Gender in translation: How the English wrote their Juvenal, 1644-1815

Representations

Volumn 65, Issue , 1999, Pages 1-41

  Wahrman, Dror ^a  

^a NONE

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

ARTICLE; ATTITUDE; CULTURAL FACTOR; ETHNOLOGY; GENDER IDENTITY; HISTORY; PERCEPTION; PUBLICATION; SEX; SOCIAL BEHAVIOR; SOCIAL CLASS; UNITED KINGDOM;

ATTITUDE; CULTURAL CHARACTERISTICS; ENGLAND; GENDER IDENTITY; HISTORY, 17TH CENTURY; HISTORY, 18TH CENTURY; HISTORY, 19TH CENTURY; PUBLICATIONS; SEX; SOCIAL BEHAVIOR; SOCIAL CLASS; SOCIAL PERCEPTION;

EID: 33646675660     PISSN: 07346018     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1525/rep.1999.65.1.01p0031m     Document Type: Review

References (114)

1. Jorge Luis Borges, Obras Completas, 1923-1972 (Buenos Aires, 1974), 732.
2. Thomas Laqueur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, Mass., 1990), 5, 11, and passim.
3. Particularly interesting examples include Terry Castle, Masquerade and Civilization: The Carnivalesque in Eighteenth-Century English Culture and Fiction (Stanford, Calif., 1986);
4. Dianne Dugaw, Warrior Women and Popular Balladry, 1650-1850 (Cambridge, 1989);
5. Kristina Straub, Sexual Suspects: Eighteenth-Century Players and Sexual Ideology (Princeton, N.J., 1992);
6. Felicity A. Nussbaum, Torrid Zones: Maternity, Sexuality, and Empire in Eighteenth-Century English Narratives (Baltimore, Md., 1995);
7. Jill Campbell, Natural Masks: Gender and Identity in Fielding's Plays and Novels (Stanford, Calif., 1995);
8. Michael McKeon, "Historicizing Patriarchy: The Emergence of Gender Difference in England, 1660-1760," Eighteenth-Century Studies 28, no. 3 (1995): 295-322.
9. See also Gary Kates, Monsieur d'Eon Is a Woman: A Tale of Political Intrigue and Sexual Masquerade (New York, 1995).
10. Laqueur, Making Sex, 8, 128-30, and passim;
11. Thomas Laqueur, "Orgasm, Generation, and the Politics of Reproductive Biology," in Catherine Gallagher and Thomas Laqueur, eds., The Making of the Modern Body (Berkeley, 1987), 1-41.
12. See also Londa Schiebinger, The Mind Has No Sex? Women in the Origins of Modern Science (Cambridge, Mass., 1989), esp. chap. 7.
13. Londa Schiebinger, Nature's Body: Gender in the Making of Modern Science (Boston, 1993).
14. And on the fluidity of Renaissance understandings of sexual identity, Stephen Greenblatt, "Fiction and Friction," in his Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England (Berkeley, 1988), 66-93.
15. This argument is developed in more detail, and with extensive discussion of some of the evidence as it emerges from these varied cultural sites, in Dror Wahrman, "Percy's Prologue: From Gender Play to Gender Panic in Eighteenth-Century England," Past and Present 159 (May 1998): 113-60. This work is part of a broader project-in-progress about the redefinition of categories of identity and the redrawing of their boundaries in the long eighteenth century.
16. The Female Rebels . (Edinburgh, 1747), 37.
17. For an analogous statement about a man see, for instance, Characterism, or, the Modern Age Display 'd; Being an Attempt to Expose the Pretended Virtues of both Sexes . (London, [1750]), 166.
18. [William Cooke], Memoirs of Charles Macklin, Comedian, with the Dramatic Characters, Manners, Anecdotes, &c. of the Age in Which He Lived (London, 1804), 126 (emphasis in the original).
19. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (New York, 1990), 6.
