Abstract
In this chapter, Helen Smith discusses early modern notions of materiality as a shaping force in translation discourse. She demonstrates how translation prefaces and dedications borrowed and adapted from ancient and contemporary theories of matter to discuss the practice of linguistic transfer. Smith identifies the various paratextual and material markers that in asking readers to consider the 'matter' of translation, presented English readers with classical concepts of matter, and helped in turn generate new conceptions of materiality, as effected in (translated) language, generic form, and the early printed book.
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Notes
- 1.
Michel de Montaigne, The essayes or morall, politike and millitarie discourses of Lo: Michaell de Montaigne … done into English by J. Florio (London: V. Simmes for E. Blount, 1603), sig. Y6v. The original reads: ‘Il faict bon traduire les autheurs, comme celuy-là, où il n’y a guere que la matiere à representer: mais ceux qui ont donné beaucoup à la grace, & à l’élegance du langage, ils sont dangereux à entreprendre, nommément pour les rapporter à vn idiome plus foible’, Les essais (Paris: Langelier, 1595), sig. Aa3r.
- 2.
William W. E. Slights, Managing Readers: Printed Marginalia in English Renaissance Books (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2001), p. 19. On printed marginalia, see also Heidi Brayman Hackel, Reading Material in Early Modern England: Print, Gender, and Literacy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), chapter 3.
- 3.
Slights, Managing Readers, p. 26.
- 4.
Neil Rhodes, English Renaissance Translation Theory, MHRA Tudor & Stuart Translations, Volume 9 (London: MHRA, 2013), p. 1.
- 5.
Cicero, De optimo genere oratorum, trans. H. M. Hubbell, Loeb Classical Library 386 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1942), p. 365.
- 6.
Thomas Wilson, The arte of rhetorique ([London]: Richard Grafton, 1553), sig. P4r. These ideas are reproduced in strikingly similar terms in the address to the reader which prefaces the first monolingual English dictionary , Robert Cawdry’s A table alphabeticall … of hard vsuall English words… (London: I. R[oberts] for Edmund Weaver, 1604), sig. A4r.
- 7.
Richard Sherry, A treatise of the figures of grammar and rhetorike (London: Richard Tottel, 1555), sig. A3v.
- 8.
The booke of freendeship of Marcus Tullie Cicero, trans. John Harington (London: Thomas Berthelet, 1550), sig. A2v.
- 9.
On the French basis of English literature, and the role of translation in the development of the English vernacular, see Anne Coldiron, Printers Without Borders: Translation and Textuality in the Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015).
- 10.
For a survey of the changing uses of this trope, see Massimiliano Morini, Tudor Translation in Theory and Practice (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), pp. 36–42.
- 11.
See Rhodes, English Renaissance Translation Theory, pp. 16–17; Peter Burke, ‘Cultures of Translation in Early Modern Europe’, in Cultural Translation in Early Modern Europe, edited by Peter Burke and R. Po-chia Hsia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), pp. 28–30.
- 12.
William Fulke, A defense of the sincere and true translations of the holie Scriptures into the English tong (London: Henry Bynneman, 1583), sig. C9v.
- 13.
Henry King, ‘To my much honoured Friend Mr. George Sandys’ , in George Sandys, A paraphrase upon the divine poems (London: [John Legatt], 1638), sig. G5v.
- 14.
James Kearney, The Incarnate Text: Imagining the Book in Reformation England (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2009), p. 15.
- 15.
Henry Ainsworth, A defence of the Holy Scriptures, worship, and ministerie, used in the Christian Churches separated from Antichrist (Amsterdam: Giles Thorp, 1609), sig. I1r.
- 16.
Matthew Day, ‘“Intended to Offenders”: The Running Titles of Early Modern Books’, in Renaissance Paratexts, edited by Helen Smith and Louise Wilson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 34–47 (p. 35).
- 17.
John White, A defence of the way to the true Church (London: Richard Field, 1614), sig. S2r.
- 18.
See Brian Cummings, The Literary Culture of the Reformation: Grammar and Grace (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).
- 19.
Joseph Caryl, An exposition with practicall observations continued upon the eighth, ninth and tenth chapters of the book of Job (London: G. Miller, 1647), sig. Kk3v.
- 20.
Coldiron, Printers without Borders, p. 26.
- 21.
I am grateful to Michele Campopiano for his comments on the Hebrew.
- 22.
Thomas Pierce, An impartial inquiry into the nature of sin (London: R[oger] N[orton], 1660), sigs. T4v–V1r.
- 23.
