The Translator's Invisibility: A History of Translation

54 The Translator’s Invisibility
(1647) and Christopher Wase’s translation of Sophocles’ Electra
(1649). 4
The one place name Denham includes in his version of Priam’s
death, “Asia,” may be taken as an allusion to the Orientalism in
Caroline court culture. Denham had himself contributed to this
trend with The Sophy (1642), a play intended for court production
and set in Persia. But the allusiveness of the translation is more
specific. “The Scepters of all Asia bow’d” to Charles in court
masques where the king and queen enacted a moral conquest of
foreign rulers by converting their nations to Platonic love. In
Aurelian Townshend’s Tempe Restor’d (1632), the royal couple
preside over the reformation of Circe’s sensual reign, figured in “all
the Antimasques, consisting of Indians and Barbarians, who
naturally are bestiall, and others which are voluntaries, but halfe
transformed into beastes” (Townshend 1983:97).
Yet more striking is Denham’s curious addition to the Latin text:
“Thus fell the King, who yet survived the State,/With such a signal
and peculiar Fate.” Virgil’s omission of any reference to the dead
king’s afterlife reveals Denham’s own belief in the continuing vitality
of the Stuart monarchy after the regicide. Although Charles I was
executed, the monarchy “survived the State” instituted by Parliament,
initially a Commonwealth governed by a Council of State, which was
later redefined to function as an advisor to a Lord Protector; this was
a “signal and peculiar” survival for the king because it took the form
of a court in exile and royalist conspiracy at home, because, in other
words, the king lived on but not in his kingdom. In the political
climate of the 1650s, with the Protectorate resorting to oppressive
measures to quell royalist insurgency, it would be difficult for a
Caroline sympathizer not to see any parallel between the
decapitations of Priam and Charles. But in this climate it would also
be necessary for a royalist writer like Denham to use such an oblique
mode of reference as an allusion in an anonymous translation.
Translation was particularly useful in royalist cultural politics, Lois
Potter suggests, because it was viewed as “transcendence, the healing
wholeness that removes controversy and contradiction” (Potter
1989:52–53). In Denham’s translation, the monarchy “survived” its
destruction.
The fact that Denham intended his translation to serve a royalist
function is borne out by a comparison with his predecessors, which
highlights the subtle changes he introduced to bring the Latin text
closer to his political concerns: