Albion (27 page)

There is another aspect to these journeys, however, which lies in the affirmation of individuality and individual experience. Many English women travellers have been noted for their apparent eccentricity of demeanour, Margery Kempe and Lady Hester Stanhope being practically indistinguishable in that respect. But this is only a sign both of their evident difference and of their desire not to be chastened or modified by male preconceptions. When Mary Wollstonecraft decided to travel within continental Europe she remarked: “You know I am not born to tread in the beaten track”; when Lady Hester Stanhope embarked upon a journey which would lead her to a flamboyant exile in Turkey, she concluded: “Go out of England I am determined.” Both of them derided the idea of feminine “weakness” or powerlessness, and in a literal way demanded their liberty. The Wife of Bath was only one of the women who in Chaucer’s narrative “longen . . . to goon on pilgrimage.” It is appropriate, then, that Dorothy Richardson should entitle her twentieth-century fictional sequence
Pilgrimage
.

The
most important
female poet of the sixteenth century was undoubtedly Mary Sidney, Countess of Pembroke and sister of the more famous Philip. She created a space beside her illustrious sibling, and her growing mastery of English verse implied an assiduous pursuit of a literary career. It has been suggested that her goal was “to extend the formal range of English lyric and to demonstrate the capacity of Elizabethan poetry to match the variety and flexibility of the French,”
³⁰
but it is important to note that she established her mastery in poetry of a Calvinist persuasion. This coincidence of female expression and religious devotion is further adumbrated by Aemilia Lanyer, perhaps best known as the putative “dark lady” of Shakespeare’s sonnets but with a more lasting claim upon the attention of posterity as the first English female poet to publish a substantial collection of her verse. In
Salve Deus Rex
Judaeorum
she invokes an imagined community of good women and remarks upon what is

. . . seldome seene A Womans writing of divinest things

The association between female creativity and “divinest things” is clearly an assertion of worth rather than of incapacity before the more scholarly male. The various divisions within her completed work are entitled “1. The Passion of Christ. 2. Eves Apologie in defence of Women. 3. The Teares of the Daughters of Jerusalem. 4. The Salutation and Sorrow of the Virgine Marie”; the emphasis upon female virtuosity and piety can hardly be overlooked. Lanyer also composed nine dedicatory poems to various royal and noble women, thus confirming the volume’s status as a female document. She asserts that “it pleased our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ, without the assistance of man . . . to be begotten of a woman, borne of a woman, nourished of a woman, obedient to a woman; and that he healed women, pardoned women, comforted women.” In her poem upon a community of women at “the
Paradice
of Cookham,” the estate belonging to the Countess of Cumberland, Lanyer seems in some instinctive manner to have been looking back at the communities of Anglo-Saxon nuns who were located in the same region of Berkshire. Cookham of course became the enchanted place of Stanley Spencer’s imagination, where he envisioned both
The Nativity
and
Bridesmaids at Cana
. The connections run deep.

I
n
sixteenth- and early
seventeenth-century drama composed by women such as Joanna Lumley and Elizabeth Cary, the emphasis rests upon “the spiritual heroism of their female characters, exalting the feminine archetype of the Christian soul.”
³¹
The same preoccupation exists among female pamphleteers and female autobiographers who explicitly aligned their sex with their religious experience; the standard comparisons are once again made with Margery Kempe, as the original of what has been called the “forthright” woman. As Margaret Fell Fox puts it, in
Womens Speaking Justified
published in the calamitous year 1666, “the Church of Christ is a Woman, and those that speak against the Womans speaking, speak against the Church of Christ, and the Seed of the Woman, which Seed is Christ.” The woeful events of 1666, together with the ferocious civil conflict which preceded them, may in fact have materially assisted the enterprise and pugnacity of female writers with an unstated presumption concerning the ills of the masculine world. We will notice a tone of barely restrained anger and frustration, not unconnected with subversion, in women’s writing of this and a later date. Certainly the imperatives of silence and obedience, once enjoined upon women, were now scarcely honoured by those females whose formidable piety forced them into expression.

