de Castilla, “ ‘Anduve mirando si parecía por allí algún morisco aljamiado,’ ” in Ma Soledad Carrasco Urgoiti, Nuria Martínez de Castilla, and Rodolfo Gil, De Cervantes y el islam (Madrid: Ministerio de Cultura: Sociedad Estatal de Conmemoraciones Culturales, 2006), 235–46, as well as Carroll Johnson, Transliterating a Culture: Cervantes and the Moriscos (Newark, Del.: Juan de la Cuesta, 2010). 12. Eric C. Graf, “When an Arab Laughs in Toledo: Cervantes’s Interpellation of Early Modern Spanish Orientalism,” Diacritics 29, no. 2 (1999): 80. 13. Michel Moner’s useful “Cervantes y la traducción,” Nueva Revista de Filología Hispánica 38, no. 2 (1990): 513–24, is updated and recast in Carlos Moreno’s “Multiculturalismo y traducción en el Quijote,” Hispanic Review 71, no. 2 (2003): 205–28. 14. Edwin B. Knowles, Jr., “The First and Second Editions of Shelton’s Don Quixote Part I: A Collation and Dating,” Hispanic Review 9, no. 2 (1941): 262. 15. The differences between the 1612 and 1620 editions are indeed so numerous, the “mannerisms” so different in the later translation, as to have given rise to speculation that

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much of the second edition and the translation of the second half are not Shelton’s at all. See Anthony G. Lo Ré, “The Second Edition of Thomas Shelton’s Don Quixote, Part I: A Reassessment of the Dating Problem,” Cervantes: Bulletin of the Cervantes Society of America  11, no. 1 (1991): 99–118, and, more recently, James  H. Montgomery, “Was Thomas Shelton the Translator of the ‘Second Part’ (1620) of Don Quixote?,” Cervantes: Bulletin of the Cervantes Society of America 26, nos. 1–2 (2006): 209–17. 16. In Covert Gestures: Crypto-Islamic Literature as Culture Practice in Early Modern Spain (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), xvii, Vincent Barletta provides this rather limited definition of “aljamiado”: “a system of handwritten textual production that made use of an idiosyncratic form of Arabic script to copy out Castilian and Aragonese texts.” His thesis is more arresting, though his concern remains with the lexical component of aljamiado: “The use of aljamiado by Castilian and Aragonese Moriscos has an extraordinarily important cross-temporal as well as cross-cultural function. It is a mistake, in other words, to view the use of Arabic script in the production of Romance texts simply as a means of connecting the Moriscos to the larger Islamic umma situated around the Mediterranean during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Th is synchronic view of Aljamiado-Morisco textuality ignores the powerful manner in which the use of Arabic script situated Morisco scribes and readers within a thousand-year tradition of God’s relationship with Muslims. It also ignores the tremendous promises for the future” (137). Mary Elizabeth Perry’s The Handless Maiden: Moriscos and the Politics of Religion in Early Modern Spain (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2005) provides a much more nuanced account of the “function” of aljamía. 17. Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra, The History and Adventures of the Renowned Don Quixote, trans. Tobias Smollett (London: A. Millar, 1755). 18. Richard Perceval and John Minsheu, A Dictionarie in Spanish and English (London: Bollifant, 1599).

8. The Social and Cultur al Tr ansl ation of the Hebrew Bible in Early Modern Engl and 1. The sun, the butterfly, and the figure of Harmony suggest that this might be a postRestoration representation of Charles II, although there is clearly also a strong resemblance to Charles I. 2. See Melinda Watt and Andrew Morrall, English Embroidery in the Metropolitan Museum, 1575-1700: ’Twixt Art and Nature (Published in Association with the Bard Graduate Centre for Studies in the Decorative Arts, Design and Culture) (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), esp. chap. 4 and the image on 158–59; see also the image on 71, where James II is depicted as Solomon. English monarchs were often depicted as biblical figures. See, for example, representations of Henry VIII as King David and of both Edward VI and Elizabeth I as Josiah and Hezekiah, and note, e.g., images of Solomon and references to the scroll of Esther: Diarmaid MacCulloch, The Boy King: Edward VI and the Protestant Reformation (Berkeley, Calif. and London: University of California Press,

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2002). See, more broadly, e.g., MacCulloch, “England,” in The Early Reformation in Europe, ed. Andrew Pettegree (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), esp. 171, 184– 85; Lucy E. Wooding, “The Marian Restoration and the Mass,” in The Church of Mary Tudor, eds. Eamon Duff y and David M. Loades (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), 227–57, and 234 for representations of Mary as the new Judith; Achsah Guibory, Christian Identity: Jews and Israel in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010); Naomi Tadmor, The Social Universe of the English Bible: Scripture, Society, and Culture in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010). 3. In the biblical narrative the two are described as “prostitutes”; 1 Kings 3:15–27. 4. Images of Hagar are studied closely by Amanda Pullan, unpublished doctoral dissertation, Lancaster University, in progress. 5. This was indeed a general convention. Readers familiar with images by Cranach and Rembrandt, for example, can no doubt recall many similar representations. For further discussion, see, for example, Alexander Nagel and Christoper E. Wood, The Anachronic Renaissance (Cambridge: Zone, 2010). 6. For broader arguments, see my Social Universe of the English Bible. 7. It would be impossible to summarize here the vast scholarly literature on Bible translation. For general notes, see Eugene A. Nida, “Theories of Translation,” Anchor Bible Dictionary 6 vols, ed. David Noel Freedman (New York, 1992), 6:512–15, hereafter cited as ABD. 8. See, e.g., Alfred W. Pollard, ed., Records of the English Bible (London: Henry Frowde, 1911);  S.  L. Greenslade, “English Versions of the Bible, 1525–1611,” in  S.  L. Greenslade, The Cambridge History of the Bible, vol. 3, The West from the Reformation to the Present Day (Cambridge, 1978), 144–74; Jack P. Lewis, “Versions, English,” ABD, 6:819– 20; David Daniell, The Bible in English: Its History and Influence (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2003); David Norton, A Textual History of the King James Bible (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); Tadmor, Social Universe of the English Bible, esp. 1–16, and notes there. 9. Examples in this section draw on Tadmor, Social Universe of the English Bible, esp. introduction, 18–20, and chap. 4, esp. 131–36. I am grateful to Cambridge University Press for allowing me to reprodce material. 10. William Tyndale, The obedien[n]ce of a Christen man and how Christe[n] rulers ought to governe (Antwerp, 1528), fol. 15v. 11. Printed in Pollard, Records of the English Bible, 376; though, to retain accuracy, the translators of the King James Version rejected word-for-word equivalence, see further discussion below. 12. Pollard, Records of the English Bible, 362. 13. Tyndale, The obedien[n]ce of a Christen man, fol. 15v. 14. See also ibid., fol. 19v. 15. In the concepts of the time, those who were not schooled in Latin were not considered among the literati. The “Report on the Making of the King James Version,” prepared for the Synod of Dort, for example, was naturally presented in Latin. Pollard, Records

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of the English Bible, 336–37. The Vulgate also remained approved for private devotional use, alongside the vernacular Bible. 16. See, for example, the preface to the King James Version, in Pollard, Records of the English Bible, 353. The translators of the King James Version also employed recent Latin versions of the Old Testament alongside the Hebrew original and cardinal ancient translations. 17. See also Scott Mandelbrote, “Making God Speak English,” History Workshop Journal 75, no. 1 (2013): 265–73; Norton, Textual History of the King James Bible, 8; Guibory, Christian Identity, 9, 14, 18. 18. Tyndale’s New Testament appeared about five years before his first rendition of the Pentateuch. Tyndale’s seminal translation of the New Testament saw light possibly before he had even gained full proficiency in Hebrew; see Tadmor, Social Universe of the English Bible, 1, n.1. The Rheims New Testament was published in 1582. The Douai Old Testament was completed in 1609–10. 19. See the instructions reproduced in Norton, Textual History of the King James Bible, 8. 20. Reproduced in Pollard, Records of the English Bible, 369. 21. Tyndale hoped that one day the boy that “driveth the plough” would know more of the Scriptures than a priest. Writing earlier (and probably echoing Jerome), Erasmus had expressed a similar desire that “ye plowma[n] wold singe a texte of the scripture at his plowbeme,” that “all women shuld reade the gospell,” that the weaver should recite Scripture at his loom to drive away the tediousness of time and the wayfarer to expel the weariness of his journey. A similar wish was subsequently repeated by Coverdale: see “The historie and discourse of the lyfe of William Tyndall out of the booke of actes and monumentes briefly extracted,” in William Tyndale, The vvhole workes of W. Tyndall, Iohn Frith, and Doct. Barnes, three worthy martyrs, and principall teachers of this Churche of England collected and compiled in one tome together (London, 1573), sig. B.i r; Desiderius Erasmus, An exhortation to the diligent studye of scripture, made by Erasmus Roterodamus. And tra[n]slated in to inglissh (Antwerp, 1529); Patrick Collinson, The Birthpangs of Protestant England: Religious and Cultural Change in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (Houndmills, Basingstoke UK: Macmillan, 1988), 96, and references there. See also, e.g., Marshall’s summary that the deep saturation of late Tudor and early Stuart English society with the language of Scripture marks a “cultural sea change”; Peter Marshall, Reformation England, 1480–1642 (London: Bloomsbury, 2003), 165; Jonathan Sheehan, The Enlightenment Bible: Translation, Scholarship, Culture (Princeton,  N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2005), arguing that the naturalization of the biblical language over time not only enhanced the Bible’s cultural significance but has led to new scholarly pursuits. 22. Tadmor, Social Universe of the King James Bible, 17ff. 23. Daniell, The Bible in English, 427–28, 430; Tadmor, Social Universe of the English Bible, 15. 24. Already used in the Wycliffite Bible (“brechis,” Wycliffite Early Version and Late Version, Gen. 3:7) and in Caxton’s Golden Legend: Jacobus de Voragine, [Legenda aurea

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sanctorum, sive, Lombardica historia] [Wylyam Caxton] (London, 1483), fol. 37v; and see also Jack P. Lewis,“Geneva Bible,” and Lewis “Versions, English,” ABD, 2:962, 6:822. Biblical versions from Tyndale to the Rheims-Douai and the King James use “aprons” (a note in KJV adds, “Or, things to gird about”). See also the fascinating early comparison in Richard Marsden, “Cain’s Face, and Other Problems: The Legacy of the Earliest English Bible Translations,” Reformation 1 (1996): 29–51. In a similar way, in the King James Version at Dan. 3:21, the three men cast into the furnace are described as being bound in their “coats, their hosen, and their hats.” The words “head attire” of the Bishops’ Bible have been erased and replaced with the more conventional yet possibly less accurate English description (as can also be seen in the only remaining working copy of the King James Bible, kept in the Bodleian Library, Oxford: Bib. Eng. 1602 b. 1 at Dan. 3:21). Historical biblical versions quoted here can be found in the machine-readable transcripts in the database The Bible in English, Chadwyck-Healey Literature Collections (ProQuest Information and Learning Company, 2009), http://collections.chadwyck.co.uk. More broadly, see, for example, Sheehan’s remark that the translation was meant to bridge as well as obscure the gap between the word of God and human art; Sheehan, Enlightenment Bible, 3. See also Norton’s discussion of the wording and sense of translations: D. Norton, A History of the English Bible as Literature (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2000), chap. 2, esp. 53–55. 25. Tyndale’s version, KJV, Matt. 2:16, 26:58, 10:18, and the same verses in J. Goodwin, ed., The Gospel according to St. Matthew and part of the first chapter of the Gospel according to St. Mark translated into English from the Greek with original notes, by Sir John Cheke (London, 1843), and gloss pp. 47–48; Daniell, The Bible in English, 220; Greenslade, “English Versions of the Bible,” 155. The particular object of Sir John Cheke, Regius Professor of Greek at Cambridge and personal tutor of Edward VI, was to Anglicize all words of Latin and Greek origin that might not be intelligible to those who knew no language other than English; see Goodwin, The Gospel, 16. Geographical and cultural naturalization can also be found in a note in the Bishops’ Bible, for example, where the land of Ophir is identified as “thought to be the Ilande in the west coast, of late founde by Christopher Columbo: fro whence at this day is brought most fine golde,” at Ps. 45:9; and see Lewis, “Bible, Bishops,” ABD, 2:719. See also V. Westbrook, “Richard Taverner Revising Tyndale,” Reformation 2 (1997): 191–205. 26. Wycliffite Early Version, Late Version Prov. 31:6, text and note. See also Wycliffite Early Version, Late Version Deut. 14:26, 29:6; Judg. 13:4, 7, 14; Luke 1:15, spelling variations “sidir,” “sithir,” “sidur,” “sidre.” Originally probably of Latin and Greek etymology, the word had already been used at that time to designate the European “fermented drink made from apples”; see OED, s.v. “cider.” One copy of the Wycliffite Bible (ca. 1420), kept in the Library of Hereford Cathedral, the heart of an apple-producing region, is particularly known as the “Cider Bible” for this use at Luke 1:15, where it is said that John shall not “drinke wyn ne sidir.” The word “sidir” is underlined in red, in a manner used elsewhere in that text for highlights and notes. See also ibid., Judg. 13:4, 7, 14, Prov. 31:6: Catalogue of Manuscripts of Hereford Cathedral Library, O.VII.1 Wycliffite Version of the Bible.

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27. Tyndale’s translation policies attracted controversy and were disputed in detail by Sir Thomas More; see More, Dyaloge of syr Thomas More knyghte: One of the counsayll of oure souerayne lorde the kyng [and ] chauncellour of hys duchy of Lancaster. Wherin be treated dyuers maters, as of the veneration [and ] worshyp of ymages [and ] relyques, prayng to sayntys, [and ] goyng o[n] pylgrymage. Wyth many othere thyngys touching the pestylent sect of Luther and Tyndale (London, 1529), third book; W. Tyndale, An answere vnto Sir Thomas Mores dialoge made by Vvillyam Tindale (Antwerp, 1531); More, Th e co[n] futacyon of Tyndales answere made by syr Thomas More knyght (London, 1532); and see also, e.g., David Daniell, William Tyndale: a Biography, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2001) esp. 178–201, 250– 80; Greenslade, “English Versions of the Bible,” 145–47; David Rollison, The Local Origins of Modern Society: Gloucestershire 1500–1800 (London: Routledge, 1992), “Tyndale and All His Sect,” and esp. 90–92, 96. As Rollison explains, the term “elder” reflects not only Tyndale’s theology but the social structure of local communities in early modern England. Following Tyndale, Coverdale also employed “congregation” for “church,” “elder” for “priest,” and “love” for “charity,” etc. (but used “penance,” explaining that what he meant by it was true repentance). The ecclesiastical words largely remain in the Bishops’ Bible, but “charity” is substituted where Tyndale had used “love” (Greenslade, “English Versions of the Bible,” 160–61; Lewis, “Bible, Bishops,” ABD, 2:719). “Arguments about the language” erupted once more surrounding the publication of the Catholic RheimsDouai version and were important in bringing about the commissioning of the King James Version. For translation policies and debates, see especially Norton, History of the English Bible as Literature, chaps. 1–2 and p. 35; Mary Dove, The First English Bible: The Text and Context of the Wycliffite Versions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 37–46 and references there. 28. E.g., ‘aliyah, KJV 2 Kgs. 4:11; lishkah, Jer. 36:10, 20; Ezekiel. 40:45; Neh. 13:5; ḥeder, e.g., Genesis. 43:30; 2 Sam. 13:10 (cf., e.g., Deut. 32:25; Gen. 6:14, “within and without”); ḥuppah, KJV Joel 2:16. See also, e.g., Moshe Zippor, The Septuagint Translation of Genesis (Targum ha-shive‘ im le-sefer bereshit) (Jerusalem: Bar Ilan University Press, 2005), 161, on the free translation of ’ohel (tent) as oikos. My transliteration here and elsewhere follows modern Hebrew pronunciation. 29. See, e.g., KJV Gen. 17:13; Rheims-Douai, KJV Gen. 23:9, 13; KJV Exod. 21:35, cf. Rheims-Douai “price,” KJV Exod. 21:30; see also kofer as “money” in Exod. 21:30. KJV usages were changed in the Revised Version (1885) at Gen. 23:9, 13; Exod. 21:30, 35. 30. Tyndale’s version, KJV Gen. 25:28–29, and especially 27; compare, however, the more accurate wording in Rheims-Douai, “hunting.” 31. Thomas Matthew, Rheims Douai, KJV 2 Sam. 18:9; for ’elah (terebinth), see Samuel E. Loewenstamm, s.v. ’Elah,’ alon, Encyclopaedia Biblica, Thesaurus Rerum Biblicarum, 9 vols. (Jerusalem, 1950–88) [in Hebrew], 1:294–96: also pistacia atlantica or pistacia palaestina; hereafter cited as EB. 32. Including yanshuf, lilit, qippoz, kos, and bat-ya‘anah in KJV alone (some qualified as “great owl,” “little owl,” and “screechy owl”), and see further identifications of “owls” relating to taḥmas, tinshemet, qa‘at, and perhaps shaḥaf in Edwin Firmage, “Zoology, Animal Names in the Bible,” ABD, 6:1155, and related notes. Tinshemet (Lev. 11:18), rendered

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in KJV as “swan,” is changed in the Revised Version to “horned owl.” See also, for example, references to “caterpillars” in Steve Hindle, “Dearth and the English Revolution: The Harvest Crisis of 1647–50,” Economic History Review 61 (2008): 64–98, and esp. n. 35. At least eight different insects, including ’arbeh, ḥargol, ḥagav, gazam, yeleq, tzlatzal, govay, and ḥasil, are identified as “locust”; see Firmage, “Zoology,” 1155–56; T. K. Cheyne and J. S. Black, eds., Encyclopaedia Biblica: A Critical Dictionary of the Literary, Political and Religious History, the Archaeology, Geography, and Natural History of the Bible (London: A. & C. Black, 1914), s.v. “locust,” 2807–9. 33. See Tadmor, Social Universe of the English Bible, discussions of neighborliness in chap. 1 and of women and marriage in chap. 2. 34. The text, probably written by the cleric John Gauden, was probably also based on materials written by the king and at least in part revised by him. The first advance copy was circulated the very day of the king’s execution. According to the records of the Stationers’ Company, Eikon basilike went, within the first year, through at least thirtyfive English editions, with fifty thousand copies published. It is therefore described as a “publishing sensation” and ranked as one of the most famous of all seventeenth-century publications in English: see Sean Kelsey, “The King’s Book: Eikon basilike and the English Revolution of 1649,” in The English Revolution c. 1590–1720: Politics, Religion and Communities, ed. N. Tyacke (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2007), 150–68, and especially 150, 152; Kathleen Lynch, “Religious Identity, Stationers’ Company Politics, and the Printers of Eikon basilike,” Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America 101 (2007): 285–312; Jason McElligott, “Roger Morrice and the Reputation of Eikon Basilike in the 1680s,” The Library: The Transactions of the Bibliographical Society, 7th ser., 6 (2005): 119– 32, esp. p. 123 for further references there. 35. Charles I, “Meditations upon Death,” Eikon basilike, 6, 132, 262; and see also references there to “King Ieroboam” and Korah. 36. Rendered “Mightie prince,” in Hebrew, nesi’-’elohim, referred to by the Hittite dwellers of Hebron: Gen. 23:6. 37. Gen. 32:28: “Thy name shall be called no more Iacob, but Israel: for as a prince hast thou power with God, and with men, and hast preuailed.” Note the Hebrew verbal form, sarita. 38. Ezek. 28:2, 30:13, 38:2–3; Ps. 68:31. 39. Based on an electronic count of the word “prince” in singular and plural forms (spelling variations prince, prynce) in the database The Bible in English. 40. J. A. Selbie, “prince,” Dictionary of the Bible, ed. James Hastings et al., 5 vols. (Edinburgh: T. & T. Clark, 1898–1904), 4:100–102, on p.100, hereafter cited as DOB. Taking account of two additional forms of already counted roots, Selbie reaches the figure sixteen. See also Cheyne and Black, Encyclopaedia Biblica, s.v. “prince,” 3847–48; J. B. Job, in The New Bible Dictionary, ed. J. D. Douglas (London: The Inter-Varsity Fellowship, 1962), s.v. ‘‘Prince’’ 1034–35, counting fifteen. 41. Often in compound titles, and “used in all degrees of chiefdom or wordenship”; see Cheyne and Black, Encyclopaedia Biblica, s.v. “prince,” 3847; Selbie, s.v. “prince,” DOB, 4:100; Hayim Rabin, s.v. “sar,” EB, 8:387.

