This article examines Mary Wortley Montagu's self-representation in her letters in the context of literature, history, and culture, especially her literal and metaphorical translations of a Turkish love lyric in a letter to Alexander Pope in the spring of 1717. Beginning with a survey of recent feminist and postcolonial criticism in Montagu studies, including the fraught term of “orientalism” as it has sometimes been applied recursively to understand the discourse of Montagu's era, I emphasize Montagu's own words as she presents herself and her purpose in the letter and as she makes use of tropes of foreignness, literary tradition, and artistic merit. Along with a consideration of critical interpretations of Montagu, this article provides a historical and cultural analysis of Montagu's understanding of a poet's role and explores the political resonance of her choice to translate a Turkish lyric for Pope, an icon of British poetry.Mary Wortley Montagu was an influential figure in the literary, social, and political circles of Britain in the eighteenth century. She was a prolific author of poems, novels, and plays, including the frequently anthologized poem “The Lover: A Ballad,” as well as more serious critiques of women's place in society, and even before the age of fourteen, she had produced an impressive volume of writing.A woman with a lively curiosity and wide social circle, she produced the Turkish Embassy Letters, a milestone in travel literature, literature by women, and British-Muslim interaction. Montagu is mostly remembered today for her travel writings. She is also known to medicine for having popularized in Britain the Turkish practice of inoculation against smallpox, decades before Edward Jenner developed vaccination.Montagu corresponded frequently with her friends while in Turkey, including the poet Alexander Pope, although her friendship with Pope appears to have ended after her return to England. She is frequently rumored to have insulted him by refusing his offer of love. They traded insults in verse: she is thought to be an author of “A Pop upon Pope,” and he castigated her in his Dunciad and his First Satire of the Second Book of Horace, Imitated.Montagu was doubly an outsider in Turkish society when she traveled there with her diplomat husband. As a woman, and therefore the appendage to her diplomat husband, she was a privileged observer of life in the countryside, at the Turkish court, and especially among the “princesses and great ladies,” as she described court women in the terms of European aristocracy.1 Although she was a British woman accompanying an early diplomatic mission to a civilization much more ancient than and at least as powerful as England's, Montagu's observations are mundane and domestic, rather than tinged with the male world of political intrigue, as she reports on life in this rival empire.These multiple layers of her presence also impart a certain authority, however. In her travel letters, she claimed to be presenting to her friends at firsthand the authentic nature of life among the Ottoman Turks. Her correspondent, Alexander Pope, is significant; Montagu's biographer Isobel Grundy suggests that “Pope, struggling against the restrictions imposed on his own life by his ill-health and by his religion, more than once expressed his sympathy with those of the other sex ‘by their Forms confin'd … Womankind.’”2 Grundy has demonstrated Montagu's involvement in women's issues; she was friends with poet and reformer Mary Astell and gave voice to feminist sentiments in works such as “Epistle from Mrs. Yonge.” Pope was still Montagu's close friend in 1717, although they would later part, apparently after their own Pan-Syrinx episode.Montagu's cultural and historical context informed her literal and metaphorical translation of lyric poetry. Assessing attitudes and views toward the Turkish culture she was visiting, whether of her compatriots, herself, or Turks, Montagu linguistically presents herself as an edified observer who has been transported to a land reminiscent of ancient Greece, with a literature reminiscent of ancient Israel as well. Montagu sidesteps the medieval conflict between Europe and Western Asia and instead appeals to both the humanist classical tradition and Judeo-Christian literary history.A study of Montagu's idea of the poet's role in the love lyric she translates for Pope, compared to other elements in her oeuvre and works by contemporary female lyricists, indicates her investment in a literary representation of the Turks barely precedented in British letters. Hans-Uwe Lemmel describes her work here as a “seminal” moment in British perceptions of Turkey and, by extension, in a larger process that shaped Europe as a geographical space in opposition to “a non-European ‘other’” between 1650 and 1800.3 Conversely, Joseph W. Lew suggests that “her Letters missed their historical moment”: in 1717, “the doors of both West and East were open for true exchange,” yet