Eighteenth-Century Secret History in Translation: The Case of The Secret History of Queen Zarah and the Zarazians and Histoire secrette de La reine Zarah, et des Zaraziens

Abstract

In 1711, an anonymous author added a new preface and a new final part to two existing volumes of Histoire secrette de La reine Zarah, et des Zaraziens, a French translation of The Secret History of Queen Zarah and the Zarazians (1705). Previous scholarship on this well-known English text has neither addressed its French translations, nor analyzed these additions. This essay reads the additions as a response to changes in British domestic politics and to political relations between Britain and France during the final phase of the War of the Spanish Succession. It also uses the relationship between Queen Zarah and La reine Zarah as a lens through which to explore the relationship between secret history and translation more broadly. I argue that translation conceived of as a movement or exchange between conditions or states, rather than just as a linguistic phenomenon, is a defining feature of secret history. The connections between translation and secret history offer new perspectives on eighteenth-century approaches to genre, national and partisan identity, authorship, and attribution.