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42. See, e.g., Selbie, s.v. “prince,” DOB, 4:100–101, and nagid there; The Hebrew and Aramaic Lexicon of the Old Testament, ed. Ludwig Koehler, Walter Baumgartener, and Johan Jakob Stamm, translated and edited under the supervision of M. E. J. Richardson, 4 vols. (Leiden: Brill, 1944–49), s.v. “nagid,” 2:667–68, hereafter cited as HALOT; A Hebrew and English Lexicon of the Old Testament, ed. Francis Brown,  S.  R. Driver, and Charles A. Briggs (1939; repr., Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1939), s.v. “nagid,” 617–18, hereafter cited as BDB. 43. See Selbie, s.v. “prince,” DOB, 4:101; BDB, s.v. “nasakh,” 650–51; also Aramaean chief, leader, chief of a tribe, see HALOT, s.v. “nasikh,” 2:702–3. 44. Selbie, s.v. “prince,” DOB, 4:101; BDB, s.v. “ḥashman,” 365; cf. HALOT, s.v. “ḥashman,” 1:362. 45. For this identification, see Selbie, s.v. “prince,” DOB, 4:101; cf. Cheyne and Black, Encyclopaedia Biblica, s.v. “prince,” 3847. 46. BDB, s.v. “seganim,” 688; Selbie, s.v. “prince,” DOB, 4:101; see also Cheyne and Black, Encyclopaedia Biblica, s.v. “deputy,” “prince,” 1075, 3848. The etymological origin of this Assyrian loan word, however, could not have been known to the learned classical and early modern translators. 47. BDB, s.v. “qatzin,” 892; Selbie, s.v. “prince,” DOB, 4:101; Cheyne and Black, Encyclopaedia Biblica, s.v. “captain,” 701, literally “he who decides.” 48. See Selbie, s.v. “prince,” DOB, 4:102; BDB, s.v. “razan, razon,” 931. 49. Also the third in a chariot team; see, e.g., Selbie, s.v. “prince,” DOB, 4:102; HALOT, s.v. “shalish III,” 4:1525–27. 50. See, e.g., “prince of the kings of the earth,” KJV Rev. 1:5, and “prince of life,” KJV Acts 3:15; and KJV Isa. 7:14, referred to in KJV Matt. 1:23. 51. See, e.g., “Christ our Cohen both Prince and Priest,” in H. Ainsworth, Annotations upon the books of Moses, “The Preface,” no page number; George Lawson, An exposition to the Epistle of the Hebrews (London, 1678), 59–60, 97, on “kohen” or “cohen” meaning also officer and magistrate, with reference to Melchizedek, “king and prince”; John Owen, A continuation of exposition, Epistle to the Hebrews (London, 1680), 100, arguing that “cohen” in Psalm 110 signifies priestly office rather than “Prince or a Ruler,” although “used absolutely” it can mean both; note also the reference in this context to Melchizedek, the New Testament, and the refutation of Jewish interpretation and Targum. See also, for example, Andrew Willet, Hexapla in Genesin & Exodum: that is, a sixfold commentary upon the two first bookes of Moses (London, 1633), e.g. 345, “cohen” as “priest” and “prince,” Gen. 41:45; Matthew Poole, Annotations upon the Holy Bible (London, 1683), note to 2 Samuel 20 on “cohen” as “chief minister.” 52. See “The Rules to Be Observed in the Translation of the Bible,” in Norton, Textual History of the King James Bible, 8. See also Pollard, Records of the English Bible, 53; and see also “Report on the Making of the Version of 1611,” 337, 339. See earlier discussions. 53. As also seen below. The Greek archōn was more inclusive than the English “prince” and included twenty different Hebrew terms; see Job, “prince,” in Douglas, New Bible Dictionary, 1034–35.

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54. Though indeed sometimes the logic is hard to discern. 55. Septuagint, Vulgate, KJV Ps. 68:32 or 31. Rabbinical interpretation reads “nobles”; see BDB, s.v. “ḥashman,” 365; Selbie, s.v. “prince,” DOB, 4:101. The etymology offered by HALOT, s.v. “ḥashman,” is Egyptian (caustic soda as a dye) and Ugaritic (red cloth), leading to a defi nition of ḥashmanim as “bronze articles or red cloths as presents for God”; however, this of course could not have been known to the learned classical and early modern translators. 56. KJV Gen. 23:6 (following earlier English versions here and in Ps. 68:32 or 31 and Isa. 40:23). On the whole, there seems to be relative uniformity in the use of “king” or “kyng” in Protestant English versions from the Great Bible onward, corresponding with the Hebrew melekh and referring both to monarchical rulers and God. The book of Genesis includes 42–46 usages of “king” or “kyng” in Tyndale’s version, the Geneva Bible, and the Authorized Version. Exodus includes 15 in all three; Numbers includes 21–23; Deuteronomy, 33 or 34; and Jonah (also published by Tyndale), 2. For other examples, see Joshua, including 115–17 usages in the Thomas Matthew Bible, the Geneva Bible, and the King James Version; 1 Samuel, including 103–4; 2 Samuel, including 285–95; Psalms, including 80–87; and Isaiah, including 95–102. For seventeenth-century debates over the role of the biblical office of king and its relation to God’s kingship, however, see especially Eric Nelson, “ ‘Talmudical Commonwealthsmen’ and the Rise of Republican Exclusivism,” Historical Journal 50 (2007): 809–35. 57. In Numbers 7, the heads of the Israelite clans were also named as “princes,” but then designated in more tribal terms as “chefe lordes”: “Elizur the sonne of Sedeur,” for instance, is named as “chefelorde amonge the childern of Ruben,” and “Selumiel ye sonne of Zuri Sadai” as “chefe lorde amonge the childern of Simeon.” 58. Figures based on an electronic word search of “prince or prynce or princes or prynces,” Old Testament text and notes. 59. The Thomas Matthew Bible was based on Tyndale’s published translations as well as most probably his unpublished drafts (see Figure 14). Comparing usages of “prince” or “prynce,” or “princes” or “prynces” in Rheims-Douai’s Old Testament with usages in KJV, while excluding those books listed in KJV in the Apocrypha, however, the figures would be 423 usages in KJV and 842 in the Rheims-Douai version. 60. Or twelve with the addition of “Priches” in Tyndale’s version of Num. 7, corrected in the Thomas Matthews Bible. However, see, e.g., twenty-two usages in Thomas Matthew’s Isaiah and eighteen in KJV. The comparable figure in this case for RheimsDouai is thirty. 61. See also, for example, the observation by de Waard and Nida that “the problem with the King James Version and other translations of the same type is that no attempt has been made to fit the level of language to the diverse genres” of the original text; Jan de Waard and Eugene A. Nida, From One Language to Another: Functional Equivalence in Bible Translating (Nashville, Tenn.: Nelson, 1968), 50. 62. KJV Gen. 17:20. 63. KJV 1 Sam. 29:4.

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64. E.g., KJV 2 Kgs. 24:14, KJV Amos 1:15 (in Bishops’ Bible, Bib. Eng. 1602 b. 1, at 2 Kgs. 24:14, “lords” is crossed over and “princes” inserted in preparation for KJV, and following also the Geneva Bible). 65. KJV Jer. 39:13. 66. KJV Est. 6:9, 1:3 (once for partamim and once for sarav). 67. Anon., The heroicall aduentures of the knight of the sea comprised in the most famous and renowned historie of the illustrious & excellently accomplished Prince Oceander, grand–sonne to the mightie and magnanimous Claranax, Emperour of Constantinople, and the Empresse Basilia (London, 1600); Anon., The first and second part of the history of the famous Euordanus Prince of Denmark with the strange aduentures of Iago Prince of Saxonie: and of both theyr seuerall fortunes in loue (London, 1605); or see Anon., A commyssion sent to the bloudy butcher byshop of London and to al couents of frers, by the high and mighty prince, lord, Sathanas the deuill of hell (London, 1557). 68. Oxford English Dictionary Online, s.v. “prince,” definition 1. 69. Smith’s Smaller Latin-English Dictionary (London, 1942), s.v. “princeps” B a. 70. Num. 17:2 and 17:6 in the English Bibles, but Num. 17:17 and 21 in the Hebrew Masoretic Text. 71. Geneva Bible, 1 Chron. 5:2, Hebrew nagid. 72. “A brief remonstrance of the state of the church and face of religion in the first age of the world, from the creation to Noes,” attached to the book of Genesis, p. 35. In Josh. 3:8, for example, this version noted that the fact that Joshua had not only princely rule over his people but also command over the priests should not be taken to imply that “lay princes are supreme heads, & gouerners of the Church,” as the “English Protestants inferre.” 73. See detailed examples in Tadmor, Social Universe of the English Bible, esp. pp. 144–48. 74. John Jewel, “An Homilee agaynst disobedience and wylful rebellion,” in The second tome of homilees of such matters as were promised, and instituted in the former part of homilies, set out by the authoritie of the queens maiestie: and to be read in euery parishe church agreeably (London, 1751), 547. Preceding references in this context are made to the Books of Genesis, Job, Ecclesiastes, Psalms, and Proverbs. 75. See the order of reading in Thomas Cooper, A briefe exposition of such chapters of the Olde Testament as usually are redde in the church at common praier on the Sondayes set forth for the better helpe and instruction of the unlearned (London, 1753); see 168–70 for the text and 170–72 for expositions condemning rebellion against the “prince.” 76. For sermons on the theme of Korah, see, for example, Gouge’s condemnation of the “rebellion of Korah” against “Moses, the chiefe Prince”; William Gouge, Gods three arrovves plague, famine, svvord, in three treatises (London, 1631); Richard Carter, The schismatick stigmatized (London, 1641), 114; Henry Killigrew, A sermon preached before the Kings Most Excellent Majesty at Oxford (Oxford, 1643), sig. B.iv. v; Thomas Hall, The beauty of magistracy (London, 1660), 209; David Lloyd, Memoires of the lives, actions, suff erings & deaths of those noble, reverend and excellent personages that suff ered by death, sequestration,

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decimation, or otherwise, for the Protestant religion and the great principle thereof (London, 1668), and mention of Korah on p. 531; Adam Littleton, The churches peace asserted upon a civil account as it was (great part of it) deliver’ d in a sermon before the Right Honourable the Lord Mayor in Guild-Hall-Chappel (London, 1669), 14, 22–23, 31; Richard Allestree, Eighteen sermons whereof fi fteen preached the King, the rest upon publick occasions (London, 1669), e.g., 292; Allestree, The art of contentment by the author of “The whole duty of man” (London, 1675), e.g., 96, and the “prince” in, e.g., sections 4 and 9; Miles Barne, A sermon preach’ d at the assizes at Hertford, July 10th (Cambridge, 1684), 7–8, 16; Anon., The murmurers, a poem (London, 1689), preface, sig. A.v.

9. Conversion, Communication, and Tr ansl ation in the Seventeenth-Century Protestant Atl antic 1. Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1955), 101; Thomas Jefferson, “Vocabulary of the Unquachog Indians,” (1791) American Indian Vocabulary Collection, American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia. William Vans Murray contributed several such vocabularies, for example, his “Vocabulary of the Nanticoke Indians” (1792), American Indian Vocabulary Collection, American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia. Ives Goddard, “The Classification of the Native Languages of North America,” in Languages, vol. 17, Handbook of North American Indians (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 1996), 290–323. Goddard explains that attention to Native American language classification was fragmentary at best until the publication of Albert Gallatin’s table of linguistic classification in 1836. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Europeans had varying degrees of awareness of the similarities and differences across different language groups. Only a small number of language families were recognized, and even these were incompletely known. 2. Anthony  J.  C. Wallace, Jeff erson and the Indians: The Tragic Fate of the First Americans (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1999). Buffon’s Histoire naturelle proposed that the New World environment led to degenerate species of flora, fauna, and native populations. According to Buffon, this had retarded the intellectual and cultural growth of the Europeans who settled there (76). 3. Peter Du Ponceau, “Vocabularies Communicated by Jefferson, Heckewelder, and Murray,” American Indian Vocabulary Collection, American Philosophical Society, Philadelphia. 4. A 1822 reprint of John Eliot’s Grammar of the Massachusett Indian Language includes a “Notes and Observations” section written by Du Ponceau. In it, Du Ponceau suggests that since great advances have been made in “comparative philology,” “some important modifications” should be made in order to incorporate “the unwritten dialects of barbarous nations” into contemporary theories of language. John Eliot, A Grammar of the Massachusett Indian Language. vol. 1 (Boston: Printed by Phelps and Farnham, 1822), xii.

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5. Samuel Forry, “The Mosaic Account of the Unity of the Human Race, Confirmed by the Natural History of the American Aborigines,” American Biblical Repository, Devoted to Biblical and General Literature 10 (July 1843): 29. 6. A debate as to whether indigenous languages were merely savage utterances or whether they conveyed complex metaphors and sonic beauty structured these dual uses of native languages during the early republic and early national period. For example, in a March 1, 1826, letter to George Ticknor, Daniel Webster writes: “Lewis Cass is a native of Exeter, New Hampshire. . . . He is probably not overlearned in Indian languages—perhaps is superficial—but I confess I was astonished to find out he knew so much. But I ought to say that I am a total unbeliever in the new doctrines about the Indian languages. I believe them to be the rudest forms of speech; and I believe there is as little in the language of the tribes as in their laws, manners, and customs, worth studying or worth knowing. All this is heresy, I know, but so I think.” George Ticknor Curtis, Life of Daniel Webster (N.p.: D. Appleton, 1872), 260. 7. The Spanish initiated this practice. In 1547, Pedro de Gante published the Doctrina Cristiana in Mexico City, providing Nahuatl translations of Catholic doctrine. The Huntington Library alone owns twenty examples of such printed texts, all published in Mexico City between 1547 and 1591. Missionary linguistics proliferated in New France with manuscript dictionaries and grammars circulating among the Jesuits and Recollets stationed in missionary communities, while vocabularies of Montagnais and Algonquian were also printed in Paris. Victor Egan Hanzeli, Missionary Linguistics in New France: A Study of Seventeenth- and Eighteenth-Century Descriptions of American Indian Languages (Mouton: The Hague, 1969). 8. For example, see De Gante, Doctrina; Sebastian Rasles, A Dictionary of the Abnaki Language in North America, in Memoirs of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, vol. 1 (Cambridge: Printer to the University, 1833), 370–575; and Jean Baptiste Le Boulanger, French and Miami-Illinois Dictionary, John Carter Brown Library, Providence Rhode Island. 9. On the importance of finding a London printer for the specific purpose of printing an Indian library in New England, see correspondence between John Eliot and Robert Boyle and other commissioners of the New England Company for the Propagation of the Gospel. “Accounts Accompanying Preceding Letter, 10 September 1662, from Hartford record of the minutes of the New England Commissioners,” “Boyle to Commissioners of the United Colonies in New England, 9 April 1663,” and “Commissioners of the United Colonies in New England to Boyle, 18 September 1663,” in Correspondence of Robert Boyle, 1636–1691, 6 vols., ed. Michael Hunter and Antonio Clericuzio (Burlington, Vt.: Pickering and Chatto, 2001), 2:49, 75, 121. 10. Correspondence between Boyle and Eliot reveals that the print production of the Indian Library far outweighed the number of converts, particularly after King Philip’s War. In 1662, £500 was donated to defray the charge of printing the Bible. Correspondence of Robert Boyle, 2:49, 75. The exchange of money for material textual production persists for over twenty years. Eliot’s letter to Boyle on April 22, 1684, begins with Eliot’s thanks

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to Boyle for the gift of £400. The report from Boston on March 1, 1683, assures the commissioners of the New England Company that Eliot has been “frugal” in the expenses of the Old Testament due to its extraordinary cost. Correspondence of Robert Boyle, 6:9, 14. By 1684, Simon Bradstreet, Thomas Danforth, and Samuel Willis expressed their concern for the mission to Boyle: “Wee must needes owne that wee now finde it very difficult to procure an addition of fit persons to labour in that worke of the Lord.” Ibid., 4:182. 11. Bernard Perley has written about this paradoxical status of the Eliot Bible in “Bibles in Dead Languages,” in Native American Voices on Identity, Art, and Culture: Objects of Everlasting Esteem, ed. Lucy Fowler Williams, William Wierzbowski, and Robert W. Preucel (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology, 2005), 70–71. 12. In contradistinction to my claim here, scholars such as Stephen Greenblatt, Jill Lepore, David Murray, and Walter Mignolo have almost uniformly read colonial language projects as a history of loss. Greenblatt reads “linguistic colonialism” as the pervasive intellectual and popular belief in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries that American Indian languages were either “deficient or non-existent” (30). Lepore and Murray show the detrimental effects of this ideology throughout the colonial period as literacy as translation destroyed cultural relativity and autonomy. Mignolo demonstrates the semiotic colonization of Amerindian languages through Renaissance writing in Latin America. Stephen Greenblatt, “Learning to Curse: Aspects of Linguistic Colonialism in the Sixteenth Century,” in Learning to Curse: Essays in Early Modern Culture (New York: Routledge, 1992), 16–39; Jill Lepore, The Name of War: King Philip’s War and the Origins of American Identity (New York: Random House, 1998); David Murray, Forked Tongues: Speech, Writing, and Representation in North American Indian Texts (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991); Walter Mignolo, The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality, and Colonization (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2003). 13. Vivian Salmon, “Thomas Harriot (1560—1621) and the English Origins of Algonkian Linguistics,” Historiographia Linguistica 19, no. 1 (1992): 25–56; Michael Booth, “Thomas Harriot’s Translations,” Yale Journal of Criticism 16, no. 2 (2003): 345–61; Jacqueline Stedall, “Symbolism, Combinations, and Visual Imagery in the Mathematics of Thomas Harriot,” Historia Mathematica 34 (2007): 380–401. 14. Francis Lodwick, “Of Converting Infidels to Christianity,” Sloane Papers, 899, ff. 40–43, British Library, London. 15. William Wood, New Englands Prospect: A True, Lively, and Experimental Description of that part of America (London: Printed by Tho. Cotes for John Bellamie, 1634), 57, 77, 92. 16. Roger Williams, “A Key into the Language of America,” in The Complete Writings of Roger Williams, ed. James Hammond Trumbull, vol. 1 (New York: Russell and Russell, 1963), 1, 30. 17. Ibid., 19. 18. Comenius’s Janua Linguarum Reserata translates as “the gate of languages unlocked.”

