“Ample transmigration”: Transcending Frontiers with George Chapman’s Visible Translator
Résumé
Opposed philological and inspirational principles run through the history of Biblical translation, from Augustine and Jerome to Luther and Erasmus. George Chapman effects an extraordinary synthesis of those principles in the claims he makes for his translations of Homer’s epic poems. Vaunting, as a translator, the “free grace/ And inspiration” he has received from God and Homer, Chapman’s translative persona vaults over the limits imposed on translation as a form of literary creation in the classical rhetorical/poetical tradition. Through his particular representation of his syncretic poetic theology, he further attempts to displace orthodox understanding of what constitutes a sacred text.
Chapman, in his signal confidence as a translator, has been deemed a “Proto-Augustan”. This paper will look rather to Renaissance contexts for this self-glorifying view of translation, as given in Chapman’s poetic and prose paratexts to his Homeric translations.
Chapman is an eager, indeed pugnacious, agent of the emerging English linguistic nationalism; his particular articulation of this position and his arguments in favour of translatability relate him to the great Ciceronian controversy of previous generations. Beyond this linguistic commitment, however, lies Chapman’s sustained representation of his inspired personal rapport or elective affinities with Homer as a Muse figure, itself characteristic of a certain Renaissance literary Platonism.
What results from this synthesis is the aesthetic strategy, remarkable in the history of literary translation, of the translator’s visibility. That is, Chapman’s conception of translation allows him to lay claim and guarantee the excellence, and even the unimpaired excellence, of his transmission of Homer’s poems.