20. Review of the Foulis Homer, Monthly Review 17 (1757),
21. quoted in Penelope Wilson, "Classical Poetry and the Eighteenth-Century Reader," in Isabel Rivers, ed., Books and Their Readers in Eighteenth-Century England (Leicester, Eng., 1982), 75.
22. William Godwin quoted in Wilson, "Classical Poetry," 73.
23. Carolyn D. Williams, Pope, Homer, and Manliness: Some Aspects of Eighteenth-Century Classical Learning (London, 1993), 27, 38, and passim.
24. Quoted in Howard D. Weinbrot, Eighteenth-Century Satire: Essays on Text and Context from Dryden to Peter Pindar (Cambridge, 1988), 30 (and see also 135).
25. Thomas Denman, review of Francis Hodgson's translation, Monthly Review, 2d series, 55 (March 1808): 246-47.
26. And compare the words of Vicesimus Knox in 1778: "The English seem to have copied the manner of Juvenal rather than of Horace. Our national spirit is indeed of the manly and rough kind, and feels something congenial with itself in the vehemence of the sullen Juvenal"; quoted in Weinbrot, Eighteenth-Century Satire, 135-36, and see passim for a detailed discussion of the popularity and influence of Juvenal in eighteenth-century England.
27. See also Robert Calvin Whitford, "Juvenal in England, 1750-1802," Philological Quarterly 7 (1928): 9-16;
28. and for the seventeenth century, William Kupersmith, Roman Satirists in Seventeenth-Century England (Lincoln, Nebr., 1985).
29. Edward Owen, The Satires of Juvenal, Translated into English Verse ., 2 vols. (London, 1785), 1: preface, [iii].
30. Walter Harte, An Essay on Satire, Particularly on the Dunciad (London, 1730), 17.
31. Francis Hodgson, The Satires of Juvenal (London, 1807), 442.
32. David Henry Urquhart, Commentaries on Classical Learning (London, 1803), 352.
33. Reuben Brower, "Seven Agamemnons," in his Mirror on Mirror: Translation, Imitation, Parody (Cambridge, Mass., 1974), 160.
34. Compare also George S. Rousseau, "Seven Types of Iliad," English Miscellany 16 (1965): 143-67, esp. the quote from Paul Valéry (144), whereby translations are "as it were created by their public."
35. An interesting exception is Carolyn Williams's discussion of Alexander Pope's notions of manliness and effeminacy as informing his translations of Homer; Williams, Pope, Homer, and Manliness, chap. 4.
36. Gender issues, of course, are not the only ones that can be illuminated by such a diachronic comparative study of Juvenal translations; for a very different perspective, focusing on the eighteenth-century political uses and connotations of Juvenal (but hardly at all on the Sixth Satire), see Howard D. Weinbrot, Augustus Caesar in "Augustan" England: The Decline of a Classical Norm (Princeton, N.J., 1978), chap. 5.
37. George Steiner, After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation, 2d ed. (Oxford, 1992), 30, 452.
38. As these quotes indicate, the basic insights into the process of translation on which the following analysis is predicated will hardly surprise anyone versed in that subdiscipline of comparative literature that has emerged over the last couple of decades as "translation studies," following the trail blazed by Steiner. Within more recent developments in this field, the exercise attempted here seems particularly in tune with the approach associated with the Tel Aviv school and especially Gideon Toury, according to whom a translation is influenced first and foremost by social and cultural norms of the receiving ("target") culture, norms that produce clear and repeated patterns in the linguistic choices made by individual translators. Indeed, in the words of Edwin Gentzler, it follows from Toury's approach that "it is necessary to study not just single texts, but rather multiple translations of the same original text as they occur in one receiving culture at different times in history." For the translation scholar, he continues, "the comparison reveals the different definitions of translation" over time, but of course it can reveal many other things as well; Edwin Gentzler, Contemporary Translation Theories (London, 1993), chap. 5 (quoted on 130-31).
39. For Toury's position and some case studies see, for example, Gideon Toury, Descriptive Translation Studies and Beyond (Amsterdam, 1995).
40. Sir Robert Stapylton, Juvenal's Sixteen Satyrs or, a Survey of the Manners and Actions of Mankind . (London, 1647), 89 (translating ll. 252-54: see Appendix).
