ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author discusses the translation experience of Ellis Heywood. In Ellis Heywood's Italian dialogue, Il Moro, a fictionalized disputation on the nature of true value set in Thomas More's garden and first printed in 1556, there is a key moment in which Moro, Heywood's figure for Thomas More. Ellis Heywood's text offers an example of the ways in which different forms of translation may be seen to put to work the representational function of language. The promise of presence that translation makes, like any promise, calls for an act of faith on the part of the one to whom the promise is given, and it is this opening to the sacred, to transcendence, that is at stake in translation. Such a movement towards transcendence always entails a movement away from that being translated, and indeed from the form of the translation itself. From a certain perspective, this might be seen as a movement from materiality to transcendence.
