The Culture of Translation in Early Modern England and France, 1500–1660 ed. by Tania Demetriou, and Rowan Tomlinson (review)

In Germany there is an elephant that can compose whole sentences in Greek, so the language cannot be very difficult to learn. So Richard Croke, the newly installed Reader in Greek at Cambridge, assured his hearers in 1519. The anecdote comes from Neil Rhodes’s essay here on the reading and translating of Greek in Tudor England. Greek was always a minority accomplishment, and not always a welcome one, as Glyn Norton tells us: the Royal Readers appointed to the Sorbonne by François I^er were perceived as a threat, partly because to read the New Testament in Greek rather than in Latin implied a challenge to the interpretative authority of the Catholic Church. As Norton and several other contributors to this volume remind us, translation cannot be separated from interpretation, and interpretation is fraught with alluring and sometimes dangerous possibilities. This collection reiterates the centrality of translation to the cultures of early modern England and France. In their Introduction, Tania Demetriou and Rowan Tomlinson stress the importance of French as an intermediary language for translations into English. North’s translation of Plutarch via Amyot’s French is perhaps the most familiar example, but Demetriou and Tomlinson report that 40 per cent of translations into English between 1500 and 1660 came not directly from the text’s original language but via an intermediary French version. Latin as an intermediary accounted for 42 per cent of translations (the original language presumably being Greek in many of these cases). Most of the essays collected here treat translations of canonical texts, so that we are offered discussions of aspects of Florio’s Montaigne, Stanihurst’s Virgil, and Urquhart’s Rabelais, while Demetriou explores the treatment of Penelope in translations of the Odyssey. This essay amply demonstrates that translation cannot avoid being interpretation, for Penelope’s conduct leads to questions about her emotions and her morality, and we can see translators of Homer making assumptions not only about this particular woman but about the proper conduct of any woman. The role of women as translators has sometimes been neglected, but the present collection includes an essay by Edward Wilson-Lee on the Countess of Pembroke’s French translations, exploring their significance as elements in diplomatic manoeuvres. This is one of several points in this volume at which we see something of the intricate cultural connections between England and France facilitated by translation. If there is a criticism to be made, it might be that the collection largely represents the view from the UK: there are no contributions from French scholars, and no essays that pay substantial attention to translation into French. Perhaps a subsequent volume might redress the balance, for the range and quality of these essays suggest that the field is a fruitful one.