The Translator's Invisibility: A History of Translation

50 The Translator’s Invisibility
stuffe be still the same, yet the die and trimming are altered,
and in the making, here something added, there something
cut away.
(Rider 1638:A3 r )
Denham’s formulation used a similar metaphor while nodding toward
the classical author with whom D’Ablancourt pioneered the free
method:
as speech is the apparel of our thoughts, so are there certain Garbs
and Modes of speaking, which vary with the times […] and this I
think Tacitus means, by that which he calls Sermonem temporis istius
auribus accommodatum […] and therefore if Virgil must needs speak
English, it were fit he should speak not only as a man of this Nation,
but as a man of this age.
(Denham 1656:A3 r )
Denham’s advocacy of free translation was laden with a nationalism
that, even if expressed with courtly self-effacement, ultimately led to a
contradictory repression of the method’s parallels and influences,
foreign as well as English:
if this disguise I have put upon him (I wish I could give it a better
name) fit not naturally and easily on so grave a person, yet it may
become him better than that Fools-Coat wherein the French and
Italian have of late presented him.
(Denham 1656:A3 v )
Denham sought to distinguish his translation from burlesque versions
of the Aeneid that were fashionable on the Continent, Paul Scarron’s
Virile Travesti (1648–1649) and Giovanni Battista Lalli’s Eneide Travestita
(1633) (Scarron 1988:10). He, like other translators associated with the
exiled Caroline court, was following another French fashion in
translation, although one linked closer to a monarchy whose absolutist
experiment proved effective: D’Ablancourt’s version of the Annals was
dedicated to the powerful royal minister Cardinal Richelieu. Denham’s
translation of Virgil in fact reflects the strong resemblance between
English and French translation methods during the period. But the
deep nationalism of this method works to conceal its origins in another
national culture—a contradiction that occurs in Denham’s case because
the method answers so specifically to an English problem: the need for