Prologue: early modern actors of translation

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ABSTRACT As the prologue to the issue, ‘Early Modern Actors of Translation,' this essay provides an overview of the collected essays and explores their overarching themes and different approaches to issues surrounding translators' agency. The second part of the essay takes up a case study that involves two of the volume's themes: retranslation and the translator as cultural critic, through a focus on classical scholar and translator Anne Dacier (1645–1720) and her use of the Dialogus de oratoribus (Dialogue on Orators). This early work by the Roman historian Tacitus had come to be associated since the Renaissance with socio-cultural critique and the Republican tradition. Rather than translating the Dialogus, Dacier incorporates it into the framework of polemical treatise, Des causes de la corruption du goût. Dacier's treatise is a scathing criticism of a recent modernizing adaptation of Homer's Iliad; at a deeper level, she calls on her contemporaries to set aside the aesthetic norms of the present in order to enter into a different culture. For Dacier, the literary works of the past are a lens not only to view history, but also to cast a critical eye on the present.