41. This translation originally appeared in 1644 in a small (and now very rare) book published in Oxford, The First Six Satyrs of Juvenal; with Annotations . It was republished in 1673, as well as in 1660, under a different title (revised and further annotated): Mores Hominum. The Manners of Man, Described in Sixteen Satyrs, by Juvenal . (London, 1660).
42. [Thomas Sheridan], The Satires of Juvenal Translated: with Explanatory and Classical Notes, Relating to the Laws and Customs of the Greeks and Romans (London, 1739), 153.
43. Sheridan's translation was republished in 1745, 1769, and 1777. An important development in classical translations during the eighteenth century was the increasing respectability of literal, prose renditions: see Wilson, "Classical Poetry and the Eighteenth-Century Reader," 80.
44. William Gifford, The Satires of Decimus Junius Juvenalis, Translated into English Verse . with Notes and Illustrations, 2d ed., corrected and enlarged (London, 1806), 185-86, repeating almost word for word the verses in the first edition of 1802.
45. Indeed, at least one reviewer concluded that "except in scattered passages," Juvenal, in Gifford's hands, was "rather travestied than translated"; The Critical Review 36 (November 1802): 327.
46. Others, however, believed that Gifford in fact had "insinuated himself completely into the nature of his author's style and opinions, tracked his latent meaning, and caught his spirit"; "with few exceptions," maintained the Edinburgh Review 12 (April 1808): 53, this was "the best version of a classic in our language";
47. both quoted in Roy Benjamin Clark, William Gifford: Tory Satirist, Critic, and Editor (New York, 1930), 115, 127. But then reviewers are no more immune to the influences of their own cultural contexts than translators.
48. Felicity Nussbaum, The Brink of All We Hate: English Satires on Women, 1660-1750 (Lexington, Ky., 1984), chap. 5 and passim - the only study of which I am aware that devotes much comparative attention to the eighteenth-century series of English translations of the Sixth Satire (and see note 36).
49. Laura Brown, Alexander Pope (Oxford, 1985), 102-3.
50. Laura Brown, Ends of Empire: Women and Ideology in Early Eighteenth-Century English Literature (Ithaca, 1993), 140-41.
51. Emma Donoghue, Passions Between Women: British Lesbian Culture, 1688-1801 (London, 1993), esp. 212-14, and see 28-33 for a brief discussion of translations of several other relevant classical texts.
52. See also Anna Clark's interesting discussion of Juvenal as a possible source for "Anne Lister's Construction of Lesbian Identity" in an article by this title in Journal of the History of Sexuality 7, no. 1 (1996): 23-50.
53. Because of the compressed nature of Latin inflections, Latin verse lines typically supply material for perhaps a line and a half in English - a fact that forced translators into verse to either cut some fragments out or provide their own material for the other half of the additional line. For a detailed discussion of the practice and mechanics of such translations, see the editors' commentary in The Works of John Dryden, vol. 4, Poems, 1693-1696, ed. A. B. Chambers and William Frost (Berkeley, 1974), 586-96.
54. Barten Holyday, Decimus Junius Juvenalis, and Aulus Persius Flaccus Translated and Illustrated . (Oxford, 1673), 96. This translation was published posthumously and was probably composed in the first half of the century.
55. Henry Fielding, Miscellanies, ed. Henry Knight Miller (Oxford, 1972), 1:111-13.
56. Dryden, Poems, 1693-1696, 169.
57. Owen, Satires of Juvenal, 1:117.
58. Owen, Satires of Juvenal, 1:[iii], ix.
59. This impulse of Owen's was not unusual: the English versions of the Sixth Satire during this period clearly displayed an intensifying urge to purge what successive generations of translators found to be unacceptably obscene materials. This cleansing was premeditated, the result of self-conscious decisions openly discussed by the translators themselves, a process rather different from the patterns of textual choice examined in this essay, which reflected prevailing cultural norms and discursive habits without necessarily being the products of systemic deliberate design. On this cleansing of the Sixth Satire, which also entailed a gradual softening of the sweeping misogyny of the text - an issue that again explicitly vexed the translators - see Nussbaum, The Brink of All We Hate, 6, and chap. 5 (on Owen, 86-88).
