Abstract
Neuertheless if it so fortune that men find not the speech of this translation so flowing, as they haue found some other of mine, that are abroad in mens hands: I beseech the readers to consider, that the office of a fit translater, consisteth not onely in the faithfull expressing of his authors meaning, but also in a certain resembling and shadowing out of the forme of his style and the maner of his speaking: vnlesse he will commit the errour of some painters, who hauing taken vpon them to draw a man liuely, do paint him long where he should be short, and grosse where he should be slender, and yet set out the resemblance of his countenance naturally. For how harsh or rude soeuer my speech be, yet am I sure that my translation will be much easier to my contriemen, than the Greeke copie is, euen to such as are best practised in the Greeke tonge, by reason of Plutarkes peculiar maner of inditing, which is rather sharpe, learned and short, than plaine, polished and easie.1
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Notes
Thomas North, The Lines of the Noble Grecians and Romanes, Compared together by … Plutarke of Chaeronea (London, 1579), sig. [⋆vijj]r.
Robert Aulotte, Amyot et Plutarque: la tradition des Moralia au XVIe siècle (Geneva, 1965), p. 277.
On Amyot, see, most extensively, Fortunes de Jacques Amyot. Actes du colloque international (Melun 18–20 avril 1985), edited by Michel Balard (Paris, 1986)
and the chronology in Jacques Amyot, L’Histoire aethiopique, edited by Laurence Plazenet (Paris, 2008), pp. 93–111. On North’s translation, see, for example, Valerie Worth, ‘Les Fortunes de Jacques Amyot en Angleterre: une traduction de Sir Thomas North’, in Fortunes de Jacques Amyot.
The two novels were published anonymously, though the identity of the translator was known in some circles, as witnesses an epigram by Charles Fontaine quoted in Aulotte, p. 277 (note 2). On Amyot’s approach to his eponymous and anonymous translations, see, for example, Laurence Plazenet, ‘Jacques Amyot and the Greek Novel: The Invention of the French Novel’, in The Classical Heritage in France, edited by Gerald Sandy (Leiden, 2002), pp. 237–80 (pp. 240–62). Amyot also turned his hand to Greek tragedy, though without publishing these versions. Two translations of Euripides survive in manuscript — dated 1542 and 1545 — and he may have also translated Sophocles.
See Euripides, Les Troades, Iphigénie en Aulis, traductions inédites de J. Amyot, edited by Luigi de Nardis (Naples, 1996).
See Alice Hulubei, ‘Henri Estienne et le roman de Longus, Daphnis et Chloé’, Revue du seizième siècle, 18 (1931), 324–40 on Longus’ novel prior to its 1598 editto princeps; on the manuscript used by Amyot,
see M. F. Ferrini, ‘Il romanzo di Longo e la traduzione di Amyot. Il problema del testo seguito’, Giornale italiano di filologia, 47 (1985), 77–100.
Jacques Amyot, Les Oeuvres morales & meslees de Plutarque (Paris, 1572), p. 608 (i.e., 762d–763a); cp. Anacreon et al., Anacreontis et aliorum lyricorum aliquot poetarum odae, edited and translated by Henri Estienne (Paris, 1556), p. 69. On Amyot’s translation, see Robert Aulotte, ‘Sur quelques traductions d’une ode de Sappho au XVIe siècle’, Bulletin de l’Association Guillaume Budé, 4e série, 4 (1958), 107–22 (pp. 118–22).
See, for instance, Sappho Through English Poetry, edited by Peter Jay and Caroline Lewis (London, 1996)
and Margaret Reynolds, The Sappho Companion (London, 2000), pp. 39, 84–6, 97.
On the implications of the fact that English is the main ‘pivot’ tongue for translation today see David Bellos, Is That a Fish in Your Ear? Translation and the Meaning of Everything (London, 2011).
Edward Hellowes, The Familiar Epistles of Sir Antony of Guevara (London, [1575(?)]), sigs ¶ iijr-¶ iijv. See Janet Fellheimer, ‘Hellowes and Fenton’s Translations of Guevara’s Epistolas Famliares’, Studies in Philology, 44 (1947), 140–56
and John Rutherford, ‘Translating without a Dictionary: The Englishing by Edward Hellowes of Guevara’s Epístolas familiares’, in Hispanic Linguistic Studies in Honour of F. W. Hodcroft, edited by David Mackenzie and Ian Michael (Llangrannog, 1993), pp. 139–52.
‘General Bibliography of Translations’ in The Oxford History of Literary Translation in English. Vol. 2: 1550–1660, edited by Gordon Braden, Robert Cummings and Stuart Gillespie (Oxford, 2010), pp. 471–560; henceforth OHLTE.
