Katherine Philips’s French Translations: Between Mediation and Appropriation
Résumé
While Katherine Philips's translations from Corneille, especially her Pompey, have attracted substantial scholarly attention in recent years, her other translations from the French have been relatively neglected. Yet these shorter translations are key to understanding the kind of niche as a social, fashionable author Philips was attempting to create for herself in the latter part of her career. The French poems she chose to translate or imitate are indicative of the forms of poetry she was trying to promote in the early 1660s, as she looked towards France for inspiration and sought to make an impact in British literary and musical life by emulating French models. Her interest in the French court air and ballet also sheds light on her aims in composing her songs between the acts in Pompey. Philips's French poems testify to her interest in contemporary French musical and literary culture, as well as in a more highbrow pastoral literature that she was trying to adapt for an English audience. Her translation of Saint-Amant's “Solitude” in particular represents an ambitious attempt to make an intervention in the contemporary debate about neo-Epicureanism, while also reflecting her literary flair for identifying popular poems.
Origine :
Fichiers produits par l'(les) auteur(s)
Loading...