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Theorizing Translation in a
Woman's Voice
Subversions of the Rhetoric of Patronage,
Courtly Love, and Morality by Early Modern Women Translators
Originally published in The Translator
1.2 (November 1995): 153-75.
1. Background
It is widely recognized among scholars
of the history of translation and its theory that English women began
to translate, and to write translation theory, in the sixteenth century,
the era of women's particularly wealthy upper-class women's
expanding access to education and what Jürgen Habermas calls the
public sphere. Several important collections of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century
women's writings include important early translator's prefaces, especially
Betty Travitsky's The Paradise of Women: Writings By Englishwomen of
the Renaissance. Margaret Patterson Hannay's Silent But for the
Word: Tudor Women as Patrons, Translators, and Writers of Religious Works,
Moira Ferguson's First Feminists: British Women Writers 1578-1799,
and Mary Beth Rose's Women in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance:
Literary and Historical Perspectives. After a scattering of important
shorter studies by Rita Verbrugge and John A. Gee on Margaret More Roper,
Anne Lake Prescott and Ruth Highey on Queen Elizabeth, and Mary Ellen
Lamb and Ruth Highey on the Cooke sisters, in 1992 Tina Krontiris published
the first book-length study of these early women translators and translation
theorists, Oppositional Voices: Women as Writers and Translators of
Literature in the English Renaissance.
What has not yet been explored, and what
I propose to discuss in some detail here, are the rhetorical means by
which these women specifically four women, Margaret Tyler in 1578,
Suzanne du Vegerre in 1638, Katherine Philips in the 1660s, and Aphra
Behn in the 1680s, but more generally several centuries of women writers,
thinkers, and translators came to voice, found a public voice,
discovered channels through which they could speak and be heard beyond
the confines of the home. What I hope to show, in fact, is that these
women's rhetorical strategies operated on and with precisely the various
rhetorics of submission that had thitherto confined them to the domestic
sphere, traditionally the only realm in which a woman's voice should be
used and could be heard; that these women came to voice by working
subversively within established rhetorics of submission, working to transform
those rhetorics into surreptitiously empowering channels of expression
that nevertheless continued to reassure the conservative male guardians
of the public sphere with stylized gestures of obeisance.
Specifically, I want to argue that English women translation theorists
of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries subverted three rhetorics that
men had used for centuries to show their subservience to social superiors
(wealthy aristocrats or royalty, high church officials) or, ironically
enough, to women: the rhetoric of patronage, the rhetoric of courtly love,
and the rhetoric of morality. The first two are in any case strikingly
similar: both explicitly stage the speaker or writer as a humble suppliant,
begging someone for a boon, a favor, a gift of money and various
other forms of professional assistance and advancement in the case of
patronage, of sexual favors (or, more ideally, love) in the case of courtship
and both require the suppliant to praise the exalted addressee
as the "price" of the favors requested.
These two rhetorics clearly traverse
the contested ground not only of social power and gender but of the public
and the private as well. The rhetoric of courtly love was not the only
realm in which men placed themselves in a subordinate position with regard
to women; this was often the case in the rhetoric of patronage as well,
whenever a lower-class man begged an upper-class woman for her support
in his artistic endeavors. Both rhetorics, then, implicitly undermine
the conventional patriarchal hierarchy according to which men are intrinsically
superior to women. Another wrinkle in this crisscrossing of discursive
power is what Tolstoi called the paradox of power: the "powerful"
person, the person beseeched for favors, is also placed in an awkward
kind of dependency upon the beseecher, largely in this case because the
social regulation of discursive values makes it virtually impossible (at
least without a grave loss of status) for the beseeched to initiate the
transaction. An aristocrat who offers to pay someone to sing his or her
praises is perceived in much the same light as a woman who offers herself
to a man of her choosing: as a prostitute, a whore. The rhetorics of patronage
and courtly love thus at once exalt and restrict the beseeched patron
or beloved: portrayed by society as possessors of various kinds of riches
and thus power, they are simultaneously required to wait more or less
passively for someone to come along and ask them to share some of those
riches in return for songs of praise.
