Jamie K. Wheeler (Princeton University)
Lucy Hutchinson (1618-1681) was a Latinist and poet who produced the first full translation of Lucretius into English verse—a philosophically controversial choice for a committed Puritan woman, and one that she herself questions in the preface to her manuscript. Hutchinson’s work outside the Memoirs of the Life of Colonel Hutchinson, her biography of her husband, has only in the past few decades come into scholarly focus (e.g. the work of David Norbrook and Hugh de Quehen). Thus, many important questions about her reasons for translating Lucretius and her positionality in doing so remain under-examined. She actively rejects Lucretius’ beliefs, yet articulates them in the act of translation; she excoriates his “ridiculous, impious, execrable doctrines” but still refers to him possessively, almost defensively, as “my author.” In this paper, I foreground and analyze the spatial and erotic metaphors through which Hutchinson theorizes the troubled relationship between translator and source.
Hutchinson, like other early modern women translators (Smith), makes powerful use of the paratexts of her translation of Lucretius—marginal notes, a dedicatory letter, and introductions to each book—as a way of situating and identifying herself as translator and as a place to make her voice heard. Considering Hutchinson’s self-presentation and theorization of herself as translator in her paratexts (including by personal examination of her manuscripts), alongside observations of her practice, I argue that the highly personalized relationship in which she is inextricably implicated with her source actually creates the opportunity for her to take up a posture from which she can make her own, very different, voice heard. She rejects any identification with Lucretius (as Hopkins rightly recognizes, but wrongly criticizes), but her attitude toward him is also not as simple as resistance and defiance. She portrays a relationship of mutual dependence between translator and source, even echoing the concept of Puritan companionate marriage, while nevertheless strongly differentiating her translating self and voice from that of the source.
Given her position as a female author in seventeenth-century England, all of Hutchinson's work is shot through with questions about the identity and legitimacy of her voice. In the Memoirs, which has disproportionately shaped her reception, she exists simultaneously as the hero's supportive and cherished wife and as the text's alienated and often acerbic narrator (Keeble). The relationship between translator and source can be similarly vexed and even similarly intimate. Hutchinson compares her relationship with Lucretius to a “wanton dalliance,” a dangerous, potentially corrupting liaison—but, as I demonstrate, she subverts the balance of power in this implicitly gendered dynamic by situating the act of translation in a domestic space that she herself controls. The seventeenth-century reception of Lucretius was deeply concerned about the supposed immorality of Epicureanism, but as Hutchinson portrays it, the virtuous wife—her own self-portrayal—is the figure who can safely interact with the Epicurean libertine.