ABSTRACT
In Breton’s An Olde Mans Lesson (1605), Chremes advises Pamphilus regarding the best ways of controlling his new wife and adds, ‘if she be learned and studious, perswade her to translation, it will keepe her from Idlenes, & it is a cunning kinde taske’. 1 His assumption that translation functions as a form of control that demands no exercise of agency on the part of the practitioner has been a constant in understandings of translation from the Renaissance to the present. Its meanings have been unduly constricted, as interpretations have concentrated wholeheartedly on value-judgements based upon the fluency and accuracy of the translation as defined in relation to the original, rather than attempting to read translations as textual interventions in their own right. 2 The interior setting of the scene of translation in Breton’s account is also telling, as it confines the meanings of translation and the set of interpretive moves that it maps (or conceals) to the personal, to the field of domestic meanings. Nowhere has this delimitation been more entrenched than in relation to the writings (including translations) of early modern women. Despite the proximity of Mary Sidney’s translation of Petrarch’s Trionfi della morte to one of the master-tropes of the English (and European) Renaissance, and her text’s nested connections to processes of political image-making in Elizabethan England, her work has constantly been relegated to the domestic sphere. 3 It has been read within the framework of the Countess of Pembroke’s preoccupation with death and the ars moriendi, resulting from what Gary Waller has termed ‘her […] deeply idealised love for her brother’. 4 Whilst the memorialization of Sir Philip Sidney undoubtedly prompted the Countess of Pembroke’s initial incursions into the public world of writing, such readings unduly constrict her work by attributing her writing exclusively to the ‘personal’, using a biographical hermeneutic that forecloses and domesticates any wider political intent.
