Abstract
This essay explores the material and intellectual making of the translation of Marguerite de Navarre’s Le Miroir de l’Ame pêcheresse, which the young Elizabeth produced as a gift for her stepmother Catherine Parr in 1544. It delves into Elizabeth’s troubled relationship with her father and the other parent figures in her life, touching upon her meaningful choice of a text that had been given as a gift by Marguerite de Navarre herself to her mother, Anne Boleyn; considering the ambiguous material of the text, which dealt with the theme of incest; and analyzing the significance of a number of material errors in translation that Elizabeth could not help making and which reveal some of her preoccupations as to her own status as the daughter of a king who had intermittently called her a bastard child. The care Elizabeth puts into the English version of the text testifies to her desire to please by crafting a gift of language, but in which the language itself inevitably turns into a mirror that reflects her difficult position within the royal family as well as the attitudes of the adults around her.
She was taken into the confidence of passions on which she fixed just the stare she might have had for images bounding across the wall in the slide of a magic lantern
Henry James, What Maisie Knew
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Notes
- 1.
John Florio , trans., Michel de Montaigne , The Essays (London: Edward Blount, 1603), A2.
- 2.
Gary F. Waller draws attention to the “marginalization and silence” inflicted upon women in the male-dominated discourse of Renaissance England in his “Struggling into Discourse: The Emergence of Renaissance Women’s Writing,” in Silent but for the Word: Tudor Women as Patrons, Translators and Writers of Religious Works, ed. Margaret P. Hannay (Kent, OH: The Kent State University Press, 1985), 238–56.
- 3.
See Mary Ellen Lamb, “The Cooke Sisters: Attitudes Toward Learned Women in the Renaissance” in ed. Hannay (1985), 107–25.
- 4.
Joan Kelly-Gadol, “Did Women Have a Renaissance?,” in Becoming Visible: Women in European History, ed. Renate Bridenthal, Claudia Koonz, and Susan Stuard, 2nd ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1987), 175–201.
- 5.
Henry James, What Maisie Knew (London: Penguin, 2010), 39.
- 6.
Marc Shell, Elizabeth’s Glass (Lincoln and London: University of Nebraska Press, 1993), 111. I refer to this edition and transcription throughout this essay.
- 7.
Shell, 1993, 112.
- 8.
Ibid.
- 9.
Ibid.
- 10.
Ibid.
- 11.
See in particular his introduction: “No Man Bastard Be,” Shell, 1993, 3–73.
- 12.
Anne Lake Prescott, “The Pearl of the Valois and Elizabeth I : Marguerite de Navarre ’s Miroir and Tudor England,” in ed. Hannay (1985), 61–76; 61.
- 13.
Prescott, 1985, 66.
- 14.
It is not that I wish to psychoanalyse here the young Elizabeth, but this is the gist of my reading: in her reading first, and then in her translation of Marguerite’s text, an unconscious movement is activated in Elizabeth. I also believe that this always happens, in every translation . As in every act of enunciation, in translation as well, to say it with Lacan, ça parle.
- 15.
Shell, 1993, 108.
- 16.
Prescott, 1985, 68; Shell, 1993, 108.
- 17.
Miroir, l. 146 and l. 512. For a bilingual edition, see Marguerite de Navarre . Selected Writings, ed. and trans. Rouben Cholakian and Mary Skemp (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008).
- 18.
Miroir, lines 350–2; Glass, fol. 20v (see Shell, 1993, 121).
- 19.
Jacques Lacan, “L’étourdit,” in Autres écrits (Paris: Seuil, 2001). See also Marie-Magdeleine Lessana, Entre mère et fille: un ravage (Paris: Fayard-Pleuriel, 2010).
- 20.
I have elaborated on this motif Lo specchio di Elisabetta (Milano: Mondadori, 2001).
- 21.
Miroir, ll. 581–4.
- 22.
Shell, 1993, 108.
- 23.
l. 468. See Shell, 1993, 109.
- 24.
ll. 587–8.
- 25.
Shell rightly emphasizes that this is the most crossed-out and rewritten part of the manuscript (Shell, 1993, 108).
- 26.
Shell, 1993, 16.
- 27.
Shell, 1993, 112.
- 28.
As early as the 1563 edition of Acts and Monuments, Foxe presents her as such.
- 29.
A Book of Devotions, Composed by her Majesty, with Translations by the Reverend Adam Fox, with a Foreword by the Reverend Cann J. P. Hodges (Gerrard Cross: Colin Smythe, 1970), 19.
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Fusini, N. (2018). What Elizabeth Knew. Language as Mirror and Gift. In: Montini, D., Plescia, I. (eds) Elizabeth I in Writing. Queenship and Power. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71952-8_10
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