Robert Cummings, ‘Recent Studies in English Translation C.1520–C.1590’, English Literary Renaissance, 37 (2007), 274–316; ‘Recent Studies in English Translation C.1590–C.1660. Part One: General Studies and Translations from Greek and Latin’, English Literary Renaissance, 39 (2009), 197–227; and ‘Recent Studies in English Translation C.1590-C.1660. Part Two: Translations from Vernacular Languages’, English Literary Renaissance, 39 (2009), 586–615.
Recent ‘general studies’ include Massimiliano Morini, Tudor Translation in Theory and Practice (Aldershot, 2006), signalled by Cummings as ‘the most ambitious attempt since F. O. Matthiessen’s Translation: An Elizabethan Art (1931) to account for the motives of early modern English translation’ and the seminal work of Peter Burke, who includes England in a broader reappraisal of the role of translation for cultural history.
See, for example, ‘Lost (and Found) in Translation: A Cultural History of Translators and Translating in Early Modern Europe’, European Review, 15 (2007), 83–94, and Cultural Translation in Early Modern Europe, edited by Peter Burke and R. Po-chia Hsia (Cambridge, 2007).
Tudor Translation, edited by Fred Schurink (Basingstoke, 2011);
Elizabethan Translation and Literary Culture, edited by Gabriela Schmidt (Berlin, 2013);
and Renaissance Cultural Crossroads: Translation, Print, and Culture in Britain, 1473–1640, edited by S. K. Barker and Brenda M. Hosington (Leiden, 2013).
Brenda M. Hosington, ‘The “Renaissance Cultural Crossroads” Catalogue: A Witness to the Importance of Translation in Early Modern Britain’, in The Book Triumphant: Print in Transition in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, edited by Malcolm Walsby and Graeme Kemp (Leiden, 2011), pp. 253–69.
See, for example, the works on Amyot referred to above; Valerie Worth, Practising Translation in Renaissance Trance: The Example of Étienne Dolet (Oxford, 1988);
M. Simonin, Vivre de sa plume au XVIe siècle ou la carrière de François de Belieferest (Geneva, 1992);
C. Buridant, ‘Les Paramètres de la traduction chez Blaise de Vigenère’, in Blaise de Vigenère, poète et mythographe au temps de Henri III (Paris, 1994), pp. 39–65; Paul Chavy ‘Vigenère, traducteur baroque’, in Blaise de Vigenère, pp. 67–76;
E. Bury, ‘Trois traducteurs français aux XVIe et XVIIe siècles: Amyot, Baudoin, d’Ablancourt. Les traductions dans le patrimoine français’, Revue d’histoire littéraire de la Trance, 97 (1997), 361–71.
Paul Chavy, Traducteurs d’autrefois: Moyen Âge et Renaissance. Dictionnaire des traducteurs et de la littérature traduite en ancien et moyen français (842–1600) (Paris, 1988).
On France as the place where debates on translation were ‘pursued with most vigour’, see Valerie Worth-Stylianou, ‘Translatio and Translation in the Renaissance: From Italy to France’, in The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism. Volume 3: The Renaissance, edited by Glyn P. Norton (Cambridge, 1999), pp. 127–35.
See also Glyn P. Norton, The Ideology and Language of Translation in Renaissance Trance and Their Humanist Antecedents (Geneva, 1981)
and Luce Guillerm, Sujet de l’écriture et traduction autour de 1540 (Paris, 1988).
Witness a number oí essay collections, such as Translation and the Transmission of Culture between 1300 and 1600, edited by Jeanette Beer and Kenneth Lloyd-Jones (Kalamazoo, MI, 1996);
Traduction et adaptation en Trance à la fin du Moyen Âge et à la Renaissance. Actes du Colloque organisé par l’Université de Nancy II 23–25 mars 1995. edited by Charles Brucker (Paris, 1997);
Traduire et adapter à la Renaissance. Actes de la journée d’étude organisée par l’École nationale de chartes et le Centre de recherche sur l’Espagne des XVIe et XVIIe siècles (Paris, 11 avril 1996), edited by Dominique de Courcelles (Paris, 1998);
Translations. Pratiques de traduction et transferts de sens à la Renaissance, edited by Elsa Kammerer et al., Camenae, 3 (2007), online at: http://www.paris-sorbonne.fr/la-recherche/les-unites-de-recherche/mondes-anciens-et-medievaux-ed1/rome-et-ses-renaissances-art-3625/revue-en-ligne-camenae/article/camenae-no-3-novembre-2007, accessed 21 August 2014.
