Alessandra Petrina, Università degli Studi di Padova
how kin ye be both?
(Jackie Kay, “Kail and Callaloo”, 1988)
[1] The practice of and reflection upon translation inform sixteenth-century European authors, influencing, renovating, and challenging vernacular, proto-national writing, even as translation generates a unique brand of writer’s anxiety for those authors. Scotland may be proposed as a very special case study, since the discussion of the role of translation and imitation in its culture is marked by a number of factors: its geographical position, far away from the Mediterranean, considered at the time the hub of nascent humanism; the historical events that imposed a sudden stop to the development of printing and the dissemination of writing in the early sixteenth century; the way its multilingual culture challenges any facile use of the phrase “national vernacular”; and the impossibility to apply to Scottish culture the conventional frame used to define the passage from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance. Scottish translators do not only measure the limits of the vernacular against the imposing presence of the classical languages they translate from; they also negotiate the role of a supposedly national language against the competing claims of its neighbour, English, as well as of other European vernaculars such as French and Italian.
[2] In their joint contribution to The International Companion to Scottish Literature 1400-1650, Kaarina Hollo and Thomas Rutledge discuss the issue of translation in late medieval and early modern Scotland (237-65). When it comes to translation in Older Scots, Rutledge employs the famous passage from Chaucer’s Parliament of Fowls,
For out of olde feldes, as men seyth
Cometh al this newe corn from yer to yere
And out of olde bokes, in good feyth
Cometh al this newe science that men lere. (22-25)
Rutledge highlights how the proliferation of translation in Southern and Eastern Scotland between 1400 and 1650 produces its own critical difficulties, requiring us to rethink the very term ‘translation’, since this word suggests the coexistence of conservation and transformation, the continuing importance of the “old books” and the equally important need to make them speak to new readers. As they note,
It is this dialectic of retrieval and reimagining that gives translations their distinctive energy; it also makes distinguishing translation from other forms of medieval and early modern intertextual practice especially difficult. And to these difficulties we may add a third – the complex linguistic situation within Scotland in this period in which we see translations not only into Scots and English […] and Gaelic, but also into Latin (Hollo and Rutledge 2018, 247).
All this was taking place at a time in which the theoretical discussion upon translation was taking its first hesitant steps in the British Isles. Neil Rhodes et al.’s English Renaissance Translation Theory accommodates in its anthological section Scottish voices such as Gavin Douglas, showing that between the sixteenth and the early-seventeenth century there appeared only one comprehensive treatise on the theory and practice of translation associated with the British Isles, Laurence Humphrey’s Interpretatio Linguarum, published in Basel in 1559 (Rhodes et al. 2013). Whatever the impact Humphrey’s treatise had, its isolated position indicates that the terminology and role of translation in Anglophone culture were far from universally accepted. Charting the discussion in Scotland is therefore a desideratum, an important step to understand the role of imitation and translation in its early modern literature.
[3] We tend to look at Gavin Douglas and his Eneados as a landmark in the history of translation in Scotland, and indeed in the history of translation from the classics, given Douglas’s attention to the letter of the text, his vindication of his role as fidus interpres (marked by line 266 of the Prologue to Book 1, in which he clearly indicates his intent “Virgillis versys to follow and no thing feyn”), and his sustained reflection on his role, which shows also his consciousness of the labour such a decision entails:
Traste weill to follow a fixt sentens or mater
Is mair practike, deficill and far strater
Thocht thyne engyne beyn eleuate and hie,
Than for to write all ways at liberte. (289-92)
Although it has received little comment, this is quite a significant passage, insisting on faithfulness on the level of both style and content (sentens and mater), and referring also to the translator’s engyne, ingenuity or intelligence, as a necessary element for a successfully faithful translation. The most famous passage in the Prologue, however, comes immediately afterwards, as Douglas criticizes William Caxton’s free rendering of the Aeneid and vindicates the closeness of his own translation to Virgil’s original:
Quha is attachit ontill a staik, we se,
May go na ferthir bot wreil about that tre:
Rycht so am I to Virgillis text ybund,
I may nocht fle leß than my falt be fund
For thocht I wald transcend and go besyde,Hys wark remanys, my schame I may nocht hyde. (297-302)
A reading of this passage in its context reinforces a sense of constriction on Douglas’s part, a constriction already highlighted by the reiterated use of the modal may, as well as by the image of the stake,[i] and complicates the notion of anxiety: Douglas is dealing with a close competitor, Caxton, but in so doing he also realizes that he is committing himself to a translating choice that allows for minimum freedom. Such an absolute, almost painful fidelity, presupposing a close study of the Latin text, is not proposed as a mere goal. Rather than marking the passage from the medieval free adaptation to the early modern quasi-philological translation, as seems suggested by the mention of Lorenzo Valla at line 127, Douglas asks for a new consciousness of the act of translating, which he proceeds to analyse in the following lines, enlisting the help of Chaucer, Servius, Gregory the Great and Horace to further refine his definition of the good translator. This articulate discussion also entails a reflection on the nature and possibilities of the target language. Douglas does not follow his own precepts, but interpolates translation with gloss, commentary, and famously inserts at the end of his work a version from Maffeo Vegio’s ‘thirteenth’ of the Aeneid book, against, I would contend, all expectations and almost as an afterthought: though Vegio’s addition had already entered Adam de Ambergau’s edition of Virgil (Venice, 1471) and the authoritative annotated edition printed in Paris in 1501 by Iodocus Badius Ascensius (Brinton 1930; Ghosh 1995), Douglas’s light-hearted tone seems to mark the experimental nature of his enterprise, as highlighted by the dream vision in the Prologue to book 13, and certainly denies any pretence of authenticity for the Vegius addition (Hollo and Rutledge 2018, 249). The organization of this articulate paratextual apparatus is not without consequences, since the prologues guide our reading experience (Canitz 1990, 1). It might be argued that this makes a mockery of Douglas’s alleged faithfulness in translating, but it would be a fallacy on the part of the twenty-first century reader; rather, Douglas uses his close reading of the text to explore a concept that was then in the making – the concept of translation.