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19. James Knowlson, Universal Language Schemes in England and France, 1600–1800 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1975), 14–15. 20. Hezekiah Woodward, A Light to Grammar (London: John Bartlet, 1641). 21. In The Examiner Defended, Williams presents the following rhetorical question: “As to that particular case of the Land of Canaan, I ask, whether that Land spewed out, and the people of Israel, whom the Land received, were not all of them typical and figurative, and attended with extraordinary, supernatural, and miraculous Considerations?”; in The Complete Writings of Roger Williams, ed. Perry Miller (New York: Russell and Russell, 1963), 251. 22. See Rhodri Lewis, Language, Mind, and Nature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 17; Hans Aarslaff, manuscript lectures on “Language, Man, and Knowledge in the 16th and 17th Centuries,” delivered at Princeton in 1977; and Allison Coudert, “Some Theories of Natural Language from the Renaissance to the Seventeenth Century,” Magia Naturalis und die Entstehung der modernen Naturwissenschaften (= Studia Leibnitiana, Sonderheft 7) (Wiesbaden, 1978), 56–114. 23. For an account of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century philosophical and literary attempts to grapple with the “corruption of speech” that ensued from the dissolution of Adam’s power to name, see Robert Essick, William Blake and the Language of Adam (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 1–45. Also see Robert Markley, Fallen Languages: Crises of Representation in Newtonian England, 1660–1740 (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1993), esp. 63–95. 24. William Wallace Tooker, “John Eliot’s First Indian Teacher and Interpreter Cockenoe-De-Long Island and the Story of His Career from the Early Records,” in Languages and Lore of the Long Island Indians (Lexington, Mass.: Ginn Custom Publishing, 1980), 176–89. 25. John Eliot, A Grammar of the Massachusetts Indian Language (Boston: Phelps and Farnham, 1822), 66. 26. Robert Boyle, Letters of Mr. Boyle to Several Persons and Letters of Several Persons to Mr. Boyle, ed. Thomas Birch (Hildemsheim: Georg Olms Verlagsbuchhandlung, 1966), 510. 27. Eliot develops this argument in his preface to Thomas Thorowgood, Jews in America (London: Printed for Henry Brome, 1660). 28. For an analysis of Puritan plain style and sermonic rhetoric, see Teresa Toulouse, The Art of Prophesying and the Shaping of Belief (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1987); on Petrus Ramus’s influence on Protestant hermeneutics, see Walter  J. Ong, Ramus, Method, and the Decay of Dialogue: From the Art of Discourse to the Art of Reason (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1958). 29. According to Noel Malcolm, Comenius began the project of translating the Bible into Turkish in Holland in 1658. Robert Boyle funded William Seaman’s translation of the Bible into Turkish in London, where the New Testament was published in 1666; Malcolm, “Comenius, Boyle, Oldenburg, and the Translation of the Bible into Turkish,” Church History and Religious Culture 87 (2007): 327–62. Boyle also funded the translation of the Bible into Irish Gaelic in 1681.

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30. Boyle Papers 11:310–34, Royal Society, London; Malcolm, “Comenius, Boyle, Oldenburg,” 327–62. 31. Thomas Shepard, Jr., letter, September 9 1673, Woodrow Collection, National Library, Edinburgh. The exact addressee of this letter is not known. 32. The letter was printed as an appendix to Edward Winslow’s Glorious Progress of the Gospel, Amongst the Indians in New England (London: Printed for Hannah Allen in Popes-head-Alley, 1649), 135. I am indebted to Cristobal Silva for bringing this reference to my attention. 33. John Dury, “Copy of Letter in Hartlib’s Hand, John Dury to Mr. Davenport,” August 7, 1642, and “John Dury to Hartlib,” May 30, 1645 in the Hartlib Papers, University of Sheffield. 34. Correspondence of Robert Boyle, 4:138. 35. Eliot, Indian Dialogues, for Their Instruction in that Great Service of Christ, in calling home their Country-men to the Knowledge of GOD (Cambridge, 1671), 8. 36. Hans Aarsleff, From Locke to Saussure: Essays on the Study of Language and Intellectual History (London: Athlone, 1982); Michael Losonksy, Linguistic Turns in Modern Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006). 37. Peter Nidditch, ed., An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975), 64. 38. Cotton Mather, “Cotton Mather, dated at Boston, New England, to John Woodward,” November 17, 1712, Royal Society of London. 39. Paul Yves Pezron, The Antiquities of Nations, More Particularly of the Celtæ or Gauls, Taken to Be Originally the Same People as Our Ancient Britains . . . Englished by Mr. Jones (London, 1706), 1–2. 40. Pezron’s contemporaries believed that the philosophical merit of his work was overshadowed by his commitment to the genetic account of nations to the point of becoming a “mixture of truth and fable.” Quoted in David Malcolme, An Essay on the Antiquities of Great Britain and Ireland (Edinburgh: T. and W. Ruddimans, 1738), 46. See also Edward Lhwyd, “Part of a Letter from Mr. Edward Lhwyd to Dr. Martin Lister,” Philosophical Transactions 20, no. 243 (1698): 243–69. 41. David Malcolme and Edward Lhwyd, A Collection of Letters, in which the Imperfection of Learning, even among Christians, and a Remedy for it, are hinted (Edinburgh, 1739), 41. 42. Edward Lhwyd, Archeologia Britannica, edited by Dewi W. Evans and Brynley F. Roberts (Aberystwyth: Celtic Studies Publications-Cymru, 2009). On Lhwyd’s etymology, see David Cram, “On Wild Etymology and Descriptive Profligacy: A Contrastive Case Study,” in A Companion in Linguistics: A Festschrift for Anders Ahiqvist on the Occasion of His Sixtieth Birthday, ed. Bernadette Smelik, Rijcklof Hofman, Camiel Hamans, and David Cram (Nijmegen: Stichting Uitgeverij de Keltische Draak, 2005), 219–30. 43. Malcolme and Lhwyd, Collection of Letters, 41–44. 44. Much of Lhwyd’s relevant correspondence on this topic is at the Bodleian Library. See “Edward Lhwyd’s Correspondence,” MS Ashmole, 1814, 1816, 1817, 1829. On the Irish language, see “Lhwyd to Richard Jones, 1688,” Archaeologia Cambrensis (3rd ser.) 7

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(1861): 130–32. For an overview, see R. T. Gunther, “Life and Letters of Edward Lhwyd,” Early Science in Oxford 14 (1945). 45. Ibid., 41–47. The Parochial Queries that Lhwyd received with handwritten notes have been preserved in the Bodleian Library collections. See “A Design of a British Dictionary,” MS Ashmole 1820a, ff. 66–169. 46. Cotton Mather, Magnalia Christi Americana, vol. 1 (London: Printed for Thomas Parkhurst, 1702), 93. The quote comes from the “Church Militant” by the Renaissance poet George Herbert. 47. Cotton Mather, “dated at Boston, New England, to James Jurin and John Woodward,” 1724, Royal Society of London. 48. Ibid. 49. Transactions of the Historical Literary Committee of the American Philosophical Society, (1819) xviii. 50. Quoted in Experience Mayhew, Observations on the Indian Language, Library of American Civilization, ed. John S. H. Fogg (Boston: D. Clapp and Son, 1884).

10. Full. Empty. Stop. Go. I am grateful for comments and suggestions made on an earlier version of this chapter, with special gratitude to Karen Newman and Jane Tylus. 1. The Chinese characters used to render the name of the college (Siyi guan) were changed with the transformation from Ming to Manchu Qing rule in the seventeenth century. The only difference is the central character, yi: the original character can be roughly translated as “barbarian,” while the new character means “translation.” Manchu rulers of China were particularly sensitive to the uses of the former character. 2. Huayi yiyu, in Beijing tushuguan Guji chuban bianji zu, vol. 6 (Beijing: Shumu wenxian chubanshe, 1987), 32. The term qi da qi shi is added on 81. Chinese and Mongolian script. 3. Huihui guan zazi, in Beijing tushuguan Guji chuban bianji zu, 6:477. Chinese and Persian script. 4. Xifan guan yiyu, electronic reproduction from Awa no Kuni Bunko, Cornell University, Kroch Library Collection, 22. Chinese transliteration only without Tibetan script. 5. Gaochang guan yiyu, in Beijing tushuguan Guji chuban bianji zu, 6:387. Chinese and Uighur script. Also, Gaochang guan zazi, in ibid., 6:437. Chinese and Uighur script. 6. Ruzhen guan yiyu, electronic reproduction from Awa no Kuni Bunko, Cornell University, Kroch Library Collection, 32. Chinese transliteration only. See also Donald Kane, The Sino-Jurchen Vocabulary of the Bureau of Interpreters (Bloomington: Indiana University Research Institute for Inner Asian Studies, 1989), 281. Kane’s work is based on the Awa no Kuni manuscript as well. 7. Baiyi guan yiyu, electronic reproduction from Awa no Kuni Bunko, Cornell University, Kroch Library Collection, 20. Chinese transliteration only. This script (baiyi) from

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Yunnan, an archaic version of Dehong Dai or Tai Dehong, is often translated simply as “Shan.” 8. The hanren, or Han peoples, are frequently paired with the contrasting yiren, or foreign peoples in the dual-script glossaries, in which this sort of pairing of intended opposites (big/small, genuine/fake, etc.) was common. 9. Zheng He returned with his fleet in October. On the seven voyages of his fleet, see Edward L. Dreyer, Zheng He: China and the Oceans in the Early Ming Dynasty, 1405– 1433 (New York: Pearson Longman, 2007). Dreyer interprets the voyages of Zheng He as a display of Ming power, in contrast to the popular account of Zheng He as a benign explorer. 10. On the dating of the founding of the Siyi guan to 1407, and on scholarly disagreement over which month it was founded (November/December or April), see Paul Pelliot, “Le Sseu-yi-kouan et le Houei-t’ong-kouan,” in “Le Hoja et le Sayyid Husain de l’histoire des Ming,” T’oung Pao (2nd series) 38, (1948), appendix 3: 227–28. 11. A number of articles and essays have treated the Siyi guan and Huitong guan. The interested reader should consult F. Hirth, “The Chinese Oriental College,” Journal of the China Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society (new series) 22 (1888): 203–19; Norman Wild, “Materials for the Study of the Ssu I Kuan (Bureau of Translators),” Bulletin of SOAS 11, no. 3 (1945): 617–40; Pelliot, “Le Sseu-yi-kouan”; Kane, Sino-Jurchen Vocabulary, esp. 90– 99; and Pamela K. Crossley, “Structure and Symbol in the Ming-Ch’ing Translator’s Bureaus (ssu-i kuan),” Central and Inner Asian Studies 5 (1991): 38–70. Many of the early works rely on the foundational work by the French Sinologist (educated in medicine as well) Jean-Pierre Abel Rémusat, “De l’étude des langues étrangères chez les Chinois,” in Mélanges asiatiques, ou Choix de morceaux de critique, et de mémoires relatifs aux religions, aux sciences, à l’ histoire, et à la géographie des nations orientales, vol. 2 (Paris, 1926), 242– 65. Several short articles through the early twentieth century reported discovering new manuscripts of the text in European collections in London, Paris, Berlin, and St. Petersburg. See, for example, E. Denison Ross, “New Light on the History of the Chinese Oriental College, and a 16th Century Vocabulary of the Luchuan Language,” T’oung Pao (2nd series) 9, no. 5 (1908): 689–95, which discusses a manuscript that likely originated in the Huitong guan. 12. Lü Weiqi, Siyi guan ze, (Taibei: Wen hai chubanshe), 42. See also Crossley, “Structure and Symbol,” 45, on the condition of the bureau buildings. 13. I maintain the translation “Uighur Bureau” for Gaochang guan here because it is the most consistently used in the historiography of the Translators’ College, but we might also consider it as the Chagatai or Uighur/Chagatai Bureau. 14. This script (baiyi) from Yunnan, an archaic version of Dehong Dai or Tai Dehong, is often translated simply as “Shan.” 15. On the naming of the Huitong guan (more commonly translated as “Bureau of Interpreters”) and the Siyi guan (commonly translated as “Bureau of Translators”), see Paul Pelliot, “Le Sseu-yi-kouan,” 208. 16. On the Huitong guan, see Henry Serruys, “Sino-Mongol Relations During the Ming: The Tribute System and Diplomatic Missions (1400–1600),” Mélanges chinois et

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bouddhiques 14 (1967): 408–42; Pelliot, “Le Sseu-yi-kouan,” 249–92; and Charles  O. Hucker, A Dictionary of Official Titles in Imperial China (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1985), 263–64. There were actually two outposts of the station in Beijing, a northern and a southern Huitong guan. Their precise locations are unclear. They were both, according to Pelliot and Serruys, quite large buildings with nearly four hundred rooms apiece. When necessary, other buildings in the capital were used to lodge foreign envoys as well. 17. See Morris Rossabi, China and Inner Asia: From 1368 to the Present Day (London: Thames and Hudson, 1975), 63–64. For more details on the trade regulations at the station, see Serruys, “Sino-Mongol Relations,” 429–35. There were many complaints about the incompetence, mediocrity, and corruption of these station interpreters. 18. See Serruys, “Sino-Mongol Relations,” 415–16, on this. Though this was typical, envoys were known earlier in the sixteenth century to use the station as a base of operations for a much longer period of time: Serruys (418–19) cites memorials from 1490 and 1521 that complain of Persian envoys who had stayed at the capital trading jade and other objects for anywhere from one to five years. Tibetan envoys, who were typically housed at temples rather than at the station, also stayed for longer periods. 19. Matteo Ricci, China in the Sixteenth Century: The Journals of Matteo Ricci, 1583– 1610, trans. Nicolas Trigault (New York: Random House, 1953), 379. The account by Persian envoys of the slippers and fancy bedclothes is reported in Serruys, “Sino-Mongol Relations.” 20. See Wild, “Materials for the Study of the Ssu I Kuan,” 634. 21. “Wang Tsung-tsai,” in Dictionary of Ming Biography, 1368–1644, vol. 2, ed. L. Carrington Goodrich and Chaoying Fang (New York : Columbia University Press, 1976), 1441–42. 22. More on the structure and content of college glossaries will be discussed in what follows. 23. Crossley, “Structure and Symbol,” 46, retells the story as recounted in Pelliot, “Le Sseu-yi-kouan,” 237–38, which is based in turn on a 1927 Japanese work by a K. Kanda. The translation from Sanskrit to Chinese is part of a much longer history of the translation of Buddhist texts and related languages in Chinese history. On this longer history, see, for example, Victor Mair, “Buddhism and the Rise of the Written Vernacular in East Asia: The Making of National Languages,” Journal of Asian Studies 53, no. 3 (August 1994): 707–51. 24. For a brief description of this in English, see Wild, “Materials for the Study of the Ssu I Kuan,” 632–34. 25. Though the name can be read as indicating that the category encompasses both colors and sounds, the extant glossaries include only color terms. 26. Some of the category names varied slightly in the glossaries. Semantically arranged dictionaries organized in similar categories had a long precedent in the Chinese language. On Chinese dictionaries, see Yong Heming and Peng Jing, Chinese Lexicography: A History from 1046 bc to ad 1911 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). See also the discussion of orthographic classification focusing largely on the Shuowen jiezi

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(completed ca. 100 ce) in Françoise Bottéro, Sémantisme et classification dans l’ écriture chinoise: Les systèmes de classement des caractères par clés du Shuowen Jiezi au Kangxi Zidian (Paris: Collège de France, Institut des hautes études chinoises, 1996). 27. See the Chaoxian glossary from the Awa no Kuni Collection for prefatory remarks on the whole series of thirteen glossaries, based on an edition compiled by Mao Ruizheng (jinshi 1601; fl. 1597–1636, courtesy name [zi] Bofu), who had written the Huang Ming xiangxu lu (1629), a treatise on tribute states of the Ming, and other texts on military and foreign relations. The edition also included a preface by Zhu Zhifan (1564–?, jinshi 1595 [optimus]) a senior official in the Hanlin Academy who was famed for his calligraphy. Zhu had been sent as an envoy to Korea in 1605, which perhaps explains why his preface to the work appeared at the beginning of the Korean glossary. The glossaries included in the Awa no Kuni Collection are Korean (Chaoxian), Ryukyu (Liuqiu), Japanese (Riben), Vietnamese (Annan), Champa (Zhancheng), Siamese (Xianluo), Mongolian (Dazu), Uighur (Weiwuer), Tibetan (Xifan), Persian (Huihui), Malacca (Manlajia), Jurchen (Ruzhen), and Baiyi. The glossaries are Ming products, but more precise dating is unknown. See Jeremy H. C. S. Davidson, “A New Version of the Chinese-Vietnamese Vocabulary of the Ming Dynasty,” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies 38, no. 2 (1975): 296–315. 28. Huo Yuanjie, Huayi yiyu (Taipei: Guiting chubanshe, 1979), Zhu Zhifan preface. This edition credits Huo with the translation and a Di Bofu with the compilation or editing. Di Bofu likely refers to Mao Ruizheng, whose courtesy name was Bofu. 29. These examples can be found in the Human Affairs (renshi) section of the Ryukyu (Liuqiu) glossary from the Guiting chubanshe edition of the Huayi yiyu, 94. Many more cases are included in the many interpreters’ glossaries from the Awa no Kuni Bunko Collection. 30. Ruzhen yiyu, electronic reproduction from Awa no Kuni Bunko, Cornell University, Kroch Library Collection, 10. 31. Ibid. 32. Ibid., 2–3. The weather never seemed pleasant, according to the Jurchen glossary. There was occasional sunshine and stars in the sky, but many more thunderclaps, bolts of lightning, clouds of fog, and rainy and snowy days. 33. Ruzhen yiyu, 38. 34. Ibid., 37–38. 35. Ibid., 37. 36. Though I have not seen examples from the late fifteenth century, the 1695 Siyi guan kao by Jiang Fan in Siku quanshu zongmu, vol. 272 (Jinan: Qi Lu shushe chubanshe, 1997), 671–728, includes poems used to aid in the memorization of vocabulary from the eight bureaus extant in 1695: Persian, Uighur, Tibetan, Siamese, Burmese, Sanskrit, Baiyi, and Babai. Some of the poems are titled, and most include the names of the authors, all of whom were translators at the college. These were most likely student assignments, as each bureau set includes the names of one or two officials who composed the poems and the names of students at the translator-official (yizi guan) rank who translated them.