Marie-Alice Belle, ‘Locating Early Modern Women’s Translations: Critical and Historiographical Issues’, in Women’s Translations in Early Modern England and Trance, edited by Marie-Alice Belle (= Renaissance and Reformation/ Renaissance et Réforme, 35:4 (2012)), pp. 1–23 (p. 7). As Belle notes, the relevant volumes of Yves Chevrel and Jean-Yves Masson’s Histoire des Traductions en Langue Française (Paris, 2012-) are forthcoming.
See, for example, Morini, pp. 13–29, and for an extreme formulation of the view, Eric Jacobsen, Translation: A Traditional Craft (Copenhagen, 1958).
For discussions, see Gordon Braden, ‘Translating Procedures in Theory and Practice’, in OHLTE, pp. 89–100; and Frederick M. Rener, Interpretatio: Language and Translation from Cicero to Tytler (Amsterdam, 1989).
Matthew Reynolds, The Poetry of Translation: From Chaucer & Petrarch to Homer & Logue (Oxford, 2011); on early modern authors, see pp. 73–81, 136–58, 287–306.
The political angles of this phenomenon are brought out in Lisa Ferraro Parmelee, Good Newes from Fraunce: French Anti-League Propaganda in Late Elizabethan England (Rochester, NY, 1996), esp. pp. 27–51.
See also Charles Giry-Deloison, ‘France and Elizabethan England’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 14 (2004), 223–42, on early modern French views of the English, where translation crops up in a variety of contexts.
Our account draws on H. S. Bennett, English Books and Readers 1558–1603: A Study in the History of the Book Trade in the Reign of Elizabeth I (Cambridge, 1965), pp. 104–11, and the ESTC.
On Huguenot publishers in London and these figures in particular, see Andrew Pettegree, Foreign Protestant Communities in Sixteenth-Century London (Oxford, 1986), pp. 84–96
and Colin Clair, ‘Refugee Printers and Publishers in Britain during the Tudor Period’, Proceedings of the Huguenot Society of London, 22 (1972), 115–26.
On Hacket as a specialized publisher, see Kirk Melnikoff, ‘Thomas Hacket and the Ventures of an Elizabethan Publisher’, The Library, 10 (2009), 257–71 (pp. 267–71).
See Alison Clarke, ‘Jean Loiseau de Tourval: A Huguenot Translator in England 1603–31’, Proceedings of the Huguenot Society of London, 20:1 (1959), 36–59
and Albert W. Osborn, Sir Philip Sidney en France (Paris, 1932), pp. 68–77.
This gives it a special place in Sidney Lee, ‘The Beginning of French Translation from The English’, Transactions of the Bibliographical Society, 8 (1906), 85–112 (pp. 97–106).
Hassan Melehy, The Poetics of Literary Transfer in Early Modern France and England (Farnham, 2010);
Anne Lake Prescott, Imagining Rabelais in Renaissance England (New Haven and London, 1998);
French Poets and the English Renaissance: Studies in Fame and Transformation (New Haven and London, 1978); ‘The Laurel and the Myrtle: Spenser and Ronsard’, in Worldmaking Spenser: Explorations in the Early Modern Age, edited by Patrick Cheney and Lauren Silberman (Lexington, 2000), pp. 63–78.
A new volume, French Connections in the English Renaissance, edited by Catherine Gimelli Martin and Hassan Melehy (Farnham, 2013), includes translation in its remit.
A. E. B. Coldiron, ‘Translation’s Challenge to Critical Categories: Verses from French in the Early English Renaissance’, Yale Journal of Criticism, 16 (2003), 315–44.
Jean-Christophe Mayer, ‘Introduction’, in Representing France and the French in Early Modern English Drama edited by Jean-Christophe Mayer (Newark, DE, 2008), pp. 21–46 (pp. 21–2),
referring of course to Sidney Lee, The French Renaissance in England: An Account of the Literary Relations of England and France in the Sixteenth Century (Oxford, 1910).
On this topic, see also Deanne Williams’ important monograph, The French Fetish from Chaucer to Shakespeare (Cambridge, 2004).
This is what Dallington claimed in 1605; but see Andrew Hadfleld, Literature, Travel, and Colonial Writing in the English Renaissance 1545–1625 (Oxford, 1998), pp. 33–44.
Simon Goldhill, Who Needs Greek? Contests in the Cultural History of Hellenism (Cambridge, 2002).
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Demetriou, T., Tomlinson, R. (2015). Introduction. In: Demetriou, T., Tomlinson, R. (eds) The Culture of Translation in Early Modern England and France, 1500–1660. Early Modern Literature in History. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137401496_1
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