Women as Translators in Early Modern England

Women as Translators in Early Modern England

Women as Translators in Early Modern England

Deborah Uman

UNIVERSITY OF DELAWARE PRESS

Newark

University of Delaware Press

© 2012 by Deborah Uman

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

Distributed by the University of Virginia Press

ISBN 978-1-64453-100-6 (paper)

ISBN 978-1-64453-101-3 (ebook)

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Information Available

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Uman, Deborah, 1969–

Women as translators in early modern England / Deborah Uman.

            p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

1. Literature—Translations into English—History and criticism. 2. Women translators—Great Britain—History—16th century. 3. Women translators—Great Britain—History—17th century. 4. Translating and interpreting—Sex differences—Great Britain—History. 5. Translating and interpreting—Great Britain—History. 6. Literature—Adaptations—History and criticism. 7. Authorship—Great Britain—History. 8. English literature—Early modern, 1500–1700—History and criticism. 9.Women and literature—Great Britain—History. 10. Feminist criticism. I. Title.

PR131.U43 2011

418'.040820942—dc23

2012000474

Contents

Acknowledgements

Conclusion

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgements

This book began as a five-page paper in a first-semester graduate seminar taught by the incomparable Margaret Ferguson, and it is to her that I owe the deepest gratitude. For her enthusiasm regarding my rudimentary ideas about translation, her skilled direction of my dissertation, and her unflagging belief in the promise of this project throughout its many incarnations, my thanks are entirely inadequate, but I offer them nonetheless.

In the years that it took me to transform my little essay into a full-fledged book, many others have generously offered their help and guidance and it is my pleasure to have this chance to thank them. In its formative stages as a dissertation, Richard Halpern challenged my thinking at every level and forced me to be smarter in my entire approach to the topic. While my directors often offered feedback from afar, Katherine Eggert created and led a dissertation group on campus, and it is hard to imagine finishing the project without her efforts. Inspired by Katherine’s careful readings, my classmates at the University of Colorado, Boulder—Sara Morrison, Teresa Nugent, Rhonda Sanford and Laura Wilson—provided valuable insights and equally valuable friendship. In this book I discuss the importance of communities of learned women, something I learned about firsthand as a member of this group. I would also like to thank Beth Robertson, Bruce Smith, and Chris Braider from my time in Boulder.

Despite its origins as a dissertation, this book barely resembles the work that is now gathering dust in my attic. Additional thanks go to those who have helped in the intervening years. Financial support from Eastern Connecticut State University and St. John Fisher College lightened my teaching responsibilities and gave me much needed time to write. My Rochester-area writing group, comprised of Melissa Bloom Bissonette, Steve Brauer, Babak Elahi, and Richard Santana, offered renewed support and motivation. In particular, Melissa has read, in some form or another, every part of this book, and it is her voice that I hear when striving to clarify my ideas and highlight my arguments.

While writing and revising, I presented sections of this project at numerous conferences where I received insightful feedback from so many. My thanks go to: Pamela Benson, Belén Bistué, Rosanne Denhard, Susan Felch, Rosemary Kegl, Erin Kelley, Ania Loomba, Catherine Loomis, Christina Malcolmson, Ken McNeil, Kathryn McPherson, Kathryn Moncrief, Susannah Monta, Helen Ostovich, Erin Sadlack, Mihoko Suzuki, Michelene White, Marion Wynne-Davies, and countless others whose names I apologize for omitting. A portion of chapter four first appeared as "‘Wonderfullye astonied at the stoutenes of her minde’: Translating Rhetoric and Education in Jane Lumley’s The Tragedie of Iphigeneia" in Kathryn McPherson and Kathryn Moncrief’s collection Performing Pedagogy in Early Modern England (Ashgate, 2011), 53–64. I would also like to thank the anonymous readers at the University of Delaware Press, one who generously gave me additional detailed advice in terms of revising for both style and substance, and did so with great tact and humor.

It is my great fortune to have found a position at a school that values teaching and scholarship. Although our library is small, our librarians, particularly those in the Interlibrary Loan department, made sure that size was never a problem. Moreover my department and colleagues at St. John Fisher College provide the kind of conviviality and intellectual stimulus one usually only dreams of finding.

It is also my good fortune to have a wonderfully supportive family. My parents, Judy and Henry Uman, are champions of education in general, and mine in particular. My daughters, Phoebe and Clara, have been enthusiastic attendees of summer camp, never objecting to the time I have spent on this book instead of with them. Their brother Jonah arrived at the end of the project and somehow allowed me to finish it. Finally, Michael Sander, who has perfected a two-minute synopsis of this book, has never let me give in to my doubts and misgivings, and for this I am especially grateful.

My initial title started with John Florio’s phrase for the female act of translation, this defective edition. I still think of this book as my defective edition, and I say this without the irony I assume Florio used. Reminding myself, as this book does, of the importance of collaboration, I recognize that this book is much better because of the help I have received. Its defects, however, remain entirely my own.

Chapter One

This Defective Edition

Gender and Translation

To my last Birth, which I held masculine, (as are all mens conceipts that are thier owne, though but by their collecting; and this was to Montaigne like Bacchus, closed in, or loosed from his great Iupiters thigh) I the indulgent father invited two right Honorable Godfathers, with the One of your Noble Ladyshippes to witnesse. So to this defective edition (since all translations are reputed femalls, delivered at second hand; and I in this serve but as Vulcan, to hatchet this Minerva from that Jupiters bigge braine) I yet at least a fondling foster-father, having transported it from France to England; put it in English clothes; taught it to talke our tongue (though many-times with a jerke of the French jargon) would set it forth to the best service I might.

—John Florio, The Epistle Dedicatorie to his translation of Montaigne’s Essays[1]

John Florio’s preface to his rendition of Montaigne’s Essays has often been quoted in recent studies of early modern women translators, though few interpret his deprecatory statement at face value.[2] Rather, it speaks to a complex view of the art of translation, a view that was often embedded in similarly complex ideas about gender, originality, and authorship. Given that he dedicates this work to Lucy, Countess of Bedford and her mother Lady Anne Harrington, Florio’s description of translation as female and defective can certainly be read ironically even as he qualifies this prefatory humility with a reminder of his more masculine work of original writing and transforms his metaphorical account of childbirth into an entirely male enterprise. In analyzing this opening statement, Jonathan Goldberg points out that Florio first compares the translator (himself and Montaigne) to Bacchus, whereas he next equates the original author (in this case, only Montaigne) with Jupiter. Goldberg argues that even though these two scenes do illustrate the humanist dream of male-male copy and . . . the denigrations of women/translation . . . they also suggest that the latter invidious scene—which nonetheless allows a place for the female—is also the one that creates—retrospectively, secondarily—human male origination.[3] Interestingly, when Torquato Tasso compares his revised Gerusalemme Conquistata to his earlier Gerusalemme Liberata, he invokes the same image of Jupiter giving birth to Minerva, although he compares his second poem to Minerva and characterizes his first as a rebellious, possibly illegitimate son. In Tasso’s analogy, he becomes Jupiter by translating his own text, and he suggests that his daughter, though derivative, is superior to his corrupt son, at the very least for knowing who her true father or originator is.

Florio’s and Tasso’s musings on the nature of revision and originality reflect the tension for early modern translators who saw themselves as active participants in the Renaissance, in the rebirth of culture, and who were aware of the weighty task of carrying over the glories of classical Greece and Rome into a modern, Christian setting. Additionally, the debate over translating the Bible into the vernacular was a crucial component of pre- and post-Reformation theology. Translations of contemporary works were also common, and Florio underscores how vernacular translation emphasizes national differences by describing his work as transporting Montaigne’s Essays from England to France and as dressing them in English clothes.[4] Although translators of every century have questioned the validity and possibility of their task, these questions were particularly acute for writers who confronted at every turn their debt both to foreign innovators and to past masters.

Early modern theories of translation were often articulated with allusions to paternity, sexuality, and gender, as the seventeenth-century adage like women, translations should be either beautiful or faithful indicates.[5] In her influential essay, Gender and the Metaphorics of Translation, Lori Chamberlain examines the language used by translators and theorists like Florio and finds frequent equations of translation with women and inferiority. Chamberlain argues that because it is often difficult to determine the difference between translation and original, the practice threatens to erase the difference between production and reproduction which is essential to the establishment of power; based on this analysis, she calls for a feminist theory that does not simply transform translation from a reproductive activity into a productive one but rather uses collaboration as a model for the combined efforts of author and translator.[6] Such gendered metaphors were particularly resonant during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries when the equation of defective and female matched the belief, based on religious doctrine and Aristotelian principles, that women are naturally the inferior sex. They were resonant also because a remarkable number of women, including Queen Elizabeth herself, were producing translations and, at times, challenging the rigid views on gender difference.

In focusing on women translators, this book seeks both to broaden our understanding of the potential of translation and to reevaluate women’s work within the context of the English literary Renaissance. I argue that the practice gave women the chance to assume an authorial role—a role that by legal and cultural standards should have been denied to them and that gave them ownership of their words and the chance to achieve profit, fame, status, and influence. Because of England’s formal split from the Catholic Church and the concomitant elevation of the written vernacular, the early modern period presents a rich object for analysis. This era witnessed not only a keen interest in reviving the literary glory of the past, but also a growing commitment to humanist education, increasing literacy rates among women and laypeople, and emerging articulations of national sentiment.[7] Most importantly, for the purposes of this project, the period saw a shift in views of authorship, in what it might mean for individuals to seek fame or profit through writing.[8] Until relatively recently in early modern scholarship, women were understood as excluded from achieving authorial status for a number of reasons—their limited education, the belief that their public writing was particularly scandalous, and the implicit rule that they should adhere to the holy trinity of chastity, silence, and obedience. Thanks to the work of numerous scholars, this view has changed dramatically and women writers and translators are now seen as appropriate objects for critical study. Despite this shift, they are still often understood, however grudgingly, as marginal to the literary culture of the time.[9] Fewer women than men wrote, they wrote less and (arguably) of lesser quality, and their choice of genres seems somewhat impoverished; add to this the debate over translation as a potential vehicle of literary expression and we can see why there have been few book-length studies of women’s translation from this time.[10]

One goal of this book is to show how translation, which even now is often viewed as an uninspired or menial activity, gave women entry into the rich literary culture of the Renaissance.[11] To do this, to look at how early modern women might have understood themselves as authors, I have selected a small number of relatively well-known writers whose works are self-consciously literary. My primary method is to focus on how female translators represent themselves and their work; this process has revealed a general pattern in which translation reflects the limitations women faced while simultaneously giving them the opportunity to transcend these limitations. For students of literature who now eagerly seek out female writers in every period, the barriers faced by early modern women can be particularly vexing. My hope is that an understanding of how women fashioned their authority through translation gives us additional ways to see, read, and value women’s work.

The slipperiness of the term author has received much deserved attention of late. Several critics have considered the significance of the developing print culture and the shift away from a medieval view of the author’s divine and literary authority.[12] By reading government legislation alongside literary texts, Jody Greene and Joseph Loewenstein identify an emerging view of authorship as ownership.[13] Since women’s legal right to property was contested, this shift and the attendant stigma of print again limited their access to authority even as the invention of the printing press expanded their access to written material. The role of author, as countless sonnets indicate, can also be tied to the promise of individual fame both in the present and the future. In exploring how Spenser, Jonson, and Milton carved out literary careers for themselves, Richard Helgerson focuses on this promise, arguing that each poet carefully presented himself and his work to achieve a position of individual authority and preeminence.[14] It is no accident that Helgerson chose three male poets as his self-crowned laureates; since ancient times the title of laureate was reserved for men. But not all mistresses depicted in their admirer’s poetry were content to be the silent objects whose descriptions lent fame to their describers. Line Cottegnies looks to Margaret Cavendish as one such example and argues that her self-representation as an authoress allows her to escape the common lot of women—oblivion after death.[15] Given that Cottegnies highlights Cavendish’s celebration of freshness and creativity, this example may seem at odds with a study of translation.[16] I will suggest, however, that translation gave women the opportunity to be creative and simultaneously helps us expand our definition of creativity in the field of literary studies.

Part of the paradox of translation studies is the explosion of scholarship on the subject that acknowledges the complexity of the practice combined with the tendency for the work of individual translators to go unnoticed.[17] Florio’s lengthy preface to his Montaigne translation suggests that he is intent on being noticed; thus he must defend the practice even as he recognizes its shortcomings. In his address to the courteous Reader, Florio opens with the question shall I apologize translation? and answers it by arguing:

from translation all Science had its of-spring. Likely, since even Philosophie, Grammar, Rhethorike, Logike, Arithmetike, Geometrie, Astronomy, Musike, and all the Mathematikes yet holde their name of the Greekes: and the Greekes drew their baptizing water from the conduit-pipes of the Egiptians, and they from the well-springs of the Hebrews or Chaldees. And can the wel-springs be so sweete and deepe; and will the well-drawne water be so sower and smell? And were their Countries so ennobled, advantaged, and embellished by such deriving; and doth it drive our noblest Colonies upon the rockes of ruine? And did they well? and prooved they well?

The very need for this defense suggests the ambivalence with which early modern writers viewed the practice of translation as both secondary and superior, but in contrast, modern translations often provoke no comment at all. The frequent invisibility of the translator, to use Lawrence Venuti’s term, poses a particular problem for the study of early modern women writers, simply because, as we have established, a significant portion of women’s writing from this period is translation.[18] While part of the motivation in writing this book is to continue the work of recognizing female literary predecessors and learning more about women’s lives and ideas from their own hands, the study of translation complicates the notion of literary precedent and reminds us of the fallacy of viewing writing as an adequate reflection of someone’s experience or views. Indeed, translation, perhaps more than any other form of writing, is like a performance or masquerade in which the voice of the translator becomes only one in a myriad of competing personae. For women, who were supposed to be defined in relation to their husbands, fathers, and sons, translation may have presented them not with a vehicle that facilitated clear self-expression but rather with a strategy of articulation that accurately mirrored their own complicated positions in the public and private spheres.

The figurative gendering of translation as female highlights many parallels between the work of translation and the cultural roles occupied by women while simultaneously demonstrating the inadequacy of a comparison between the linguistic practice and the biological/natural/constructed fact of sex or gender. While Chamberlain looks primarily at metaphors for translation, understanding translation as metaphor is also a critical component of this project. As Goldberg points out, the word translation has a wide range of definitions, but "Latin translatio translates Greek metapherein," demonstrating the etymological connection between translation and metaphor.[19] The two words have similar root meanings (to carry from one place to another and to transfer) and both lead to notions of transformation, of metamorphosis. These concepts are embedded in translators’ writings about their practices and suggest a way to understand the transformation of conventions as a logical result of the translation process. Just as translation is a form of writing, so is writing a form of translation—a female and defective enterprise that nonetheless resembles a goddess emerging fully formed from her father’s head.

TRANSLATION, METAPHOR, AND ALLUSION

Understanding translation as a gendered activity and describing it in figurative language has continued in contemporary theory. For Jacques Derrida, who readily admits that women are often invited to translate because they are seen as subordinate, this situation creates opportunities to deconstruct the male/female and primary/secondary binaries. If, as he argues, the original is indebted to the coming translation, then women should be understood as necessary to the writing process and thus not subordinate after all. Derrida characterizes the woman translator not as the author’s secretary, but as the one who is loved by the author and on whose basis alone writing is possible.[20] Goldberg points out that Derrida’s concept of the author/translator relationship is similar to Florio’s use of Minerva as a figure of translation who allows the achievement of authorial primacy.[21] Both men manipulate the analogy of a gender hierarchy in order to disrupt the common notion of original writing’s superiority to translation. Derrida’s reliance on metaphor—translation now compared to love—serves as an example of the continued prominence of figurative language in contemporary theories of translation. Allusion becomes a particularly rich source for translation theorists, with stories from the Bible and classical mythology, not surprisingly, offering illustrative stories that simultaneously recall some of the principal objects of translation during the early modern period and underscore the transformative potential of the practice that is the focus of this study. For early modern women, allusions to female characters, whose voices and bodies in classical and biblical texts are frequently dispersed, appropriated, or silenced, offer an opportunity for revision. Often, these figures become metaphorical representatives of the translators themselves.