60. The footnote in question had Martin Madan admit that these "feats of strength" were in fact "Masculine exercises," thus making it clear that the alteration in the body of the text was a self-conscious one; Rev. Martin Madan, A New and Literal Translation of Juvenal and Persius; with Copious Explanatory Notes ., 2 vols. (London, 1789), 1:263. (Madan had achieved some notoriety a few years earlier for the advocacy of polygamy in his Thelypthora of 1780.)
61. John Stirling, The Satires of Juvenal, with the Original Text . and a Close and Truly Literal English Translation . In a Method Entirely Different from All Yet Extant (London, 1760), 83 (the author was a Hertsfordshire vicar).
62. Hodgson, Satires of Juvenal, 103.
63. The vehemence of Dryden's critical attitude toward strong women in his translation of Juvenal's Sixth Satire has also been related to its specific political context, namely Dryden's crypto-Jacobite opposition to the reign of Queen Mary: see Tanya Caldwell, "Dryden's Sixth Satire of Juvenal and the Sexual Politics of Monarchy," Philological Quarterly 75 (Winter 1996): 23-41.
64. Gifford, Satires of Decimus Junius Juvenalis (1806 ed.), 183-85, and 183 n.
65. William Rhodes, The Satires of Juvenal (Oxford, 1801), 146. The apparent confusion of athletic exercises, wrestling, and fencing in these translations is accounted for by the undifferentiated pursuits of Roman gladiators, encompassing all of the above.
66. Fielding, Miscellanies, 1:111.
67. Dugaw, Warrior Women and Popular Balladry, 125-26.
68. The matter-of-factual acceptance of these early-eighteenth-century female fighters stands in striking contrast to an early-nineteenth-century antiquarian account of Mrs. Stokes and her colleagues, looking back on their "shameful" practice as distant and alien, completely at odds with the "delicately attenuated nerves" of civilized female readers; James Peller Malcolm, Anecdotes of the Manners and Customs of London during the Eighteenth Century . (London, 1808), 339-44 (including quotes of advertisements for Mrs. Stokes's fights).
69. Also see William B. Boulton, Amusements of Old London (London, 1901), 1:29-31.
70. These lines of Fielding, in relation to those of Dryden's Juvenal, are also discussed in Brown, Ends of Empire, 138-41;
71. however, Brown's conviction - or rather presupposition - that the masculine woman always presented a threat, has led her to see Fielding's lines merely as "references that brought the problem of the threatening Amazon up to date," completely missing the change - indeed reversal - of tone and implication in Fielding's verses in comparison with Dryden's. Similarly, Terry Castle sees those passages in Fielding's imitation of the Sixth Satire as indications of a negative attitude toward gender-crossing women (an attitude that, as she notes, is puzzlingly contradicted by Fielding's own gender-playful practices as stage manager). But as I have suggested here, reading those lines not as a simple statement of Fielding's views, but as his reworking of the classical text, and comparing them with other reworkings of the same text appears to support precisely the opposite conclusion; see Terry Castle, "'Matters not Fit to Be Mentioned': Fielding's The Female Husband," in The Female Thermometer: Eighteenth-Century Culture and the Invention of the Uncanny (New York, 1995), 77-79.
72. Appropriately, the words wanton and naked were Gifford's own embellishments to the Latin text. Madan, New and Literal Translation of Juvenal, 1:263 and 262 n.
73. [Sheridan], Satires of Juvenal, 153 (Satire 6, ll. 261-64).
74. Edward Courtney, A Commentary on the Satires of Juvenal (London, 1980), 292.
75. It might also be noted that these two lines, suggesting the possible power of gender to shape sexual bodies, were silently omitted from a 1795 edition of Dryden: The Works of Juvenal. Translated by John Dryden, Esq. and Others, vol. 12 of A Complete Edition of the Poets of Great Britain (London, [1795]).
