Page:Performing Without a Stage - The Art of Literary Translation - by Robert Wechsler.pdf/62

 the often conscious creation of modern vernacular languages that was central to the cause of the Reformation, religiously and politically. This was a time before copyright laws, before the concept of plagiarism, before one would have to pay to translate or adapt a work. Not long before this, before Gutenberg invented movable type in the fifteenth century, most people who wrote had been transcribers, people who copied out books, who plagiarized in the most basic, slavish, and time-consuming way possible.

Although educated Renaissance Britons were less monoglot than they are today, a principal reason that literary translation, primarily of the classics, began to flourish there was the fact that fewer educated people were learning Latin and Greek. Much of this has to do with the Anglican Church breaking away from Rome: preaching was being done in English, and sermons and other religious books, including biblical and prayer book translations, were appearing in English. At the same time, vernacular poetry was on the rise, although poets still wrote some of their work in Latin well into the seventeenth century. But the English language and poetic forms were not very sophisticated, and there was little in the way of great epics, histories, and philosophical works on a par with Homer, Virgil, Herodotus, Plato, and Cicero. So translation was the logical way to bring these forms and works into English. Translators saw their work as service to their country and their language, not to the author or the foreign culture.

This political faithfulness even went so far as to include the attempt to affect the revolution that was occurring, that is, to prevent it from becoming violent: “[T]hrough the reading of classical literature,” wrote C. H. Conley, “the public were to be advised of the general misery and national decline certain to be attendant upon civil strife. . . . far-seeing members of the nation recognized in translations of the classics instruments for setting up the new order. . . to introduce the rationalistic spirit of ancient literature as the most direct means of transforming national ideals.”*

Translating classics was a much more legitimate and effective way than the writing of new works for the primarily young Renaissance English translators to proselytize their ideas and values. In any event, to make a name for themselves as writers, they felt 62