Killing the Messenger: Diplomatic Translators in Late Elizabethan Culture

abstract :

Edward Wilson-Lee examines the structural role of translators in the early modern period, both in actual embassies and in literary representations of diplomacy, analyzing a series of episodes that involve the erasure (violent or otherwise) of the translator. He argues that translators posed a threat in their ability to act as a conduit between nation states and cultures and that the erasure of these figures was necessary to preserve ideas of sovereign equality that were central to early modern conceptions of statehood. The different modes of erasure also shed light on a balancing act performed by England in the early modern period, defining itself both against supposedly barbaric Others while at the same time articulating its own identity by aligning itself with the same barbarous Others in proud opposition to Catholic Europe.