[4] The translation thus becomes a vehicle to bring the reader back to the times in which the original was composed: any accompanying, paratextual element should help the reader in this journey. Through his firm vindication of his translating stance, Douglas introduces a metatextual awareness that will allow the discussion on translation to enter the final text; it also proposes the act of translating as an act of mediation, not an end in itself. We should not read Douglas’s complex work as a static container of everything by and about the Aeneid, but as a prompting for further work; perhaps in this sense the Scottish writer proposed the usefulness of his version for future generations, in the “Directioun” inserted at the end of his work:
Ane othir proffit of our buke I mark,
That it salbe reput a neidfull wark
To thame wald Virgill to childryn expone;
For quha lyst note my versys, one by one,
Sall fynd tharin hys sentens euery deill,
And al maste word by word, that wait I weill.
Thank me tharfor, maisteris of grammar sculys,
Quhar ʒe syt techand on ʒour benkis and stulys. (41-48)
Douglas’s work may then be presented as a palimpsest, re-proposing the concept of intertextual freedom and urging a renovation of the debate on the modalities and role of translation that goes well beyond his own statements in the Prologue to Book 1. At the end of his discussion on translation in early modern Scotland, Rutledge borrows Walt Whitman’s splendid line from Song of Myself (l. 1326): “I am large, I contain multitudes” – the final passage through which the self of the poem transcends his own boundaries (Hollo and Rutledge 2018, 265). Linguists have long pointed out that the act of translation enriches the target language, and in historical terms gives it greater autonomy. This phenomenon has been studied in the case of early modern Europe and, in the case of Scottish literature, has found an important definition in J. Derrick McClure’s foundational essay on translation and transcreation (1991). While McClure focuses on the late sixteenth century, Theo van Heijnsbergen rightly highlights the role of Douglas in this process, writing that, by combining diverse attitudes to the authority of Virgil,
the Eneados continues to move Scottish literature from a more passive, Boethius-based mode of contemplation of the forces in life to a more active and autonomous engagement with cultural and literary discourses, and in the process takes literature a step further toward becoming a normative and formative socio-intellectual discourse. (1998, 17-18)
In this sense we might look at the translated text not as a target, an end-point, but as a node in the network, just as Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde is a powerfully active node between Boccaccio’s Filostrato and Henryson’s Testament of Cresseid.
[5] Douglas’s prologue to Book 1 of his translation symbolically opens the discussion on translation in the Scottish Renaissance; the Eneados, completed in 1513, appeared in print in London in 1553. Thirty-one years later, in 1584, young King James VI, then eighteen years old, had his own Essayes of a Prentise, in the Divine Art of Poesie printed in Edinburgh. The Essayes included a short treatise on poetry, Reulis and Cautelis: this and Douglas’s prologue might well be, as has been posited, the only two important pieces of writing in sixteenth-century Scottish literature that show “evidence of a great concern over the issues involved in imitation, invention and the cultivation of a vernacular language which are endemic to the continental literary culture of the sixteenth century” (Bushnell 1994, 92). The seventy years separating the composition of the two works, while without important contributions on the theory of translation on the part of Scottish writers, witnessed a development of the debate elsewhere in Europe: much of it revolved on the translation of the Bible, but some of it focused on the effect of translation on the target culture.
