<i>Translation, Subjectivity and Culture in France and England, 1600-1800</i> (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Translation, Subjectivity and Culture in France and England, 1600-1800 Mary Helen Mcmurran Julie Candler Hayes . Translation, Subjectivity and Culture in France and England, 1600-1800. Stanford: Stanford, 2009. Pp. 336. $60. This study of two centuries of neoclassical translation in France and England contributes significantly to both translation and literary history. Each chapter discusses a separate phase of translation's evolution and a particular network of translators, structured around analyses of their discourse. Five of the seven chapters deal [End Page 70] with translations of the ancient Greek and Roman canon, and biblical translations from Latin, Greek, and Hebrew; a chapter on women translators includes the vernaculars, as does the final chapter, which addresses modern classics such as Shakespeare and Cervantes's Don Quixote. Though the primary material is translators' prefaces, familiar ground for translation historians, many of them have not been read carefully. Ms. Hayes admirably elucidates the ways that translators sensitize us to the linguistic, aesthetic, and cultural stakes of their work. Her focus on prefaces reins in a potentially unwieldy subject, but since one of Ms. Hayes's aims is to challenge the oversimplified distinction between fidelity and infidelity, it sometimes constrains the argument. The prefaces need to be set against the empirical evidence of actual translating decisions, which confirm or deny what translators say about their work. In this period, the preface is a kind of set piece that relies heavily on commonplaces and therefore tends to document its own rhetoric about translation better than it portrays translation as a whole. In a chapter devoted to Dryden, whose Preface to Ovid's Epistles (1680) was the first to categorize the different modes of translating in this period, Ms. Hayes's argument deflects discussion of Dryden's own rendering practices and instead associates his "middle way" of translating with his "authorial self-consciousness." A detailed investigation of translating decisions might lend greater specificity to her claim that Dryden moves between identification with and estrangement from the source, which is true for a good many translators in any historical period. Nonetheless, the book greatly advances the study of early modern translation as well as neoclassicism. Besides providing a useful compendium of translators' work, Ms. Hayes makes useful observations about the intellectual and cultural history behind the translator's literary figures: the use of transubstantiation as a metaphor for embodied spirit central to seventeenth-century French translating; the metaphors of migration and conquest underwriting the politics of English translation in the Restoration period; metaphors of naturalization in the mid-eighteenth century, shedding light on the shift from a temporal to cultural framework for translation. While each phase of this history has its own character, Ms. Hayes's overarching view is that translation was dynamic, transformative, and ethically open. She singles out Lawrence Venuti's The Translator's Invisibility in several places to refute his argument that the vaunted goal of transparency in neoclassical translation was not an anodyne interest in clarity, but marked an entire ideology of domestication. If Ms. Hayes repudiates assumptions of a closed or static system of neoclassical translation, her alternative is a translation system replete with "complex and contradictory patterns." The first three chapters discuss multiple instabilities (the sign, language, and time), as well as the collaborative and in-process character of translation that adds up to "a permanent revolution of multiplicity, movement, change." The emphasis on complex motives and contradictions appears again in the fifth chapter on women translators, in the problematic argument that they fluctuate between active and passive authorship, and yet that they attain mastery through a middle voice. In the sixth chapter, which addresses modern classicists, translators undermine their own arguments as they lead their readers toward the foreign author and also resist aspects of foreignness. Such contradictions are symptoms of the translator's [End Page 71] discourse, but translation, because it is and also cannot be the source it renders, contains its own contradiction. Readers of this study are not quite certain of the causes of these symptoms, or whether the causes may be located in the specific history of neoclassical translation rather than attributed to translation itself. Part of the difficulty of distinguishing historical causes stems...