in 1762, when her letters were widely published, “this moment had been lost…. Lady Mary's ironic vision was rejected for one based on the new British power.”4Montagu's involvement role in this process was not unambiguous, like the involvement of others before her, such as Queen Elizabeth I, who corresponded with the Turkish queen mother Safiye, as Bernadette Andrea has described. Andrea describes “the emergence of a discourse we can clearly label ‘feminist’ and material conditions we can reliably call ‘imperialist’” in Montagu's era.5 Montagu does not evince a fully developed modern “orientalist” view on Turkey, nor are her views straightforwardly egalitarian; rather, Montagu's appropriation and translation of a Turkish love lyric for her correspondent reveals a nuanced approach to a culture foreign to her and a diplomatic engagement that reflected her husband's own employment.Katherine S. H. Turner calls Montagu's approach “classical, tolerant, and largely ahistorical,” in contrast to the 1789 travel writings of Elizabeth Craven, who is associated with the inception of orientalism.6 Similarly, Lew asserts that “Lady Mary turned her female-addressed letters into powerful critiques of both Ottoman and British culture; her description of how Oriental women subverted order anticipated, by two hundred fifty years, the work of feminists such as Mernissi and Abu-Lugho.”7Her critique of Ottoman and British culture suggestively parallels her critique of genre discussed by Scott Paul Gordon: “Montagu's poetic production enables us to consider, more unsettlingly, that we may never know whether or not we are outside of genre.”8 Devoney Looser adds, “Montagu's writings do not reveal a programmatic political agenda (feminist or otherwise), nor do they convey consistent generic affiliations. Like the masquerade she was so fond of in several cultures, Montagu tried on a variety of writerly guises in regard to genre.”9 Montagu states that her correspondent will naturally view this love lyric as foreign, containing unfamiliar language and tropes, and she responds to this assumed view by emphasizing this Turkish lyric's many overlaps with the British lyrical tradition. She explicitly situates herself in response to an othering culture and as seeking to present a less othered view of the Turkish lyric.Montagu, therefore, in her own rhetorical choices, seeks to emphasize the poetic validity of a non-British lyrical tradition in a letter to a pillar of the British poetic tradition. Andrea describes Montagu's approach as a “celebrationist, and even exoticist, stance” in discussing Montagu's account of women in the hammam.10 Arthur J. Weitzman, conversely, says of the same account that “the overall effect … avoids the implication that these women are from some exotic world, distant from and alien to Europe but instead discovers a link of commonality and sororal camaraderie, notwithstanding Lady Mary's upper-class bias.”11Links of commonality inform the present reading of Montagu's letters, without denying the cultural context, subjectivity, and presuppositions that drive her approach. Ruth Bernard Yeazell locates the contradictory nature of subject and object overturned in Montagu's experience in the hammam, “ironic reversals of comparative liberty,” such “as Lady Mary first registered when the Sofia bathers mistook her corset for a cage in which she was locked up by her husband.”12Montagu also emphasized the humane treatment of women she encountered in her travels, challenging what she described as the erroneous prejudices current in her own country about how Turkish women were treated. As she presents Pope with both a literal and a more metaphorical translation of the Turkish love lyric, Montagu repeatedly describes the Turks in terms analogous to the British aristocrats and the ancient Greeks: Adrianople is “a place where truth, for once, furnishes all the ideas of [Theocritean] pastoral.”She emphasizes Turkey's geographical and cultural closeness to Greece, as well as her experiences with Greek gardeners and women who went unveiled. She presents her experiences as a corrective to myths prevalent in Britain in an ironic comment to her sister: “‘Tis also very pleasant to observe how tenderly he and all his brethren voyage-writers lament the miserable confinement of the Turkish ladies, who are perhaps more free than any ladies in the universe.”13Speaking of the Turks, Montagu writes to her sister that “neither do I think, in many other particulars, they deserve the barbarous character we give them. I am well acquainted with a Christian woman of quality, who made it her choice to live with a Turkish husband.” Montagu explicitly describes her role as a corrective to inaccurate and demeaning beliefs current in Britain. By foregrounding the women's own assessment of their experiences rather than imposing different cultural beliefs onto their situation, Montagu is able to sidestep hegemonic views.Further, Montagu emphasizes the similarity