[6] It is the case in some of the writings of the Pléiade poets: most notably, Joachim du Bellay, in his Deffence et Illustration de le Langue Françoise, urged contemporary French writers to “suyvre les vertuz d’un bon aucteur, et quasi comme se transformer en luy” (“follow the strengths of a good author and, as it were, transform oneself into him”; Helgerson 2006, 338-39). Such a transformation is clearly distinct from passive imitation, since it entails a rethinking of the very persona of the poet. To make his point clearer, du Bellay uses the metaphors of ingestion and digestion:
Si les Romains (dira quelqu’un) n’ont vaqué à ce labeur de traduction, par quelz moyens donques ont ilz peu ainsi enrichir leur langue, voyre jusques à l’egaller quasi à la Greque? Immitant les meilleurs aucteurs Grecz, se transformant en eux, les devorant, et apres les avoir bien digerez, les convertissant en sang et nouriture, se proposant, chacun selon son naturel, et l’argument qu’il vouloit elire, le meilleur aucteur, dont ilz observoint diligemment toutes les plus rares et exquises vertuz, et icelles comme grephes, ainsi que j’ay dict devant, entoint et apliquoint à leur langue.
(If the Romans (someone will say) did not devote themselves to this labor of translation, then by what means were they able so to enrich their language, indeed to make it almost the equal of Greek? By imitating the best Greek authors, transforming themselves into them, devouring them, and, after having thoroughly digested them, converting them into blood and nourishment, selecting, each according to his own nature and the topic he wished to choose, the best author, all of whose rarest and most exquisite strengths they diligently observed and, like shoots, grafted them, as I said earlier, and adapted them to their own language). (Helgerson 2006, 336-37)
The nutritional metaphor, allowing the writer to explore the connection between imitation and mimesis, became meaningful in contemporary literary debate in France (Trotot 2019). The image would also be used by Philip Sidney in his Apology for Poetry: “the diligent imitators of Tully and Demosthenes (most worthy to be imitated) did not so much keep Nizolian paper-books of their figures and phrases, as by attentive translation (as it were) devour them whole, and made them wholly theirs” (Shepherd 1973, 138). The image of translation as nourishment highlights its function as an active node in the network: useful as the final movement from source to target, it also becomes living material, allowing the target language and culture to take new directions, just as food will allow the body to move to further activity.
[7] The Scottish courtly coterie formed at James’s court in the 1580s, with its interest in contemporary French poetry, would have been aware of the debate. The King made explicit reference to du Bellay in Reulis and Cautelis, referring his readers to the French work for all the material he did not include in his treatise. More importantly, judging from the literary output of the writers at the King’s court, it would seem that all of them, whatever their theoretical premises, were engaged to a greater or lesser degree with the practice of translation or imitation, exploring different facets of Douglas’s ‘multitudinous’ proposal: if Thomas Hudson’s Judith and William Fowler’s Prince (though the latter may be unconnected with James’s court) can be considered instances of straightforward, ‘faithful’ translations, in other cases there is much more creative mimesis, an attempt to ‘digest’ the examples of ancient or contemporary classics; James Stewart of Baldynneis freely reworks Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso by following the example of Philippe Desportes’ Imitations (Petrina 2022, 17-38), William Fowler remains apparently faithful to Petrarch’s Triumphi but incorporates an articulate glossing function within his text (Petrina 2020, 60), while Alexander Montgomerie “revisited and ‘translated’ (old fields, new corn) passages from poems of Petrarch, Ronsard, Du Bellay, Saint Gelais, and Desportes” (Hollo and Rutledge 2018, 256), activating translation as a reclamation of a national heritage.
