Abstract
This essay by Brenda M. Hosington examines the role of translated titles as ‘textual standard bearers’ in the early modern culture of print. She studies in particular the titles of translations issued by three significant printers of the period: Richard Pynson, John Wolfe, and Thomas Harper. As well as fulfilling the traditional functions of titles, translated titles, by being intertextual, operate a transfer of cultural capital and an exchange of connotative values. They provide a space within which the foreign can be made visible through explicit presentation, or invisible through ‘domestication’ for a new readership, and frequently enhance the translator and translation by also giving them visibility.
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Notes
- 1.
Colin Symes, ‘You Can’t Judge a Book by its Cover: The Aesthetics of Titles and Other Epitextual Devices’, The Journal of Aesthetic Education, 26.3 (1992), 17–26 (20).
- 2.
See for example Guyda Armstrong, ‘Paratexts and their Functions in Seventeenth-Century English Decamerons’, Modern Language Review, 102.1 (2007), 40–57 and Brenda M. Hosington, ‘“If the Past is a Foreign Country”: Neo-Latin Histories, their Paratexts, and English Cultural Translation’, The Canadian Review of Comparative Literature/Revue Canadienne de Littérature Comparée, 41.4 (2014), 432–55.
- 3.
This figure is taken from The Renaissance Cultural Crossroads Online Catalogue of Translations in Britain 1473–1640, edited by Brenda M. Hosington et al., online: http://www.hrionline.ac.uk.rcc, accessed 16 September 2017.
- 4.
See Claude Duchet, ‘La Fille abandonée et La Bête humaine, éléments de titrologie romanesque’, Littérature, 12.4 (1973), 49–73; Leo H. Hoek, La marque du titre (Paris: Mouton, 1981); Charles Grivel, Production de l’intérêt romanesque: un état du texte (Paris: Mouton, 1973); John Hollander, ‘“Haddock’s Eyes”: A Note on the Theory of Titles’, in Vision and Resonances: Two Senses of Poetic Form, 2nd edition (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), pp. 212–26; Alistair Fowler, Kinds of Literature: An Introduction to the Theory of Genres (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982), pp. 92–8; Laurence Lerner, ‘Titles and Timelessness’, in Reconstructing Literature, edited by Laurence Lerner (Oxford: Blackwell, 1983), pp. 179–204.
- 5.
Harry Levin, ‘The Title as a Literary Genre’, The Modern Language Review, 72.4 (1977), xxiii–xxxvi (xxxvi).
- 6.
Wolfgang Karrer, ‘Titles and Mottoes as Intertextual Devices’, in Intertextuality, edited by Heinrich F. Plett (Berlin and New York: De Gruyter, 1991), pp. 122–34.
- 7.
Gérard Genette, Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation, trans. Jane E. Lewin and Richard Macksey (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), pp. 89–93.
- 8.
Marie Maclean, ‘Pretexts and Paratexts: The Art of the Peripheral’, New Literary Theory, 22.2 (1991), 273–9.
- 9.
The terms are Lawrence Venuti’s, in The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation, 2nd edition (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), pp. 1–30, 53–8. See more generally Friedrich Schleiermacher, ‘On the Different Methods of Translating’, trans. André Lefevere, in Translating Literature: The German Tradition from Luther to Rosenzweig, edited by André Lefevere (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1977), pp. 67–89; Walter Benjamin, ‘The Translator’s Task’, trans. S. Rendall, in Walter Benjamin’s Essay on Translation: Critical Translations, edited by Alexis Nouss, TTR, 10.2 (1977), 151–65; Antoine Berman, ‘La traduction et la lettre, ou l’auberge du lointain’, in Les Tours de Babel: Essais sur la traduction, edited by G. Granel (Mauvezin: Trans-Europ-Repress, 1985), pp. 31–50.
- 10.
Maclean, ‘Pretexts and Paratexts’, 275–76.
- 11.
Christiane Nord, ‘Text-Functions in a Translation: Titles and Headings as a Case in Point’, Target, 7.2 (1995), 261–84.
- 12.
Maurizio Viezzi, ‘Titles and Translation’, in Haasteena, Perspektivet som utmaning, Point of view as challenge, Perspektivität als Herausforderung. VAKKI-symposium XXXIII 7.–8.2.2013, edited by M. Eronen and M. Rodi-Risberg (Vaasa, Finland: VAKKI Publications, 2013), Vol. 2, pp. 374–84.
- 13.
See for example Margery Corbett and R. W. Lightbrown, The Comely Frontispiece: The Emblematic Title-Page in England 1550–1660 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1979); Martha W. Driver, The Image in Print: Book Illustration in Late Medieval England and its Sources (London: The British Library, 2004), pp. 77–114; Margaret M. Smith, The Title-Page: Its Early Development 1460–1510 (New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll Press, 2001); Paul Voss, ‘Books for Sale: Advertising and Patronage in Late Elizabethan England’, The Sixteenth Century Journal, 29.3 (1998), 733–56. Matthew Day, in an important and innovative discussion of running titles, makes a similar complaint in (‘“Intended to Offenders”: The Running Titles of Early Modern Books’, in Renaissance Paratexts, edited by Helen Smith and Louise Wilson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), pp. 34–47).
- 14.
