On Translating More’s Utopia

Thomas More’s most celebrated work appeared at Louvain in December 1516 from the press of Thierry Martens. It doesn’t seem unreasonable to claim that it is the most widely known Neo-Latin book, though it is surprising how few people seem to realise that More wrote it in Latin (for a discussion of a range of translations and editions of Utopia, see McCutcheon, ‘Ten English Translations/Editions’). It was seen through the press by Erasmus, who was conceivably responsible for the final title Utopia (as late as September More still referred to it as Nusquama), and it was aimed primarily at the readers of his Encomium Moriae (1511), an audience which, even if it didn’t know Greek, might well aspire to do so. Thus we have the range of prefatory letters, again organised by Erasmus, which draws in a number of prominent figures in Netherlandish scholarship, and for the 1517 Paris edition even the great French Hellenist Guillaume Budé. It’s a book, in other words, that is stylistically self-conscious. More, in practical terms a London lawyer and acting diplomat, is creating for himself an alternative identity in the republic of letters. Hence the intriguing games played in the parerga, when the fiction leaks out of its own world and appears to engage the real one, rather like those pictures in which a limb or a garment protrudes over the frame. However the word is taken, More was a witty man; he had a disconcerting sense of play, and this has important implications for any translator.

What motives might there be for translating Utopia? In contrast to the dual-language evolution of his Richard the Third/Historia Richardi Tertii, a vernacular rendering can hardly have been in the forefront of More’s mind when he addressed his cosmopolitan audience, though he did target Anglophone readers with his translation of the biography of Pico della Mirandola as well as his later Reformation polemics. It’s worth recalling his remarkable retraction in The Confutation of Tyndale’s Answer where he asserts that

yf any man wolde now translate [Erasmus’s] Moria in to Englyshe, or some works eyther that I have my selfe wryten ere this…I wolde not onely my derlynges bokes but myne owne also, helpe to burne them both wyth myne owne hands, rather then folke sholde (though thorow theyr own faute) take any harme of them…

(Complete Works 8.1: 179)

More’s point is that in the fraught atmosphere prevailing in 1532, when ‘men by theyr owne defaute mysseconstre and take harme of the very scripture of god’, satire is no longer a secure medium, especially in translation. In 1517 More’s allusion in his second prefatory letter to Peter Gillis, to ‘that rushed and perfunctory way in which priests tend to say their office (assuming that they say it at all)’ (Utopia, tr. Baker-Smith 19),¹ might raise a knowing smile, but a few years later it could fuel something much more alarming. The Moria and the Utopia had been directed at a Latinate readership equipped to handle irony and ambivalence, but once translated for a largely undefined vernacular readership they might well slide out of control. To some extent, then, the reception of Utopia was muffled by the outbreak of the Reformation, and I would suggest that its ambivalence was in part compromised by the emergence of a more cautious and literal mind-set.

The first Italian translation, by Ortensio Landi in 1548, was probably encouraged by the Buonvisi family whose banking activities provided a link between More’s own circle, where Antonio Buonvisi was his intimate friend, and the family base in Lucca. No fewer than four of Landi’s books appeared under a Utopian pseudonym, and he may well have been attracted by the book’s implicit criticism of the established order, as he had been with the works of Erasmus which he also translated. But that, of course, meant focussing on Utopian institutions rather than on the mediating dialogue—on the blueprint rather than the fiction—and this becomes the dominant characteristic of most readings (and...