[8] While modern scholarship refers to Reulis and Cautelis as the theoretical manifesto of James’s courtly coterie, their actual literary enterprises can be glimpsed in other texts. An illustration of the royal command to translate can be found in the preface Thomas Hudson wrote to his translation of Guillaume Du Bartas’ La Judith:
It pleased your Highnesse (not onely to esteeme the pereles stile of the Greek HOMER, and the Latin VIRGIL to be inimitable to vs, whose toung is barbarous and corrupted:) But also to alledge partly throw delite your Maiest. tooke in the Hautie stile of those most famous Writers, and partly to sounde the opinion of others, that also the loftie Phrase, the graue inditement, the facound termes of the French Salust (for the like resemblaunce) could not be followed, nor sufficiently expressed in our rude and impollished english language. Wherein, I more boldly then aduisedly [with your Maiest. lycence] declared my simple opinion. Not calling to mind that I was to giue my verdit in presens of so sharp & clear-eied a censure as your highnesse is: But rashly I alledged that it was nothing impossible euen to followe the footsteppes of the same great poet SALVST, and to translate his verse (which neuerthelesse is of it selfe exquisite) succintlie, and sensibly in our owne vulgar speech. Whereupon, it pleased your Maiestie (amongste the rest of his workes) to assigne me, The Historie of Judith, as an agreable Subiect to your highnesse, to be turned by me into English verse. (Craigie 1941, 3-4)
James commanding Hudson to translate Du Bartas almost as a punishment for his taking a liberty with the King appears to anticipate Queen Elizabeth’s more famous injunction to John Harington to translate Ariosto’s Furioso; as such, it can be read as a literary commonplace, part of the paratextual material usually attached to such enterprises. If we compare it, for instance, with the dedicatory letter Fowler inserts to introduce his translation of Petrarch’s Triumphi, we find some interesting analogies and differences:
our Laureate Poet Francis Petrarch, a noble Florentine, has devised and erected these Triumphs in the honour of her whom he loved, thereby to make her more glorious and himself no less famous. Which, when I had fully perused, and finding them both full and fraughted in stately verse, with moral sentences, godly sayings, brave discourses, proper and pithy arguments, and with a store of sundry sort of histories embellished and embroidered with the curious pasmentis of poesy and golden freinyeis of eloquence, I was spurred thereby and pricked forward incontinent by translation to make them somewhat more popular than they are in their Italian original. (Petrina 2020, 69)
Fowler focuses on the uniqueness of the source text and the fame of its author, while also devoting space to the contemplation of moral and rhetorical beauties; Hudson seems to be considering the poem as just an instance of the lofty literature the Scottish court is taking as a model. Hudson’s description of his conversation with the king introduces the topos of the inferiority of contemporary vernacular to classical languages, together with the “duty to reinterpret and recreate […] the achievements of the ancients” (Ross 1962, 253). There is also a sense in which it is not Du Bartas’ poem in itself which is of interest to James, but rather its stylistic and semantic traits, since James had appointed Hudson translator of Judith “amongste the rest of his works”: it is as if the important issue was not the rendering into English of this particular poem, but an exercise in perfecting the rhetorical and poetic possibilities of English through translation. Such a reading would explain the flurry of translation activity, which did not stop at one poem or one writer. Du Bartas’ phrases and terms are part of a repository that exists in potentia also in the target language, and that can be brought to fruition through the nourishing act of translation. In fact, Hudson’s translation will not attempt literal adherence to the original, but apparently follow King James’ own dictum, preferring alliteration to the subtler formal devices of the original: “Let all zour verse be Literall, sa far as may be, quhatsumever kynde they be of, bot speciallie Tumbling verse for flyting. By Literall I meane, that the maist part of zour lyne, sall rynne upon a letter’” (chapter 3).[ii] Saying that Hudson is following James’s rules, however, may be the result of historical fallacy: Hudson’s Judith appeared also in 1584, printed by the same Thomas Vautrollier who had printed, or was about to print, James’s Essayes of a Prentise. Though obviously the most prominent and authoritative, the King was also very much the youngest of the group. It remains to be seen to what an extent Reulis and Cautelis could be said to be a prescriptive text for the poets working at the royal court, or whether it should be considered simply the attempt at a description of the art of poetry on the part of a literary novice, enthusiastically scorning his national literary tradition and drawing from a fashionable foreign model.
[9] Identifying James’s position within his courtly coterie and the role he attributed to his theoretical writing is especially important given the apparent paradox between the fervent translation activity delineated above and the King’s own caveat against translation, appearing in Chapter 7 of his treatise. Reulis and Cautelis is a strange text, short, tentative, fragmentary and self-contradictory, “much more Scots in grammar and especially in orthography than is that of the poems printed in the same volume” (Craigie 1955, 306), as if it belonged to the King’s more private and less polished meditations; revealingly, R.D.S. Jack called it “a textbook on elementary versifying rather than a full poetic theory” (1967, 211). It presents itself as a series of musings, eschewing the form of the well-structured rhetorical treatise: when Gabriel Harvey criticised its structure, he was voicing a preference for the classical organization of rhetorical manuals starting from inventio and decorously proceeding to dispositio and elocutio, noting: “His aptest partition had bene, into precepts of Inuention. Elocution. in tropes, ye meter, & other figures” (Relle 1972, 405). But even if we consider James’s avowed model, Joachim du Bellay’s Deffence, which was not meant as a rhetorical manual but was based on a more polemical agenda, we find a settled and articulate structure, starting from a discussion of the role and importance of ancient languages, proceeding to imitation as a means of enriching the French language, and then discussing, in the second book, modes and style in French poetry. Instead, Reulis and Cautelis begins by proclaiming in the Preface the author’s desire to chart the great change in (national?) poetry, boldly stating “As for them that wrait of auld, lyke as the tyme is changeit sensyne, sa is the ordour of Poesie changeit”. It does not immediately mention invention, but rather proceeds in the first and longest part of the treatise to offer a detailed discussion of individual matters of rhyme and rhythm, asking the poet to pay attention to formal characteristics that seems to have more to do with setting poetry to music than with literary composition per se, thus justifying Helena Mennie Shire’s attention to the role of music in this literary coterie (Shire 1969, 1-9). This attention to the formal quality of the poetic text coincides with what Hudson mentions in the preface to his Judith: translation is a means of working on the stylistic and metrical characteristics of the target language and may have more value as an exercise than as a finished product.