Mary Sidney’s
Psalmes
is of course a translated work. Translation itself has been deemed to be an intrinsic feature of the English imagination, but the connection between translation and female literature is a peculiarly close one. It was generally considered to be a secondary activity, appropriate to women who could not be considered to have “authored” a text without some prior fertilisation. It is inevitable that earlier literate nuns, under the direction of their abbess, would have translated portions of the sacred scriptures and passages of prayer for their less educated sisters. That is why Chaucer characterised his Second Nun as a translator. There was indeed in the medieval period an efflorescence of female translators who in their submissive role towards the authoritarian text may be said to have followed the injunctions of silence and obedience in a literary context. Their self-effacement may have disguised the fact that they were surreptitiously appropriating the authority of these texts, but in the period their activity was seen as akin to that of embroidery. In the sixteenth century, too, there was a “great outpouring of translation.”
³²
It has been estimated that one-third of the extant works by women are couched in this form. John Florio felt compelled to apologise for his translation of Montaigne on the presumption that “all translations are reputed femall,” but the remark obscures the real achievement. Mary Sidney’s great task was to re-create the sacred literature of the Psalms in the vernacular, thus asserting the capability and strength of the English language itself. The mode of translation was also an indirect means of establishing a tradition or at least a continuity of women’s writing.

A Renaissance

Edmund Spenser. Engraving by George Vertue, 1727

CHAPTER 26

But Newly Translated

Only half the story
of the English imagination resides in England itself; the rest derives from continental sources. Allusions to the “Renaissance” began to appear only in the 1840s, having been borrowed from the French, and from the historian Michelet in particular; it would be unwise, in any case, to set any specific date for the cultivation of continental European learning in England. It began in the years of the Roman settlement, and was considerably enlarged by the Anglo-Saxons. There has never been a time, in fact, when European scholarship and cultivation did not materially affect the fabric of English life. Boccaccio described the English as tardy in classical studies—“studiis tardi”—but by the fifteenth century the introduction of the “new learning,” largely based upon Latin translations of Greek originals, was effected by Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester and brother of Henry V. The assertion of national sovereignty did not impede the development of an international movement in letters.

London became a centre of learning, catholic in every sense, and even in the early fourteenth century there are records of St. Paul’s almonry school holding volumes of Ovid, Horace and Virgil. The central pathway of learning, therefore, was between England and Italy; from Rome and Florence and Ferrara came newly discovered or newly translated classical texts. There were English scholars and theologians, also, who studied Greek in an effort to reclaim the learning of Europe. An analogy might be made with English domestic architecture when, in the middle of the fifteenth century, the number of windows increased so that “almost for the first time sunlight is allowed to pour into the house.”
¹

And so the first English humanists—among them William Grocyn, Thomas Linacre and John Colet—travelled abroad in search of the purer light of learning. They read Aristotle and Plato in the original, in an effort to imbibe the language of the ancients without the intermediaries of medieval scholastic or encyclopedic commentaries. Colet established a new school in the precincts of St. Paul’s, and there instituted a curriculum largely under the influence of the Dutch humanist Erasmus; Erasmus himself visited London, claiming that it harboured more genuine scholars than Italy itself, and took up a post as Professor of Greek at Cambridge. Just as the proponents of the “new learning” wished to restore classical texts to their original purity by a more rigorous approach to matters of grammar, so they wished to renovate the Catholic Church by removing its scholastic and superstitious accretions. Erasmus and Colet in turn were the mentors and companions of Thomas More, who was the first man to translate the work of the Greek satirist Lucian into English and who wrote his treatise
Utopia
in Latin for the benefit of a European community of scholars.

