Translation from the Ancients in Seventeenth-Century France

"Lanfin Malherbe vint." Boileau little thought that these words could be applied to the originator of a style of translating that he was one of the first to criticise. And yet Malherbe's translation of the thirty-third book of Livy is typical of the new era about to dawn in French literature, an era in which after a long series of civil wars the French nation created for itself a discipline. The refinement in manners and social habits inaugurated at the beginning of the century naturally had its influence upon letters. The salons not only produced writers of the type of Gomberville and Scudery but were indirectly responsible for a new type of translator. The age of pure savants was passed, that of original writers was come, whose task it was not only to modernise the language of the ancients, but to make it suitable to rank in politeness, grace and refinement with contemporary literature. In a word, translations, like everything else, had to conform to the biense'ances.1 The reading public increased as the leisured classes grew in size, and moreover it was a public to whom the ancients, if translated literally, would make hardly any and perhaps no appeal. Translators continued to open up new worlds, but worlds that had suffered much disfigurement owing to their efforts. Yet they were regarded with the same degree of popularity as original writers, and their numbers multiplied. The Academy welcomed many of them within its walls. Thus it is that Malherbe says in his extremely important preface2 : "Si, en quelques autres lieux, j'ai ajoutd ou retranch6 quelque chose, comme certes il y en a cinq ou six, j'ai fait le premier pour eclaircir des obscurites qui eussent donn6 de la peine a des gens qui n'en veulent point; et le second pour ne tomber en des rdp6titions ou autres impertinences dont sans doute un esprit delicat se ffit offens6. Pour ce qui est de l'histoire, je l'ai suivie exactement et ponctuellement; mais je n'ai pas voulu faire les grotesques qu'il est impossible d'dviter quand on se restreint a la servitude de traduire mot a mot. Je sais bien le gofit du college, mais je m'arrete a celui du Louvre." War, then, was now declared between the Collige and the Louvre, a war which lasted for nearly two hundred years. Let us examine the protagonists and try to gather what were their aims.3 The most noted translator of the early part of the century was Perrot d'Ablancourt. He was the apostle of the literary as opposed to the accurate type of translation,4 and it was round his works that the battle was chiefly