of Turkish poetic style to that used in Judeo-Christian scriptures: “The Eastern manners give a great light into many scripture-passages, that appear odd to us, their phrases being commonly what we should call scripture-language…. Besides this distinction, they have what they call the sublime, that is, a style proper for poetry, and which is the exact scripture style.” She then offers her translation of the love lyric to Pope as an example of this “scripture-language”: she explicitly compares the lyric, which a Turkish poet had sent to the princess he was about to marry, to the Canticles. Montagu does not locate the commonality between the Judeo-Christian and Turkish traditions in the medieval Arabic conquest but rather in a far older literary and religious tradition. She explicitly presents her work as a literary argument for the universal roots of the Muslim Turk, the polytheistic ancient Greek, and the Christian Briton.Montagu's letter tells us far more about Montagu herself than about the Turkish literature she presented. Indeed, as she does not share the original Turkish lyric, Montagu quite literally elides it in favor of her own interpretation. In another letter, about a year after she had sent her translation to Pope, Montagu transcribes and translates into English for a different correspondent a Turkish love letter that reflects a custom whereby items such as a pearl, pepper, or gold wire represent poetic love lines: soap, for example (“jabun”), meant “Derdinden oldum zabun,” which Montagu translates as “I faint every hour”: “I can assure you, there is as much fancy shewn in the choice of them, as in the most studied expressions of our letters; there being, I believe, a million of verses designed for this use.”14 She also teases her correspondent with the variety of European and Asian languages spoken in Turkey, humorously emphasizing its urbane syncretism: “I live in a place, that very well represents the tower of Babel.”Again, Montagu emphasizes the commonalities of the country as well as a British traveler's surprises: she encounters Christians, Muslims, Greeks, and persons of many nationalities and customs as she moves through the countryside, fluctuating in her mind between ancient civilization and modern imperial melting pot, toward the capital, that historic threshold between continents.By demonstrating deep-level parallels between her own and Turkish culture, Montagu explicitly acknowledges what cannot be translated, and her own respect for the Turkish lyric, as an outsider to, though a student and observer of, Turkish culture. In her attempt to locate points of congruency between her own British tradition and the Turkish tradition, Montagu gives space to what she specifically defends as a faithful, literal translation.She situates her translation specifically within both the British and the Turkish lyric tradition, which, as she argues, share a common ancestor. Such connections and boundary crossings are central themes to her work. Weitzman concludes: “She was able to assimilate the orientalism of her time and remain true to the Enlightenment's project of comparative judgments. She avoided insularity by effective use of travel-book aesthetics and ekphrasis and pierced the myths of orient by refusing to demonize the Turks, using her admittedly amateur ethnographic understanding. When she looked at the ‘other’ she saw herself.”15Sixteenth-century British women writers often employed “safe,” private forms of literature, such as epistles, religious literature, epitaphs, dedications, and, especially, translation, in order to show their skill and assert their voices in an overwhelmingly male literary field engrossed in imitatio, or adaptations of classical literary themes. Even in imitatio, subversive voices appear, as, for example, in the opportunity for comment and exegesis and the possibility of shadings of meaning in a translation or adaptation of an original.16 Seventeenth-century works by women, such as The Countesse of Montgomeries Urania by Mary Wroth, published in 1621, and Margaret Cavendish's plethora of publications, began to move away from such forms, taking up secular, often romantic, themes, via the emotion-laden lyric.Montagu, as a poet and travel writer of the early eighteenth century, reflects her foremothers' themes. Recent reevaluations of Montagu's travel letters from Turkey have demonstrated that her stance is shifting and humanist rather than monolithic or imperializing. Montagu's era had a vogue for all things Turkish, which went beyond the othering of the Muslim in Christopher Marlowe's Tamburlaine, where Timur finally burns the Qur'an, or Andrew Marvell's Crusader reference to “the Turkish Crescent and the Persian sun” in his Britannia and Raleigh dialogue.17A close examination of Montagu's translation of a Turkish love lyric in an April 1717 letter to Alexander Pope—the definitive poet of their age—discloses the particular choices and self-positioning of this woman writer