ABSTRACT
If translation does not start as the original question then it is, at the very least, a start in the questioning of the origin.1
Framing Caxton’s Ovid The translations produced by Elizabeth Talbot, Elizabeth Singer Rowe, Mary Chudleigh and Mary Wortley Montagu are examples of the variable approaches that early modern women take to the Metamorphoses and the range of discourses – from the moral to the erotic – which are inscribed in their texts. In form and content, their works articulate the intricate ways in which subjectivities are interpellated through and in Ovidian translation. Nevertheless, their contributions to the history of Ovid in English have been largely ignored. Oddly similar is the translation which is the focus of this final chapter: William Caxton’s prose manuscript rendition of the Metamorphoses (c. 1480). Whilst it may seem unusual to conclude with a discussion of the earliest translation, Caxton’s Ovid provides a fitting point of departure for this study. The quotation from Andrew Benjamin which serves as the epigraph to this section suggests that translation may be perceived as a disruptive textual practice. The dialectical interplay between ‘origin’ and ‘copy’ that resides in translation interrogates orthodox assumptions about temporality and linearity. Described as a ‘false start’ in the poem’s vernacular genealogy,2 Caxton’s Ovid seems to justify Benjamin’s claims that ‘if translation does not start as the original question then it is, at the very least, a start in the questioning of the origin’. Indeed, as we shall see, this fifteenth-century Metamorphoses, a text which loiters in the margins of the early modern period, engages with the cultural politics of translation in fifteenth-century England and troubles the definition of translation itself. In the Prologue to his translation Caxton sets out the text’s didactic purpose:
Alle scriptures and wrytyngis ben they good or evyll ben wreton for our prouffyt and doctryne. The good to thende to take ensample by them to doo well. And the evyll to thende that we sholde kepe and absteyne us to do evyll. Hyt is sayd comunely and it is trouth that wysdom or scyence hyd is but lost. and is moche to be desprysed And therfore it ought not to be hyd but to publysshe and shewe it unto them that can not ne knowe it not. For whych cause I wil recyte aftir myn Auctour Ovyde the fables of the olde and anncyent tyme aftir that I understande by my symple and lytyl understandyng. (fols. 16r-16v)3
Employing the conventions of Pauline exegesis, the Prologue declares its aim to ‘publysshe’ (make publicly known) Ovid’s narratives as moral exempla.4 In practice, however, Caxton’s rendition of the classical poem has had little impact upon critical sensibilities. Rosemond Tuve’s study of the influences of medieval allegory on the literary culture of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, for example, declines to discuss Caxton’s Ovid ‘because it had no currency’.5 In one sense, of course, Tuve’s exclusion of the text from her discussion is apt; Caxton’s translation is known only through a single manuscript, and there is no evidence that it was printed. To be sure, Tuve’s comments emphasize the limited agency of this single manuscript when compared with other extant versions of Ovid’s Metamorphoses published in England in the early modern period,6 and this perspective has remained the dominant one, particularly in English literary studies. In another sense, though, Tuve’s explanation avoids the most interesting problems raised by Caxton’s Ovid which are concerned with translation and critical practice. This is a difficult text for modern criticism to come to terms with, partly because
in analytic terms, we are not skilled in discussing imitative works as imitations. Once we have noted a so-called model or source, we are only beginning to understand the model as a constitutive element of the literary structure, an element whose dynamic presence has to be accounted for [...]. For once the positivist stage of investigation is passed, then the structures of imitative texts confront one with the enigmas of literary history, enigmas that call into question the meaning of periodization, the nature of historical understanding, the precise operations of change, the diachronic nature of language.7
