Marie-Alice Belle and Brenda M. Hosington, “Introduction: Indirect Translation in Early Modern Britain: Languages, Mediations, Contexts”

Introduction to Special Double Issue

Indirect Translation in Early Modern Britain 

Guest Edited by Marie-Alice Belle and Brenda M. Hosington

A. E. B. Coldiron, “Indirect Translations via French in Caston’s Corpus: England’s First Printer and the Appetite for Cultural Variety”

England’s first printer, William Caxton, was also a prolific translator. Reading Caxton’s moment as profoundly consequential, this essay acknowledges economic motives for such a large translation corpus (providing new, page-based estimates of its size), yet sees Caxton’s translations as driven by an appetite for polychronic cultural variety. With many English works readily available for print production, Caxton nevertheless took greater trouble, during a brief two decades, to print thousands of pages of translated-foreign materials. Indirect translation via French-language intermediation was Caxton’s chief means of reactivating more than a Millennium’s foreign materials for an expanding English readership. “French,” however—no unified linguistic-cultural filter—actually provided regionally, socially, and aesthetically varied intermediations. Caxton’s translations had less to do with linear empire-transfer (translatio imperii et studii) than with cross-cultural harvesting and redistribution. In translating so many deeply polychronic, foreign works, Caxton created less a “native English” corpus than an anti- insular, anti-presentist, “englished” corpus.

Gabriela Schmidt, “Transforming ‘Tragedye’: Mediations of John Lydgate’s Fall of Princes in Sixteenth-Century English Print”

John Lydgate’s Fall of Princes is, like much of his oeuvre, an indirect translation, channelling the Latin prose of Boccaccio’s De casibus virorum illustrium through Laurent de Prémierfait’s fifteenth-century French version and numerous other sources into English rhyme royal. This article explores the transmission of this multivocal work in early modern print, arguing that it was precisely its openly displayed cultural and generic hybridity that enabled it to survive the radical political and religious changes of the period. In particular, Lydgate’s Fall is shown to suit the cultural moment of Marian England, when it was twice reprinted by John Wayland and Richard Tottel in 1554. Examining these editions within the wider context of Marian cultural poetics and their printers’ overall activity provides important insights not only into the characteristic bi-focality of Marian literary culture but also into the innovative potential of this hybrid and Janus-faced moment in English literary history.

Jaime Goodrich, “Translation as Remediation: Erasmus, Tudor Noblewomen, and the Humanist Reception of Classical Literature”

This essay reconsiders indirect translations of ancient Greek texts made by Queen Elizabeth and Jane Lumley, Tudor noblewomen who received cutting-edge humanist educations during the middle of the sixteenth century. Although the very existence of these works once served as confirmation of their translators’ extraordinary learning, modern scholars have discovered to their disappointment that both women worked from intermediary Latin translations made by Erasmus. This essay offers an alternative perspective on Elizabeth and Lumley by borrowing the concept of remediation from media theory in order to propose that translation involves the remediation of a text’s cultural, formal, linguistic, and material elements. Within this framework, Erasmus, Elizabeth, and Lumley can be identified as participants in a humanist tradition of remediating classical texts. This case study demonstrates the previously overlooked cultural value of indirect translation within sixteenth-century England and provides a theoretical framework for redressing the modern critical bias toward direct translation.

José María Pérez Fernández, “Early Modern Thucydides and the Politics of Indirect Translation”