[10] Only in the last part of the treatise (Chapters 6 and 7) does James consider the topic of invention; the last and longest, Chapter 8 he devotes to different types of lines and stanzas, thus reverting to James’s main concern, metre and rhythm. And yet, in traditional rhetorical manuals, following the division proposed in Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria and in the pseudo-Ciceronian Rhetorica ad Herennium, invention would normally be discussed in the opening sections (Mack 2011, 15-16). Besides, in these two short chapters the word invention and its cognates appear no less than seven times, assuming special relevance in Chapter 7, but there is some uncertainty as to the meaning of the word, as can be seen in the following long quotation:
Chapter VI
Ze man also be warre with composing ony thing in the same maner, as hes bene ower oft vsit of before. As in speciall, gif ze speik of loue, be warre ze descryue zour Loves makdome, or her fairnes. And siclyke that ze descryue not the morning and rysing of the Sunne in the Preface of zour verse; for thir thingis are sa oft and dyuerslie writtin vpon be Poëtis already, that gif ze do the lyke it will appeare ze bot imitate, and that it cummis not of zour awin Inuentioun, quhilk is ane of the cheif properteis of ane Poete. Thairfore, gif zour subiect be to prayse zour Loue, ze sall rather prayse hir vther qualiteis, nor her fairnes or hir shaip; or ellis ze sall speik some lytill thing of it, and syne say that zour wittis are sa smal, and zour vtterance sa barren, that ze can not discryue any part of hir worthelie; remitting alwayis to the Reider to iudge of hir, in respect sho matches, or rather excellis, Venus, or any woman, quhome to it sall please zow to compaire her. Bot gif zour subiect be sic as ze man speik some thing of the morning or Sunne rysing, tak heid that, quhat name ze giue to the Sunne, the Mone, or vther starris the ane tyme, gif ze happin to wryte thairof another tyme, to change thair names. As gif ze call the Sunne Titan at a tyme, to call him Phœbus or Apollo the vther tyme; and siclyke the Mone, and vther Planettis.
Chapter VII
Bot sen Inuention is ane of the cheif vertewis in a Poete, it is best that ze inuent zour awin subiect zour self, and not to compose of sene subiectis. Especially translating any thing out of vther language, quhilk doing, ze not onely essay not zour awin ingyne of Inuentioun, bot be the same meanes ze are bound, as to a staik, to follow that buikis phrasis quhilk ze translate.
Ze man also be war of wryting any thing of materis of commoun weill, or vther sic graue sene subiectis (except Metaphorically, of manifest treuth opinly knawin, yit nochtwithstanding vsing it very seindil), because nocht onely ze essay nocht zour awin Inuentioun, as I spak before, bot lykewayis they are to graue materis for a Poet to mell in. Bot because ze can not haue the Inuentioun, except it come of Nature, I remit it thairvnto, as the cheif cause not onely of Inuentioun bot also of all the vther pairtis of Poesie. For airt is onely bot ane help and a remembraunce to Nature, as I shewe zow in the Preface.
In their edition, Rhodes, Richards and Marshall suggest that James’s use of the word invention may be connected with the definition in Thomas Wilson’s Arte of Rhetorique, first published in 1553: “The findyng out of apte matter, called otherwise Invencion, is a searching out of thynges true, or thynges likely, the which maie reasonably sette furth a matter, and make it appere probable” (Derrick 1982, 31). Wilson is proposing a traditional definition of invention as the first part of rhetoric, meant as a search rather than connected with the idea of artistic creation. This is what we find also in Thomas Elyot’s Boke Named the Gouernour (Elyot 1531, sig. Gviiiv); in Stephen Hawes’s Pastime of Pleasure, first published in 1509, where we read that “The first of them, is called Inuention | Which surdeth, of the most noble warke | Of.v. inwarde wittes” (sig. Ciiiiv); or even in John Lydgate’s Fall of Princes, which describes the five parts of eloquence as if they were five banners, and then states:
The firste off hem callid Inuencioun,
Bi which a man doth in his herte fynde
A sikir grounde foundid on resoun,
With circumstaunces, that nouht be left behynde,
Fro poynt to poynt enprentid in his mynde
Touchyng the mateer, the substaunce & the grete,
Of which he caste notabli tentrete. (VI.3319-26)
He later specifies the meaning he attributes to invention by asking that “foryetilnesse Be non hindrere to inuencioun” (VI.3361-62). The closeness of memory and invention shows how alien any modern notion of poetic creativity is to the medieval poet’s mind.
