ABSTRACT
The paradoxical relationship between translation and imitation may be illustrated with reference to some treatises and handbooks on the art of poetry from mid-sixteenth-century France. Peletier's metaphors of submission and of digging up valuable treasures, for example, are commonplace in the sixteenth-century discourse on translation, but they are not normally part of the metalanguage of imitation, while Du Bellay's images of digestion and transformation are not normally found in statements on translation. In the case of translation the metaphor should be seen and often occurs in conjunction with a host of other images and direct pronouncements denoting subordination and qualitative inferiority. The supreme image for this transformation is the Pythagorean notion occasionally acknowledged as such of the migration of souls, or metempsychosis. The rhetoric of the complimentary poem is such that it consistently inverts the images of subordination and inferiority pertaining to the traditional metalanguage of translation, and upgrades the judgements on the use and value of translation.
