venuti

Canon 57“the house within,” “long halls,” “Priams bed-chamber,” “archedSielings” (Ogilby 1654:215). And Denham is alone in using “Portcullis”for the Latin “postes” (“door-posts”), refusing such previous and likelyrenderings as “pillars,” “gates,” and “posts” for a word that conjuresup the architectural structure most closely associated with aristocracyand monarchy, the castle. Denham’s architectural lexicon permits thedescription of the Greek attack to evoke other, more recently besiegedcastles, like Windsor Castle stormed by the parliamentary armies, orperhaps Farnham Castle, where in 1642 Denham was forced tosurrender the royal garrison he commanded there. Denham’sdomesticating translation casts the destruction of Troy in a form thatresonates with certain moments in English history, those whenaristocratic rule was dominant (the medieval past) or allied, howevertenuously, with the monarchy (the absolutist experiment of the 1630s),or decisively defeated and displaced (the civil wars and Interregnum).There are other senses in which Denham’s decision to translate BookII of the Aeneid addressed the displaced royalist segment of theCaroline aristocracy. By choosing this book, he situated himself in aline of aristocratic translators that stretched back to Surrey, a courtlyamateur whose literary activity was instrumental in developing theelite court cultures of the Tudor and Stuart monarchs. From Tottel’sMiscellany (1557) on, Surrey was recognized as an important innovatorof the sonnet and love lyric, but his work as a translator also possesseda cultural significance that would not have been lost on Denham:Surrey’s translation of Virgil proved to be a key text in the emergenceof blank verse as a prevalent poetic form in the period. FollowingSurrey’s example, Denham turned to Book II to invent a method ofpoetry translation that would likewise prove culturally significant forhis class. His aim was not only to reformulate the free methodpracticed in Caroline aristocratic culture at its height, during the 1620sand 1630s, but to devise a discursive strategy for translation that wouldreestablish the cultural dominance of this class: this strategy can becalled fluency.A free translation of poetry requires the cultivation of a fluentstrategy in which linear syntax, univocal meaning, and varied meterproduce an illusionistic effect of transparency: the translation seems asif it were not in fact a translation, but a text originally written inEnglish. 6 In the preface to his 1632 Aeneid, John Vicars described “themanner, wherein I have aimed at these three things, Perspicuity of thematter, Fidelity to the authour, and Facility or smoothnes to recreatethee my reader” (Vicars 1632: A3 r ). In Denham’s words, the translation