England was therefore in the advance guard of a new European civilisation. By introducing Greek and Latin authors as models for imitation and composition the proponents of the new learning, whether at St. Paul’s School or at Cambridge University, were shaping English sensibility along the lines of classical European scholarship. This in turn was to have a profound effect upon many generations of English pupils and undergraduates, who became aware of ancient Greek and Roman history before they were acquainted with its English variant, and who learned how to write verse in those ancient tongues before they ever ventured into the English language. When Erasmus suggested that the English schoolmaster should instruct his pupils in Cicero and in Ovid, and that his “themes be selected from Homer, Sophocles, Euripides, Virgil or even sometimes from histories,” we may observe that what became a peculiarly English education was in fact based upon the precepts of a classical European civilisation. Milton may have considered the English to be the chosen nation, but he believed Europe to be his home. He denounced a king in Latin, so that Europe might hear. When we remember, too, that Spenser and Sidney imbibed their neo-Platonism from its sources in fifteenth-century Italy, and that Spenser in particular derived his style from Erasmus’s lessons upon
copia
or rich and abundant style, then we may recognise that the origins of the English imagination are not wholly to be found in England itself. Christopher Wren remarked in 1694 “that our English Artists are dull enough at Inventions but when once a foreigne patterne is sett, they imitate so well that commonly they exceed the originall.” It is a shrewd observation, and may explain why the great English poets have excelled at translation. A German art historian, Hans Swarzenski, has in turn noted that “English art needed repeated stimulation from abroad to remain productive and creatively alive,” as if the national genius were not strong enough to exist upon its own resources. This may account for the intrinsic tone of melancholy noticed by others. Yet it may also be the cause of humour. In
The
Unfortunate Traveller
, Thomas Nashe remarks that “I, being a youth of the English cut . . . imitated four or five sundry nations in my attire at once.” In
The Merchant of Venice
a “young baron of England” is depicted thus: “I think he bought his doublet in Italy, his round hose in France, his bonnet in Germany, and his behaviour everywhere.”

England has in fact relied upon translation to nourish its native genius. The Anglo-Saxon renderings of Augustine and Boethius are only the beginnings of a process which included Chaucer and Malory and Wycliff. Ezra Pound, a writer whose own true gift lay not in self-expression but in translation, remarked that after the Anglo-Saxon example “English literature lives on translation, it is fed by translation; every new exuberance, every new heave is stimulated by translations, every allegedly great age is an age of translations, beginning with Geoffrey Chaucer . . .”
²
Here is an important truth. For many centuries, in fact, translation itself was the characteristic activity of the English imagination. In John Donne’s meditations it even becomes a metaphor for the sacred world. “All mankind is of one
Author
, and is one
volume
; when one Man dies, one
Chapter
is not
torne
out of the
booke
, but
translated
into a better
language . . . God’s
hand is in every
translation
; and his hand shall binde up all our scattered leaves againe, for that
Librarie
where every
booke
shall lie open to one another.” Before the twentieth century every serious poet, or at least every poet who wished to be considered as serious, attempted translation as a significant and necessary art. These poets were, in truth, creating new works of art. It might even be claimed that the English imagination most successfully conveyed itself through the medium of translation; it stimulated fresh creation and brought renewed life into the language. Thomas Wyatt translated Petrarch and Marlowe translated Ovid, Jonson translated Catullus and Milton translated Horace, Dryden translated Virgil and Pope translated Homer, Congreve translated from the Greek and Johnson from the Latin, Shelley translated Plato and Tennyson translated Homer. The references could be multiplied indefinitely.

The practitioners of this art argued over the relative merits of metaphrase (direct word-for-word translation), paraphrase (a freer rendition) and imitation (a looser transcription in a modern setting). Of the last John Denham wrote, in 1667: “If Virgil must needs speak English, it were fit he should speake not only as a man of this Nation, but as a Man of this Age.” Perhaps the greatest artist of translation, John Dryden, believed that imitation consisted in “taking only some general hints from the original, to run division on the ground work as he pleases.” That is why Dryden himself preferred paraphrase, where the translator remained faithful to the purport and sense of the original without exact copying. The technique is suggested by Ben Jonson in
The
Poetaster
when he describes the ability of the true poet “to convert the substance, or riches of another poet, to his own use . . . to draw forth out of the best and choicest flowers with the bee, and turn all into honey, work it into one relish and savour: make our imitation sweet: observe how the best writers have imitated, and follow them.” In one sense this practice continued the medieval traditions of authorship, when the individual maker bowed in humility and reverence before the established authorities and where
imitatio
, in the Platonic sense, was the condition of poetry itself.