76. The female philosopher is another case in point for the present analysis. Our translators differed, sometimes explicitly, about whether the female philosopher was at all gender transgressive, or simply insufferable company, and as we have by now come to expect, while the eighteenth-century translations hardly represented her as transgressing gender boundaries, the later ones anxiously magnified her transgression as both a gender and a sexual one. Note, in particular, how her image became more explicitly sexualized between the three editions of Gifford: The Satires of Decimus Junius Juvenalis (London, 1802), 207-8;
77. Satires of Decimus Junius Juvenalis (1806 ed.), 199;
78. and The Satires of Decimus Junius Juvenalis, and of Aulus Persius Flaccus, Translated into English Verse (London, 1817), 250.
79. Stapylton, Juvenal's Sixteen Satyrs, 89.
80. Madan, New and Literal Translation of Juvenal, 1:265.
81. Rhodes, Satires of Juvenal, 147.
82. In Gifford's 1802 edition the last line read, "Then laugh to see her squat, when the vile farce is o'er!" And compare also Rev. William Heath Marsh, The Satires of Decimus Junius Juvenalis. Translated into English Verse (London, 1804), 77-78.
83. On these riding habits see Wahrman, "Percy's Prologue," 120, and the sources cited there.
84. The Spectator had already anticipated the aptness of the use of Juvenal for the critique of such masculine female fashions: Donald F. Bond, ed., The Spectator (Oxford, 1965), 2:28.
85. Campbell, Natural Masks, 39-40. One consequence of this emphasis of Fielding's, as Campbell points out, is that his imitation of Juvenal breaks off less than half way through the Sixth Satire, ending it at a point where Juvenal's denunciation of women turns into a denunciation of luxury, consumption, and money. Campbell's book also helps to situate Fielding's perceptions of gender identity, as revealed here in the imitation of Juvenal, within the broader context of his works, suffused throughout with "the apprehension that male and female identity might be in some sense conventional, acquired, or historically determined" (12).
86. Kathleen Wilson, The Sense of the People: Politics, Culture, and Imperialism in England, 1715-1785 (Cambridge, 1995), 186-87.
87. Compare also John Barrell, The Birth of Pandora and the Division of Knowledge (Basingstoke, Eng., 1992), 64-65.
88. [Henry Fielding], The Champion, 8 April 1740,
89. reprinted in The Champion: Containing a Series of Papers ., 2d ed. (London, 1743), 2:80.
90. On the sometimes contradictory eighteenth-century meanings of effeminacy predicated on the critique of luxury and possibly associated with women as well as men, see also Michèle Cohen, Fashioning Masculinity: National Identity and Language in the Eighteenth Century (London, 1996), 5-6 and passim.
91. The Adulteress (London, 1773), 1-2, and v.
92. Elsewhere as well, as indicated by its title, this text did not display signs of anxiety about gender transgression, but rather repeated anxieties about sexual behavior. Compare also Charles Churchill's "The Times" of 1764: in this outburst of shrill homophobia, often gesturing very clearly to Juvenal (indeed John Wilkes wrote to Churchill upon receiving "The Times": "You have gready excelld Juvenal in his own manner"), Churchill too presented an attitude toward gender transgression opposite to that of Juvenal, recommending that a young man cross the gender boundary as a guarantee against the pervasive, unnatural sexual advances of other men: "Go forth a Woman to the public view, / And with their garb assume their manners too"; The Works of C. Churchill, 5th ed. (London, 1774), 3:180.
93. For Wilkes's letter see The Correspondence of John Wilkes and Charles Churchill, ed. Edward H. Weatherly (New York, 1954), 91; I am very grateful to Anna Clark for sharing this quote from her unpublished work on Wilkes.
94. [Edward Barnaby Greene], The Satires of Juvenal Paraphrastically Imitated, and Adapted to the Times (London, 1763), 73.
95. Note also [Edward Young], Love of Fame, the Universal Passion. In Seven Characteristical Satires, 2d ed. (London, 1728).
