Translation, Subjectivity, and Culture in France and England, 1600-1800 (review)

No culture or nation in the West has gotten by without translation. The paradox of Christianity and of nation states, such as Britain and France, is that they are founded on translation. Ancient Greeks such as Plato and Aristotle played crucial roles in the development of Christian theology and the Reformation in England and Germany, which produced the Authorized Version and Luther's Bible respectively. Moreover, the English (later British) and French empires also involved translation of travel and encounter narratives from Spanish, Portuguese, and other languages in order to frame their expansion. The translation of study was part of the translation of empire. Julie Candler Hayes argues for the importance of translation in connection with subjectivity and culture in the crucial period 1600-1800, roughly from the waning of Elizabeth I to the rise of Napoleon, a period wherein France and England experienced an intense intercultural dialogue. This book, which ranges widely and provides a perceptive and detailed analysis, makes an important contribution to the comparative study of translation and culture. Hayes also maintains a helpful website, from the Department of French at University of Massachusetts, Amherst, that includes a "corpus of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century French translators' prefaces and related documents" that supplements her briefer English translations in this book and provides a resource for scholars.

Hayes begins her book with Huit oraisons de Ciceron (1638), a departure that declares French eloquence the equal of the great Roman orator Cicero. It became a key text for the development of national literature in France and Britain as well as in the debates on culture, language, authorship, and translation. For Hayes, translation makes language visible and is suggestive for difference and openness. She stresses the historicity of translation and argues that translation studies allow for an examination of history, culture, and language and lead to a greater understanding of our reality and that of others.

The questions translators faced are diverse and have wide implications. The shifting relation with antiquity and the loss of the classical past, the connection between national language and identity, subjectivity and the author, as well as otherness and cultural change are all issues in translation. During the Renaissance, debates over imitation related closely to the role of nation, culture, and translation. Hayes emphasizes the conditions in the seventeenth century that laid the foundations for neoclassical translation: the increasing importance of translators, the development of the vernacular, and the formation of a body of criticism on translation. She also stresses the close connection of interests in poetry, imitation, and language. Another significant contribution is Hayes's view that the neoclassical translators ranged widely on issues such as fidelity versus freedom, the ability of culture to represent culture, and the relationship between past and present.

Hayes achieves her end of figuring out the many projects and agendas of neoclassical translation through an attentive reading of the words of translators themselves, especially in their prefaces. Prefaces, in my own experience, are rich sources, and Hayes is wise to situate them and related materials in regard to ideas, marketplace, patronage, and the work of other translators in order to see what their theory of translation might be. The popularity of the critical or translation preface was itself translated from Renaissance Italy and France to seventeenth-century England. This movement helps to frame Hayes's comparative study. Hayes is concerned with questions of agency and originality as well as of author, writing, and voice. Otherness is at the heart of her method. Openness or exposure, the mutual implication of other and self, and the open possibilities of communities and languages are central topics that she explores. Hayes discusses the particularities of language in time and space by exploring a range of examples, including the circle of Nicolas Perrot d'Ablancourt and the Jansenist translators at Port-Royal; and the role of translation for the Carolinian exiles in an English context, the case studies of...