Yet the art of translation has been modified over the centuries. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries there was a progressive loosening of texture, so that a certain awkward novelty in Elizabethan translation was replaced by smoothness and fluency. In the first wave of sixteenth-century translation, however, the whole wealth of antique learning flooded into the language. Among the histories, for example, were those of Sallust, Livy, Thucydides, Plutarch, Herodotus, Tacitus, Pliny, Xenophon and Suetonius; they remained the staple of classical scholarship into the twenty-first century. Among the poets were Ovid, Virgil, Homer, Juvenal, Lucretius, Seneca, Martial, Sappho, Horace, Lucian and Propertius. But if this activity represented an Elizabethan voyage of discovery, to use a metaphor current at the time, it was also a voyage of expropriation and colonisation. Of the Romans one translator, Philemon Holland, wrote: “They conquered us by the dent of their sword, we have to conquer them by the dint of our pen.”

Translation also replicated splendour. Even in the middle of the sixteenth century it was possible for Roger Ascham to conclude that “as for the Latin or greke tonge, every thynge is so excellentlly done in them that none could do better. In the Englysh tonge contrary every thinge in a maner so meanly, both for the matter and handelynge, that no man can do worse.” The opinion of Ascham may be over-emphatic, but it can at least be affirmed that the absorption of the Latin and Greek tongues did indeed modify whatever was “meanly” in the native language. When Marlowe translated Ovid’s Elegies he experimented with the abrupt tone and declamatory style of the dramatic monologue, with suggestive consequences for the rest of Tudor drama. The introduction of new forms, and an unfamiliar range of feeling, meant that the possibilities of the language were infinitely extended. Blank verse, that measure which more than any other seems to have moved with the English imagination, was introduced by the Earl of Surrey for his translation of the second and fourth books of Virgil’s
Aeneid
; the unrhymed iambic pentameters represented a deliberate attempt to imitate the plangency and gravity of Virgil’s hexameters, and in turn they were deployed by Marlowe, who scorned the “jigging veins of rhyming mother-wits.”

Some of these forms, newly translated, were wholly unfamiliar. Wyatt intoduced the epistolary satire into English, for example, through his translations of Horace; then, in his translations of Italian poetry, he deliberately introduced what the Italians knew as the “magnificent” style. At a later date Milton adapted it within his graver and more sonorous music. Cowley encountered quite by chance the Greek odes of Pindar and “having considered at leisure the height of his invention and the majesty of his style, he tried immediately to imitate it in English.” It is this urgency, this excitement, which characterised the role of the translator. In
The Shepheardes Calender
Spenser modeled his poetry on that of Virgil’s
Eclogues
and the “new poet,” as Spenser was known, thus created “a new vernacular language.”
³
From Ovid and Martial, through the medium of Nicholas Grimald and Christopher Marlowe, came the closed decasyllabic couplet which was to exert a powerful hold upon eighteenth-century poetry:

In summer’s heat, and mid-time of the day, To rest my limbs upon a bed I lay

It wrought a change in the English language as great as anything recorded in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. When Joseph Hall copied Juvenal and Horace he declared:

I first adventure: follow me who list, And be the second English satyrist

So satire, which would become an intrinsic aspect of the English imagination, was itself borrowed from European classicism. Thus fluency and dignity are compounded with novelty. Translation had become a means of conflating the tradition and the individual talent. The music of the past, to adapt Samuel Johnson’s phrase, helps to tune the tongues of the present. It is the story of English literature itself.

In an edition of his works, published in 1735, Pope offered a commentary upon his translations of Horace. “The occasion of my publishing these
Imitations
was the clamour raised by some of my
Epistles
. An answer from Horace was both more full, and of more dignity, than I could have made in my own person.” It is an interesting claim, to have adopted or borrowed another voice with such success that it is no longer Pope who writes. It may be called pastiche or imitation, but the practice is deeply congenial to the English imagination principally because it combines the twin tendencies towards historicism and theatricality; the self-effacing narrator can hide himself in another persona while at the same time displaying all the ornamentation and complexity of an old style made new.