[11] Individual wit and noble literary works cooperate as the necessary ground of invention: the literary attitude behind these statements is distant from our modern sensibility, which posits a sharper separation between originality and imitation, and which might find the use of the word invention in expressions such as “the invention of the truth” slightly paradoxical.[iii] To move to writers who might have been closer to James’s rhetorical training, Pierre de Ronsard, in his Abbrege de l’Art Poëtique François, had been ambiguous on the meaning of invention, as shown in the following quotation, which juxtaposes opposite positions:
Le principal poinct est l’invention, laquelle vient tant de la bonne nature, que par la leçon des bons & anciens autheurs. […] L’invention n’est autre chose que le bon naturel d’une imagination concevant les Idées & formes de toutes choses qui se peuvent imaginer tant celestes que terrestres, animées ou inanimes, pour apres les representer, descrire, & imiter.
(The main issue is invention, which comes both from one’s genius and from the lessons of good ancient writers […] invention is nothing but the good inclination of an imagination conceiving ideas and forms of anything one can imagine, both celestial and terrestrial, animate or inanimate, in order then to represent, describe, and imitate them).[iv]
But rather than positing a stark diversity of meaning in the sixteenth-century use of invention as opposed to our usage, we might consider how late medieval and early modern writers explore poetic composition in terms that are much closer to the description of the art of the craftsman. In this perspective, passages such as Robert Henryson’s “fenȝeit of the new | Be sum poeit, throw his inuentioun”[v] can be read by paying attention to the act of fashioning inherent in the word fenȝeit: it will then be the artisanal moulding that gives relevance to the poet’s invention, rather than any creation ex nihilo. Imitation and originality are no longer enemies: rather, the former is the indispensable premise of the latter.
[12] Such a reading might help also the reading of one of the most famous poems of Philip Sidney, a writer very dear to King James, who would contribute a sonnet to the volume of Latin poems commemorating Sidney’s death (Academiae 1587, sig. K1r; Rickard 2007, 42). In the first sonnet of his Astrophil and Stella, Sidney famously experiments with the concept of invention:
Loving in truth, and fain in verse my love to show,
That she (dear she) might take some pleasure of my pain;
Pleasure might cause her read, reading might make her know;
Knowledge might pity win, and pity grace obtain;
I sought fit words to paint the blackest face of woe,
Studying inventions fine, her wits to entertain;
Oft turning others’ leaves, to see if thence would flow
Some fresh and fruitful showers upon my sunburnt brain.
But words came halting forth, wanting invention’s stay;
Invention, nature’s child, fled step-dame study’s blows;
And others’ feet still seem’d but strangers in my way.
Thus great with child to speak, and helpless in my throes,
Biting my truant pen, beating myself for spite,
“Fool,” said my muse to me; “look in thy heart, and write.”
Apparently an impassioned plea for natural inspiration in poetry writing, the sonnet reveals its fundamental, possibly jocular ambiguity by setting the idea of invention as a central concern: the word itself is repeated three times, possibly with the same meaning but with slightly different functions. Sidney is using poetic composition to pursue his own semantic investigation, as well as offering us a sophisticated game of poetry-making, as shown in Nashe’s preface to the 1591 edition of the poems: “here you shal find a paper stage streud with pearle, an artificial heau’n to ouershadow the faire frame, & christal wals to encounter your curious eyes, whiles the tragicommody of loue is performed by starlight” (McKerrow 1966, 329). The performance of love is not concerned with claims of authenticity or otherwise: what fascinates writer and reader is the wonder of the mise-en-scène. Sidney himself had vindicated the role of imitation in the composition of poetry by recurring to the authority of Aristotle: “Poesy therefore is an art of imitation, for so Aristotle termeth it in his word mimesis, that is to say, a representing, counterfeiting, or figuring forth – to speak metaphorically, a speaking picture – with this end, to teach and delight” (Shepherd 1973, 101). James himself, in the preface to His Majesties Poeticall Exercises at Vacant Houres (1591), had used the image of the living mirror, by definition a mimetic metaphor, when describing the ensuing poetical work, which gained strength by its being a translation:
Receaue heere beloued Reader, a short Poetique discourse, which I haue selected and translated, from amongst the rest of the works of DV’BARTAS: as a viue mirror of this last and most decreeped age. Heere shalt thou see clearlie, as in a glasse, the miseries of this wauering world. (Craigie 1955, 98)
In her study of the technology of poetic invention in the Renaissance in England, Rayna Kalas offers a compelling reading of the image of the glass, beloved of early modern poets. Though Kalas uses it to explain the concept of invention, the image can usefully be applied to the concept of translation, given its power to absorb and reflect that “as a steel glass, poetic invention gathers and reflects the wisdom of its predecessors and polishes anew the spiritual and ethical reflections that may illuminate the conditions of the present” (2007, 116). Rather than setting invention against imitation, James explores the range of possibilities if we put invention and imitation at the two ends of a spectrum. What he apparently fulminates against in Reulis and Cautelis is an imitation in the manner, not in the text.