On accommodation and application, see Arnold Hunt, The Art of Hearing: English Preachers and their Audiences 1590–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), especially pp. 27 and 316; and Mary Morrissey, ‘Ornament and Repetition: Biblical Interpretation in Early Modern English Preaching’, in The Oxford Handbook of the Bible in Early Modern England, c.1530–1700, edited by Kevin Killeen, Helen Smith, and Rachel Willie (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), pp. 303–16. This inversion of margin and text was not confined to scripture. Peter Heylyn, for example, quibbled with the long-dead Thomas Becon, comparing him to Chrysippus, of whom, he claims, it was said that if everything was removed from his writings that was not his own ‘his Papers would be emptie of all manner of matter’ (Antidotum Lincolniense or An answer to a book entituled, The holy table (London: [Miles Flesher and R. Bishop] for John Clark, 1637), sig. Aaa1v). Heylyn itemises his author’s mistakes, crowing with delight when he finds a report of ‘Archimedes, who washing in a brazen Lavatorie, cryes out he had found it. What had he now found?
, saith your margin rightly: but very wrongly you translate it, and tell us it was nothing but the Coronet or circumference of the vessell’ (sig. Aaa3r). - 24.
John Brinsley, Ludus literarius: or, the grammar schoole (London: [Humphrey Lownes] for Thomas Man, 1612), P3r. Brinsley’s text was re-edited in 1627 and published again in four variant issues in that same year. On Brinsley’s educational ideals, see John Morgan, Godly Learning: Puritan Attitudes Towards Reason, Learning and Education, 1560–1640 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), esp. pp. 173–6 and 192–202.
- 25.
Brinsley translated and published The first book of Tullies Offices translated grammatically in 1616 and Ouids Metamorphosis translated gramatically in 1618, both printed by Humphrey Lownes for Thomas Man.
- 26.
Marcus Tullius Ciceroes thre bokes of duties, to Marcus his sonne, turned oute of latine into english, by Nicholas Grimalde (London: Richard Tottel, 1556), sig. Cc5v.
- 27.
Certaine epistles of Tully verbally translated [by William Haine] (London: [N. Okes] for the Company of Stationers, 1611), sig. B5v.
- 28.
The first book of Tullies Offices translated grammatically, sig. [A4v].
- 29.
John N. King, Foxe’s ‘Book of Martyrs’ and Early Modern Print Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), pp. 64–5. King also notes that margins were sometimes used for the clarification of terms (itself a kind of translation).
- 30.
Neil Rhodes, ‘Status Anxiety and English Renaissance Translation’, in Renaissance Paratexts, edited by Helen Smith and Louise Wilson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 107–20.
- 31.
On commonplacing , see especially Peter Beal, ‘Notions in Garrison: The Seventeenth-Century Commonplace Book’, in New Ways of Looking at Old Texts: Papers of the Renaissance English Text Society, 1985–1991, edited by W. Speed Hill (Binghamton, NY: Renaissance English Text Society, 1993), pp. 131–48; Mary Thomas Crane, Framing Authority: Sayings, Self, and Society in Sixteenth-Century England (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993); Ann Moss, Printed Commonplace-Books and the Structuring of Renaissance Thought (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996); and Fred Schurink, ‘Manuscript Commonplace Books, Literature, and Reading in Early Modern England’, Huntington Library Quarterly, 73.3 (2010), 453–69.
- 32.
OED, ‘fraught’, adj., def. 2.a.
- 33.
The reference to Resner is probably to Nikolaus von Reusner, Symbolorum imperatoriorum, first published in Frankfurt by Johann Speiß in 1588. The Private Libraries of Renaissance England database suggests this book was owned by Walter Brown, an Oxford cleric and scholar, and by an anonymous Oxford scholar, whose books were inventoried in c.1650 (online: http://plre.folger.edu, nos 159.421 and 164.50). The edition of Lycosthenes, printed by George Bishop, is not listed in STC, and seems not to have survived.
- 34.
The elements of geometrie of the most auncient philosopher Euclide of Megara. Faithfully (now first) translated into the Englishe toung, by H. Billingsley (London: John Daye, 1570), sig. R2r.
- 35.
Jeffrey Todd Knight, ‘“Furnished” for Action: Renaissance Books as Furniture’, Book History, 12 (2009), 37–73 (pp. 53, 55).
- 36.