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37. The poems are laid out on the page in the order of the original script, so the physical experience of reading a compilation of poems from the different bureaus is actually quite disorienting. The Persian poems, for example, are read from right to left, with one line of verse continuing across all the pages of the document before the reader would have had to flip back to the first page to read the next line, and do the same for that line. In contrast, the Siamese poems are read top-down and right-left on each page. 38. See, for example, Gang Liu, “The Poetics of Miscellaneousness: The Literary Design of Liu Yiqing’s ‘Qiantang Yishi’ and the Historiography of the Southern Song” (PhD dissertation, University of Michigan, 2010), 2–31; Daiwie Fu, “The Flourishing of Biji or Pen-Notes Texts and Its Relations to History of Knowledge in Song China (960– 1279),” Extrême-Orient, Extrême-Occident 1 (2007): 103–30; and Peter Bol, “A Literati Miscellany and Sung Intellectual History: The Case of Chang Lei’s Ming-tao tsa-chih,” Journal of Sung-Yuan Studies 25 (1995): 121–51. 39. Some examples include the Youyang zazu and the Mengxi bitan. See Carrie Reed, “Motivation and Meaning of a ‘Hodge-Podge’: Duan Chengshi’s ‘Youyang zazu,’ ” Journal of the American Oriental Society 123, no. 1 (January–March 2003): 121–45; and Fu, “Flourishing of Biji.” 40. On the diversity of material in the Mengxi bitan, for example, see Ya Zuo, “The Production of Written Knowledge Under the Rubric of Jiyi,” East Asian Science, Technology and Society: An International Journal 4 (2010): 255–73. 41. On ways of categorizing biji as a form of miscellany, see Gang Liu, “Poetics of Miscellaneousness,” 4–5. 42. On these three features of biji as miscellany, see ibid., 5. “Poetics” challenges the notion of brevity as being central to this characterization. 43. On this, see Serruys, “Sino-Mongol Relations,” 452–53. The practices described here are on some level a best guess and a reconstruction from imperfect evidence. 44. On this, see ibid. 45. All of these appear in the respective scripts under manju in [Yuzhi] Wuti Qingwenjian, vol. 1 (Beijing, 1957), 1147. The term manju is included under the category niyalma, or People. 46. See Pamela Kyle Crossley, “Manchu Education,” in Benjamin  A. Elman and Alexander Woodside, eds. Education and Society in Late Imperial China, 1600-1900 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 343–44, one of many places in her work where she argues that Manchu identity, as well as the standard speech and script of the Manchu people, was an invented political and institutional construct that transformed what had been Jurchens into a new imperial force. 47. The Dictionary was also used as a textbook in banner schools after its 1772 revision. On Manchu dictionaries, see Crossley, “Manchu Education,” 346. For a fuller account of polylingual publishing in the Qing, see Evelyn S. Rawski, “Qing Publishing in Non-Han Languages,” in Printing and Book Culture in Late Imperial China, ed. Cynthia Brokaw and Kai-wing Chow (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005), 304–31, with 314–17 devoted to the publication of language aids; and Pamela Kyle Crossley and

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Evelyn S. Rawski, “A Profile of the Manchu Language in Ch’ing History,” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 53, no. 1 (1993), 63-102. 48. Though never printed, the Qing Pentaglot (as it is sometimes known) was completed in a manuscript version that was reprinted in 1957 in a three-volume edition and is easily accessible in the Asian language collections of many university libraries. 49. Walter Fuchs, “Remarks on a New ‘Hua-I-I-Yü,’ ” Bulletin of the Catholic University of Peking 8 (1931): 92–93 and 94n1. In this brief article, Fuchs reports from Beijing on a ninety-eight-volume, thirty-six-language dictionary (including English, French, German, Italian, Latin, and Portuguese, with the European scripts ostensibly written by foreign missionaries at court, and nine different Tibetan dialect vocabularies) that he argues was produced as a result of these efforts. He translates the text of the decree on 96–97. 50. See ibid., 91; Fuchs bases this on the Donghua xulu. 51. Pamela Kyle Crossley argues that this was its main function after 1748 in “Structure and Symbol” and “Manchu Education.” 52. See Crossley, “Manchu Education,” on the importance of linguistic simultaneity for Qianlong. 53. This happened in at least two ways: the use of Manchu translations of Chinese texts by translators of Chinese documents into European languages; and the use of Manchu as a medium into which knowledge from European-language texts was rendered. There is an extensive literature on Manchu translation in the Qing, but for a discussion of some specific examples of these phenomena in the context of the Kangxi court, see Catherine Jami, “Imperial Science Written in Manchu in Early Qing China: Does It Matter?,” in Looking at It from Asia: Th e Processes That Shaped the Sources of History of Science, ed. F. Bretelle-Establet (Dordrecht and New York: Springer, 2010), 371–91. 54. See Carla Nappi, “Surface Tension: Objectifying Ginseng in Chinese Early Modernity,” in Early Modern Things: Objects and Their Histories, 1500–1800, ed. Paula Findlen (New York: Routledge, 2013), 31–52.

11. K atherine Philips’s Pompey 1. George Saintsbury, ed., Minor Poets of the Caroline Period, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1905), vol. 1. 2. The Collected Works of Katherine Philips, the Matchless Orinda: The Translations, ed. Germaine Greer and Robert Little, vol. 3 (Stump Cross, UK: Stump Cross Books, 1993), which takes as its copy text the first Dublin edition (1663). All quotations, unless specified, are from this edition, hereafter cited as CWKP, vol. 3. The 1992 facsimile edition of Philips’s 1667 Poems silently excludes all the translations; Poems (1667): A Facsimile Reproduction with an Introduction by Travis Dupriest (Delmar, N.Y.: Scolars’ Facsimiles and Reprints, 1992). 3. Letters from Orinda to Poliarchus (London, 1705), 127 (hereafter cited as Letters). The two editions are Pompey. A Tragœdy [sic] (Dublin: Printed by John Crooke, Printer to

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the Kings Most Excellent Majesty, for Samuel Dancer, next Door to the Bear and RaggedStaff, in Castlestreet, 1663); Pompey: A Tragœdy. Acted with Great Applause (London: Printed for John Crooke, at the Sin of the Ship in St Paul’s Church-yard, 1663). The two editions are quartos, but the Dublin edition is more handsome, with large margins and printed in larger type than the London quarto, which looks more cramped. 4. Peter Beal, In Praise of Scribes: Manuscripts and Their Makers in Seventeenth-Century England (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 147–91. 5. Between August 1662 and December 1663. See The Collected Works of Katherine Philips, the Matchless Orinda: The Letters, ed. Patrick Thomas, vol. 2 (Stump CrossUK: Stump Cross Books, 1992), 46–121 (hereafter cited as CWKP, vol. 2). 6. She sent manuscript copies to Sir Charles Cotterell and Mary Aubrey in October and December 1662 (CWKP, vol. 2:57, 63). In January 1663, Cotterell offered a copy to the Duchess of York, whose patronage Philips seems to have been eager to secure, and she seemed to hope that it would draw the attention of the king himself; Catharine Gray, “Katherine Philips in Ireland,” English Literary Renaissance 39, n. 3 (2009): 581. Cf. Letters, 110, 122. 7. It was eventually published as Pompey the Great. A Tragedy. As It was Acted by the Servants of His Royal Highness the Duke of York. Translated out of French by Certain Persons of Honour, printed for Henry Herringman, London, 1664. 8. Catherine Cole Mambretti, “Orinda on the Restoration Stage,” Comparative Literature 37, no. 3 (1985): 246. 9. Gray, “Katherine Philips in Ireland,” 557–85; Beal, In Praise of Scribes, 159–61; Mambretti, “Orinda on the Restoration Stage,” passim; Christopher Morash, A History of Irish Theatre, 1601–2000 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 28; and Deana Rankin, “ ‘If Egypt now enslav’d or free / A Kingdom or a Province be’: Translating Corneille in Restoration Dublin,” in Culture and Conflicts in Seventeenth- Century France and Ireland, ed. Sarah Alyn Stacey and Véronique Desnain (London: Four Courts Press, 2004), 194– 209. See also Christopher J. Wheatley, “ ‘Your Fetter’d Muse’: The Reception of Katherine Philips’ Pompey,” Restoration and Eighteenth- Century Theatre Research 7 (1992): 18–28. Rosalind Schut sees Philips as manipulated by Orrery in “ ‘La Femme Forte’: Katherine Philips and the Politics of Her Dublin Writings, 1662–3,” in Early Modern English Women Testing Ideas, ed. Jo Wallwork and Paul Salzman (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2011), 107–19. 10. Charles II wrote enthusiastically of having read Orrery’s play, although critics disagree about the dates of his letter to Orrery; Nancy Maguire, Regicide and Restoration: English Tragicomedy, 1660–1671 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 93; Mambretti, “Orinda on the Restoration Stage,” 238. According to William Smith Clark, Altamira was performed privately in October 1662. See William Smith Clark, The Early Irish Stage: The Beginnings to 1720 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1955), 60, as well as Mambretti, “Orinda on the Restoration Stage,” 242, and Gray, “Katherine Philips in Ireland,” passim. The play was later performed publicly in London in September 1664 under the title The General. 11. For other possible reasons to explain Philips’s choice of this play, see Anne Russell, “Katherine Philips as Political Playwright: ‘The Songs Between the Acts’ in Pompey,”

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Comparative Drama 44, no. 3 (2010): 299–300. Also meaningful was the choice of a prologue and an epilogue by such prominent members of the Anglo-Irish aristocracy as the Earl of Roscommon and the epilogue by Sir Edward Dering. 12. Andrew Shifflett, Stoicism, Politics, and Literature in the Age of Milton: War and Peace Reconciled (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 75–106; Mambretti, “Orinda on the Restoration Stage,” 233–51; Hero Chalmers, Royalist Women Writers, 1650– 1689 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004), 86–95; Russell, “Katherine Philips as Political Playwright,” 299–323; Wheatley, “ ‘Your Fetter’d Muse,’ ” 18–28. 13. Chalmers, Royalist Women Writers, 96. Chalmers cites John Crouch’s praise of Philips in support of her interpretation: “She taught the World the sweet and peaceful Arts / Of blending Souls, and of compounding hearts” (96). 14. For Philips’s conflicting attitude toward publication, see Beal, In Praise of Scribes. 15. A discourse of life and death. Written in French by Ph. Mornay. Antonius, a tragoedie written also in French by Ro. Garnier. Both done in English by the Countesse of Pembroke Marc Antoine (London, 1592). On translation for women as a worthy cultural activity, see, among many others, Paul Salzman, Reading Early Modern Women’s Writing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 12–14, or Jonathan Goldberg, Desiring Women Writing (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1997), 75–134, in particular 75–90. See also Deborah Uman, Women as Translators in Early Modern England (Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2012), passim, and Danielle Clarke, The Politics of Early Modern Women’s Writing (London: Longman, 2001), passim. 16. Margaret Hannay, Philips’s Phoenix: Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 125. 17. Orrery’s motivations might have been partly political, however. See John Kerrigan, “Orrery’s Ireland and the British Problem, 1641–1679,” in British Identities and English Literary Renaissance Literature, ed. David J. Baker and Willy Maley (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 201. 18. According to Anne Russell, the songs introduce dramatic irony in the play. See Russell, “Katherine Philips as Political Playwright,” 311. 19. Maguire, Regicide and Restoration, 37, 65. 20. Elisabeth Woodrough, “Corneille et la Grande-Bretagne: L’intérêt que suscite l’oeuvre de Pierre Corneille outre-Manche au XVIIe siècle,” in Pierre Corneille: Actes du Colloque tenu à Rouen (2–6 octobre 1984), ed. Alain Niderst (Paris: PUF, 1985), 74. On the influence of Corneille in the Restoration, see Maguire, Regicide and Restoration, 54–55, and Dorothea Frances Canfield’s classic study, Corneille and Racine in England: A Study of the English Translations of the Two Corneilles and Racine, with Especial Reference to Their Presentation on the English Stage (New York: Columbia University Press, 1904). 21. Sophie Tomlinson, Women on Stage in Stuart Drama (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 202. 22. Books 9 and 10 of La Calprenède’s Cleopatra, translated as Hymen’s Praeludia (London, 1659). 23. Chalmers, Royalist Women Writers, 97. See also Mambretti, “Orinda on the Restoration Stage,” passim.

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24. Plays such as Mary Sidney’s previously mentioned translation of Garnier’s Marc Antoine, published as Antonius in 1592, which was followed by Thomas Kyd’s translation of Garnier’s Cornelia in 1594, Daniel’s Cleopatra (1594), Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra (1606), an anonymous Tragedie of Caesar and Pompey (1607), Fletcher and Massinger’s The False One (1620), or Chapman’s Caesar and Pompey (published 1631), among others. 25. See Pierre Corneille, La Mort de Pompée, in Théâtre, vol. 2, ed. Jacques Maurens (Paris: GF Flammarion, 1980), act 3, scene 2, l. 919 and act 3, scene 4, l. 1049. (All subsequent quotations are from this edition, cited simply as Théâtre.) 26. Théâtre, 537, ll. 774–86. 27. Ibid., 508–9. “I make her in love only for ambition. . . . I think, carefully examining history, that she had only ambition, and no love” (my translation). 28. Letter 19, added to the 1729 edition of Letters from Orinda to Poliarchus (London, 1729), 83. I quote from the manuscript, used as a copy text for this letter in the Thomas edition (CWKP, vol. 2:113–14). 29. “Descant” is a complex word that can refer to a melodious accompaniment or counterpoint, or harmonized composition, or an instrumental prelude, consisting of variations. 30. John Denham, preface to The Destruction of Troy (London, 1656), n.p. It is perhaps not a coincidence that Denham ended up completing Philips’s unfinished translation of Horace after her death. The anonymous Philo-Philippa writes in her praise of Philips that she “Liquors from vessel into vessel pour’d” (Philips, Poems by the most deservedly admired Mrs. Katherine Philips, the matchless Orinda, 1667, sig. [c3v]). 31. Abraham Cowley, The Works of Mr. Abraham Cowley (London, 1656), n.p. 32. The Aeneid (London, 1649 and 1654). See Marie-Alice Belle, “Sur la retraduction de Virgile en Angleterre au XVIIe siècle: Les enjeux politiques et esthétiques de l’Enéide de John Ogilby (1654),” Etudes.episteme.org 12 (2007): 49–82. 33. I am aware that this way of correlating Philips’s interest in decorum with what I see as a gendered conception of translation might be contentious. I am not forgetting that Philips is the author of intense lyrics to other women, and as such is also subversive as a poet. However, my claim is that Philips’s intervention on translation theory is channeled into traditionally gendered concepts that allowed her to compete with her male rivals and offered her a particular place to speak from. Th is is not contradictory with a more radical view of Philips as an author of homoerotic verse. See my own article that explores Philips’s conception of friendship, “Leaves of Fame: Katherine Philips and Robert Herrick’s Shared Community,” in Lords of Wine and Oil”: Community and Conviviality in Robert Herrick, ed. Tom Cain and Ruth Connolly (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 127–52. 34. Philips comments in particular on the introduction in act 4 (translated by Lord Buckhurst) of “10 to 12 lines of Romes becoming a Monarchy” (CWKP, vol. 2:113). See also Edmund Waller et al., Pompey the Great. A Tragedy. As it was Acted by the Servants of His Royal Highness the Duke of York. Translated out of French by Certain Persons of Honour (London, 1664), 38. 35. In his famous preface to Ovid’s Epistles (London, 1680), n.p.

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36. Katherine Philips, Poems (London, 1667), sig. [c4]. 37. A point to which she comes back in a letter printed only in the 1729 edition of Letters (81). Cf. CWKP, vol. 3:111–13. 38. It must be noted, however, that Philips is not too strict about the rhyme. 39. See Edward Phillips’s opinion: “The imitation [of Corneille] among us, and of the perpetual Colloquy in Rhime, hath of late much corrupted our English Stage” (Theatrum poetarum [London, 1675], 28). 40. Corneille, La Mort de Pompée, act 1, scene 1, ll. 21–22, Théâtre, 513; CWKP, vol. 3:6. 41. Corneille, La Mort de Pompée, act 1, scene 1, l. 116, Théâtre, 516; Philips, CWKP, vol. 3:10; Waller et al., Pompey the Great, 4. 42. Another example would be Ptolemy’s invocation to Caesar’s wrath in act 4, scene 1: “Tonne, tonne à ton gré, fais peur de ta justice” (Théâtre, 547), which flatly becomes “Let thy justice threaten as it please” (CWKP, vol. 3:40). Hero Chalmers offers a gendered reading of this idea of “smoothness,” which is repeatedly used to praise Philips (Royalist Women Writers, 98–100). 43. Along the same line, Cornelia is described as a “widow,” not a “moitié” (CWKP, vol. 3:36), which can be translated as “his other half.” 44. Philips, Poems (1667), sig. [c4]. 45. “On the 3rd of September, 1651,” in The Collected Works of Katherine Philips, the Matchless Orinda: The Poems, ed. Patrick Thomas, vol. 1 (Stump Cross, UK: Stump Cross Books, 1990), 82–83. Catharine Gray comments on the “potential instability” of Pompey “as a figure for political allegory” (“Katherine Philips in Ireland,” 577). 46. The Waller version is even freer, but like Philips’s, it exaggerates Cleopatra’s power of seduction: . . . myself though Young / Yet of an Age to make that Beauty known / Which Heav’n had lent me, and some Hearts my own; / Above the rest Caesar his Passion shows, / Declares his Love, but yet his Caution wooes (Waller et al., Pompey the Great, 9). 47. Again CWKP, vol. 3:61, and Théâtre, 565. 48. Tomlinson, Women on Stage, 192. She adds that Philips was obviously inspired by “the play’s ennobling portrayal of feminine passion and ambition” (ibid.). Catharine Gray is also mistaken in assuming for her own part that “both Philips herself and her contemporaries identified her poetic persona, ‘Orinda,’ not with Cornelia but with Cleopatra” (“Katherine Philips in Ireland,” 571). 49. Russell, “Katherine Philips as Political Playwright,” passim; Gray, “Katherine Philips in Ireland,” 569.

12. Tr ansl ating Scottish Stadial History I discuss the topic of this chapter in a book-length study, Translations, Histories, Enlightenments: William Robertson in Germany, 1760–1795 (Houndmills, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014). For earlier and partial treatment of various aspects, see László Kontler, “William Robertson’s History of Manners in German, 1770–1795,” Journal of the

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History of Ideas 58, no. 1 (1997): 125–44; idem, “William Robertson and His German Audience on European and Non-European Civilisations,” Scottish Historical Review 80, no. 1 (2001): 63–89; idem, “Germanizing Scottish Histories: The Case of William Robertson,” Cromohs 12 (2007): 1–9, http://www.cromohs.unifi.it/12_2007/kontler_robertson.html; idem, “Mankind and Its Histories: William Robertson, Georg Forster and a Late Eighteenth-Century German Debate,” Intellectual History Review 23, no. 3 (2013): 411–29. 1. Herrn Dr. Wilhelm Robertsons Geschichte der Regierung Kaiser Carls des Fünften. Nebst einem Abrisse des Wachstums und Fortgangs des gesellschaftlichen Leben in Europa bis auf den Anfang des sechszehnten Jahrhundert, 3 vols., trans. Theodor Christoph Mittelstedt, notes by Julius August Remer, 2nd ed. (Braunschweig: Waisenhaus, 1778–79), 3: “Vorrede,” by Julius August Remer. The first edition was published without Remer’s collaboration in 1770–71. 2. Ibid., 1: “Vorrede.” 3. In detail, see László Kontler, “Translation and Comparison: Early-Modern and Current Perspectives,” Contributions to the History of Concepts 3, no. 1 (2007): 71–103; idem, “Translation and Comparison II: A Methodological Inquiry into Reception in the History of Ideas,” Contributions to the History of Concepts 4, no. 1 (2008): 27–56; idem, “Concepts, Contests and Contexts: Conceptual History and the Problem of Translatability,” in Rethinking Conceptual History, ed. Willibald Steinmetz and Michael Freeden (Oxford: Berghahn, forthcoming), and the sizable literature cited in these studies. 4. A full-scale modern biography is still missing. Like other Scottish literati, Robertson received his due from Dugald Stewart, Biographical Memoirs of Adam Smith, L.L.D., of William Robertson,  D.D, and of Thomas Reid,  D.D. (Edinburgh: George Ramsay, 1811). Robertson as the life and soul of the Moderate Party has been discussed by Jeremy J. Carter, “The Making of Principal Robertson in 1762: Politics and the University of Edinburgh in the Second Half of the Eighteenth Century,” Scottish Historical Review 49, no. 1 (1970): 60–84; and Richard B. Sher, Church and University in the Scottish Enlightenment: The Moderate Literati of Edinburgh (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1985). For an excellent, concise overview of Robertson’s career, see Stuart J. Brown, “William Robertson and the Scottish Enlightenment,” in William Robertson and the Expansion of Empire, ed. Stuart J. Brown (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 7–35. 5. Cf. the perspective adopted (as against both the traditional notion of a unitary, even monolithic—cosmopolitan, freethinking-secularist, “progressive”—Enlightenment, and one fragmented according to either “national” context, ideological alignment, or both) in John Robertson, “The Enlightenment Above National Context,” Historical Journal 40 (1997): 667–97; idem, Th e Case for the Enlightenment: Scotland and Naples, 1680–1760. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). 6. Karen O’Brien, Narratives of Enlightenment: Cosmopolitan History from Voltaire to Gibbon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); J. G. A. Pocock, Barbarism and Religion, vol. 2, Narratives of Civil Government (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).