The allusive title of George Steiner’s foundational collection, After Babel (1975), offers the familiar biblical narrative as a logical starting point for examining translation metaphors. He describes this story as the second fall, in some regards as desolate as the first, which eliminated the assurance of being able to grasp and communicate reality.[22] To him, those who render the words of one language into another are merely men groping toward each other in a common mist whose Babel of tongues results in wars and persecutions, the logical result of their tendency to misconstrue and pervert each other’s meanings.[23] The phallic imagery of the tower, the use of men as synonymous with humanity, and the conception of the myth in Genesis in wholly masculine terms all reflect not just the time in which the study was published but also the patriarchal tradition of biblical exegesis. Furthermore, the feminine-sounding definition of translation as constant and unfulfilled facilitates Steiner’s connection of Babel to the first Fall, for which Eve is often blamed and which ended their ability to speak and understand each other perfectly.[24] The gender politics in Derrida’s discussion of Babel are similar. Like Steiner, Derrida uses feminine-sounding language when he suggests that the tower exhibits an incompletion, the impossibility of finishing, of totalizing, of saturating.[25] When discussing specifically the prevalence of female translators, Derrida makes the implicit gendered associations with the tower of Babel and its destruction explicit, explaining that Babel is a man, or rather a male god, a god that is not full since he is full of resentment, jealousy, and so on. He calls out, he desires, he lacks, he calls for the complement of the supplement, or, as Benjamin says, for that which will come along to enrich him."[26]

Although theorists including Derrida, Steiner, and Walter Benjamin celebrate the supplemental and post-Babelian condition of translation and thus, in some sense, undo the traditional gender hierarchy, some feminist critics have found these allusions to the tower of Babel troubling. Luise von Flotow criticizes writers such as Derrida and Steiner for describing translation in terms that have largely negative associations: translation is difficult, incomplete, even impossible; it is traitorous and untrustworthy, and she finds that their references to Babel also suggest a certain nostalgia for a mythic time when it was not necessary to distinguish between an original and a translation.[27] Using terms similar to those of deconstruction, von Flotow offers as an alternative image, Karin Littau’s optimistic interpretation of Pandora and her box or cornucopia, read not as a figure of chaos and transgression, but rather as a symbol of multiplicity and fertility. This revision of the Pandora myth reveals the serial nature of translation; because there can always be new translations, it is an unending process.[28] Flotow’s desire to rewrite masculine paradigms and patriarchal myths is itself a kind of translation that highlights the transformative nature of this literary practice. In a similar adaptation of an often maligned female figure, Willis Barnstone relies on Gnostic interpretations of Genesis to support his revisionary claim that Eve is the mother of translation who gives the transformed fruit to her children and laughs when her children arrogantly make her invisible translation their own immaculate and holy creation.[29] By creating new metaphors for the term, von Flotow and Barnstone illustrate the connection between separate meanings of translation. Not only are they rendering an original text into a different, feminist language, but they also must translate or transform the figures of Pandora and Eve, so that these women, traditionally read as bringing hardship and evil to humankind, can be interpreted as introducing knowledge and light to the world.

The translators whom I study in this project also populate their writings with allusions to women both metaphorically and literally linked to translation and transformation, and I will examine figures such as Echo, Daphne, and Cleopatra who appear in multiple contexts and who complicate any simple understanding of primary and secondary. As she is to Steiner and Barnstone, Eve is of particular interest to early modern writers familiar with the antifeminist tradition and its use of the Genesis depiction of Eve eating from the Tree of Knowledge to justify all women’s subordination. As I will discuss in my chapter on religious translations, women’s edification, in particular their direct engagement with sacred texts, was facilitated