Abstract
The Abbé Desfontaines is known primarily as a pioneering but unfaithful translator of Swift, Pope, and Fielding. This essay argues that Desfontaines' translations, which included both ancient and modern works, illuminate a broader, neglected issue in eighteenth-century translation history: shifting ideas about authority in the relationship between source authors and translators. Liberties were commonly taken, but the premodern system in which the translator was allowed to rival the ancients while respecting their authority was disintegrating. In his relationships with Jonathan Swift and Laurence Echard in particular, Defontaines harks back to a former era in his self-authorized freedoms, yet refuses to accord these modern writers the respect that accompanied such freedoms.
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