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7. The academic study of the social scientific embeddedness of eighteenth-century Scottish historiography began seriously with Roy Pascal, “Property and Society: The Scottish Historical School of the Eighteenth Century,” Modern Quarterly 2 (1938): 167–79; it became more pronounced in Gladys Bryson, Man and Society: The Scottish Inquiry of the Eighteenth Century (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1945); it grew into a torrent with (and included critical assessments of ) Ronald L. Meek, Social Science and the Ignoble Savage (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976). The term “conjectural history,” famously coined by Dugald Stewart—a younger contemporary and biographer of the great generation of the Edinburgh literati, himself a noted philosopher—first appeared in the title of an article in Harro M. Höpfl, “From Savage to Scotsman: Conjectural History in the Scottish Enlightenment,” Journal of British Studies 17 (1978): 19–40. As a further milestone, mention must be made of Istvan Hont and Michael Ignatieff, eds., Wealth and Virtue: The Shaping of Political Economy in the Scottish Enlightenment (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983). The literature on the subject since then is endless. 8. William Robertson, The History of America, vol. 2 (London: Routledge / Thoemmes Press, 1996), 30. 9. [Albrecht von Haller], review of William Robertson’s History of Scotland, Göttingische Anzeigen von gelehrten Sachen (hereafter cited as GAgS) 8 (1760): 913–18; idem, review of William Robertson’s History of Charles V, GAgS 1/18 (1770), 551–53, 931–33, 996– 99; [Christian Gottlob Heyne], review of William Robertson’s History of America, pt. 1, Zugabe zu den GAgS 1/23 (October 18, 1777): 657–67; idem, review of William Robertson’s History of America, pt. 2, Zugabe zu den GAgS 1/23 (November 1, 1777): 689–99; [Georg Forster], review of William Robertson’s Historical Disquisition, GAgS 49 (December 3, 1791), in Georg Forster, Werke, vol. 11, Rezensionen, ed. Horst Fiedler (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1977), 294–302; [Anon.], review of William Robertson’s Historical Disquisition, Annalen der Geographie und Statistik 3 (1792): 111–21; Arnold Herrmann Ludwig Heeren, review of William Robertson’s Historical Disquisition, Bibliothek der alten Litteratur und Kunst 9 (1792): 105–22. (This list does not include reviews of the German translations of Robertson’s works.) 10. The list of German translations of Robertson’s works, in chronological order of the appearance of the originals, is as follows: (1) The Situation of the World at the Time of Christ’s Appearance (1755): Der Zustand der Welt bey der Erscheinung Christi und sein Einfluß auf den Fortgang der Religion, trans. Johann Philipp Ebeling (Hamburg: Herold, 1779); (2) History of Scotland (1759): Herrn Wilhelm Robertsons Geschichte von Schottland unter den Regierungen der Königinn Maria, und des Königes Jacobs VI. bis auf dessen Erhebung auf den englischen Thron, 2 vols., trans. Theodor Christoph Mittelstedt (Braunschweig: Meyer; Leipzig: Breitkopf, 1762): Wilhelm Robertsons Geschichte von Schottland unter den Regierungen der Königinn Maria und des Königs Jacobs VI. bis auf die Zeit, da der Letztere den englischen Thron bestieg, trans. Georg Friedrich Seiler (Ulm: Gaum, 1762); (3) History of Charles V (1769), parts or whole: Entwurf des politischen Zustandes in Europa, vom Verfall der römischen Macht an bis auf das sechzehnte Jahrhundert. Aus Robertsons Einleitung in die Geschichte Karls des Fünften gezogen [1773], in Vermischte Gedichte und prosaische Schriften

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von Herrn Ludwig Heinrich von Nicolay (Berlin: Friedrich Nicolai, 1793); Herrn Dr. Wilhelm Robertsons Geschichte der Regierung Kaiser Carls des Fünften. Nebst einem Abrisse des Wachstums und Fortgangs des gesellschaftlichen Lebens in Europa bis auf den Anfang des sechszehnten Jahrhundert, 3 vols., trans. Theodor Christoph Mittelstedt (Braunschweig: Waisenhaus, 1770), 2nd ed., with notes by Julius August Remer (Braunschweig: Waisenhaus, 1778–79); Herrn Dr Wilhelm Robertsons Geschichte der Regirerung des Kaiser Carls des Fünften. Nebst einem Abrisse des Wachstums und Fortgangs des gesellschaftlichen Lebens in Europa bis auf den Anfang des 16. Jhs, 5 vols., trans. and revised by Julius August Remer (Vienna: Härter, 1819), based on the edition at Braunschweig: Schulbuchhandlung/ Waisenhaus, 1792–96; (4) History of America (1777): Geschichte von Amerika, 2 vols., trans. Johann Friedrich Schiller (Leipzig: Weidmanns Erben & Reich, 1777); (5) Historical Disquisition (1791): Historische Untersuchung über die Kenntnisse der Alten von Indien, und die Fortschritte des Handels mit diesem Lande vor der Entdeckung des Weges dahin um das Vorgebirge der guten Hoff nung, trans. Georg Forster (Berlin: Voß, 1792). 11. For an overview of the emerging field of study of the interconnections between urban space and practices of knowledge formation, see Antonella Romano and Stéphane Van Damme, “Sciences et villes-mondes: Penser les savoirs au large (XVIe–XVIIIe siècle),” Revue d’Histoire Moderne et Contemporaine 55, no. 2 (2008): 7–18; English version, idem, “Science and World Cities: Thinking Urban Knowledge and Science at Large (16th– 18th Century),” Itinerario 33, no. 1 (2009): 79–95. On Edinburgh and Göttingen, Roger Emerson, “The Enlightenment and Social Structures,” in City and Society in the 18th Century, ed. Paul Fritz and David Williams (Toronto: Hakkert, 1973), 99–124; Stéphane Van Damme, “La grandeur d’Édimbourg: Savoirs et mobilization identitaire au XVIIIe siècle,” Revue d’Histoire Moderne et Contemporaine 55, no. 2 (2008): 152–81; David Bayne Horn, A Short History of the University of Edinburgh, 1556–1889 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1967); Roger Emerson, “Scottish Universities in the Eighteenth Century,” in Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century, vol. 167, ed. James A. Leith (Oxford: Voltaire Foundation, 1977), 453–74. On the university in the context of the Edinburgh urban community, and its transformations during the eighteenth century, see Nicholas Phillipson, “Commerce and Culture: Edinburgh, Edinburgh University, and the Scottish Enlightenment,” in The University and the City: From Medieval Origins to the Present, ed. Thomas Bender (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988), 100–116; Luigi Marino, Praeceptores Germaniae: Göttingen 1770–1820 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1995), 1–89 [Italian original: Turin: Einaudi, 1975]; William Clark, Academic Charisma and the Origins of the Research University (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 23841, 245– 47, and 377–80. 12. Karl Julius Hartmann and Hans Füchsel, eds., Geschichte der Göttinger Universitäts-Bibliothek (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1937), 19, 33; Marino, Praeceptores Germaniae, 9; Bernhard Fabian, “Die Göttinger Universitätsbibliothek im achtzehnten Jahrhundert,” in Göttinger Jahrbuch (Göttingen: Heinz Reise Verlag, 1980), 115; Graham Jefcoate, Karen Kloth, and Bernhard Fabian, eds., A Catalogue of English Books Printed Before 1801 Held by the University Library at Göttingen (Hildesheim: Olms-Weidmann,

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1988); William Clark, “On the Bureaucratic Plots of the Research Library,” in Books and the Sciences in History, ed. Marina Frasca-Spada and Nick Jardine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 201. Cf. Martin Gierl, “Compilation and the Production of Knowledge in the Early German Enlightenment,” in Wissenschaft als kulturelle Praxis 1750–1900, ed. Hans Erich Bödeker, Peter Hanns Reill, and Jürgen Schlumbohm (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1999), 100–101. 13. Even though the “Westphalian system” as a concept denoting the emergence of a universe of states possessing “agency” has long been called into question, its status as a “surrogate constitution” of the Holy Roman Empire still holds, even if with some qualifications. See Wolfgang Reinhard, “Staatsmacht als Kreditproblem,” Vierteljahrschrift für Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte 61 (1974): 289–319; Heinz Duchhardt, “ ‘Westphalian System’: Zur Problematik einer Denkfigur,” Historische Zeitschrift 269 (1999): 305–15; most recently Lothar Höbelt, “The Westphalian Peace: Augsburg Mark II or Celebrated Armistice?,” in The Holy Roman Empire, 1495–1806: A European Perspective, ed. R. J. W. Evans and Peter H. Wilson (Leiden: Brill, 2012), 19–34. 14. On the varieties of eighteenth-century German historical thought and writing, see Peter Hanns Reill, The German Enlightenment and the Rise of Historicism (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1975); Aufklärung und Geschichte: Studien zur deutschen Geschichtswissenschaft im 18. Jahrhundert, ed. Hans Erich Bödeker, Georg  G. Iggers, and Jonathan B. Knudsen (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1986); Frederick C. Beiser, The German Historicist Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), chaps. 1–3. 15. Han F. Vermeulen, “Göttingen und die Völkerkunde. Ethnologie und Ethnographie in der deutschen Aufklärung, 1710–1815,” and Guillaume Garner, “Politische Ökonomie und Statistik an der Universität Göttingen (1760–1820),” in Die Wissenschaft vom Menschen in Göttingen um 1800, ed. Hans Erich Bödeker, Philippe Büttgen, and Michel Espagne (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2008), 199–230, 371–92. See also Norbert Waszek, “Die Schottische Aufklärung in der Göttinger Wissenschaft vom Menschen,” in ibid., 125–49. For a highly sophisticated study of the Scottish “natural history of mankind” and the German Menschheitsgeschichte within the context of the science of man and the Wissenschaft vom Menschen—and therefore, emphatically, not as a part of the history of historiography in the narrower sense but as a critical phase in the reconstruction of the entire contemporary landscape of knowledge—see Annette Meyer, Von der Wahrheit zur Wahrscheinlichkeit: Die Wissenschaft vom Menschen in der schottischen und deutschen Aufklärung (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 2008). 16. For details, see the studies mentioned in note 4. 17. For cases in question, see Robertson, Geschichte Carls des Fünften (1778), 1:53ff. 18. Idem, Geschichte von Schottland, trans. Mittelstedt (1762), 1:135; idem, Geschichte von Schottland, trans. Seiler (1762), 69; Geschichte Carls des Fünften (1778–79), 2:267; idem, Geschichte Carls des Fünften (1792/1819), 1:27–28, 64; 2:4, 318. 19. Idem, Geschichte von Amerika, 1:294 and 2:399; idem, Historische Untersuchung, 159. 20. E.g., idem, Geschichte von Amerika, 2:311.

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21. Moses Mendelssohn, “Über die Frage: Was heißt aufklären?,” [Berlinische Monatsschrift, 1784], in Was ist Aufklärung? Thesen und Definitionen, ed. Ehrhard Bahr (Stuttgart: Reclam, 1974), 4. 22. Rudolf Vierhaus, “Bildung,” in Geschichtliche Grundbegriff e, ed. Otto Brunner, Werner Conze, and Reinhart Koselleck (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1972–78), 1:508–51, for Herder specifically 515–17. 23. Wolf Lepenies, “Die Übersetzbarkeit der Kulturen: Ein europäisches Problem, eine Chance für Europa,” in Die Sprache der Anderen: Übersetzungspolitik zwischen den Kulturen, ed. Anselm Hawerkamp (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1997), 95–121; Fania Oz-Salzberger, “The Enlightenment in Translation: Regional, Cosmopolitan and National Aspects,” European Review of History / Revue Européenne d’Histoire 13, no. 3 (2006): 385–410. 24. Johann Gottfried Leibniz, Unvorgreiffliche Gedanken, betreff end die Ausübung und Verbesserung der Teutschen Sprache, cited in Winfried Sdun, Probleme und Theorien des Übersetzens in Deutschland vom 18. bis 20. Jahrhundert (Munich: Max Hueber Verlag, 1967), 21. 25. K. A. Schleiden, Klopstock’s Dichtungstheorie als Beitrag zur Geschichte der deutschen Poetik (Saarbrücken: West-Ost, 1954), 36–38; Sdun, Probleme und Theorien des Übersetzens, 25. 26. Johann Wolfgang Goethe, “Übersetzungen,” in Werke, vol. 2, ed. Erich Trunz (Munich: Beck, 1988), 255. For the translation of Goethe’s text and the comment on it, I have relied on Charlie Louth, Hölderlin and the Dynamics of Translation (Oxford: European Humanities Research Centre, 1998), 6. 27. Johann Gottfried Herder, Fragments on Recent German Literature (1767–68), in Philosophical Writings, ed. Michael N. Forster (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 37–38. 28. Friedrich Schleiermacher, “On the Different Methods of Translating” (Über die verschiedenen Methoden des Übersetzens) (1813), in Translating Literature: Practice and Theory in a Comparative Literature Context, ed. André Lefevere (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 1992), 69–93. 29. Roger Zuber, Les “Belles Infidèles” et la formation du goût classique: Perrot d’Ablancourt et Guez de Balzac (Paris: Armand Colin, 1968), esp. ch. 2 and 3. But cf. Julie Candler Hayes, Translation, Subjectivity, and Culture in France and England, 1600–1800 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2009), where it is argued that translators of the times were more open to cultural “otherness” than has been generally supposed. 30. William Guthrie, “Preface to the Orations of Marcus Tullius Cicero” (1741), in English Translation Th eory 1650-1800, ed. T. R. Steiner (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1975), 98–99. 31. For a modern edition, see Alexander Fraser Tytler, Essay on the Principles of Translation, ed. J. F. Huntsman (Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1978). 32. Oz-Salzberger, “The Enlightenment in Translation”; Johan van der Zande, “The Microscope of Experience: Christian Garve’s Translation of Cicero’s De Officiis (1783),” Journal of the History of Ideas 59 (1998): 82.

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33. See Gilbert Stuart, A View of Society in Europe in Its Progress from Rudeness to Refinement: or, Inquiries Concerning the History of Law, Government, and Manners (1778; Basel: Tourneisen, 1797), 59. On Stuart, see William Zachs, Without Regard to Good Manners: A Biography of Gilbert Stuart, 1743–1786 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1992). Meiners’s preoccupation with race as a decisive factor in history had been well known since the publication of his Grundriß der Geschichte der Menschheit (Lemgo: Meyer, 1785); but see especially his Geschichte der Ungleichheit der Stände unter den vornehmsten Europäischen Staaten, vol. 2 (Hanover: Helwing, 1792), chaps. 5 and 7. On Meiners, see Friedrich Lotter, “Christoph Meiners und die Lehre von der unterschiedlichen Wertigkeit der Menschenrassen,” in Geschichtswissenschaft in Göttingen, ed. Hartmut Boockmann and Hermann Wellenreuther (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1987), 30–75. Meiners also figures prominently in Michael Carhart, The Science of Culture in Enlightenment Germany (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007). Remer had Christoph Friedrich Blankenburg’s 1779 German translation of the View of Society by Stuart. For reference to this book and the ones by Meiners and Herder, see Julius August Remers weil: Herzogl. Braunschw. Lüneb. Hofraths und Professors der Geschichte und Statistik auf der Julius Karls Universität zu Helmstedt hinterlassene Büchersammlung, welche den 1sten November 1804 und folgende Tage zu Helmstedt öffentlich verkauft warden soll (Braunschweig, 1804), 8, 56, 59, 79, 93. 34. This sketch is based on Johann Georg Meusel, Lexikon der vom Jahr 1750 bis 1800 verstorbenen teutschen Schriftsteller, 15 vols. (Leipzig, 1802–1816; repr. Hildesheim: Olms, 1967), 9: 190–92; Georg Christoph Hamberger and Johann Georg Meusel, Das gelehrte Teutschland oder Lexikon der jetzt lebenden teutschen Schriftsteller, 23 vols. (Lemgo, 1796– 1834; repr. Hildesheim: Olms, 1965), 6: 305–8; Allgemeine Deutsche Biographie, vol. 28 (Leipzig, 1889), 198–200. 35. On this work, see Giovanna Ceserani, “Narrative, Interpretation, and Plagiarism in Mr. Robertson’s 1778 History of Ancient Greece,” Journal of the History of Ideas 66, no. 3 (2005): 413–36. 36. Adam Smith, Untersuchung der Natur und Ursachen von Nationalreichthümern, trans. Johann Friedrich Schiller and Christian August Wichmann, vol. 1 (Leipzig: Weidmanns Erben & Reich, 1776–78), preface. 37. Unlike in the case of Remer and Schiller, the literature on Forster as an intellectual vagabond of real stature is formidable. In earlier scholarship, he was mainly appreciated as a dominant figure in the revolution of the Rhineland after the French invasion of 1792 and as a deputy to the French Convent—in other words, as a leading German “Jacobin.” Recently there has been more emphasis on his character as a “philosophical traveler,” his intellectual achievement, and his exchanges with dominant figures of contemporary German thought—Kant, Herder, Goethe, Wilhelm von Humboldt. See especially Ludwig Uhlig, Georg Forster: Einheit und Mannigfaltigkeit in seiner geistigen Welt (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1965); Detlef Rasmussen, ed., Weltumsegler und seine Freunde: Georg Forster als gesellschaftlicher Schriftsteller der Goethezeit (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1988); for a recent biography, see Ludwig Uhlig, Georg Forster: Lebensabenteuer eines gelehrten Weltbürgers (1754–1794) (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2004);

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all the diverse pursuits of Forster are set in a comparative context in the valuable studies in Georg Forster in interdisziplinären Perspektive, ed. Claus-Volker Klenke, Jörn Garber, and Dieter Heintze (Berlin: Akademie Verlag, 1994). A series, Georg-Forster-Studien (fifteen volumes and several special issues to date, edited by Horst Dippel and Helmut Scheuer), is published by the Georg-Forster-Gesellschaft with Kassel University Press.

Coda 1. Robert Wechsler, Performing Without a Stage: The Art of Literary Translation (North Haven, Conn.: Catbird Press, 1998), 69. 2. José Ortega y Gasset, “The Misery and Splendor of Translation,” trans. Elizabeth Gamble Miller, in Theories of Translation: An Anthology of Essays from Dryden to Derrida, ed. Rainer Schulte and John Biguenet (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 94. 3. Vladimir Nabokov, “Problems of Translation: Onegin in English,” trans. Elizabeth Gamble Miller, in Schulte and Biguenet, Theories of Translation, 127–43. 4. John Dryden, “On Translation,” in Schulte and Biguenet, Theories of Translation, 31. 5. Weschler, Performing Without a Stage, 101. 6. Octavio Paz, “Translation: Literature and Letters,” trans. Irene del Corral, in Schulte and Biguenet, Theories of Translation, 152. 7. Edith Grossman, translator’s note, in Miguel de Cervantes, Don Quixote, trans. Edith Grossman (New York: Ecco Press, 2003), xvii–xx. 8. Ibid., xx.