The rhetoric of morality operates somewhat differently, taking its authority
from religion, from God and his church, and thus imposing upon its user
a conflicted superiority that is rhetorically grounded in humility: the
moralist only claims superior knowledge, only claims to know what must
be done better than everyone else, through humble submission to the will
of God. Renaissance women borrowed this rhetoric too from centuries of
male use; as Rita Copeland has shown, all through the Middle Ages a "translation"
tradition associated with grammar and painful fidelity to the letter of
the original ran parallel to a "commentary" tradition associated
with rhetoric and an overriding concern for the "right" or moral
understanding of the reader. In this latter tradition it was perfectly
acceptable to modify a text, add to it or subtract from it, exfoliate
it with moral or historical glosses that had the effect of assimilating
a text distant in time and place to what contemporary readers already
knew and what they needed to know, prune it of pagan influences, and so
on. The Ovide moralisé is only the most famous example of this
medieval approach to a foreign text; in practice, contrary to the Renaissance
myth of the "bad" literalist medieval translator, nearly all
vernacular texts in the Middle Ages (whether identified as "translations"
or not) were written in this fashion. Copeland puts this tension in a
useful historical and disciplinary context:
In describing how he has translated
some models of Attic oratory, Cicero states: "I did not translate
them as an interpreter but as an orator." This opposition
between ways of translating is really part of a much larger issue, the
conflict over disciplinary hegemony. From Cicero's position, to translate
like an "interpreter' isw to practice within the restricted competence
of the textual critic whose duty is to gloss word for word; and this
is a restriction that the profession of rhetoric (Cicero's profession)
historically imposed on the profession of grammar. To translate as an
"orator" is to exercise the productive power of rhetoric,
a power which rhetoric asserted and maintained by purposefully distinguishing
itself from grammar. As we can see from even this cursory view of Cicero's
pronouncement, the real underlying issue is not how to define the terms
of good translation, but rather how to define the disciplinary status
and cultural privilege of rhetoric. Translation was only one of the
sites on which this larger conflict was played out, and a theory of
translation did not come into being except as an instrument of this
disciplinary contest. (Copeland 1991:2)
What Renaissance women (and men) added
to this rhetorical "discipline" of translation was a middle-class
tone. By the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries the middle classes were
increasingly powerful in society; and as medieval Christian morality was
gradually assimilated to middle-class values (thrift, hard work, common
sense), it was also, as Ann Douglas has shown, incrementally feminized,
placed in the hands of women. It would in fact be several centuries before
women actually assumed social control of even a few moral discourses;
but the middle classes believed from the start that women were innately
more moral than men, correct, decorous, angelic creatures whose impact
on brutish men at first as mothers and wives, later as teachers,
nurses, and the like must be to civilize them, to educate them
in the softer, kinder, gentler ways of Jesus Christ. A good deal of feminist
scholarship has shown just how repressive this conception of women was,
and in part remains today; its dual effect was on the one hand to restrict
middle-class women to a narrow sphere of proper behavior, cutting them
off from cussing and boozing and choosing their own sexual partners and
generally having a good time, activities reserved (however duplicitously)
for "brutish" men, and on the other to set women up as men's
moral watchdogs, domestic authorities to be feared and circumvented.
Whatever the problems, however, the specifically
middle-class rhetoric of morality did have the effect of giving women
a public voice, and in that sense was empowering. In fact all three rhetorics
begin, presumably, as private discourses, addressed individually to a
single aristocrat or beloved or family, but are quickly transformed into
public oratory, poetry, actual song, and even religious discourse. All
three retain traces of privacy, secrecy, even domesticity, while also
embodying a becoming-public voice that hesitates between address-to-one
and address-to-many. This becoming-public voice, combined with the becoming-powerful
voice of patronage, hesitating between subservience and superiority, makes
the rhetorics of patronage, courtly love, and morality ideally suited
to educated Renaissance women who feel nearly as subservient as they have
been raised to be, but also chafe at that subservience and long to be
free of it and who still feel the conditioned impulse to speak
only privately, only at home, only with husband and children and guests
and servants, but also long to address the public, thousands of strangers
whom they will never meet, all at once, through the impersonal medium
of print.
2. Early Statements
Let me begin my narrative, somewhat arbitrarily,
in the early sixteenth century, in England. Women had done translations
before, though usually anonymously, making attribution often problematic
and discussion difficult. But the story of rhetorical appropriation and
transformation that I propose to tell begins here. In 1524 Margaret More
Roper, the 18-year-old daughter of Sir Thomas More, translates a piece
her father's friend Erasmus had published the year before, Precatio
Dominica, as A Devout Treatise Upon the Pater Noster; and while
she does not presume to pronounce upon her own translation in a preface,
the More family tutor Richard Hyrde takes the opportunity to include in
the volume a prefatory polemic in favor of women's education (on the grounds
that it can hardly hurt them, since "women abide most at home, occupied
ever with some good or necessary business," and education will keep
women from the harmful fantasies born of leisure). Twenty years later
an even younger translator, Lady Elizabeth, the eleven-year-old daughter
of Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn, soon to become the most famous queen of
England, writes a letter to her stepmother, the current queen, Catherine
Parr, in regard to her translation of Queen Marguerite of Navarre's "The
Glasse of the Synnefull Soule" (1544), and the letter is included
as a preface when the translation was published. Lady Elizabeth does now
venture to speak in her own voice, but not yet with the intention of publishing
her own words:
And although I know that, as for my
part which I have wrought in it (as well spiritual as manual), there
is nothing done as it should be, . . . yet do I trust also . . . that
the file of your excellent wit and godly learning, . . . shall rub out,
polish, and mend (or else cause to mend) the words (or rather the order
of my writing), the which I know, in many places, to be rude, and nothing
done as it should be. But I hope that, after to have been in your grace's
hands, there shall be nothing in it worthy of reprehension, and that
in the meanwhile no other (but your highness only) shall read it, or
see it, lest my faults be known of many. Then shall they be better excused
(as my confidence is in your grace's accustomed benevolence) than if
I should bestow a whole year in writing or inventing ways for to excuse
them. (Tudor 1544:76-77)
Four years later, now fifteen, Lady Elizabeth
translates another piece by Queen Marguerite of Navarre, A godly Medytacyon
of the christen Sowle (1548), and takes one more step toward theoretical
self-possession: she writes the translation for publication, and addresses
her reader, still subserviently and self-deprecatingly, but with a new
discursive confidence:
If thu do throughly reade thys worke
(dere frynde in the lorde), marke rather the matter than the homely
speache therof, consyderynge it is the studye of a woman, whych hath
in her neyther conynge nor science, but a fervent desyre that yche one
maye se, what the gifte of God the creatour doth when it pleaseth hym
to justyfye a hart. (Tudor 1548:142)
Her translation is still just "the
study of a woman", her preface just the self-deprecations of a woman
of one woman, herself, but in this case also, perhaps, more generally
of a "subject", a person socially inferior to her addressee,
a rhetorical position occupied by many men in this era as well. But in
her tonalities, even in her self-deprecations ("whych hath in her
neyther conynge nor science"), there begins to sound the inner steel
of the intelligent and learned woman who would rule England for half a
century and give her name to the first great flowering of modern English
culture.