1527 saw the posthumous publication in print of Claude de Seyssel’s translation of Thucydides’s History of the Peloponnesian War, whose original manuscript had been previously distributed among aristocratic circles ca. 1515. Although this was the first translation of the text into French, Seyssel had not rendered it from its Greek original, but from Lorenzo Valla’s first Latin translation of 1452. Seyssel and his subsequent editors offered Thucydides’s History to the French monarchy and its courtly elites as a catalogue of patterns for political communication and military strategy. This French translation in its own turn generated the first rendering of Thucydides into English, penned by Thomas Nicolls from Seyssel’s text (French paratexts and all), which he published in 1550 with a dedicatory preface for John Cheke, regius professor of Greek in Cambridge and tutor to Edward VI. In his own preface Nicolls invoked the authority of both Seyssel and Valla as mediators between the political doctrine, the oratorical exempla, as well as the diplomatic and military strategies locked in the Greek original, on the one hand, and his new English readers on the other. Rather than focus on just one of these versions, this article samples some relevant milestones that punctuate the path traced by Thucydides’s text as it circulated first from Valla’s Latin on to Seyssel’s French and finally Nicolls’s English version. The essay stresses how these translations were not the result of a single agent, but were rather determined by the mediation of the intersections that made them possible. This must perforce include an overview of the political, religious and intellectual environments which are indispensable for their proper interpretation. Some of the most relevant episodes in this general overview are used as case studies to exemplify the appropriation of Thucydides’s History for political purposes and to illustrate the role played by these indirect translations, their paratexts, and their editorial design as a singular chapter within the long history of the reception of Thucydides in early modern Europe.

Sara Miglietti, “Translations of Self-Translations in Early Modern Europe: Preliminary Remarks and Exploratory Case Studies”

Self-translations—works rewritten in a second language by their own authors—represent a significant subset of early modern translations. Generally taking place between Latin and a vernacular, self-translation enabled authors to expand and diversify their readership while retaining control over their message. But what happened when self-translations were translated into other languages by “ordinary” translators? Was either version—the Latin or the vernacular—more commonly taken as the basis for further translations, or did translators seek to take both versions into account where possible? What can the choices made by these translators tell us about shifting language dynamics, strategies of cultural mediation, and material access to foreign language books in early modern Europe? This article tackles these questions by focusing on Franco-Latin works translated into English according to three possible scenarios: translations based on a composite text (e.g. Knolles’s translation of Bodin’s République / De republica), translations based on the Latin version (e.g. English translations of Ramus’s Dialectique/ Dialectica), and translations based on the vernacular version (e.g. Carew’s translation of Estienne’s Apologia pro Herodoto / Introduction au traité de la conformité). Overall, the article argues that the translation of self-translations can be considered as a special case of indirect translation in which the mediating translation itself comes from the original author.

Marie-Alice Belle, “‘French Tunes with English Words’: The Standish Psalter and Mid-Seventeenth Century Psalm Culture”

This essay examines a little-studied English book of Psalms, John Standish’s All the French Psalm tunes with English words, first published in 1632 and re-edited in 1650. The collection gathers metrical versions of the Psalms to be sung to the original tunes of the Geneva psalter. It also provides plain musical notation for each piece, the volume’s main function being to allow English travelers abroad to participate in reformed church services in their own tongue. While explicitly presented as translated from the Hebrew, Standish’s Psalms are in fact the result of multiple processes of mediation. At the musical level, obviously, the English arrangements are shaped by the constraints of the “French tunes.” At the textual level, the English version is indebted to the Geneva psalter by Marot and De Bèze—but it also adapts existing English versions, notably by Philip and Mary Sidney. This essay explores the various forms of translation at work in this multi-mediated book, setting them against the backdrop of seventeenth-century controversies over Psalm translation, Continental influences on Anglican liturgy, and the place of song in reformed spirituality and worship.

Massimiliano Morini, “Did Renaissance England Have a Problem with Indirect Translation?”

In Descriptive Translation Studies and Beyond (1995), Gideon Toury included “directness of translation” in his list of “preliminary norms.” Is it “permitted at all?” he wondered. And in translating from what “source languages/text types/periods”? These questions are particularly relevant if applied to the early modern age—i.e., to the time when people began to legislate on translation, and to worry about the interlingual processes which were to be considered acceptable, prestigious or dubious. In this context, was indirect translation permitted, prohibited or simply tolerated? Also taking its cue from a recent flowering of secondary literature on the topic, this article interrogates texts and paratexts of a few versions of the Aeneid and of Guarini’s Pastor fido in order to evaluate the status of indirect translation in early modern England.