“That Famous Wit and Cavaleer of France”: The English Translation of Cyrano de Bergerac in the 1650s

In her study of the bookseller Humphrey Moseley and a group of translators active in the 1650s and 1660s, Alice Eardley has reminded us that, in the wider context of an increasing demand for translations from the French, by the mid-seventeenth century romance had become a worthwhile commodity for English booksellers (130–42). This essay focuses on the English translations of two works by Cyrano de Bergerac that were published in quick succession in London during the Interregnum in the context of this new interest in French literature. In 1658, Henry Herringman published Satyrical Characters and Handsome Description in Letters, a translation, by “a Person of Honour,” of Cyrano’s Oeuvres diverses, originally published in 1654. In 1659, Humphrey Robinson published <Selenarchia>, Or the Government of the World in the Moon: A Comical History, which is the first English translation by Thomas Sydserf (or St-Serf) of Cyrano’s Histoire comique par Monsieur de Cyrano Bergerac, Contenant les Estats & Empires de la Lune, first published in 1657.

These two translations, appearing within two years of the publication of the French originals, illustrate the new currency acquired by French literature in the period and its increasing profitability in the context of the Interregnum, when a generation of royalist exiles who had spent time on the Continent came back to England. They also reflect the rise of a middle-class, commercial translator in the context of a socially-mixed readership. The texts belong to very different genres: the first one is a collection of familiar letters, some of them burlesque, and the second a serioludic narrative of a voyage to the moon in the Lucianic vein. Cyrano’s Histoire comique was in fact inspired by Francis Godwin’s The Man in the Moone, initially published in 1638 and translated into French in 1648. Godwin’s and Cyrano’s romances offer an interesting instance of a back-and-forth circulation of texts between France and England through the medium of translation. Cyrano’s debt to Godwin is explicit: Domingo Gonsales, Godwin’s hero, is featured in Cyrano’s Histoire comique, and even meets the narrator on the moon: their jailers, identifying them as members of the same species, keep them in the same cage in the hope that they will breed (Cyrano, Histoire 75)—a joke that those who were privy to Cyrano’s sexual preferences would have enjoyed. A second English edition of The Man in the Moone appeared in London in 1657, only two years before the translation of Cyrano’s moon voyage, and it seems clear that the publication of Cyrano’s text was marketed as a follow-up to this second edition of Godwin’s text.

This article proposes a study of the marketing strategies that booksellers, translators, and potential editors used to present the two works in translation. In both instances, the translators’ own voices can be heard: the translation of Cyrano’s letters, although published anonymously, includes a preface by the translator to the reader, and the translation of Histoire comique has a dedicatory epistle to two Scottish officers by the translator Thomas Sydserf. The two texts evince elaborate strategies of adaptation and mediation for the English book market of the 1650s, and a subtle refashioning of Cyrano as a “Famous Wit and Cavaleer of France” (<Selenarchia> title page)—a form of “cavalier packaging” (Barker 152)—through the selection and tailoring of information in the paratext, and in particular the title page. This paratextual apparatus reveals certain generic manipulations intended to enable an English reader to assimilate translated works immediately. Yet Cyrano’s identity as a “Libertin érudit” with a scandalous reputation in France, whose works were submitted to censorship, seems not to have registered in the English context.¹ The translatorial and editorial strategies tend to disregard the question of heterodoxy: as he crossed the Channel, Cyrano lost his aura of scandal to become the archetypal figure of the French “Wit”—a marketing strategy capitalizing on national stereotypes, but also catering to the demand for French literature in English translation.

The 1650s saw...