Two years later another translator's
preface, another letter written by a daughter to a mother (as Lady Elizabeth's
first pretended to be), finds a new tonal self-possession though
again in the guise of self-deprecation. Around 1550 the twenty-two-year-old
Anna Cooke, one of five gifted, learned, and prolific sisters (and mother
to Francis Bacon), undertakes the translation into English of fourteen
sermons by a contemporary Italian theologian named Bernadine Ochine, and
prefaces her translation by assigning any originality there may be in
her to her mother:
Since the Orygynal of whatsoever is,
or may be converted to ani gooduse in me, hath frelye proceded (thoughe
as the minister of GOD) of youre Ladyshypes mere carefull, and Motherly
goodnes, as well procurynge all thynges thereunto belongeynge, as in
youre many, and most Godly exhortacyons, wherein amonge the rest, it
hath pleased you, often, to reprove my vaine studye in the Italyan tonge,
accompting the sede thereof, to have bene sowen in barayne, unfruitful
grounde . . . I have . . . perceived it my duty to prove howe muche
the understandynge of youre wyll could worcke in me towardes the accomplyshynge
of the same. (Cooke 1550:143)
This is a complex rhetorical gesture:
it simultaneously disclaims the originality of her own learning, like
a good woman should; attributes the source of her learning to her mother,
another woman, rather than her father; and defends her language studies
against her mother's reproofs, thus charting out a rebellious realm of
originality that her mother attempted to squelch, while attributing even
that rebelliousness to her mother's will. Thus do learned sixteenth-century
women begin to lift themselves up by their own discursive bootstraps,
building on the education their progressive parents have allowed them
by thematizing subservience as autonomy and autonomy as subservience
the original as copy and the copy as original.
3. Margaret Tyler: Deconstructing the
Rhetoric of Patronage
The first major rhetorical shift in women
translators' and translation theorists' bid for an empowered and empowering
public voice is engineered by a woman about whom we know almost nothing
except that, ironically enough (given the standard association
of Renaissance women's public voice with educated wealthy women), she
may have worked for a time as a servant. Margaret Tyler's preface to her
translation of Diego Ortunez de Calahorra's A mirrour of princely deedes
and knighthood (1578) is an openly and unapologetically feminist document
that boldly defends her project against cavilers by expertly chopping
(or deconstructing) the patriarchal logic that would exclude her. Her
defense of her own translation covers two separate points: why she chose
to translate a "manly" tale about "princely deeds and knighthood:,
and how she felt justified in translating anything at all. Of these only
the latter directly addresses the issue of patronage; but the former argument
is rhetorically so congruent with the latter that it makes sense to consider
them together. At first, then, Tyler justifies her "womanly"
translation of "manly" text by likening the translator to a
bugler or drummer:
Such deliverie as I have made I hope
thou wilt friendly accept, the rather for that it is a womans worke,
though in a storye prophane, and a matter more manlike than becometh
my sexe. But as for any manlinesse of the matter, thou knowest that
it is not necessarie for every trumpetter or drumstare in the warre
to be a good fighter. They take wages onely to incite others though
themselves have privie maymes, and are therby recurelesse. So gentle
Reader if my travell in Englishing this Authour, may bring thee to a
liking of the vertues heerein commended, and by example thereof in thy
Princes & Countries quarrell to hazard thy person, and purchase
good name, as for hope of well deserving my selfe that way, I neither
bend my selfe thereto, nor yet feare the speach of people if I be found
backward, I trust every man holdes not the plough, which would the ground
were tilled, and it is no sinne to talk of Robinhood, though you never
shot in his bowe; Or be it that the attempt were bolde to intermeddle
in armes, so as the auncient Amazons did, and in this storie Claridiana
doth, and in other stories not a few, yet to report of armes is not
so odious, but that it may be borne withall, not onely in you men which
your selves are fighters, but in us women, to whome the benefit in equall
part appertaineth of your victories, either for that the matter is so
commendable that it carryeth no discredit from the homelynesse of the
speaker, or for that it is so generally knowen, that it fitteth everie
man to speake thereof, or for any it jumpeth with this common feare
on all parts of warre and invasion. The invention, disposition, trimming,
and what else in this storie, is wholy another mans, my part none therein
but the translation, as it were onely in giving enterteinment to a straunger,
before this time unacquainted with our countrie guise. (Tyler 1578:54-55)
"They take wages onely to incite
others though themselves have privie maymes, and are therby recurelesse":
this association with buglers and drummers still asserts the inferiority
of women, as of translators and other noncombatants, and so works rhetorically
to reassure male readers who may feel anxiety at this female encroachment
on what has long been men's territory, both militarily and textually.