96. Compare Dryden, Poems, 1693-1696, 175;
97. Stapylton, Mores Hominum, 206 n.
98. For a discussion of this distinction as it pertained to Roman taxonomical categories regarding sexual matters, see Juvenal: Satires, Book 1, ed. Susanna Morton Braund (Cambridge, 1996), 168.
99. It should be noted that homosexuality for Juvenal is overwhelmingly a male vice; a point made explicitly by a female voice, Laronia, that Juvenal introduces into the Second Satire. See S. H. Braund, "A Woman's Voice? Laronia's Role in Juvenal Satire 2," in Richard Hawley and Barbara Levick, eds., Women in Antiquity (London, 1995), 212.
100. [Sheridan], Satires of Juvenal, 31, 47 (Satire 2, ll. 9-13, 137-40).
101. John Biddle, Virgil's Bucolicks Englished. Whereunto Is Added the Translation of the Two First Satires of Juvenal (London, 1634), D4v.
102. Stapylton, Mores Hominum, 45. And note the change that Stapylton introduced between these two editions, replacing the transformation of the body (in 1644) with the less ambiguous change of sex (in 1660).
103. e Thing [that] offends him," rather than its more profound, monstrous unnaturalness; Thraliana: The Diary of Mrs. Hester Lynch Thrale (Later Mrs. Piozzi), 1776-1809, ed. Katharine C. Balderston (Oxford, 1942), 2:949 and 949 n. 1 (entry for 9 Dec. 1795).
104. Indeed some later translators dropped this particular Satire completely; see, for instance, Rev. John Hawkesworth, Select Satires of Decimus Junius Juvenalis . (Dublin, 1830).
105. Owen, Satires of Juvenal, 23.
106. It might be noted that the Latin original does not specify the reason for not entrusting the boy to the eunuch; the suggestive allusion to the danger posed to the boy by his priapic member was Dryden's own sexualized embellishment (one he probably borrowed from the commentary of Cornelius Schrevellius, E. Junii Juvenalis & Auli Persii Flacci Satyrae (Amsterdam, 1684);
107. It is also interesting to note the connotation given to this passage in a much earlier text, Ben Jonson's Epicœne. Or the Silent Woman, first acted in 1609. In this play, True-wit's attempt to dissuade Morose from marriage (act 2, scene 2) is in fact a rather close précis of Juvenal's Sixth Satire. A wife, says True-wit among many other things, "neuer weighes what her pride costs, sir: so shee may kisse a page, or a smoth chinne, that has the despaire of a beard." In this early interpretation of the beardless eunuch, all that seemed to be disturbing about the possibility of having sex with him was simply the proud ostentation that it was perceived to entail, rather than the admission of his sexuality; Ben Jonson, ed. Charles Harold Herford and Percy Simpson (Oxford, 1937), 5:182.
108. James P. Carson, "Commodification and the Figure of the Castrato in Smollett's Humphry Clinker," Eighteenth Century 33, no. 1 (1992): 24-46.
109. Note also James Sinclair, The Satires of Juvenal, Literally Translated into English Prose, 2d ed. (Edinburgh, 1815), 61, whose text was in many places lifted almost word for word from Stirling's translation of 1760, but who chose in 1815 to replace Stirling's phrase "weak eunuchs" with "impotent eunuchs" (emphasis added).
110. J.J. Howard, The Metamorphoses of Publius Ovidius Naso in English Blank Verse (London, 1807), 144.
111. See also the interesting comments on the eighteenth-century translations of Ovid in Donoghue, Passions Between Women, 28-30.
112. It is arguable that eighteenth-century understandings of sexuality - of sexual behavior - were more closely intertwined with gender than with biological sex, appearing therefore in a corresponding multiplicity of imaginable forms before the closing decades of the century; see Nussbaum, Torrid Zones, 95-96.
113. Again, for the broader evidence for this cultural shift at this juncture, see Wahrman, "Percy's Prologue."
114. Charles Badham, M. D., The Satires of Juvenal: Translated into English Verse (London, 1814), 155 n.