The Translator's Invisibility: A History of Translation

60 The Translator’s Invisibility
And stem ye flood wth their erected brests
Then making towards the shore their tayles they wind
In circling curles to strike ye waves behind
1656
Laocoon, Neptunes Priest, upon the day
Devoted to that God, a Bull did slay,
When two prodigious serpents were descride,
Whose circling stroaks the Seas smooth face divide;
Above the deep they raise their scaly Crests,
And stem the floud with their erected brests,
Their winding tails advance and steer their course,
And ’gainst the shore the breaking Billow force.
(ll. 196–203)
Denham’s fluent strategy allowed the 1656 version to read more
“naturally and easily” so as to produce the illusion that Virgil wrote
in English, or that Denham succeeded in “doing him more right,”
making available in the most transparent way the foreign writer’s
intention or the essential meaning of the foreign text. Yet Denham
made available, not so much Virgil, as a translation that signified a
peculiarly English meaning, and the revisions provide further
evidence for this domestication. Thus, the 1636 version translated
“Teucri” (l. 251) and “urbs” (l. 363) as “Trojans” and “Asias empresse,”
whereas the 1656 version used just “The City” (ll. 243, 351), suggesting
at once Troy and London. And whereas the 1636 version translated
“sedes Priami” (l. 437) as “Priams pallace” and “domus interior” (l.
486) as “roome,” the 1656 version used “the Court” and “th’Inner
Court” at these and other points (ll. 425, 438, 465, 473). Even
“Apollinis infula” (l. 430), a reference to a headband worn by Roman
priests, was more localized, turned into a reference to the episcopacy:
in 1636, Denham rendered the phrase as “Apollos mitre,” in 1656
simply as “consecrated Mitre” (l. 416). The increased fluency of
Denham’s revision may have made his translation seem “more right,”
but this effect actually concealed a rewriting of the Latin text that
endowed it with subtle allusions to English settings and institutions,
strengthening the historical analogy between the fall of Troy and the
defeat of the royalist party.
Fluency assumes a theory of language as communication that, in
practice, manifests itself as a stress on immediate intelligibility and
an avoidance of polysemy, or indeed any play of the signifier that