in translating a secular and foreign genre, as well as her approach to that foreign culture itself.Montagu translated a man's secular love lyric, and a Turkish one at that, into English, without giving the original Turkish lines. Perhaps she simply considered her audience, Pope, too unfamiliar with Turkish to appreciate the original. Translation had been key to women's entry into literature, as in the case of Wroth and her aunt Mary Sidney Herbert, but usually it was of European or ancient literature or religious works like Herbert's contributions to the family psalter.Gender and ethnic tensions in Montagu's appropriation reflect Turkey's presence in European consciousness as a locus of culture and ancient civilization, a rich site of poetry and art, a valuable trade partner, and also, sometimes, a threatening military presence. Caroline Finkel notes that the Austrians and Venetians were at war with the Ottomans around 1717, when Montagu wrote her letter to Pope from Turkey, a situation that was resolved in 1718 with the appointment of Nevşehirli Damad Ibrahim Paşa, grand vizier of the Tulip Era and the most likely candidate for the poet Montagu translated for Pope.18This cyclical tension is visible, for example, in Othello's complaint “Are we turned Turks, and to ourselves do that / Which Heaven hath forbid the Ottomites?” and in Montagu's contemporary Casanova's erotic parries with the Venetian Turk Ismail.19 Montagu and Casanova's attention to Turkish culture represents Turkey's growing power and its influence on the political interests of Britain, which correspondingly inspired a more serious British consideration of and interest in Turkish arts and culture.In discovering similarities between the European and the Turkish love lyric, Montagu correctly situated their common origins in a shared history of ancient Greco-Roman and Hebrew traditions. The lyric in early modern England was labyrinthine in form, as Heather Dubrow has documented: it was often personal, short, musical, addressed to women, private, and immediate, but it also at times featured characteristics of the epic and dramatic modes, warned against parochialism, was long or sequential, addressed a complicated, multiple audience, communal, marginal (literally), religious, and established boundaries between poet and reader.20In early modern England, the lyric was the dominant poetic idiom, from Edmund Spenser and Philip Sidney to Henry Vaughan and Richard Crashaw. The Western European lyric was characterized by elements of romanticized or courtly love, such as the petition to the beloved, musicality (such as a refrain and meter), garden imagery, the song of the nightingale (the classical Philomela), the carpe diem convention, the blazon, or catalogue of parts, and the beloved's coldness, as in sonnet 41 of Spenser's Amoretti.The Persian ghazal and the Ottoman gazel generally reflect similar conventions as the lyric of Western Europe: musical refrain, lover and beloved as nightingale and rose, garden imagery, a catalog of parts of the beloved's hair and face, and reproaches to the beloved for coldness or distance. The Turkish lyric could address a legion of issues, including male bonding, politics and the court, law, religion, war, and violence, as Walter G. Andrews and Mehmet Kalpaklı have explored in their study of commonalities between the Turkish and western European traditions (although they primarily trace the homoerotic or homosocial tradition).21Court lyrics like the one Montagu translated were common in the golden age of Ottoman culture, the “Tulip Era,” from about 1718 to 1730, which coincides with Montagu's visit. The sixteenth-century monarch Süleymân the Magnificent wrote love lyrics, as did court women like Mihrî Hatun, called “the Sappho of the Ottomans,” who inscribed the feminine voice in her lyrics, herself as lover and a man as beloved: “At times, my longing for the beloved slays me / At times, union with him and the passing of time slay me too.”22Just as the inheritance of the Canticles would indicate, a text has been read both as an allegory of God's love for Israel and as a love poem from Solomon to one of his wives, the love lyric in the religious or mystical sense is found as well as the lyric in the sexual sense in both the Turkish and Western European traditions. A sense of gender ambiguity governs portrayals of the beloved for poets like Fuzûlî (1520–1566). Sometimes the ambiguity indicates homoerotic portrayals or, especially for Fuzûlî, the deity, in a Sufi tradition that stretches back to Rūmī in thirteenth-century Persia.This tradition is present in many love lyrics by women, such as the Hindu saint Mirabai's sixteenth-century bhajans, which cast Krishna as her “beloved,” the Spanish devotional poetry of Teresa of Ávila and Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, and Vittoria Colonna's sonnets for Michelangelo.23 Religious works, of course, were a common “safe” outlet for women, but women's authoritative conflation of religious and secular themes was unexpected.Transgression of so-called conventions was a common theme for lyricists seeking to demonstrate their mastery of the form. In the Canticles, the woman and man speak alternately, with the woman as the lover and the man as the beloved (e.g., “I am my beloved's, and my beloved is mine: he feedeth among the lilies”), reversing what would have been the expected order in early modern England.24 Nancy J. Vickers's idea of dismemberment appears in the Canticles, a point of lyric origin for both Montagu and the Turkish poets she admired, as well natural or garden imagery for the beloved, recalling archetypal Eden but also confining women in a sensual, earthly, objectified role.25In the late seventeenth century, poems like Aphra Behn's “The Disappointment” and Montagu's own “The Lover: A Ballad” challenged convention with satirical revisions of the pastoral mode from the female beloved's point of view. According to Judith Kegan Gardiner, “The perfect reciprocity that Behn implies ought to exist in sexual love is denied for the woman of ‘The Disappointment’ in two apparently contrasting but reinforcing ways—the man's physical power over her and his lack of power over his own body, a debility Behn heightens in comparison to her source.”26Montagu parodies this “perfect reciprocity” Gardiner sees implied in Behn, which is near the heart of the love lyric in general, with an ironic reference to classical authority in the Metamorphoses. Montagu's poem “Julia to Ovid,” supposedly written at the age of twelve, indicates how prevalent knowledge of Ovid was for an educated aristocrat like her; likewise, in her letter to Pope, she refers to “an Arabian fable, as well known here as any part of Ovid amongst us.”At the same time, as Liz Oakley Brown has discussed, while translations among Montagu's juvenilia “fracture the apparently imperious masculine frame” of the Metamorphoses, “from source text to target language, Ovid's Metamorphoses in English is perceived as a text translated, controlled, and, generally, produced by men.” Brown also sees the conclusion to “The Lover” as “an articulation of the double bind of the so-called virtuous female,” in contradistinction to my own view.27The metaphorical transformation of the speaker's women into figures of nature is not a silencing function but rather, in Montagu's terms, discrimination (“niceness”) of speech, subversion of outworn lyric conventions, and a signal of the poem's own close. Ovid's metaphors are a “sweet,” palatable method of indicating the harsh truth (for a hapless lover) that such women have power over their own bodies, allowing or refusing access.Montagu uses the female perspective in “The Lover” to respond to Ovid and to the patriarchal culture with a humorous denial, refusing to enter into the expected marriage and upending the conventions. This controversial attitude participates in the surge of feminism Bernadette Andrea has described in Montagu's era, leading up to Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Women.The love lyric was not the most common choice for an early modern British woman writer, perhaps because the foundational gender opposition, set according to the Petrarchan tradition, saw a male lover importuning a female beloved, as in Sidney's Astrophel to Stella sequence. The dismemberment of the female beloved identified by Vickers also holds political implications for Moira P. Baker, who argues that for Sidney in Astrophel, “the act of praising the woman is an act of self-fashioning as he dismembers her body and divests it of its autonomy. Through his stylized fragmentation and reification of the female body, he asserts his subjectivity as a poet, manipulating and controlling her objectified person.”28This trend in poetry reflected societal structures that still considered women the property of their husbands, only allowing widows to own property in their own right. Less usual but still identifiable are lyrics involving a woman as lover addressing a male beloved or homoerotic lyrics in which woman is explicitly both the lover and beloved, such as Donne's “Sapho to Philaenis,” or lyrics celebrating a relationship between men, such as Shakespeare's sonnets addressing a beautiful young man. Least usual of all in the early modern era is a love lyric written by a woman, as distinguished from a love lyric cast by a male author in a female voice.In general, the love lyric was far less popular among British women than among their continental and especially their Italian counterparts, although Isabella Whitney is an outstanding late sixteenth-century exception to this pattern, as a commoner who published love lyrics. Paul A. Marquis says of Whitney that “the feminine lyric voice reveals an internal complexity that achieves a level of authenticity, or truth … not found in the fictional feminine voices in Surrey, Wyatt, Googe, and Turbervile.”29Montagu begins her letter with a quote from the conclusion