Just as men with "privie maymes" have no recourse to armed battle
and so can only be paid to incite others, so too translators, and women,
are to be allowed (and paid for) their talk of battles only under cover
of their "privie maymes" in women's case, apparently,
their (socially enforced) unfitness for battle. Ironically, of course,
the "maymes" that keep some men out of battle are private because
men are normatively defined in terms of, and socially conditioned to pursue,
military activities (what makes a man unfit for battle is some hidden
weakness, an illness, a deformity); while the "maymes" that
keep women out of battle are purely public, social, ideological (what
keeps a woman out of battle is that women are normatively defined in terms
of, and socially conditioned to pursue, nonmilitary activities). In Tyler's
triumphant logic, the impetus to assume a public voice as a translator
arises precisely out of the "mayme" that defines her as a woman,
and thus as a noncombatant.
The second part of Tyler's defense is
if anything even bolder:
So if the question now ariseth of my choice, not of my labour, wherefore
I preferred this storie before matter of more importance. For answere
wherein gentle reader, the truth is, that as the first notion to this
kind of labour came not from my selfe, so was this peece of worke put
upon me by others, and they which first counsailed me to fall to worke,
tooke upon them also to bee my taskemasters and overseers, least I should
be idle, and yet because the refusall was in my power, I must stand to
answer for my easie yeelding. . . . But my defence is by example of the
best, amongst which, many have dedicated their labours, some stories,
some of warre, some Phisicke, some Lawe, some as concerning government,
some divine matters, unto diverse Ladyes and Gentlewoman. And if men may
and do bestow such of their travailes upon Gentlewomen, then may we women
read such of their workes as they dedicate unto us, and if wee may read
them, why not farther wade in them to the search of a truth. And then
much more why not deale by translation in such arguments, especially this
kinde of exercise, beeing a matter of more heede then of deepe invention
or exquisite learning, and they must needes leave this as confessed, that
in their dedications, they minde not onely to borrowe names of worthie
personages, but the testimonies also for their further credite, which
neither the one may demaund without ambition, nor the other graunt without
overlightnesse: if women be excluded from the viewe of such workes, as
appeare in their name, or if glorie onely be sought in our common inscriptions,
it mattereth not whether the partyes be men or women, whether alive or
dead. But to returne whatsomever the truth is, whether that women may
not at all discourse in learning, for men late in their claime to be sole
possessioners of knowledge, or whether they may in some manner, that is
by limitation or appointment in some kinde of learning, my perswasion
has bene thus, that it is all one for a woman to pen a storie, as for
a man to addresse his storie to a woman. (Tyler 1578:55-56)
Or, syllogistically:
P1. I didn't choose the SL text; someone
suggested I translate it, so as to prevent my idleness.
P2. Perhaps I should have refused the suggestion, but after all, men
dedicate their books to women.
P3. Women should be able to read what is dedicated to them.
C1. If they are allowed to read these books, they should be allowed
to translate them.
C2. It's no different for a woman to write a story than for a man to
dedicate his to a woman.
This second argument steps boldly beyond
the surviving rhetorical subservience of the first by attacking the patriarchal
idealization of women as the muses or patronesses of men's art who merely
inspire or, worse, passively receive men's dedications of works they are
not allowed to read. This is a frontal assault on the binary logic according
to which men are active, women passive, men are real, women ideal
or, if they are real, if they participate actively in the real world of
public discourse and physicality (strength and sexuality), they are evil.
It might be argued, of course, that this
attack on patriarchal logic is potentially less effective than Tyler's
earlier and subtler argument, precisely because it is so uncompromising:
a tokenistic rhetoric that calls for the inclusion of a few inferiors
in an overtly submissive or secondary role will always awaken less anxiety
in power-holders than an egalitarian rhetoric that condemns blatant inequities
and inconsistencies and demands equal rights. Conditioned as we are by
four centuries of feminism, we may well favor Tyler's second argument
over her first, because it is bolder; it is important to recognize, however,
that its logic may have been politically counterproductive in its time.
Even today, in fact, it is easy enough to respond to this sort of argument
with the protest, "You're confusing two totally different things!"
And while it seems clear that men dedicating
their writing to women and women writing are not totally different, it
does seem to me that Tyler's second argument glosses neatly over two important
differences between the two. The agent-roles women play (or are assigned)
as patroness and as author are quite different both in society and in
the written work. In society, the patroness is the male author's social
superior, of a higher social class or station, or perhaps simply wealthier;
the patroness serves the social function of facilitating the author's
work both financially (providing the author room and board or a stipend,
or both) and socially (distributing it, perhaps only speaking well of
it, to influential people). Class, station, and wealth do not lose their
significance in the author's social agent-role, but they are subsumed
into a different communicative paradigm, in which the author conceives
her/himself as someone with something to say, something worth listening
to, and her/his audience as in need of the message s/he brings. Textually
the difference is even greater: there the patroness is little more than
apostrophized, addressed almost mythically, like a goddess or a muse,
in a rhetoric that is intended to flatter its object but at some level
dehumanizes her. After Michel Foucault's essay "What Is An Author?"
it is difficult to argue that the "author" as textual construct
and as social function is any more "human", any more "alive",
than the patroness or muse: the author-function, in Foucault's term, or
the translator-function in Miriam Díaz-Diocaretz's adaptation of
it, varies widely in society, but it is always an ideological projection
attributed or assigned to the real person (dead or alive) who actually
penned the words, not an active subjectivity. Still, author-functions
and translator-functions have a very different social impact than do what
we might call patron(ess)-functions. Ideally, the patron(ess)-function
stands on the top level of the hierarchy and inspires and controls the
author, who stands in the middle and inspires and controls the translator
standing at the bottom; less ideally, in the target culture the translator
creates, or helps create, the SL author-function, (re)shaping even that
author-function's creation of a patron(ess)-function.
