Introduction: ‘Transformance’: Renaissance Women's Translation and the Performance of Gift Exchange

Summary

Abstract: This introduction situates the translational practice of early modern women writers within its historical and political context and argues for the essential connection between translation and gift culture in early modern England. The introduction offers a brief history of translation theory and practice in the period by examining medieval and Renaissance paratexts such as dedications and prefaces. The introduction considers these in connection with modern theories of translation and argues for seeing the early modern translations studied in the book as participating in a translational ethics rooted in the idea of ‘transformance’. Translation as performance and resistance is effected through the patronage networks and gifting practices of early modern England.

Keywords: gifting; patronage; Renaissance; translation; women's writing

The feminist translator immodestly flaunts her signature in italics, in footnotes – even in a preface

– Barbara Godard

Barbara Godard describes in the epigraph above a translational practice completely at odds with the model of translation prevalent from the end of the seventeenth century and still largely privileged today, in which the success of a translation is judged by the ‘invisibility’ of its translator and its illusion of transparent transfer of meaning from one language to another. Translators and theorists have strenuously challenged this model in recent years, with Lawrence Venuti the most ‘visible’ of these commentators. Transparency, the absence of linguistic or stylistic peculiarities, effectively ‘conceals the numerous conditions under which the translation is made, starting with the translator's crucial intervention’. Venuti and others find such transparency ethically problematic, as it silently colonizes the source language of a text and elides both the translator's creative work and her cultural biases. The epigraph from Godard above emphasizes the way in which the twentieth-century feminist translator challenges the ideal of transparency, working to emerge from the shadow of her source text and make herself visible in the materials and paratexts of her book. For Godard, feminist discourse is translation as it ‘set[s] out to “destroy the discursive mechanism” by assuming the feminine role deliberately, in an act of “mimicry,” which is to convert a form of subordination into an affirmation and to challenge an order resting on sexual indifference’.