A Translator's Voyage: The Greek Landscape in George Sandys's Relation of a Journey (1615)

Abstract

Unlike other early modern travellers to Greece, George Sandys was a poet and translator, interested in relating the past to the present and thus foreshadowing the trend of studying the classics in situ rather than in the library. Although the quotations from ancient literature, interwoven with descriptions of landscapes, may function as a way of effacing subjectivity and avoiding contact with the confusing realities of the foreign place, Sandys's narrative is intriguing in its suggestion of an alternative conception of space; literature and history give meaning to the author's experience and classical loci map the locations in his itinerary, rather than the opposite. Sandys's writing is structured through contradictions, especially while travelling in Greece, whose ambiguity is both geographical (situated at the threshold between East and West) and cultural (its noble past set against its ignoble present). Held until the nineteenth century by a non-Western power, the Ottoman Empire, Greece complicates the ‘typical’ colonial (or rather postcolonial) model used in reading travel writing and defies interpretations of the early modern accounts of the region as simply ‘Orientalist’. In Sandys's travelogue, the sight of the foreign place is itself a translation, a rendering of the unknown into the known, similar to the appropriation of the classics through the work of the Renaissance translator.