Montaigne , The Essayes, sig. Ggg5r, a translation of ‘Ces pastissages de lieux communs, dequoy tant de gents mesnagent leur estude’ (Essais, sig. Qqq4r). Florio’s ‘rapsodies’ has its own physicality; as Piers Brown has recently shown, a poetical ‘rhapsody’ was understood as fragments figuratively—or sometimes literally—stitched together (‘Donne, Rhapsody, and Textual Order’, in Manuscript Miscellanies in Early Modern England, edited by Joshua Eckhardt and Daniel Starza Smith (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015), pp. 237–55.
- 37.
OED, ‘comprehension’, n.
- 38.
Elizabeth Spiller, Reading and the History of Race in the Renaissance (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), p. 83.
- 39.
Thomas Thomas, Dictionarium linguae Latinae et Anglicanae (Cambridge: Thomas Thomas, 1587), sig. Mm6v. Thomas’s imprint is in Latin (‘Ex officinal Thomae Thomasii, inclytae academiae typographi …’), as is usual in works written and printed in Latin, but it translates Thomas, his London bookseller Richard Boyle and St Paul’s Churchyard into the learned language of the dictionary.
- 40.
John Florio, Queen Anna’s new world of words … augmented (London: Melch. Bradwood [and William Stansby], 1611), sigs. Cc2r–v; Randle Cotgrave, A dictionary of the French and English tongues (London: Adam Islip, 1611), sig. Fff2v. Florio also offers a definition of Materiále: ‘materiall, substantiall, made of or consisting of any matter. Also vsed for a dull or shallow witted and grosse fellow, wanting forme’.
- 41.
The Iliads of Homer prince of poets … donne according to the Greeke by Geo: Chapman (London: [Richard Field] for Nathaniel Butter [1611?]), sig. A1r.
- 42.
OED, ‘material’, def. A, adj., 7.
- 43.
Homer, Iliads, sig. G1v.
- 44.
Cicero, De optimo genere oratorum, p. 365.
- 45.
British Library Shelfmark 237.l.18., B2r.
- 46.
Virgils Eclogues , vvith his booke De apibus, concerning the gouernment and ordering of bees, translated grammatically, and also according to the proprietie of our English tongue, so farre as grammar and the verse will well permit [by John Brinsley] (London: Richard Field, 1620), sig. I3r.
- 47.
On this complex, see also Diane Kelsey McColley, Poetry and Ecology in the Age of Milton and Marvell (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007), esp. chapter 4.
- 48.
Virgils Eclogues translated into English: by W. L., Gent (London: Richard Jones, 1628), sig. A5v.
- 49.
Gerard Passanante, The Lucretian Renaissance: Philology and the Afterlife of Tradition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011), p. 36.
- 50.
Passanante, The Lucretian Renaissance, p. 37. On the relationship between Virgil and Lucretius, see Monica R. Gale, Virgil on the Nature of Things: The Georgics, Lucretius and the Didactic Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).
- 51.
Passanante, The Lucretian Renaissance, p. 47.
- 52.
As John Monfasani points out in a review of The Swerve, Greenblatt significantly overstates the contemporary importance of Bracciolini’s discovery (John Monfasani, review of The Swerve: How the Renaissance Began, online: http://www.history.ac.uk/reviews/review/1283). The ideas of Epicurus and his followers circulated during the fifteenth century in Cicero’s De finibus and De natura deorum, Lactantius’s Divine institutes, and Diogenes Laertius’s Lives of the philosophers, translated by the Camaldulensian monk, Ambrogio Traversari.
- 53.
Virgils Eclogues, sigs. G3v–G4v.
- 54.
The .xiii. bukes of Eneados … Translatet out of Latyne verses into Scottish metir bi the Reuerend Father in God, Mayster Gawin Douglas (London: William Copland, 1553), sig. B3v; Thee first foure bookes of Virgil his Aeneis translated intoo English heroical verse by Richard Stanyhurst (Leiden: John Pates, 1582), sigs. A2r–v; quoted in Rhodes, English Renaissance Translation Theory, p. 338, n. 8.
- 55.
Richard Mulcaster, Positions … for the training vp of children (London: Thomas Vautrollier, 1581), sig. Y1r.
- 56.
The seuen first books of the Eneidos of Virgill, conuerted in Englishe meter by Thomas Phaer Esquier (London: John Kyngston, 1558), sigs. A1v, I4r, A2r.
- 57.
Craig Kallendorf, The Protean Virgil: Material Form and the Reception of the Classics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015), p. 9.
, saith your margin rightly: but very wrongly you translate it, and tell us it was nothing but the Coronet or circumference of the vessell’ (sig. Aaa3r).Author information
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Smith, H. (2018). Matter in the Margins. In: Belle, MA., Hosington, B. (eds) Thresholds of Translation. Early Modern Literature in History. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-72772-1_2
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