Kronos as Crone: Inversions of Beauty and Gender through Translation in L'Astrée

Abstract

Abstract In this essay, I treat problems of translation and ekphrasis and their relationship to the representation of gender in the First Part of Honoré d'Urfé's pastoral romance, L'Astrée. Through allusion to Petrarch's canzone 90, d'Urfé provides in the opening pages of his romance a template of feminine beauty and power which serves as the basis for idealized portraits of both beauty and ugliness, particularly in two important ekphrases of the First Part (the 'peintures esclattantes' in Book 2, and the 'Histoire de Damon et de Fortune' in Book 11), both contained by the garden of the nymph Galathée's Palais d'Isoure. The parallels between ekphrasis and translation, particularly with regard to the topos of enargeia, make gender subject to the wondrous 'raretez' that issue from the lair of the sorceress Mandrague: as an old woman, the witch herself assumes the posture of the nymphs at the romance's beginning, but her stance is clearly masculinised. The portrait of this 'hag' in Book 11 harmonises with the 1657 English translator's astonishing conversion of Saturn as father of the gods to a ghastly mother who ingests the flesh of her own children: translatio imperii, or the transfer of power from Saturn to Jupiter depicted in the murals of the Palais d'Isoure, calls forth the translator's gender-based, interpretive dismantling and re-fashioning of source text. Ekphrasis and translation conjoin in the First Part of L'Astrée to make clear the ties between pastoral romance and fairy-tale motifs. The shepherd Céladon is an apt witness to both ekphrases, where gender is ambiguous and polyvalent, in both source text and translation, since he will later incarnate the principle of enargeia through cross-dressing.