of Virgil's version of “Orpheus and Eurydice” in his Georgics, establishing her familiarity with the ancient lyric pastoral and elegiac traditions: Caput a cervice revulsum,Gurgite cum medio, portans Oeagrius Hebrus,Volveret, Eurydicen vox ipsa, et frigida lingua,Ah! miseram Eurydicen! anima fugiente vocabat,Eurydicen toto referebant flamine ripae.30(Even then, while Oeagrian Hebrus swept and rolled in mid-current that head, plucked from its marble neck, the bare voice and death-cold tongue, with fleeing breath, called Eurydice—ah, hapless Eurydice! “Eurydice” the banks re-echoed, all adown the stream.) In discussing Ovid's, Virgil's, and John Gay's versions of this elegy, Regina James has pointed out that these lines inflict dismemberment on the male lover: “Abandoning the body, Virgil had whirled Orpheus' head, wrenched from his ‘marble neck,’ in Hebrus's waters. Revising Virgil, Ovid stilled the head and scattered the body parts. Gay lets them bleed, and only the trunk remains unscattered.”31Vickers has discussed the dismemberment of the female beloved in the early modern Petrarchan tradition, but the dismemberment of the male lover is less examined. By introducing her letter with this quote from the Georgics, however, Montagu signals her assumption of authority over lyric convention: “If I had much regard for the glories that one's name enjoys after death, I should certainly be sorry for having missed the romantic conclusion of swimming down the same river.”32 With this reference and with her choice of quote from the ending of a classic lyric that voices a sorrowful farewell, Montagu indicates her interest in revising the conventions, beginning a new lyric to take up where this one has concluded.Montagu then situates her Turkish locale as “a place where truth, for once, furnishes all the ideas of pastoral”: pomegranates and oranges are common symbols in Turkish lyrics, as in Süleymân's epithets for his beloved (“my orange, my pomegranate”), as well as phrases such as “my bright moon,” “my elixir of Paradise,” and “the ruler of my heart's Egyptian dominion,” which are likewise familiar in British poems, recalling, for example, Donne's comparisons of a beloved to “a heaven like Mahomet's paradise” or the Canticles' “a garden inclosed is my sister, my spouse; a spring shut up, a fountain sealed. Thy plants are an orchard of pomegranates, with pleasant fruits … a fountain of gardens, a well of living waters, and streams from Lebanon.”33Among the other pastoral images Montagu presents are a garden, cypress trees “on the branches of which several couple of true turtles are saying soft things to one another from morning till night,” summer, fruit trees, luncheons on the grass, flower garlands, lambs, and “a rural instrument, perfectly answering the description of the ancient fistula, being composed of unequal reeds.” There is “not … one instrument of music among the Greek or Roman statues, that is not to be found in the hands of the people of this country.”The fistula is a reference to the fistula panis, the reed flute of Pan, the goatish god in both the pastoral and the phallic sense (Montagu's line “like rivers grow cold” refers to a panicked maiden). Montagu deliberately sets a classical Arcadian scene. Other references to classicism prefacing Montagu's translation include pastoral allusions to Theocritus and Homer. She evens points to similarities between classical Greek aristocratic women and contemporary Turkish women: “It would be too tedious to you, to point out all the passages that relate to present customs.”Montagu first provides what she claims to be a “literal” translation and then her own version. Although she does not make room for the original Turkish text, in providing a literal translation, she does acknowledge the space between her European view and the Turkish original, as well as points of overlap. Research has thus far failed to unearth the original text, so the authenticity and literalness of her translation must be left unexplored.However, a “literal” line like “One dart from your eyes has pierc'd thro' my heart,” while it sounds suspiciously like the kind of line one might find in an English lyric, in fact does demonstrate the strong similarities between the two lyric traditions. Thus writes Râsih Bey in the Tulip Era: “Don't lower your languid eyes, don't aim your pointed lashes / Don't fire black arrow after arrow into my wounded heart!”34Montagu reports that the original author of the love lyric she reassembles here was “Ibrahim Bassa, the reigning favorite,” probably a reference to the Grand Vizier Nevşehirli Damat İbrahim Paşa, whose title “damat” reflects his status as husband to a member of the Ottoman dynasty, the sultan's daughter, the Princess Hatice. Damat İbrahim was the central figure of the cultural and political revival of the Ottoman Empire during the Tulip Era, which is periodized according to his grand vezirate (1718–1730) rather than by the sultan's reign.As Michael Co