In either case, Tyler's insistence that
"it is all one for a woman to pen a storie, as for a man to addresse
his storie to a woman" is simplistic, perhaps deliberately disingenuous;
her earlier discussion is much closer to the actual social processes involved:
"And if men may and do bestow such of their travailes upon Gentlewomen,
then may we women read such of their workes as they dedicate unto us,
and if wee may read them, why not farther wade in them to the search of
a truth. And then much more why not deale by translation in such arguments,
etc." In other words, give us an inch and we'll take a mile: very
much what was going on through all this.
4. Katherine Philips: Using The Male
Patron
What for Margaret Tyler remained theory,
deconstructive argument, the claim that men's use of women as muses and
patronesses implicitly opened the door to women's entrance into the public
sphere, for Katherine Philips became social reality: the patriarchal structure
of women's dependence on men made it possible for a woman to enter the
public sphere with a male patron. As Philips develops this rhetoric of
patronage in Letters from Orinda to Poliarchus (1705, written in
the early 1660s), it blends with the rhetoric of courtship as well: her
patron becomes her courtier in two senses of the word, as the man who
pays court to her (begs her to translate and to publish) and as her agent
at court. As either goddess or carnal being, muse or servant, superior
or inferior in fact, as the beloved who is at once deified and
passivized, but in both roles implored to speak, if only the simple word
"Yes!" a woman might find public voice.
Katherine (Fowler) Philips (1631-1664)
may have been the first woman ever to write a "book" on translation
although that is a problematic description of what she did in several
ways. In the first place, she didn't exactly write Letters from Orinda
to Poliarchus as a book; it was a collection of actual letters written
to her patron Sir Charles Cotterell published after her death. In the
second, the book is not exactly "about" translation certainly
it is not a theoretical treatise on translation such as a few men in her
day were beginning to publish. Still, it was or the letters from
which it was compiled were written by a translator, through the
epistolary voice of a translator, and revolves around the practical problems
she faces, emotional and technical, in translating into English Corneille's
La mort de Pompée (1643), which had appeared just two decades
before she wrote. Philips writes as "Orinda" (her literary pseudonym
in all her writing, especially the poems and letters she had written to
her Society of Friends) to her patron "Poliarchus:, about a variety
of subjects everything one writes about to a friend, like the slowness
of the post, the friends and acquaintainces in town, and so on, also the
literary issues of the day, upon which Orinda pronounces in passing and
almost apologetically but the scarlet thread running through the
book is her work on Corneille's "Pompey". In letter 14, dated
"Dublin, Aug. 20, 1662", she tells Poliarchus that she has had
the good fortune to make the acquaintance of Roger Boyle, an Irish magnate
who had been a confidential advisor to Oliver Cromwell during the Protectorate
but, two years before this writing, at the restoration of Charles II,
had won favor with the king as a poet and playwright and the same year
(1660) had been created first earl of Orrery:
He is indeed a man of great parts,
and agreeable conversation; and has been so extremely civil to me, that
were he not a most obliging person, I am sure he could not excuse it
to his own judgment. By some accident or another my scene of Pompey
fell into his hands, and he was pleased to like it so well that he sent
me the French original; and the next time I saw him, so earnestly importuned
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 obeyed him so far as to finish the act in which that
scene is; so that the whole third act is now English. This I the rather
did, hoping to undeceive him in the partial opinion he had of my capacity
for such an undertaking; and not doubting but he would have dispensed
with my farther trouble therein. But he no sooner had it than (I think
to punish me for having done it so ill) he enjoined me to go on; and
not only so, but bribed me to be contented with the pains by sending
me an excellent copy of verses, which, were I not conscious of my own
unworthiness, would make me rather forget the subject, than disbelieve
the compliments of his Lordship's muse. But I have undergone as great
a temptation to vanity from your tongue and pen as he can give me; and
yet I hope neither of you shall ever make me forget my self so much,
as to take pride in any thing, but the having Poliarchus for my friend.
I will by my next send you my Lord's verses, on condition that in exchange
you will let me have a copy of your translation of Le Temple de la Morte;
his Lordship is in love with the original, and you will infinitely oblige
me in putting it in my power to show him your excellent version of it.
To bribe you yet farther, I will send you mine of Pompey as fast as
I do it; and because this is no great temptation, I will send you some
translations from Virgil by Mr. Cowley. You will wonder at my Lord's
obstinacy in this desire to have me translate Pompey, as well because
of my incapacity to perform it, as that so many others have undertaken
it; but all I can say or do is to no purpose, for he persists in his
request, and will not be refused. (Philips 1705:65-68)
What is striking about this passage is
not so much Philips' self-deprecatory fawning, though that is what first
strikes the modern reader: her tone is not markedly different from that
adopted by other seventeenth-century writers cajoling their patrons and
patronesses. What is striking is that it is written by a woman. It may
seem to us that her sycophantic, self-effacing tone is precisely that
required of a woman by a male-dominated society but in fact it
was not until the nineteenth century, two centuries after Philips wrote,
that women gained relatively easy access to such epistolary self-effacement.