Herbert Grabes, The Mutable Glass: Mirror Imagery in Titles and Texts of the Middle Ages and English Renaissance, trans. Gordon Collier (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982).
- 15.
Warren Boutcher, ‘From Cultural Translation to Cultures of Translations’, in The Culture of Translation in Early Modern England and France, 1500–1660, edited by Tania Demetriou and Rowan Tomlinson (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), pp. 22–40 (24–6).
- 16.
Eleanor F. Shevlin, ‘“To Reconcile Book and Title, and Make ’em Kin to One Another”: The Evolution of the Title’s Contractual Functions’, Book History, 21.1 (1999), 42–77.
- 17.
Michael Saenger, The Commodification of Textual Engagements in the English Renaissance (Aldershot and Burlington: Ashgate, 2006), pp. 39–40. Ironically, Saenger devotes only a few short paragraphs to titles, while he never mentions them in his section on translations.
- 18.
Victoria Gibbons, ‘Towards a Poetics of Titles: The Prehistory’, PhD Thesis, Cardiff University, 2010.
- 19.
Ceri Sullivan, ‘Disposable Elements? Indications of Genre in Early Modern Titles’, The Modern Language Review, 102.3 (2007), 641–53.
- 20.
Sullivan, ‘Disposable Elements?’, p. 650. In fact, William London also defines the function and purpose of long titles: ‘([they] should be the scope of each Book in short)’ and they are to assist and encourage the ‘timorous’ reader, for ‘a full Title tels us as the purport and intent of the Books’, Catalogue of the most vendible books in England (London, 1657), sigs. C1r–v.
- 21.
Venuti, The Translator’s Invisibility; Anne E. B. Coldiron, ‘Visibility Now: Historicizing Foreign Presences in Translation’, Translation Studies, 5.2 (2012), 189–200.
- 22.
Although after 1593 Wolfe passed most of his printing to Robert Bourne and his print material to John Windet and Adam Islip, his name remained on the imprints until 1601, the year of his death. Given the collaborative nature of early book production, he is likely to have continued to have some input in the matter of titles.
- 23.
Clifford Chalmers Huffman, Elizabethan Impressions: John Wolfe and His Press (New York: AMS Press, 1988), Appendix II, ‘John Wolfe: A Short-Title Checklist’, pp. 133–61. Huffman’s list omits six translations recorded in the Renaissance Crossroads Catalogue and fails to identify very many works as translations.
- 24.
Boutcher, ‘From Cultural Translation to Cultures of Translation’.
- 25.
On this question see Jonathan R. Olson, ‘“Newly Amended and Much Enlarged”: Claims of Novelty and Enlargement on the Title Pages of Reprints in the Early Modern English Print Trade’, History of European Ideas, 42.5 (2016), 618–28. Many of his observations hold true for both first editions and reprints of translations.
- 26.
See Marcy L. North, The Anonymous Renaissance: Cultures of Discretion in Tudor-Stuart England (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2003), pp. 67–75.
- 27.
Andrea Rizzi and John Griffith claim that translation can constitute ‘a crucial place’ for such mediation to be studied, given its collaborative nature (‘The Renaissance of Anonymity’, Renaissance Quarterly, 69 (2016), 200–12).
- 28.
Huffman, Elizabethan Impressions, pp. 76–7.
- 29.
The original and its translations, but not their titles, are discussed by Huffman in Elizabethan Impressions, pp. 80–2.
- 30.
For a discussion of the work and its paratexts, see Brenda M. Hosington, ‘Giovanni Bruto, Alexandre de Pontaymeri and the Tasso Cousins Cross the Channel: The Transforming Power of Translation and Paratext in the querelle des femmes’, in “Fideli, diligenti, chiari e dotti”: Traduttori e traduzione nel Rinascimento, edited by Elisa Gregori (Padua: CLEUPSC, 2016), pp. 259–76.
- 31.
S. K. Barker, ‘“Newes lately come”: European News Books in English Translation’, in Renaissance Cultural Crossroads: Translation, Print and Culture in Britain, 1473–1640, edited by S. K. Barker and Brenda M. Hosington (Leiden: Brill, 2013), pp. 227–44 (238).
- 32.
Barker, ‘“Newes lately come”’, p. 240.
- 33.
Harper has received little attention since Henry Plomer’s entry in his Dictionary of the Booksellers and Printers Who Were at Work in England, Scotland and Ireland from 1641 to 1667 (London: The Bibliographical Society/Blades, East & Blades, 1907). For brief notices, see Matteo A. Pangallo, ‘Correction to Plomer’s Biography of Thomas Harper’, Notes and Queries, 56 (2009), 203–5 and ‘Thomas Harper’ (blog published November 2012), and Graham Rees and Maria Wakely, ‘Thomas Harper’, The King’s Printer Project (2000–9), online: http://www.english.qmul.ac.uk/kingsprinter, accessed 22 May 2017.
- 34.
Day, ‘“Intended to Offenders”’, pp. 34 and 47.
- 35.
Coldiron, ‘Visibility Now’, pp. 198–9.
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Hosington, B.M. (2018). Textual Standard-Bearers: Translated Titles and Early Modern English Print. In: Belle, MA., Hosington, B. (eds) Thresholds of Translation. Early Modern Literature in History. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-72772-1_4
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