[13] Later writers would echo this attitude. Writing around 1603, and envisaging a political union that would bring consequences in linguistic terms, Samuel Daniel insisted on the uniqueness and harmony of an ‘English verse’ that was native to the island and that found in ryme its national characteristic: “The Irish, Briton, Scot, Dane, Saxon, English, & all the Inhabiters of this Iland, either haue hither brought, or here found the same in vse” (1603, sig. F3v). What was to be admired in the classical languages was not their metre or the technical characteristics of their poetry, but something else: “We admire them not for their smooth-gliding words, nor their measurs, but for their inuentions: which treasure, if it were to be found in Welsh, and Irish, we should hold those languages in the same estimation” (sig. F6r). The vindication of a similar potential was based on a common humanity: “We are the children of nature as well as they, we are not so placed out of the way of iudgement, but that the same Sun of Discretion shineth vpon vs” (sig. F8v). The plea is based on impeccable reasoning: the knowledge of the classics does not entail servile imitation, but rather awareness of the potentialities of one’s own language. It is therefore invention, rather than form, that should be imitated.
[14] Given the complexity and ambiguity of the word invention in early modern usage, the discussion of the term in Reulis and Cautelis needs to be reconsidered, doing away with the facile opposition between invention on the one hand and imitation/translation on the other. In the prefatory material to his translation of Paolo Giovio, published in 1585, Daniel had inserted a letter by his Oxford friend N.W., which strikingly summarised the inconsistency of the old opposition: “Shall [translators] be lesse reuerenced, for perfecting knowledge, then the old Philosophers for a shadowed inuention?” (quoted in Hulse 1979, 56). James was by no means averse to the practice of translation, whether in his own person or by proxy. The comparison of the Reulis with the other great theoretical statement on translation in sixteenth-century Scotland, Gavin Douglas’s Prologue, shows a startlingly similar image: both writers recur to the idea of the translator bound to the text as if to a stake:
Quha is attachit ontill a staik, we se,
May go na ferthir bot wreil about that tre:
Rycht so am I to Virgillis text ybund (297-99)
Especially translating any thing out of vther language, quhilk doing, ze not onely essay not zour awin ingyne of Inuentioun, bot be the same meanes ze are bound, as to a staik, to follow that buikis phrasis quhilk ze translate. (Chapter 7)
It is distinctly possible that James consciously adopted Douglas’s image because he wanted his readers to understand the subtle difference between different types of translation, and because, like Douglas, he realised that a translation adhering faithfully to the original, though necessary and desirable in some cases, brought its own penance. The simile highlights the sense of constraint entailed by philological accuracy, but rather than as a condemnation of translation, faithful or otherwise, it should be read as a lucid appraisal of its cost.
[15] Douglas had assayed this form of translation, alongside commentary, gloss, and even creative rewriting all at the same time, working on the vast canvas of Virgil’s Aeneid; James attempted different forms of imitation in different poetic exercises. In the case of his translation of Du Bartas’ Uranie, for instance, he had his version printed side by side with the French original, as he notes in the preface to the text, with an insistent captatio benevolentiae:
I haue put in, the French on the one side of the leif, and my blocking on the other: noght thereby to giue proofe of my iust translating, but by the contrair, to let appeare more plainly to the foresaid reader, wherin I haue erred, to the effect, that with lesse difficulty he may escape those snares wherin I haue fallen. (Craigie 1955, 17)
The editorial vicissitudes of Basilikon Doron show the extent to which James was fascinated by the medium of printing, and loved experimenting with it (Rickard 2007, 36-46). In the case of his earlier, poetic publication he was using the various possibilities offered by printing, transforming the Essayes of a Prentise into exercises in various degrees of imitation: the Basilikon moves from its opening sonnets which, though undoubtedly ‘original’, show the influence of Alexander Montgomerie, to the translating of the Uranie, presenting the original to the reader as proof of this translation’s fidelity, to the interestingly titled “Ane metaphoricall invention of a Tragedie called Phoenix”, which plays on the form of the lozenge already praised by George Puttenham, and in the following acrostic forces the layout of some of the lines to spell the name of Esmé Stewart. The next work in the collection is a short text called “A paraphrasticall translation out of the poete Lucane”, where a few lines from Lucan’s Pharsalia (V.335-40) are followed by forty lines in ballat royal (octaves rhyming ababbcbc) paraphrasing and glossing the Latin; then, after Reulis and Cautelis, we have a translation of the Psalms which explicitly declares that John Immanuel Tremellius’ Latin version is the intermediate text. If in his theoretical treatise James was really fulminating against translation, then its collocation in the Essayes would have been nonsensical. Most of the collection is in fact an exercise on the art of translation, confirming the hypothesis that translation in early modern Scotland might be seen “as part of a continuum that includes imitation, paraphrase, and commonplacing, as well as what we might consider to be original composition”. (Rhodes et al. 2013, 1)
[16] The influence and inheritance of James’s literary experimentation in the 1580s is difficult to gauge. Some of the poets of the following generation would show a heightened consciousness of the act of imitation, transforming literary composition into a creative meeting of texts. This is evident for instance in the compositional practice of William Drummond of Hawthornden, analysed by Jason Lawrence in these terms:
After copying out the two sonnets in Italian, one by Antonio Tebaldeo and the other by Pietro Bembo, Drummond first translates them “In the same sort of rime”, offering an accurate line-by-line account of the originals. He moves on to translations “In frier sort of rime”, substituting couplets for the Italian rhyme scheme, before progressing on to a third version “Paraphrasticalie translated”. These final renderings display a greater freedom from their originals in terms of both form and verbal content. (Lawrence 2005, 37)
The metrical experiment shows the Italian form contaminated by the English influence, but such contamination is evident also in the imagery employed, and in the treatment of the themes, allowing Lawrence to note how this progression through increasingly freer renderings showed “the important connection between an act of translation and an act of imitation from the same source, mediated through linguistic paraphrase” (2005, 38). In the following pages, Lawrence also describes Drummond’s possible mediation of Italian poetry via French texts. In this respect, the above-mentioned concept of intermediate translation needs to be discussed. This is still a little-studied subject, especially as concerns early modern Europe, but it was certainly a highly significant phenomenon. The kind of reading suggested by the dissemination of multilingual books is not linear, but comparative and lateral: it is the case of John Wolfe’s 1588 trilingual edition of Castiglione’s Cortegiano, where the Italian original appeared alongside Gabriel Chappuys’ French translation and Thomas Hoby’s English one. Commenting on Drummond’s translation technique, R.D.S. Jack speaks of a “principle of originality through imitation”:
When adapting from other poets, he would tend to reveal a preference for adding mythological details, for de-intellectualizing the material with which he was faced and for concluding close borrowings with a sudden thematic divergence finally. Metaphors would attract him, but might be altered either for stylistic or thematic reasons, and he might occasionally metaphorize the very metaphors with which he was dealing, creating a world in which associative rather than logistic values reign. (Jack 1972, 135)
The slightly convoluted sentence strikes at the heart of the problem we have when we attempt to assess translation as distinct from imitation, and both as distinct from originality.
[17] In his Prologue to Book 1 of Eneados, Douglas refers with admiration to Ptolemy, king of Aegypt, describing him somewhat confusedly in the marginal commentary as the promoter of the great project of translation of the Old Testament into Greek – the project that would result in the Septuagint Bible.[vi] Almost a century later, in 1604, the translation of the Bible, arguably King James’s greatest achievement in literary production, was first mooted during the Hampton court conference. On that occasion the president of Corpus Christi College, John Rainolds, pointed out a number of infelicities and mistakes in extant translations:
To which motion there was at the present no gainsaying, the objections being trivial and old, and already in print, often answered. Only my Lord of London [Richard Bancroft, Bishop of London] well added that if every man’s humour should be followed, there would be no end of translating. Whereupon his Highness wished that some especial pains should be taken in that behalf for one uniform translation. (Rhodes et al. 2013, 175)
On the tension between “every man’s humour” and “one uniform translation” rests much of the early modern Scottish search for poetic form.
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NOTES
[i] The image might be a commonplace: Priscilla Bawcutt (2020, vol. 1, p. 64) notes that it appears also in Du Bellay’s Epistre to Vers traduits (1552), a work known to King James, while David Coldwell (1964, 148) refers to the image of bear-baiting employed by John Lydgate in The Churl and the Bird, I.132.
[ii] By using the word Literall, James appears to be the first to attempt to find a term for what will be later called alliterative (Craigie 1955, 312).
[iii] The phrase is used in Thomas Starkey, Dialogue between Pole and Lupset, 1538 (Mayer 1989, 78).
[iv] Translations mine. Ronsard, 1965, 3r, 5v.
[v] Robert Henryson, The Testament of Cresseid, ll. 66-67 (Fox 1981, 113).
[vi] See 1 Prologue 100. Priscilla Bawcutt offers an excellent explanation of the line and marginal commentary (2020, 62).