Translation and Invention in Fifteenth-Century Scotland

Translation sweeps across sixteenth-century Europe, influencing, renovating and challenging vernacular, proto-national writing, and generating its own brand of writer’s anxiety. Scotland may be proposed as a very special case study, since the discussion of the role of translation and imitation in its culture is made unique by its geographical position, far away from the Mediterranean, considered at the time the hub of nascent humanism; by the historical events that imposed a sudden stop to the development of printing and the dissemination of writing in the early sixteenth century; by its multilingual culture, that challenges any facile use of the phrase ‘national vernacular’; and by the impossibility of applying to Scottish culture the conventional frame used to define the passage from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance. The present article analyses Scottish writers’ approach to translation in the sixteenth century by looking at Gavin Douglas’ Prologue to Book 1 of his Eneados and James VI’s Reulis and Cautelis. Douglas’s Prologue symbolically opens the discussion on translation in the Scottish Renaissance; the translation, completed in 1513, appeared in print in London in 1553. Thirty-one years later, in 1584, young King James VI had his own Essayes of a Prentise, in the Divine Art of Poesie printed in Edinburgh. The Essayes included a short treatise of poetry, Reulis and Cautelis: this and Douglas’s prologue might well be the only two important pieces of writing in sixteenth-century Scottish literature that show attention to the issues involved in imitation, invention and translation. Given the complexity and ambiguity of the word invention in early modern usage, it may be posited that the discussion of the term in Reulis and Cautelis needs to be reconsidered, doing away with the facile opposition between invention on the one hand and imitation/translation on the other. James was by no means averse to the practice of translation, whether in his own person or by proxy. The comparison of the Reulis with the other great theoretical statement on translation in sixteenth-century Scotland, Douglas’s Prologue, shows a startlingly similar image: both writers recur to the idea of the translator bound to the text as if to a stake. It is distinctly possible that James consciously adopted Douglas’s image because he wanted his readers to understand the subtle difference between different types of translation, and because, like Douglas, he realised that a translation adhering faithfully to the original, though necessary and desirable in some cases, brought its own penance. The simile highlights the sense of constraint entailed by philological accuracy, but rather than as a condemnation of translation, faithful or otherwise, it should be read as a lucid appraisal of its cost.