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Contributors

Gordon Braden is Linden Kent Memorial Professor of English at the University of Virginia. He is author of, among other works, Renaissance Tragedy and the Senecan Tradition (Yale, 1985), The Idea of the Renaissance (Johns Hopkins, 1989, with William Kerrigan), and Petrarchan Love and the Continental Renaissance (Yale, 1999), and coeditor of The Oxford History of Literary Translation in English, vol. 2, 1550–1660 (Oxford, 2010). Peter Burke studied at Oxford (St John’s and St Antony’s Colleges, 1957–62) before joining the faculty of the new interdisciplinary University of Sussex, where he taught until 1979, when he moved to Cambridge to be Lecturer in European History, then Reader in and Professor of Cultural History. He has published twenty-three books, including The Italian Renaissance (Batsford, 1972), Popular Culture in Early Modern Europe (London, 1978), The Fabrication of Louis XIV (Yale, 1992), The Art of Conversation (Cornell, 1993), A Social History of Knowledge (Polity Press, 2000), Eyewitnessing (Reaktion, 2001), What Is Cultural History? (Cambridge, 2004), and Languages and Communities in Early Modern Europe (Cambridge, 2004), and has been translated into twenty-eight languages. Having retired in 2004, he remains a Fellow of Emmanuel College. A. E. B. Coldiron (PhD, University of Virginia; Professor of English, History of Text Technologies Program, and affiliated faculty in French, Florida State University) is the author of three books on Renaissance translation, most recently Printers Without Borders: Translation and Textuality in the Renaissance (Cambridge, 2015). Her awards include Folger Fellowships, NEH Fellowships, and a Kluge Fellowship (junior) in the Library of Congress. Her essays on translation and poetry have appeared in such journals as Comparative Literature, Chaucer Review, Spenser Studies, Criticism, and the Yale Journal of Criticism.

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Line Cottegnies is Professor of English Literature at the Université Sorbonne Nouvelle–Paris 3. She is the author of a monograph on the politics and poetics of wonder in Caroline poetry, L’ éclipse du regard: La poésie anglaise du baroque au classicisme (Droz, 1997). She has coedited Authorial Conquests: Essays on Genre in the Writings of Margaret Cavendish with Nancy Weitz, and has published widely on seventeenth-century literature, in particular on Margaret Cavendish and Aphra Behn’s translations. She has edited and translated Shakespeare’s Henry VI (Parts 1, 2, and 3) for the Gallimard bilingual editions, for which she has edited twelve plays. Her edition of Henry IV, Part 2 is forthcoming with Norton. She has also published an anthology of early modern English women writers in French translation, Margaret Astell et le féminisme au XVIIe siècle: Anthologie commentée (ENS, 2008), and is currently working on a multiauthor project on early modern women writers and the politics of translation and imitation of French literature. Margaret Ferguson is Distinguished Professor of English at the University of California at Davis; she previously taught at Yale, Columbia, and the University of Colorado at Boulder. She has just completed serving as President of the Modern Language Association, and has been a trustee for the Shakespeare Association of America and a member of the executive boards for the American Comparative Literature Association and the Renaissance Association of America. She is the author of Trials of Desire: Renaissance Defenses of Poetry (Yale, 1983) and Dido’s Daughters: Gender, Literacy, and Empire in Early Modern England and France (Chicago, 2003); the latter won the Roland Bainton Prize for Sixteenth Century Studies and was a cowinner of the best book prize of the Society for the Study of Early Modern Women. She has coedited eleven books, among them the first play published in England by a woman (Mariam, the Fair Queen of Jewry, 1613) and the fourth and fifth editions of The Norton Anthology of Poetry (Norton, 2004). Edith Grossman has translated poetry, fiction, and nonfiction by major Latin American and Spanish writers, ranging from Gabriel García Márquez and Mario Vargas Llosa to Miguel de Cervantes and Luis de Góngora. Awards include Fulbright, Wilson, and Guggenheim Fellowships, the PEN Manheim Medal for Translation, an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Queen Sofía Translation Prize, and induction into the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.

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Ann Rosalind Jones is Esther Cloudman Dunn Professor of Comparative Literature Emerita at Smith College. Her work includes two books on women writers of the Renaissance, The Currency of Eros: Women’s Love Lyric in Europe, 1540–1620 (Indiana, 1990) and a translation of The Poems and Selected Letters of Veronica Franco, with Margaret  F. Rosenthal (Chicago, 1998). Her more recent work has focused on the meanings of dress in early modern Europe, including Renaissance Clothing and the Materials of Memory, with Peter Stallybrass (Cambridge, 2000), winner of the Modern Language Association’s 2001 James Russell Lowell Prize, and another translation with Margaret Rosenthal, The Clothing of the Renaissance World (Europe, Asia, Africa, America): Cesare Vecellio’s Habiti Antichi et Moderni (Thames and Hudson, 2008). László Kontler is Professor of History at Central European University in Budapest. His research interests include intellectual history, translation, and reception, as well as the history of knowledge production in the early modern period, mainly the eighteenth century. He has written and published extensively on the history of European and Hungarian political and historical thought. He is the author of a book (in Hungarian) on the early history of conservatism, and of A History of Hungary (Palgrave, 2002). His book on the German reception of the Scottish historian William Robertson, Translations, Histories, Enlightenments appeared from Palgrave in 2014. Jacques Lezra is Professor of Comparative Literature, Spanish, English, and German at New York University, and Chair of the Department of Comparative Literature. His most recent book is Wild Materialism: The Ethic of Terror and the Modern Republic (Fordham, 2010; Spanish translation, with a prologue by Etienne Balibar, 2012; Chinese translation, Peking University Press, 2013). With Emily Apter and Michael Wood, he is the coeditor of the translation into English of Dictionary of Untranslatables (Fr. Vocabulaire européen des philosophies; Princeton). He coedited, with Georgina Dopico-Black, Sebastián de Covarrubias: Suplemento al “Tesoro de la lengua castellana, o española.” With Paul North, he edits the Fordham University Press book series IDIOM. Carla Nappi is Associate Professor of History and Canada Research Chair in Earl Modern Studies at the University of British Columbia. Her first book, The Monkey and the Inkpot: Natural History and Its Transformations in Early Modern China (Harvard, 2009), explored the construction of knowledge in a

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sixteenth-century Chinese encyclopedia of natural historical knowledge. Her current research focuses on the cultures and practices of translation across early modern Eurasia. Karen Newman is Owen Walker ’33 Professor of Humanities and Professor of Comparative Literature and English at Brown University. She has written widely on Shakespeare and Renaissance letters and culture and is the author of several books, including Shakespeare’s Rhetoric of Comic Character (Methuen, 1985), Fashioning Femininity and English Renaissance Drama (Chicago, 1991), Fetal Positions: Individualism, Science, Visuality (Stanford, 1996), Cultural Capitals: Early Modern London and Paris (Princeton, 2007), and Essaying Shakespeare (Minnesota, 2009). Her articles have appeared in various journals, including Comparative Literature, ELH, ELR, PMLA, Shakespeare Quarterly, and Renaissance Drama. Her current research is on cultural translation and the reception of Shakespeare in Europe. Katharina N. Piechocki is Assistant Professor in the Department of Comparative Literature at Harvard University. She holds a PhD in comparative literature from New York University for a thesis titled “Cartographic Humanism: Defining Early Modern Europe, 1400–1550.” She also completed a dissertation on the origin of the opera libretto in Italy and France at Vienna University, Austria. Sarah Rivett teaches in the English Department at Princeton University and specializes in early American and eighteenth-century transatlantic literature and culture. Her first book, The Science of the Soul in Colonial New England (North Carolina, 2011), was awarded the Brewer Prize of the American Society of Church History. She is the coeditor of Religious Transformations in the Early Modern Americas (Pennsylvania, 2014) and is currently completing the manuscript for a book to be titled Unscripted America: Writing Indigenous Tongues from Colony to Nation. Her articles have appeared in PMLA, American Literary History, Early American Literature, William and Mary Quarterly, and Early American Studies. Naomi Tadmor is Professor of History at Lancaster University. She is the author of Family and Friends in Eighteenth-Century England: Household, Kinship, and Patronage (Cambridge, 2001) and The Social Universe of the English Bible: Scripture, Society, and Culture in Early Modern England (Cambridge,

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2010); coeditor of The Practice and Representation of Reading in England (Cambridge, 1996); and joint guest editor of Kinship in England and Beyond, 500– 2000, a special issue of Continuity and Change (2010). She has published articles on the history of the family, the history of reading, and the culture of the Bible in early modern England. Jane Tylus is Professor of Italian Studies and Comparative Literature at New York University, and Faculty Director of the Humanities Initiative. Her work includes Writing and Vulnerability in the Late Renaissance (Stanford, 1993), the coedited Epic Traditions in the Contemporary World (California, 1999), Reclaiming Catherine of Siena: Literature, Literacy, and the Signs of Others (Chicago, 2009), the coedited The Poetics of Masculinity in Early Modern Italy and Spain (Toronto, 2010), and the forthcoming Siena: City of Secrets (Chicago, 2015). She edits the journal I Tatti Studies in the Italian Renaissance and edited the early modern volume for The Longman Anthology of World Literature. She is the award-winning translator of the storie sacre of Lucrezia Tornabuoni de’ Medici (2001) and the complete poems of Gaspara Stampa (Chicago, 2010). Her current project focuses on linguistic hospitalities and the translation of epic in early modern Italy.

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Index

Abbt, Thomas, 245 Aberdeen (Scotland), 241 Act of Settlement, 222 Aeneid (Virgil), 8, 227, 269n35 Africa, 26, 85, 86–87 Africe brevis descriptio (Osorius), 85 Alberti, Leon Battista, 28, 31–32, 34–38, 40–42, 285n21 Album amicorum, 91, 93 Alcida (Greene), 103 Alexander V, 79 Alexander VI, 285n23 Alexander the Great, 79 Alfonso of Aragon, 37 Alfonso the Wise, 160 Alighieri, Dante, 9, 12, 15, 17, 116, 262 Almagest (Ptolemy), 284n7 Altamira, 222, 225. See also The Generall America, 15, 84–85, 87, 158, 191, 194, 196, 201–2; English settlement in, 192–93; Mosaic history, 203–4; spiritual renewal, as space of, 204. See also North America American Dictionary (Webster), 190 American Indians. See Indian [native American] population American Philosophical Society (APS), 189–90, 204 Aminta (Tasso), 140 De Amore (Ebreo), 100 Amores (Ovid), 47–49, 51–52 Anatomy of Wit (Lyly), 103 Androuet du Cerceau, Jacques, 27, 37–38, 40–41 Angeli da Scarperia, Iacopo, 79, 80, 284n10, 285n13; and translatio imperii, 79 Anglo-Saxons, 202 Annam (modern Vietnam), 208 Anselm, 85

The Antiquities of Nations (Pezron), 202 Antonius (Garnier), 223 Aporias (Derrida), 123 Apothegms (Erasmus), 100 Aquinas, Thomas, 27 Archeologia Britannica (Lhwyd), 202–3 Archibald, Elizabeth, 73, 281n23, 283n42 De architectura (Baldi), 32 architectural treatises, 27–28, 34, 39; architecture, as collaborative at, 37; cultural translation, 38; illustrations of, 35; printers of, 36 Architecture (Delorme), 43 Aridjis, Homero, 260 Ariosto, Ludovico, 7–8, 72, 134, 136–39, 143 Aristotle, 9–10, 13, 22, 27, 77, 132, 294n3 Ars amatoria (Ovid), 46, 49, 52, 132 Arte of English Poesie (Puttenham), 124 Ascham, Roger, 130 Asia, 21, 77, 82–83, 85, 87–88 De Asia (Piccolomini), 85, 87 As You Like It (Shakespeare), 54 Atlas (Ortelius), 91 Aubrey, John, 193 Aubrey, Mary, 325n6 Augustus, 47, 49, 52 Awa no Kuni Collection, 322n27 Azande, 26 Babylonian Empire, 187 Bacon, Francis, 41, 195, 200 Bacon, Sir Nicholas, 41–42 Bailey, Amanda, 124 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 269n34 Baldi, Bernardino, 32 Baldus (Folengo), 56, 72, 74 Bale, John, 57–58, 63–65

344

INDEX

Barbaro, Daniele, 32, 36, 39 Barker, William, 300n50 Barletta, Vincent, 305n16 Bartoli, 32–33 Basel (Switzerland), 36 Bate, Jonathan, 48 Battiffera, Laura, 16–17 battle of Orsha, 90 Baudelaire, Charles, 251 Baxter, Richard, 197 Beal, Peter, 221 Beckett, Samuel, 264 Behn, Aphra, 20 Beier, A. L., 126 Belitt, Ben, 255–56 Bellay, François de, 38 Belleau, Remy, 37–38, 72 De Bello Huguenotico (Belleau), 72, 74 Bembo, Pietro, 28, 72 Benedictus (Bale), 57, 63, 64–65, 280n18 Beneventano, Marco, 84, 287n39 Ben Israel, Manasseh, 196 Benjamin, Walter, 3, 121 Benveniste, Emile, 7, 128–29 Berlin (Germany), 241 Berman, Sandra, 2 Berriott, Karine, 111 Besse, Jean-Marc, 92 Bibles: Bishop’s Bible, 177, 184; Coverdale, 177; early modernity, role in, 16; Geneva Bible, 16, 177, 180, 187; Great Bible, 177, 183, 187; Hebrew Bible, 179, 182; King James Version, 1, 177–80, 182–84, 312n59, 312n61; Latin Vulgate, 12, 179; New Testament, 176, 179, 198; Old Testament, 176, 179, 182; Rheims-Douai, 178, 183–84, 280n18, 312n59; Septuagint, 8, 16, 182; St. Jerome’s Vulgate, 16; Thomas Matthew Bible, 177, 183–84, 312n59; translations of, 175–77; Tyndale, 177–79, 183–84; Vulgate, 16, 21, 179, 182–83; Wycliffite Bible, 177, 179–80, 183 Bill, John, 19 Biondo, Flavio, 89 Bistué, Bélen, 132 Bizzarri, Pietro, 92 Blake, William, 139 Bloom, Gina, 124 Bloom, Jonathan, 80–81 Blum, Hans, 34 Boccaccio, Giovanni, 9, 11, 13, 15, 28, 268n31

Bodley, Thomas, 19 Boehme, Jacob, 195 Bohemia, 27 Boninsegni, Domenico di Lionardo, 285n20 Bonnefoy, Yves, 257–58 Book of Common Prayer, 63 Book of the Courtier (Castiglione), 75 Book of Psalms, 16–17 books, 34; booksellers, 18–19; format of, 27; readers of, 37; and reception, 39 Borges, Jorge Luis, 255–56 Bosman, Anston, 124 Botley, Paul, 284n10 Botticelli, Sandro, 6 Bourdieu, Pierre, 27 Bourges, Clémence de, 102 Bourne, Richard, 198 Boutcher, Warren, 15 Boyle, Marjorie O’Rourke, 13 Boyle, Robert, 195, 197, 199–200, 315n10, 317n29 Boyle, Roger. See Orrery, Earl of Braccesi, Alexandro, 5–7, 9–10, 22, 266n13 Bracciolini, Gianfrancesco Poggio, 28 Bradstreet, Simon, 315n10 Bramante, Donato, 35–36 Brantôme, Pierre de, 44 Braybrook, Jean, 72 Brazil, 287n37 A Briefe and True Report of the New Found Land of Virginia (Harriot), 192 Brinsley, John, 130–31 Britain: ancient languages of, 202–3; national identity, and primitive civilizations, as central to, 201 Brittany, 202–3 Brunelleschi, Filippo, 285n21 Bruni, Leonardo, 4, 9–11, 13, 17, 22, 79, 129–30, 132, 284n10, 285n13 De Brys, Theodor, 19 Buache, Philippe, 95 Buckhurst, Lord, 222 Buffon, Comte de, 189 Burgh, Benedict, 59 Burghley House, 41–42 Caesar, Julius, 225 Call to the Unconverted (Baxter), 197 Calvo, Fabio, 36 Canada, 205 Canterbury Tales (Chaucer), 7

INDEX cartography: “epoch of translations,” 78; errors, 80; geographic knowledge v. empirical knowledge, 77–78, 94, 96; Greek language, importance of to, 79; mappae mundi, 80; mistranslation, 78; performativity of, 93; text and image, relationship between, 80–81; translation, as form of, 94, 96 visualization, as process of, 78, 82; words and images, relationship between, 78 Castiglione, Baldassare, 33, 43 Catholic Church, 16, 62, 65, 68–69; and witchcraft, 70 Catlin, 46–47, 49 Caxton, William, 57–60, 62, 279n12, 279n14 Cecil, William, 41–42 La Celestina (Rojas), 20, 153–55, 157–58, 165, 174 Celtic languages, 202 Cervantes, Miguel de, 166–69, 171–74, 259–63; modernity of, 170; translation, as model of, 170 Cesariano, Cesare, 35, 38–39 Chalmers, Hero, 225 Charlemagne, 27 Charles I, 175, 181, 188, 225, 231 Charles II, 20, 175, 222, 225, 232 Charles V, 38 Charley, Pierre, 102 Chartier, Roger, 27, 98 Chaucer, Geoff rey, 7 Chaulmer, Charles, 225 Cheney, Patrick, 51 China, 2, 23, 207; Huitong Siyi guan, bureaus at, 219; Interpretators’ Station, 209, 212–13, 219; Manchu language in, 218–20; Manchu literature, 218; miscellany practice of in, 214–18; multilingualism in, 218–19 Chowaniec, Czesław, 287n39 Christianity, 13, 21, 39, 170, 194 Chronica Polonorum (Miechowita), 83 Chrysoloras, Manuel, 78–80, 284n10 Churchyard, Thomas, 46, 49 Cicero, 3, 9, 11–12, 39, 246 The Civil War (Cowley), 225 Classic of Changes, 213 Clement VIII, 16 Cleopatra (La Calprenède), 224 Clermont, Louise de, 38

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code-switching, 58–59, 71–72; and translation, 68–70 Coecke, Pieter, 35 Collected Works (Philips), 221 Columbus, 83, 158 Colwell, Thomas, 65 A Comedy of Thre Lawes (Bale), 57, 63–64 Comenius, Jan, 194–95, 198–99, 317n29 Commedia (Dante), 262 Conley, Tom, 94 Contes d’Eutrapel (Du Fail), 44 Cooke, Anne, 41 Cooke, Anthony, 41 Cooke, Mildred, 41 Copernicus, 36 Corneille, Pierre, 2, 221–23, 228–30, 234; political relevance of, 225–26; popularity of, 224 Cornwall, 203 Cortegiano (Castiglione), 33–34 Cosmographia (Schöner), 88 Cosmography (Münster and Ortelius), 290n63 Cotterell, Sir Charles, 221, 223, 227, 325n6 Cotton, John Jr., 193 Courtauld Institute, 40 Covarrubias, Sebastián de, 163, 165–66, 169–70, 173 Coverdale, Myles, 180, 307n21 Cowley, Abraham, 223, 225, 227, 235 The Craft of Translation (Schulte), 100 Cratylus (Plato), 195 Cromwell, Oliver, 188, 222 Crooke, John, 221 Crupi, Charles, 103 cultural exchange, 26 cultural transfer, 26 cultural translation, 17–18, 26, 39–40; architectural treatises, 38; typefaces shift of, 34 Curtius, Ernst R., 56, 58, 60, 63, 69, 72–73 d’Ablancourt, Perrot, 227 d’Armagnac, Georges, 37 dal Pozzo Toscanelli, Paolo, 285n21 Danforth, Thomas, 315n10 Daniel, Samuel, 6–7 Davenport, John, 199 Davies, John, 224 Davis, Natalie, 111 “Death the Poet” (Hecht), 280n22

