The Politics of Translation and Gender in the Countess of Pembroke'sAntonie

Abstract

The relationship of women writers to the art of translation is often acknowledged to be paradoxical, and this is nowhere more apparent than in the differing values attributed to women's and men's translation activities during the so-called 'golden age' of translation, the English Renaissance.1 In this period, translation was seen as a suitable activity for women on the basis of the assumed submission of the practitioner to the superior authority of the master-text. But, given the complex understanding of the cultural, political, and linguistic significance of translation current in the period's theory and practice of rhetoric and pedagogy, this is by no means the full picture. Formulations such as Nicholas Breton's in An Olde Mans Lesson (1605), where Chremes advises his young friend Pamphilius to set his restless wife to translation because 'it will keepe her from Idlenes, & it is a cunning kinde task',2 need to be placed in the context of Renaissance theories of translation, rather than taken as unproblematic evidence of how translations by women were read and understood. Such representations of the act of translation do not necessarily tell us very much about the meanings of translated texts undertaken by women; rather, they indicate that the assessment of translations, like that of other texts, is predicated on specific assumptions of value attached to the writer's gender. In the scene set up by Breton, translation is an agent of control, allied to the occupation of hands and minds by technical accomplishments such as needlework, spinning, and embroidery. The linkage of translation to repetitive craft, rather than to the rhetorically and politically motivated encounter between translator and text, is clearly indebted to an a priori assumption about the inability of women to take on the mantle of authorship: copious speech and public action were reckoned beyond them. In this scenario, women's translation activity is private and domestic, connected with the maintenance of household piety and virtue, in stark contrast to its status as the cornerstone of an entire pedagogic system of humanistic and linguistic training for men. Modern critics of Early Modern women's writing have been curiously reluctant to challenge the representations of women as translators found