Travels and Translations in the Sixteenth Century: Selected Papers from the Second International Conference of the Tudor Symposium (2000) (review)

Volume 20 of Ashgate's Studies in European Cultural Transition series, Travels and Translations in the Sixteenth Century compiles selected papers from the Second International Conference of the Tudor Symposium (2000). Edited by Mike Pincombe, the essays query the semantic and epistemological overlaps of travel and translation in light of early modern conflations of "travel" and "travail," as well as "translate" and "transport." As Arthur F. Kinney puts it in his brief introduction, "translation depends on the travels and travails of the poetic mind" (xvii). Elsewhere we see how narratives of travel regularly involve a translation of the foreign into a more comprehensible or palatable form. Because Kinney's introduction offers only a glimpse of the range of travels and translations elaborated in the essays, and because Pincombe's two-page afterword simply describes the original conference, the collection sorely lacks a synthesizing overview. Thisis a particular shame since the essays, for the most part, offer such a cohesive, interanimating archive.

The ten compiled essays are allotted to two sections. The division of four "travels" essays in part 1 and six "translations" essays in part 2 is regularly betrayed, however, by an emerging emphasis on the rhetorical travails of both travelers and translators. That said, the essays of part 1 certainly share a more precise interest in the perceived potential for the contamination of English travelers abroad. Thus Elizabeth Heale's essay on early Elizabethan poet-travelers sits comfortably alongside Efterpi Mitsi's piece on English travelers to Greece, and Melanie Ord's examination of Anthony Munday's descriptions of Catholic Rome, whereas all three return to the ways in which English authors "translated" the foreign for domestic consumption, and particularly for the sake of their own self-fashioning. Cathy Shrank's essay on topographic works indicates the strategic description of landscape to disseminate certain political imperatives. The description of England as an island, for example, enables a mythographic isolation of English culture from continental religion and culture that was seen as erroneous or lewd. In effect, Shrank identifies a kind of transportation in the "blurring between the use of landscape as an explanation for behaviour, and as a metaphor for it" (43).

While the "translations" described in part 2 may vary more widely than the "travels" of part 1, they too share an interest in rhetorical "travail." Amina Alyal's essay on George Gascoigne, for example, argues that Gascoigne's decision to represent his second edition of The Adventures of Master F. J. as an Italian translation, considers how "translation" confers certain "foreign" values onto a native tale. Georgia Brown develops a similar argument in her fascinating study of Elizabeth Tudor's translations of French poetry. By using queer theory to consider the politics of translating from gendered romance languages into the more ambiguous English, Brown makes a case for Elizabeth as a more subversive figure in regards to patriarchal culture than has generally been allowed. She argues, for example, that Elizabeth's translation of Marguerite de Navarre's Le miroir de l'âme pécheresse effects a recursive construction of female community, "privileging matrilineage over patrilineage [and] spiritual and intellectual inheritance over inheritance of the blood" (96). Roy Rosenstein similarly argues for a "back translation" as he argues that Shakespeare's Richard II restores Polydore Vergil's "pellucid ethical vision [of Richard] obscured in the shapeless sensationalist compilation that is Holinshed" (137). Here as in a few other instances, a provocative argument may strain the term "translation." Mark Robson does, however, offer a catalogue of various "levels of translation" at play in Ellis Heywood's fictionalized portrait of Sir Thomas More in the Italian dialogue, Il Moro. While Robson focuses on the translation of Thomas More into a fictional character in arguing for Heywood...