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Debarbieux, Bernard, 95 Le Débat de Folie et d’Amour (Labé), 97–98, 100–101, 104, 116; context of, 102 The Debate between Follie and Loue (Greene), 97, 100, 116; context of, 102 Decameron (Dante), 11 Deleuze, Gilles, 95–96 Delorme, Philibert, 27, 37–38, 40–43 Denham, John, 223, 226–27, 235 Denmark, 16 Department of Homeland Security, 120 Derrida, Jacques, 3–4, 114, 123, 128, 140, 152 Devotions upon Emergent Occasions (Donne), 23 de Worde, Wynkyn, 57, 62–63, 279n14 D’Holbach, Baron, 291n75 A Dictionarie in Spanish and English (Perceval and Minsheu), 172, 173 Dictionary of Untranslatables, 129 Diehl, Patrick, 283n42 Dietterlin, Wendel, 40 diglossia, 123 Discoverie of Witchcraft (Scot), 58–59, 69–70 Doctrina Cristiana (de Gante), 191, 315n7 Dolven, Jeff, 130–31 Donation of Constantine, 12 Donne, John, 23–24 Don Quixote (Cervantes), 1, 23, 166, 169, 171, 258–64; confusion of languages in, 173–74; modernity of, 174; peregrine wandering in, 173–74 d’Orléans, Charles, 73 dragomans, 21 Dryden, John, 138, 255, 228, 235 Du Bartas, Guillaume de Salluste, 6–7, 17 Dublin (Ireland), 222 Dudley, John (Duke of Northumberland), 40 Du Fail, Noël, 44 Du Guillet, Pernette, 108 Duke’s Theatre, 222 Dunbar, William, 57–59, 67 Du Ponceau, Peter, 190, 314n4 Dürer, Albrecht, 42 Dury, John, 195, 199 Dylan, Bob, 46 The Ear of the Other (Derrida), 123 Ebreo, Leone, 116 Edgerton, Samuel Y., 285n21

Edinburgh (Scotland), 240–41 Edinburgh Enlightenment, 241 Edward IV, 66 Edward VI, 40, 65–66 Egypt, 16 Eikon basilike (Charles I), 181 Eliot, John, 191, 193, 196, 200, 315n10; Praying Towns, 198; ten lost tribes theory of, 199; translation, theory of, 197–98 Eliot Bible, 191, 199 Elizabeth, Queen, 41, 48, 50, 127, 133, 151 The Elizabethan Prodigals (Helgerson), 103 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 148 England, 8, 16–18, 21, 34–35, 38, 62, 64–65, 103, 118, 120, 127, 133, 138, 141, 176, 194–95, 204, 223, 225, 227, 238, 279n13, 281n23; macaronics in, 73–74; multilingual printing in, 57, 74–75; as polyglot, 58; Roman civitas, as modeled after, 129; Somerset network in, 40–42 English Bibles, 177, 180, 183–84, 187; and Englishing, 180–81, 188; English tongue, and Hebrew, affinity with, 178–79, 182; Scriptures, backward reading of, 179; Vulgate, rooted in, 179 English Renaissance literature: Ovidianism in, 45; as transnational enterprise, 57, 75; witchcraft in, 69 Enlightenment, 4, 22–23, 237, 238, 240, 249; multilingual modernity of, 245 Epistulae ex Ponto (Ovid), 46, 47, 255 Erasmus, 12–13, 16–17, 21, 101, 116, 147, 180, 300n50, 307n21 Essais (Montaigne), 22, 44 Essay Concerning Human Understanding (Locke), 200–201 Essay on the Principles of Translation (Tytler), 246 Essay on Translated Verse (Earl of Roscommon), 223 Estienne, Henri, 18 Ethics (Aristotle), 100 Eugene Onegin (Tchaikovsky), 254 Eunuchus (Terence), 131, 138 De Europa (Piccolomini), 85 Europe, 2, 4, 10, 15–21, 23–24, 26, 36, 43, 77-78, 82–85, 86–91, 132, 176, 239–40, 242, 246, 263, 290n63 European Science Foundation, 26 European Union (EU), 21

INDEX Evans-Pritchard, Edward, 26 Everingham, Robert, 198 Fables (Aesop), 100 Fanshawe, Sir Richard, 235 Farmer, John Stephen, 64 Fasti (Ovid), 47, 52 Felstiner, John, 257–58 Ferguson, Adam, 237, 246 Filarete, Antonio, 43 Filargis, Peter, 79 Filmer, Sir Edward, 222 Finnegans Wake (Joyce), 56 Fitter, Christopher, 126 Flanders (Belgium), 41 Flaubert, Gustave, 258 Fleming, Juliet, 99 Fletcher, John, 143, 145 Florence (Italy), 6, 36, 43, 78, 80; botteghe in, 80; Latin in, as living language, 9–10; publishing industry in, 80 Florio, John, 20, 22 Folengo, Teofilo, 56, 72 Forster, Georg, 249 Forster, Johann Reinhold, 249 Foucault, Michel, 7 Frame, Donald, 115 France, 8, 15, 17, 20, 27, 37, 41–42, 62, 111, 223–25 François I, 37 Frankfurt (Germany), 18–19; book fair, 18–19 Fraunce, Abraham, 140 French Revolution, 237, 249 Frost, Robert, 251 Fumerton, Patricia, 126 Galbraith, Stephen, 279n12 Galen, 80 Gallatin, Albert, 314n1 de Gante, Pedro, 315n7 García Márquez, Gabriel, 255, 260 Gargantua and Pantagruel (Rabelais), 111 Garnier, Robert, 225 Garve, Christopher, 249 Gascoigne, George, 134, 136–38, 140–41, 143 Gauden, John, 310n34 The Generall, 222. See also Altamira Genette, Gérard, 27 Geography (Ptolemy), 77–81, 82–84, 86, 284n6, 284n10, 286n24, 287n39 Germanus, Nicolaus, 81–82, 89

347

Germany, 18, 34, 87, 237, 240–42, 244–45, 248 Ghiberti, Lorenzo, 43 Giocondo, Fra Giovanni, 32, 36 Giudici, Enzo, 111 Glaber z Kobylina, Andrzej, 83 Glasgow (Scotland), 241 Głogów, Jan of, 84, 287n37 Goddard, Ives, 314n1 Godolphin, Sidney, 222 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 245–46, 334n37 Golding, Arthur, 55 Gombrich, Ernst, 42 Gorhambury (building), 41 Gothic, 27 Götingen (Germany), 240–41 Goujon, Jean, 31, 35 Gower, John, 47 Gramática de la lengua castellana (Nebrija), 158, 163–65 Grammarians’ Wars, 279n13 Grammatical Institute of the English Language (Webster), 190 Granada (Spain), 158, 169 Grand Duchy of Muscovy, 89–90 Greece, 249 Greenblatt, Stephen, 316n12 Greene, Robert, 2, 20–22, 97–98, 100, 109–10, 112–14, 116; audience of, 103; background of, 102–3; literature, as social aspiration of, 103; Love and Folly, treatment of, 105–7; male readers, attention to, 99, 103, 115; women, attitude toward, 103–4 Greene, Thomas, 8–9 Greene’s Carde of Fancie (Greene), 98 Greenes News from both Heaven and Hell (Greene), 103 Greer, Germaine, 221 Gresham, Christiana, 41 Gresham, Sir Thomas, 41–42 Grondregulen der Bow-Const (Scamozzi), 28 Grounds of Architecture (Shute), 43 Gustav II, 16 Guthrie, William, 246 Gwydonius (Greene), 97–99, 102–4 habitus, 27 Hajdukiewicz, Leszek, 84, 287n37 Hale, Matthew, 201

348 Halle (Germany), 241 Hamilton, John T., 121–22 The Handmaid’s Tale (Atwood), 250 Hankins, James, 268n29, 285n20 Hanlin Academy, 209 Harington, John, 7–9, 17 Harley, J. P., 94 Harriot, Thomas, 192–93 Hart, John, 192 Hartlib, Samuel, 194–96, 199 Hecataeus of Miletus, 286n33 Hecht, Anthony, 280n22 Heckewelder, John, 190 Helgerson, Richard, 103 Henri II, 36 Henrietta Maria, 224 Henry V (Shakespeare), 129, 135 Herbert, Mary Sidney, 223 Herder, Johann Gottfried, 156, 244–46, 334n37; and national spirit, 247 Herodotus, 203 Heroides (Ovid), 46, 134, 146–47, 301n54 Hessler, John W., 79, 86 Hieroglyphics (Horapollo), 36 An Historical Disquisition . . . India (Robertson), 239, 248–49 The History of America (Robertson), 239, 248–49 History of Charles V (Robertson), 4, 236, 238 Th e History of Scotland (Robertson), 238 Hobbes, Thomas, 188, 200 Hodgdon, Barbara, 119, 138–39, 294n1 Holy Roman Empire, 17–18, 242; and Westphalian system, 332n13 Home, Henry (Lord Kames), 237 Homer, 77, 94, 111, 135, 151, 263, 291n73 Hope for Israel (Ben Israel), 196 Horace, 3, 11–12, 22–23, 269n35 Horace (Corneille), 221 Horapollo, 36 Hosley, Richard, 138–39 Howard, Thomas (Earl of Arundel), 40 Huang Ming xiangxu lu (Mao Ruizheng), 322n27 Hugh of St. Victor, 27 humanism, 25 Hume, David, 237, 239 Hutson, Lorna, 135 Huygens, Constantijn, 40

INDEX Hyperboreans Mountains, 76, 83, 89, 93–94; erroneous mapping, as example of, 77 Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, 36, 43 Ideas on the Philosophy of History of Mankind (Herder), 247 Iliad (Homer), 301n54 “I maister Andro Kennedy” (Dunbar), 57–59, 67–68 Imperial Academy, 208, 209 Imperially Commissioned Definitive Manchu Dictionary, 218 Imperially Commissioned Manchu Dictionary in Five Scripts, 219 India, 90 Indian Bible, 198, 315n10 Indian Dialogues (Eliot), 200 Indian Grammar (Eliot), 197 Indian [native American] languages, 189, 191, 192, 198, 199, 200; ancient British, affi nities between, 201; Eu ropean response to, 193; Hebrew, resemblance to, 197; Mosaic account, of human history, 190, 205; national identity, 204; sacred essence of, 190; sacred contents of, 193–96, 205 Indian Library, 191 Indian [native American] population, 189, 190–91; as dispersed Jews, 193; Mosaic history, 201–2; ten lost tribes, as descendents of, 196–97, 199 Indian Primer (Eliot), 198–200 Inferno (Dante), 12 Innocent VII, 285n13 In Praise of Scribes (Beal), 221 Institution de la femme chrestienne (Vives), 100 De Institutio Oratoria (Quintilian), 117 “Interlinear Trysting” (Moisan), 131 “Into the Still Hollow” (Merwin), 280n22 Introductio in Ptolemaei Cosmographiam (Stobnica), 85 Introductorium in tractatum Sphaerae (Sacrobosco), 84 Iraq, 120 Ireland, 198, 224, 227 Isabel, Queen, 158–61, 163 Isidore of Seville, 85 Islam, 170 The Isle of Dogs (Jonson), 112

INDEX I Suppositi (Ariosto), 136, 139 Italy, 9, 15, 17–18, 26, 27, 37–38, 40–41, 43, 72, 78–79, 87 Jakobson, Roman, 122–23 James, Heather, 150, 299n46 James I, 16, 19, 127 James the Printer, 197 Jefferson, Thomas, 16, 189–90, 205 Jena (Germany), 241 Jesus Christ Superstar, 155 Jews in America (Thorowgood), 196 Jianwen Emperor, 208 Jodelle, Etienne, 225 Johnson, Marmaduke, 197 Jones, Inigo, 27, 36–37, 40 Jonson, Ben, 112 Juana Inés de la Cruz, Sor, 53 Judaism, 170 Jurin, James, 204 Kangxi Emperor, 218 Kant, Immanuel, 334n37 Kerver, Jacques, 36 A Key into the Language of America (Williams), 194–95, 197 Khubilai Khan, 213 King Lear (Shakespeare), 6 King Philip’s War, 315n10 King’s Men, 127 Kirby Hall, 41 Klopstock, Friedrich Gottlieb, 245 Knowles, Edwin, 171 Kochanowski, Jan, 17 Korah, 181–82, 188 Krumpach, Nikolaus, 88 Kundera, Milan, 250 Labé, Louise, 2, 17, 20–22, 97–100, 103, 108–10, 113–15; background of, 102; hierarchy, antagonism toward, 111–12, 116; Love and Folly, treatment of, 104–5, 107; women’s education, defense of, 101 Lacock Abbey, 40 Landers, Clifford, 251 language of architecture, 24; grammar of, 26; illustrations, importance of to, 32–33; terms of, 42–44 languages, 201; divine essence, as vehicle for, 194; indigenous, 315n6; as “lost,” 15–16; translational notions of, 199–200; and

349

universal language, 194; as vernacular, 16–19, 29, 23 Lapacino, Francesco di, 285n20 Latin, 12–13, 17–18, 20, 23; Church, dependence on, 15; as grammatical language, 15–16; Greek, competition with, 11; as obstacle, to readers, 34; shifting status of, 10 Latini, Brunetto, 100 Latin Office for the Dead, 66 Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 245 Léon, Fra Luis de, 16 Leonardo da Vinci, 43 Lepore, Jill, 316n12 Letters from Orinda to Poliarchus (Philips), 221, 223–27, 232, 234–35 Lévinas, Emmanuel, 7 Lhwyd, Edward, 201–4 A Light to Grammar (Woodward), 194 The Light in Troy (Greene), 8 literary theory, 45 Little, Robert, 221 Living to Tell the Tale (García Márquez), 260 Livy, 9, 12, 22 Locke, John, 122, 188, 195, 200–201 Lodwick, Francis, 193 London (England), 40, 102–3, 222, 241 López de Velasco, Juan, 173 Loscoco, Paula, 221 Louis XIV, 225 Low Countries, 17–18 Lucan, 12, 225, 230 Lucian, 116, 269n34 Lucretius, 11 Ludus Literarius (Brinsley), 130 Lupton, Julia Reinhard, 119 Luther, Martin, 2–3, 8, 12, 16, 245 Luther’s German New and Old Testaments, 16 Lyly, John, 131, 139, 141–42 Lyon (France), 18, 36, 101–2, 111 Mabbe, James, 153 macaronic elegy, 66 macaronics: aureate line in, 73; codeswitching, 59, 70, 72 contre-texte, practice of, 73–74; cultural negotiation, 59; Englished books, 59; expressive tactics of, 70–74; interlingual contact, 75; language difference, 60; Latin prayer, use of, 62–63; multilingualism of, 73;

350

INDEX

macaronics (continued) negative capability, 71; Otherness, contact with, 58; phonetic play in, 71; poetry, 2, 57, 64, 279n13, 281n23; political or social critique and satire, 66–67; as polyglot, 4, 58–59; in printing, 57–59, 74; transgressive sexuality, treatment of, 66–67; translation, use of, 58–60, 62, 65, 69; verse, 56, 72, 74–75 Macherey, Pierre, 114 Machiavelli, Niccolò, 13 Madrid (Spain), 34 Magellan, Ferdinand, 79, 93–94 Maggi, Annibal, 83 Magnalia Christi Americana (Mather), 203 Magnus, Albertus, 27–28 Maguire, Laurie, 134 Maguire, Nancy, 224 Malcolm, Noel, 317n29 Malcolme, David, 203 Mamillia (Greene), 98, 103 Mamusse wunneetupanatamwe up biblum God (Eliot), 191, 198 Manheim, Ralph, 261 Manuel I, 90 Mao Ruizheng, 322n27 mappae mundi, 77, 80 Maria of Hungary, 38 Marlowe, Christopher, 20–21, 46, 51 Marot, Clément, 100 Martha’s Vineyard, 198, 205 Martin, Jean, 43 Martin, Jehan, 35–36, 38 Mary, Queen of Scots, 238 Marx, Karl, 121 Massachusetts Bay Colony, 196 Mather, Cotton, 201–4 May, Thomas, 225 Mayhew, Experience, 193, 205 Maximilian I, 89 McKenzie, Don (D. W.), 27 Medea (Euripides), 46 Medici, Catherine de’, 38 Medici, Lorenzo de’, 37 Medici, Lorenzo Pierfrancesco de’, 5 Medidas del Romano (Sagredo), 34, 43 Meiners, Christoph, 247 Mela, 77 Ménage, 227 Menocal, María Rosa, 167 The Merchant of Venice (Shakespeare), 140

The Merry Wives of Windsor (Shakespeare), 1, 4 Merwin, W. S., 280n22 Metamorphoses (Ovid), 45–46, 52–53, 55, 133, 137 Midas (Lyly), 139, 141 A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Shakespeare), 4, 45 Miechowita, Maciej, 77, 83, 88–91, 290n63 Mignolo, Walter, 316n12 Milanesi, Marica, 286n33, 288n45 Millar, John, 237 Ming dynasty, 21, 207–8, 213, 218–20 Minor Poets of the Caroline Period (Saintsbury), 221 The Mirror for Magistrates, 66 Mirrour of Modestie (Greene), 98 miscellanies, 220; as pidgin linguistic space, 217–18; practice of, 215–17; as textural genre (xiaoshuo, or small writings), 215–16 “The Misery and Splendor of Translation” (Ortega y Gasset), 252 missionaries: Anglo-American, 191–92, 195, 205; Jesuits, 39, 191, 315n7; Protestants, failure of, 199–200; and Puritan evangelization, 196–98, 203 Mittenhuber, Florian, 80 modernity, 1–2, 13, 15; Bible, role of in, 16; vernacular, as literary language in, 16–17 Modern Times (Dylan), 46 Moisan, Thomas, 124, 131, 149 Molera, Antonio Medina, 167 Molière, 224 Montaigne, Michel de, 22, 38, 44 Morris, Brian, 136 La Mort de Pompée (Corneille), 221, 225; topicality of, 223–24 Muchembled, Robert, 26 Mulcaster, Richard, 135, 146, 300n50 Münster, Sebastian, 290n63 Murray, David, 316n12 Nabokov, Vladimir, 254–55 Naples (Italy), 17–18 Nashe, Thomas, 112 Nation, Language, and the Ethics of Translation (Berman and Wood), 2 Natural History (Pliny), 76, 83 Natural History of the Earth (Woodward), 201 Navarre, Marguerite de, 37–38, 100