In the seventeenth century, at least in the semipublic letters that served
as newspapers and novels, this tone was reserved not for women but for
socially inferior men. Women may have used this subservient rhetoric in
private, in speech with their husbands, but were silent in public.
At least they were supposed to be: Philips
was one of a growing number of women who were finding circuitous routes
to a public voice. One way of describing the route she took, in fact,
might be that she assimilated the rhetoric of subservience and self-effacement
prescribed for women in the private sphere to that prescribed for men
in the public sphere; and that in blending the two rhetorics together
in her highly idealized "Society of Friendship" letters, studded
with classical pseudonyms and allusions, she at once helped forge a new
form of "public femininity" and subtly undermined its apparent
impact in a new form of "feminine publicity". Her overt assumption
throughout her letters to Poliarchus is that her translations are utterly
worthless and her patrons are shameless flatterers for seeing any merit
in them; but the subtext of those letters is that, no matter how insistently
she demeans and effaces herself, these learned and influential men keep
seeing merit in her work, demanding she pursue it further, finish it,
have it staged and printed, show it to the queen. The operative paradox
for Philips' purposes is that public self-effacement is no self-effacement
at all; to deny her merits over the protests of her male patrons is to
publicize her merits. Her self-advertisements are, certainly, more circumspect
and roundabout than, say, Norman Mailer's Advertisements for Myself;
but they patently are self-advertisements nonetheless.
Another way of framing her rhetorical
innovation is, as I began to suggest a moment ago, that she is toying
with the rhetoric of courtly love: Orrery and Poliarchus are both her
suitors, begging her for favors, favors that are in fact textual
but in tone sexual. Orrery "so earnestly importuned 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 obeyed him so far as to finish the act" the act of love,
this almost says outright. Orrery is staged in this letter as a courtier
on his knees before Orinda, "earnestly importuning" her; she
is at once shamed by his ritual self-abasement (required of knights by
the courtly tradition) and empowered by it to "finish the act",
to make the leap from private to public voice. This transgression of the
traditional bounds enclosing the feminine realm is justified by her obedience
to "him who had so lately commanded a kingdom" she is
still submissive, still subject to male control, and therefore "safe"
despite her transgression but it also allows her to enlarge and
expand the role-reversal by which he becomes "a petitioner . . .
for such a trifle" and she the power than can grant or deny his wish.
The sexual titillations of conventional courtly advances and demurrals,
pleas and acquiescences, charge the whole passage tonally without ever
quite surfacing: "he no sooner had it than (I think to punish me
for having done it so ill) he enjoined me to go on; and not only so, but
bribed me to be contented with the pains", "I have undergone
as great a temptation to vanity from your tongue and pen as he can give
me", "his Lordship is in love with the original, and you will
infinitely oblige me in putting it in my power to show him your excellent
version of it", "all I can say or do is to no purpose, for he
persists in his request, and will not be refused".
The implication is that the woman translator possesses a boon, a talent,
a gift, comparable to lovemaking, which she is at once willing and unwilling
to grant conventionally unwilling, because as a woman she has been
programmed for passivity and the purity of silence, but also actually
willing, even eager, because as a new woman she revels in the dual pleasures
of sexuality and textuality, and in the traditionally male prerogatives
of initiating sex and public speech that are now, cautiously, being allowed
her. As women enter the public sphere, the metaphorics of translation
are increasingly shifted to encompass the woman not as passive text, passive
property of the male source-language writer and target-language reader,
but as active producer of text, who must be courted before she will deign
to bestow her textual favors on her readers.
In a later letter, dated September 17,
1663, Orinda tells Poliarchus that she has just seen the second and fourth
acts of Pompey as translated by the court wits, and has the audacity
to criticize their work though "I really think the worst of
their lines equal to the best of my translation" (Philips 1705:).
She is a worse translator, this implies, but a better translation critic;
tellingly, however, she will not even say this much: "the expressions
are some of them great and noble, and the verses smooth; yet there is
room in several places for an ordinary critic to show his skill"
(Philips 1705:). His skill: the idea, one assumes, is that she dares criticize
the court wits' translation not as a woman but as a man or rather,
that the idealized, universalized, and implicitly masculine norms for
correct translation criticize the wits' translation through her,
that, insofar as she is able to assimilate her rhetoric to the masculinity
of the "ordinary critic", she becomes the channel of truth.
And what then emerges is something like the normative Western translation
theory in its seventeenth-century guise:
But I cannot but be surprised 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 translators, and unbecoming
the modesty of that attempt; for since the different ways of writing ought
to be observed with their several proprieties, this way of garbling authors
is fitter for a paraphrase than a translation; but having assumed so great
a licence, I wonder their verses are anywhere either flat 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 sense most commonly
languishes through three or four lines, and then ends in the middle of
the fifth: for I am of the opinion that the sense ought always to be confined
to the couplet, otherwise the lines must needs be spiritless and dull.
(Philips 1705:)
This letter is an interesting admixture
of the feminine translator's modesty and subservience and the traditional
translation critic's authoritarian prescriptions a rhetorical blend
that has the effect of subtly assimilating the latter to the former (her
judgments are circumscribed by protestations of her own inferiority) in
order, paradoxically, to clear a space for the former in the latter, a
modest female voice within the institution of prescriptive translation
theory.