INDEX Navigazioni e viaggi (Ramusio), 83 Nebrija, Antonio de, 161, 170, 172; Castilian Spanish, 159–60, 162; modernity of, 165–66; modern Spanish grammar, 158; and peregrinas, 163–65, 173 Netherlands, 18, 34, 41–42 Newcomb, Lori Humphrey, 98–99 New England, 193, 197–98, 204 New England Company for the Propagation of the Gospel, 200 New England Primer, 197 New England’s Prospect (Wood), 193 New France, 315n7 Newman, Karen, 67, 152 New Testament (Erasmus, 1516), 12–13, 16 New World. See America Niccoli, Niccolò, 79, 284n10, 285n13, 285n20 Nicholas V, 28 Nicomachean Ethics (Aristotle), 9, 22 North Africa, 263 North Carolina, 192 Notes on the State of Virginia (Jeff erson), 189 Nouvelles Inventions (Delorme), 41 Nuremberg (Germany), 34, 36 Nuthaci, 218 O’Brien, Karen, 238 Oceania, 26 Odyssey (Homer), 94 Of Hospitality (Derrida), 128 Ogilby, John, 224, 227 Olor Iscanus (Ovid), 47 One Hundred Years of Solitude (García Márquez), 255 Ong, Walter, 278n9 Orations (Cicero), 246 De oratore (Cicero), 3 Origen, 13 Orlando furioso (Ariosto), 7–8 Orrery, Earl of, 222, 224–25 Ortega y Gasset, José, 252, 256 Ortelius, Abraham, 91–93, 290n63 Osorius, Paulus, 85 Ottheinrich, Elector Palatine, 38 Ottoman Empire, 21 Ovid, 20–21, 45, 49, 52–53, 117, 119, 133–35, 137, 139–40, 144, 146–51, 301n54; erotic poetry of, 51; as exile, 132; exile poems of, 46–48, 50–51, 54–55; Loeb Edition of, 46 Owen, Anne, 222

351

Oxford Guide to Literature in English Translation (Boutcher), 15 Oxford History of Translation in English: 1550–1660 (Braden), 4 Palladio, Andrea, 28, 35–38, 40 Pandosto (Greene), 98 Panglottia (Comenius), 195 Panofsky, Erwin, 27, 36 Parker, Patricia, 131 Paris (France), 34, 36 Parochial Queries (Lhwyd), 203 Paruus Catho, 57, 59–60 Paz, Octavio, 257 Peletier du Mans, Jacques, 100 Pell, John, 193 Penelope’s Web (Greene), 98–99, 103–4 Pequot War, 197 Percy, Henry (ninth Earl of Northumberland), 40 Perdrier, Jacques, 38 peregrinus, 18, 20, 163–66, 173–74 Performing without a Stage (Wechsler), 251 Persian Empire, 187 Petrarch, Francis, 9–13, 15, 17, 28, 43, 50, 53, 55, 100, 268n31 Petreius, Johan, 36 Pezron, Paul Yves, 202, 318n40 Philandrier, Guillaume, 32, 35, 37–38, 41 Philip II, 37, 43, 290n63 Philips, Katherine, 2, 221–22, 224–25, 233–34, 325n6; elegance, pursuit of, 230–31; enjambments, 229–30; as gendered, 228, 327n33; heroic couplet, defense of, 229; as peregrinus, 20; poetic decorum, 231–32, 327n33; poetry, concerns about, 228–29; politics of translation, 223, 226; as responsible translator, 227–28, 235; stylistic clarity, emphasis on, 229; stylistic ennobling of, 228 Philo-Philippa, 231 Piccolomini, Aeneas Silvius, 85, 87, 89. See also Pius II Pindarique Odes (Cowley), 227 Pius II, 5–6, 9–10, 22 Plato, 112, 116, 195 Plessner, Helmuth, 121–22 Pliny the Elder, 76–77, 79–80, 83, 204 Pocock, John, 238 Poitiers Diane de, 38 Poland, 17, 21, 27, 83–84, 90

352

INDEX

Politics (Aristotle), 11 Poliziano, Angelo, 37 Polo, Marco, 83 Pompey (Corneille), 221 Pompey (Philips), 221–24, 226–35; significance of, 225. See also Altamira Pompey the Great (Waller et. al), 222, 228 Pomponius, 77 Positions (Mulcaster), 135 Posonby, William, 97–99, 102–3 Pound, Ezra, 251 Praise of Folly (Erasmus), 101 Prescott, Anne Lake, 97, 106, 109 Primavera (Botticelli), 6 The Primitive Origin of Mankind (Hale), 201 printing: black letter type, 60, 62–63; importance of, 17; linguistic and national traditions, 18; and macaronics, 72, 74; polyglot pattern, 74–75; reader-copyist system, 81; and translation, 60, 75; and vernacular language, 18–19 Protestantism, 16, 72, 198; and AngloAmericans, 191–92, 195, 204–5; missions, failure of, 199–200; sola scriptura, 192, 195 Ptolemy, 77–80, 82–85, 86, 89, 91, 93, 284n7, 285n21, 286n32; map production system of, as hypothetical, 81 Puritans, 197–98, 203; and Babylonian Confusion, 196 Putnam, Samuel, 259 Puttenham, George, 124 Pynson, Richard, 57 Qianlong, 219; and multilingualism, as marker of, 218–19 Qing Empire, 213, 219–20 Qing Qianlong Emperor, 218 Quart Livre (Rabelais), 113 Quine, W. V. O., 117–18 Quin Junchu, 211 Quintilian, 117 Rabassa, Gregory, 255 Rabelais, 37, 111, 113, 115 Racine, Jean, 224 Ralegh, Sir Walter, 48–50 Ramusio, Giovanni Battista, 83, 290n63 Raphael, 36 De re aedificatoria (Alberti), 28

De recto interpretatione (Bruni), 9, 79 Reformation, 12, 65, 74, 251 Regole delli cinque ordini (Vignola), 28 Regole generali (Serlio), 28 Reid, Joshua Samuel, 7 Reigle générale d’architecture (Bullant), 28 Remer, Julius August, 236–37, 247–49 Renaissance, 1, 8, 15, 19, 35, 38, 45, 49, 74, 77–78, 100, 130, 132, 251; architecture of, 27, 36; decompartmentalization, as period of, 36; reception of, 25–27, 32; reprint culture of, 73; Somerset network in, 40; texts, migration of, 27 Renaissance Cultural Crossroads Project, 8 Rerum Moscovitarum comentarii (Miecho wita), 89 Respuesta a la Sor Filotea (Sor Juana), 53 Restitution of Decayed Intelligence (Verstegan), 202 Restoration, 188, 222, 225–26 Rhode Island, 194 Ricci, Matteo, 21, 39, 210 Rich, Adrienne, 97 Rich, Barnabe, 103 Richelieu, Cardinal, 225 Rico, Francisco, 262 Ricoeur, Paul, 8 Rigolot, François, 111 Ringmann, Matthias, 84 Ríos, Julián, 261–62 Riphean Mountains, 82–84, 86–87, 93, 94, 286n33; as ambiguous, 76–77; erroneous mapping, as example of, 77; as invention, 88; persistence of, 91, 96 Riquer, Martín de, 260, 262–63 Rivius. See Ryff, Walter Hermann Roanoke ( Virginia), 192 Robertson, William, 4, 236–38, 240–41, 249; German reception of, 242–44, 247–48; and “science of man,” 239 Robinson, Douglas, 294nn3 Rojas, Fernando de, 153, 155–58, 170, 172, 174; modernity of, 165–66 Romance languages, 19, 39 Roman Empire, 187; Roman civitas, 129; Roman law, 25 Rome (Italy), 27, 36–37, 269n34; Roman structure, groups of, 38 Roscommon, Earl of, 223, 235 Royal Exchange, 41 Royal Society, 198, 203

INDEX Russia, 90 Ryff, Walter Hermann, 26, 35–36, 39, 44 Sagredo, Diego, 34, 43 Saintsbury, George, 221 Śakuntalā (Kālidāsa), 249 Sallust, 9, 12 Saltonstall, Wye, 46, 49–50 Salutati, Coluccio, 10, 80 “Salve Regina,” 57, 60-62 Sandys, George, 46 Sangallo brothers, 35–36 Sarmatia (Poland, the Baltic States, and Ukraine), 82, 85, 86–87, 90, 286n32 Scalabrini, Massimo, 72, 74 Scamozzi, Vincenzo, 28, 37 Scenes of Instruction (Dolven), 130 Scève, Maurice, 100, 108 Schlegel brothers, 156 Schleiermacher, Johann Friedrich, 2, 246, 248 The Scholemaster (Ascham), 130 Schöner, Johann, 88 Schulte, Rainer, 100 Scot, Reginald, 58–59, 69–70 Scotland, 198–99, 238, 241 Scottish Enlightenment, 237–38 Seaman, William, 317n29 Security: Politics, Humanity, and the Philology of Care (Hamilton), 121 Sedley, Sir Charles, 222 La Semaine, ou, Création du monde (Du Bartas), 6–7 Seniles (Petrarch), 11 Serlio, Sebastiano, 18, 28, 33–38, 40–41, 43 Serres, Michel, 291n73 Serruys, 321n18 Seymour, Edward (Duke of Somerset), 40 Seymour, Thomas, 40 Shakespeare, William, 1, 4, 22, 45, 48, 120, 121–23, 127, 133, 135–36, 138, 142–43, 146–47, 259; exile, treatment of by, 54; Ovid, appropriation of, 55; Sonnets of, 48, 54 Sharington, Sir William, 40 Shelton, Thomas, 166, 170–72 Shepard, Thomas, 197 A Shrew (1594 play text), 118 The Shrew (1623 play text), 118–20, 143 Shute, John, 27, 38, 40–41, 43 Sicily, 17–18

353

Sidney, Philip, 17 Sigismund I, 89–90 Silex Scintillans (Vaughan), 47 Simpson, David, 120–21 Sincere Convert (Shepard), 197 Sirie compediosa descriptio (Isidore of Seville), 85 Sixtus IV, 285n23 Siyi guan kao (Jiang fan), 322n36 Skelton, John, 66, 71, A Skeltonicall Salutation, 66 Smarr, Janet, 7, 101 Smith, Adam, 237, 239, 249 Smith, Dr. Miles, 178 Smith, Sir Thomas, 40–42 Smock Alley Theatre, 222, 224 Smolensk (Russia), 90 Smollett, Tobias, 172, 259 The Social Universe of the English Bible (Tadmor), 181 “La Solitude” (St-Amand), 224 Somerset House, 40 “Song” (Bale), 57, 63, 65 Spain, 16–17, 35, 263; Arabs, expulsion from, 169; Castilian Spanish, 160; Jews, expulsion from, 158–59; Moriscos, expulsion from, 167–68; Spanish Empire, 158–61, 163 The Spanish Bawd (Rojas), 153. See also La Celestina (Rojas) Speke, Parott, 74 Spinoza, Baruch, 166 Spivak, Gayatri, 270n56 Stafford, Sir Humphrey, 41 St. Andrews (Scotland), 241 Stans Puer ad mensam, 60 St. Augustine, 12 Stewart, Dugald, 330n7 St. Jerome, 3, 12–13, 250, 307n21 St. Kilda (Scotland), 203, 205 Stobnica, Jan, 85, 86–87 St. Paul, 13, 108 Strabo, 77 Strozzi, Palla, 80 Stuart, Gilbert, 247 Summerson, Sir John, 26, 43 The Supposes (Gascoigne), 134, 136–38, 140–41 Sweden, 16 Switzerland, 28 Symposium (Plato), 112 Syon House, 40

354

INDEX

Tacitus, 22 The Tamer Tamed (Fletcher), 143 The Taming of the Shrew (fi lm), 136 The Taming of the Shrew (Shakespeare), 1–2, 7–8, 54, 118, 119; Bianca subplot in, 132–38, 144, 150–52; commedia erudita, 136; First Folio of, 125, 131, 137, 139; home-schooling scene in, 134–37, 142, 152; hospitality in, 128; hosts and guests, treatment of in, 125–29; intertheatricality of, 124; intralingual translation in, 123–25; master-servant relations, 138; mistranslation in,131, 149; New Comedy tradition, 138–42; Ovidian text in, 132, 135, 144–51; queering notions of ownership and agency in, 135–36; regional and national languages in, 129; Second Folio, 137, 139; sexualized language games in, 124–25; sources of, 136; translatio, trope of in, 117; translation, treatments of in, 117, 129, 132, 136; translational grammar in, 148–49; “unsafe” reading of, 120–22, 124 Tasso, Torquato, 140 Taylor, Robert, 73 The Tempest (Shakespeare), 54–55 Terence, 131 Terrae sancta & Urbis Hierusalem (Anselm), 85 Tesoro de la lengua (Covarrubias), 163 Tetrabiblos (Ptolemy), 284n7 Theatrum orbis terrarium (Ortelius), 91, 92, 93, 290n63 Theobalds (building), 41–42 Thirty Years’ War, 242 This Too a Philosophy of the History of Mankind (Herder), 247 Thorowgood, Thomas, 196 Thynne, Sir John, 40–42 Tiers Livre (Rabelais), 37 Todi, Jacopone di, 43 Toledo (Spain), 166–67, 169–71, 173 Tomlinson, Sophie, 224, 234 Tory, Geoff roy, 87 de Tournes, Jean, 100–102 Tractatus de duabus Sarmatiis (Miechowita), 77, 83, 88–89 translatio studii, 80 translation, 1, 24–25, 45, 48, 69, 117–18, 155–58, 169, 242–43, 248; adaptation, boundaries between, 246–47; analogy, use of, 255–56; appropriate translation, 245; of architec-

tural treatises, 34–35; Ars poetica, 11–12; as collective activity, 21–22; commensurability, notion of, 129; comparables, working to construct, 8–9; and context, 255; cultural distance, 2; debates about, 223; disseminating knowledge, as means of, 15; domesticating of, 246; double translation, 130–31; dyads, concern with, 129; early modern vernaculars, competition between, 15; exile, self-conscious character of, 20–21; and fidelity, 132, 252–55; as gendered, 20, 97, 116, 228; homeland insecurity, 120–21, 125; illustrations, as form of, 33; imperiallinguistic translation theory, 161; inequities of, 16–17; as interlingual, 122, 237; as intersemiotic, 122; as intralingual, 122–24; invisibility, concept of, 278n9; language, as process of, 257–58; and lapis, 3–4; “libertine” mode of, 223, 227; literal, prejudice against, 3; literary language, as form of, 257; literary sensibility, importance of, 9; literary translation, 8; miscellanies, in China, 215–18; mobility of, 13; and negotiation, 39, 68; as noun and verb, 164; peregrine account of, 18, 20, 166, 174; philosophy and ethics of, 3; and poetry, 221, 227; and printing, 60; professionalization of, 20; as “seamless,” 252, 258; self-abnegation, 129–30; as sense, 9; and signification, 3; target language, 258; team translation, 132; third space of, 8–9, 13, 20, 214, 217; as transcription, 15; transfer, idea of, 26; as transformative, 10; as two-stage process, 130; as undervalued, 250–52; as unscientific, 22; as utopian enterprise, 25, 256; as women’s work, 20 “Translation: Literature and Literalness” (Paz), 257 translation studies, 2–3; linguistic and cultural appropriation, ethics of, 6; translators, invisibility of, 6 translation theory, 22–23, 156–57; mobility in, 3–4; and sense, 3 Translators’ College, 21, 207, 213; Court of the Imperial Stud, 210; employees of, 209–11; glossaries for, 208–9, 211–14, 216; instructors and professors of, 210–11; Interpreters’ Station, absorption into, 219; miscellanies of, 214–15; pedagogical aids of, 213–14; student housing at, 211; written translation, devoted to, 209

INDEX Tresham, Sir Thomas, 38 Tristia (Ovid), 46–49, 51–52, 132, 146, 299n46 Trobrianders, 26 Trotter, D. A., 73 Turberville, George, 301n54 Turzo, Stanisla, 90 Tusser, Thomas, 300n50 de Tyard, Pontus, 100 Tylus, Jane, 129–30 Tyndale, William, 177–78, 180, 307n21, 312n59 Tytler, Alexander Fraser, 246 United States, 263 Universalis Cosmographia (Waldseemüller and Ringmann), 84–85 universal language movement, 200; indigenous tongues, 198 Urrea, Miguel de, 35 Vabres, Evrard de, 38 Valla, Lorenzo, 12 Van Aecken, Cornelius Claesz, 93 Van Helmont, Francis Mercury, 195 Vatican II, 16 Vaughan, Henry, 47 Velasco, Lázaro de, 35 Venice (Italy), 18, 36–37 Venuti, Lawrence, 278n9 vernacular language, 17, 20, 23; publishing trade, 18–19 Verstegan, Richard, 202, 205 Vespucci, Amerigo, 21–22, 83, 85, 87 Vettori, Francesco, 13 Vies des dames illustres (Brantôme), 44 A View of the Progress of Society in Europe . . . (Robertson), 237 Vignola, 35, 38, 40 Villalpando, Francesco de, 35 Villani, Giovanni, 43 Virgil, 8, 12, 22, 51, 116, 137, 146, 226–27, 269n35 Virginia, 192, 205 visual culture, 25

Viti, Paolo, 268n29 Vitruvius, 27–28, 31–32, 34–43, 80 Vittoria (Magellan), 79 von Herberstein, Siegmund, 89 von Humboldt, Wilhelm, 334n37 Vries, Vredeman de, 39–40 Vrrea, Diego de, 173 Waldseemüller, Martin, 21–22, 84–85, 86–87, 287n39 Wales, 202–3 Waller, Edmund, 222, 228–30 Wang Zilong, 210 Wang Zongzai, 211 Wapowski, Bernard, 84, 287n39 Warburg, Aby, 25 Warner, Jason Scott, 7 Wealth of Nations (Smith), 249 Wechsler, Robert, 251, 256 Werstine, Paul, 120 West, William, 124 “What Is a ‘Relevant’ Translation?” (Derrida), 140, 152 Williams, Gordon, 125 Williams, Roger, 193–95, 197 Willis, Samuel, 315n10 Willoughby, Sir Francis, 38 Wogan-Browne, Jocelyn, 73 Wolf, Thomas, 38 Wood, Michael, 2 Woodward, David, 79 Woodward, Hezekiah, 194 Woodward, John, 201, 204 Wotton, Sir Henry, 37, 40 Wyatt, Thomas, 65 Wycliffe, John, 12, 16 Yongle Emperor, 207–10, 218–19 Zeffirelli, Franco, 136 Zheng He, 208 Zhu Zhifan, 322n27 Zumthor, Paul, 73 Zurich (Switzerland), 36

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Acknowledgments

The idea for this collection began at a Folger Shakespeare Library conference, “Early Modern Translation: Theory, History, Practice,” in the spring of 2011. The engaging discussions and strong interest in considering early modern translation from a wide variety of angles prompted us to ask a number of the participants as well as other scholars if they would consider contributing to a collection, and we are grateful that so many agreed. The conference itself was the brainchild of Daniel Javitch, who as a member of the Program Planning Committee for the Folger Institute proposed a symposium on early modern translation and lobbied the Folger to organize it. Kathleen Lynch, Executive Director of the Folger Institute, then took the lead, issued invitations, wrote grant proposals, and made the conference happen. David Schalkwyk arrived as Director of Research and Chair of the Folger Institute, and immediately offered his support. Subsequently David encouraged us to bring out this collection. We thank Daniel, Kathleen, and David for their commitment to the idea of such an event and their intellectual engagement with questions of translation that motivate the work collected here. Particular thanks to the Gladys Krieble Delmas Foundation for its support of the conference. The Folger is an exceptional venue in which to hold an academic conference, particularly because of the hard work of its staff, especially Owen Williams, Assistant Director for Scholarly Programs, and Adrienne Shevchuk, Program Assistant and now at the Chesapeake Bay Foundation, whose attention to logistics and detail left us free to focus on the intellectual side of things, while also contributing mightily to that side as well. Warmest thanks also to Jerry Singerman at the University of Pennsylvania Press for his confidence in this project and his willingness to wait while we waited on others. Nathan Klein was instrumental in assembling the final document, and Charlotte Buecheler helped to obtain images and their permissions.

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A c k now l edg m ents

Finally, working together was a pleasure from start to finish and an experience from which we each learned a great deal. We would write something again together in a heartbeat. Karen Newman Jane Tylus