6. Suzanne du Vegerre and Aphra Behn:
Translation Moralized
As feminist scholars beginning with Ann
Douglas in The Feminization of American Culture have shown, the
modern period (from the fifteenth or sixteenth century on) is the era
during which the middle classes not only increasingly bring moral concerns
to the fore for debate and consensual determination, but also significantly
feminize the social agents of those concerns. Suzanne du Vegerre provides
one excellent example of this shift in her preface to her translation-cum-abridgement
of John Peter Camus' novel Admirable Events (1639): by assimilating
the medieval tradition of "moralizing" translations of Ovid
and other potentially "dangerous" texts for the populace to
the new moral imperatives of the middle class, she also assimilates those
moral imperatives to a maternal voice, and so opens a channel for women's
public speech. Aphra Behn, too, in her preface to her translation of Fontenelle's
Discovery of Many Worlds (1688), combines the new middle-class
concern for moral and intellectual uplift with a feminist sensibility
not unlike Margaret Tyler's from a century before, and calmly informs
her reader of the many changes she made in "her" text in order
to make it at more more diverting and more effective.
If Katherine Philips balances feminine modesty and masculine authority,
Susanne du Vegerre begins to develop a repressive voice of feminine authority,
a voice whose authority is derived from morality, moral virtue
implicitly from God.
Unabashedly assuming the role of translator
as censor, she charges her moralistic task with the heroic stature of
Greek myth: faced with "those frivolous books which may all be comprised
under the name of Romance" (du Vegerre 1639:), she wishes she had
"the hands which fables attribute to Briarus, or the strength which
Poets give unto Hercules" (du Vegerre 1639:), but fears "a labour
like unto that of Danaides, or of Sisyphus" (du Vegerre 1639:). Symbolizing
romances as a many-headed monster, or as a tree that keeps putting out
vines and branches faster than one can cut them off, she wavers between
fortitude and despair, as Augustine had prescribed: "but what cannot
a courage do, animated by a zeal of pleasuring his neighbour, and provoked
by desire to advance the light of virtue, and to lessen vice. O why has
not my pen the virtue to cure the wounds that these wicked books cause
in this world? or at least why cannot it devour these monsters, which
the writers of those aforesaid works, mere enchanters of minds, cause
to appear in the forms of books?" (du Vegerre 1639:).
What is interesting here is the subtle
series of shifts du Vegerre makes from the ancient masculine ideal of
doing direct physical battle with an enemy thematized as evil and destroying
it once and for all, to the more modern, middle-class, moral, and "feminine"
task she is undertaking. She has courage, but it is directed not at winning
glory for herself, but at pleasuring her neighbor a far more traditionally
feminine ambition. She is fighting in the cause of virtue, but she conceives
that cause in incremental terms, as "advanc[ing] the light of virtue
and lessen[ing] vice", not as a once-and-for-all eschatological triumph.
She bemoans her inability to destroy the monsters and cure the wounds,
but one senses that her self-deprecation is only rhetorical, for her true
mission is not destruction but moral uplift: "at least if these my
labours could cure those who are miserably infected with often viewing
these pamphlets; if the loss of so much time may be called employment,
I should not think my labour spent in vain, nor my pen unprofitable"
(du Vegerre 1639:). One works toward a cure not through dragon-battle
but through education; not by destroying the source of evil but by improving
its victims' powers of resistance.
This means combatting vice indirectly
rather than directly, which is to say, with maternal morality rather than
paternal logic:
Now to overthrow so many fabulous books,
I undertake not my combat directly, as if I were confuting heresies,
for it is not needful that I should trouble myself to prove the obscurity
of darkness, nor to show the falsehood of these romances, adventures,
chivalries, and other such trash. . . . By what manner do I then labour
to overcome my adversaries? it is by diversion, setting relations true
and beneficial, in the place of those that are profane, . . . to the
end that those whose great leisure causes to seek wherewith to employ
their time may find wherewithall to entertain their desires. (du Vegerre
1639)
She seeks to combat the evil of the romance,
in other words, not by syllogistic reasoning but by moralistic translation:
reducing romances to the bare bones not of logic but of moral vignettes
grounded not in art but in "nature" and "truth"
"natural beauties without art" (du Vegerre 1639:). All decoration,
including plot, is pared away as dross, leaving only the pure core of
person and event defined as the natural elements of moral exemplum. "For
although fables, parables, and poetical fictions do sometimes hide in
them good precepts, and many serious examples", as she says, "yet
the instructions lose much of their credit when they are mixed amongst
vain inventions" (du Vegerre).
This quest for deartificed nature, for
the stripped-down human truth (conceived as inherently moral) without
decoration, might be thought of as the moral equivalent of reason, or
as the liberal equivalent of science, or as the maternal equivalent of
bourgeois paternalism: the attempt of the modern middle classes to demystify
the baroque excesses of medieval thought and establish the bare facts,
the true spark of divinity in the chaotic complexities of human sinfulness.
That the bare facts are still tied, in the early seventeenth century,
to divinity to morality, virtue, the good, or to logic as the purest
form of the Logos does not contradict this demystificatory impulse;
it only indicates that the demystification had not yet proceeded as far
as it would in the succeeding centuries. Du Vegerre, like most other moralists
of her time, does still want to believe that a story deprived of all "artifice"
will be intrinsically moral that the "skeleton" of truth
will advance the light of virtue and lessen vice and she translates
accordingly:
As for the manner I am to advertise
thee, that I study as much as I can for brevity. . . . I keep close
to the matter, & give little liberty unto my thoughts to spread
into digressions, if they be not necessary, and as it were bred in the
subject, by reason whereof I have weaned myself from the sweet mill
(?) of poesie, and have abstained from putting any verses in these events.
I have also taken away the other graces, as apostrophes, dialogisms,
complaints, speeches, conferences, letters, orations; in brief, all
that might enlarge or embellish so that in comparison of our other relations,
these are but abridgements of histories, and as it were skeletons, nothing
remaining but the bones of each event, stripped of the ornaments which
might have set forth their bodies in a far fairer hew. There be minds
which soil in reading a history of great length, human patience being
not of any great extent; but when events are set down in such a manner
as the end is not far from the beginning, this is it which encourages
the reader, and both gives him a desire of seeing further and also eases
him in reading. . . . (du Vegerre 1639:)
One might say that du Vegerre translates
for the Reader's Digest series of abridged books, providing for the easily
distracted middle-class reader not only shorter and easier books that
cater to the middle-class preference for no-nonsense pragmatism over upper-class
flights of fancy, but a moral justification for the same: "There
be minds which soil in reading a history of great length, human patience
being not of any great extent." Impatience with a long book actually
soils the middle-class mind. To protect her readers from that soiling,
that muck of (potential) immorality, she cuts mercilessly.
As I made clear in section 1, this is
certainly not the first instance of a Western translator acting as censor;
such translations were common throughout the Middle Ages, and were commonly
ridiculed by the humanist translators of the Renaissance. It is, however,
one of the first impassioned theoretical defenses of translational censorship
and, perhaps because it is the first such defense to be written by a woman,
the first also to assimilate censorship to middle-class moral maternalism.
Du Vegerre does not say, "I am leaving these artificial parts of
the original untranslated because they would not be good for you",
as the paternalist rhetoric of medieval translation might have said (had
it not so utterly mystified its purposes); she says, "I am leaving
these artificial parts of the original untranslated because you don't
want them". They would bore you, and through your boredom tempt
you into vice. I am on your side, is du Vegerre's subtext: I know what
you want better than you do yourself. Let me guide you to it; let me provide
it for you.
This new impulse is taken to even riskier
(because more explicitly antiauthoritarian) extremes by Aphra Behn, one
of the most astonishing voices of her age. Given that she was only nine
years younger than the self-deprecatory Katherine Philips (and six years
younger than Madame de La Fayette, whose Princess of Cleves she
mentions in her preface), it is nothing short of miraculous that she should
have been so bold in her opinions and so forceful in their articulation.
As Angeline Goreau makes clear in her biography of Behn, the late seventeenth
century was not tolerant of women who pursued careers conventionally defined
as masculine, and it was so savagely censorious of women who pursued those
careers openly, loudly, and brashly, without hiding their proclivities
toward free sex and free speech, that such women were almost nonexistent.
Behn too was censured, of course vilified as a "whore"
not only for conducting her love affairs in public but for venturing to
write for the theater yet somehow she found the strength not to
back down, not to give in: to exist.
Behn turned to translation late in life,
in 1688, the year before she died, to help make ends meet after the collapse
of the London theater deprived her of her most lucrative source of income.
By that time she had been writing for the theater and braving the
loathing and the intrigues of her male colleagues for eighteen
years, and was not likely to be impressed by conventional restrictions
imposed on the "faithful" translator.
6. Conclusions
It is tempting to draw broad-based historical
and theoretical conclusions about this material: for example, to claim
that the women writing about translation in the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries in England were more "modern" (whatever we take that
epithet to mean) than their male contemporaries. And certainly an interesting
and perhaps persuasive case could be made for that generalization. Unfortunately,
we do not yet have enough historical data to support such a claim. The
rapid proliferation of feminist scholarship over the past two or three
decades has brought with it the recovery of translations and translator's
prefaces by women from the early modern period, and I have drawn heavily
on that research here; but historical scholarship on translation and its
theory is only now beginning to proliferate, and much work remains to
be done. Not only are there almost certainly many female translators and
translation theorists yet to be uncovered; there are undoubtedly many
peripheralized male translators and translation theorists as well, men
whose practice of and comments upon translation may deviate just as interestingly
from hegemonic histories of translation theory (such as have been written
from Pierre-Daniel Huet in 1666 to Frederick M. Rener in 1989) as these
women.
If there is a conclusion to be drawn from this material, then, it is that
more primary research needs to be done in the textual areas explored by
feminist scholars like Betty Travitsky, Margaret Patterson Hannay, Moira
Ferguson, and Tina Krontiris: prefaces, letters, and journal entries,
where the kinds of surprising remarks that are overlooked by more traditional
historians frequently appear. Where "theory" is defined restrictively
and repressively as a systematic, rule-governed explanation of every aspect
of a field, it is all too easy to believe not only that translation theory
first begins to be written by women in the 1970s Katharina Reiss,
Juliane House, Susan Bassnett, Justa Holz-Mänttäri but
that wild, woolly, deviant translation theories are a (late-)twentieth-century
phenomenon. A normative definition of "theory" by definition
precludes (and thus blinds many scholars to) reflections, ponderings,
remarks, insights that can be enormously productive in rethinking both
translation today and its many historical metamorphoses in the past.
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