Translation as Rhetoric: Edward Jerningham's “Impenitence” (1800)

Abstract

Edward Jerningham's “Impenitence” (1800)––a translation of Bossuet's “Sermon du mauvais riche” (1662)––is remarkably dissimilar to its French original. This article investigates the rhetorical reasons behind this discrepancy. These reasons concern the problems of promoting a French model of eloquence in a fiercely anti-French climate and––even more problematic––promoting a text whose main theme is a denunciation of the rich in a period of extreme counterrevolutionary fervor. Jerningham's text shows that in facing potentially resistant readers, the strategies of a translator are those of a rhetor.

Notes

¹I owe many thanks to RR reviewers David Fleming and James J. Murphy for their valuable suggestions in revising an earlier version of this article.

²France notes that “[t]he translator … is in a rhetorical situation. Translation, particularly literary translation, is not a scientific procedure but a personal initiative akin to that of the orator situated between a subject and a public” (261).

³The 1986 Sullivan edition of the Satyricon translates this phrase as “found me playing around with Giton” (11).

⁴For a detailed treatment of these translations, see David E. Stein's article concerning recent translations of the Torah.

⁵One notable recent example is Karen E. Whedbee's study of J. S. Mill's translation of the Gorgias.

⁶This essay was originally published in 1787.

⁷These names represented historical figures that were already seen as sympathetic ones by the British. Fénelon (1651–1715), whose Aventures de Télémaque (1699) went through numerous English translations in the latter part of the century, had dared to criticize the excesses of Louis XIV, excesses, as one translator put it, that led to “the calamities which the present generation has so deeply to deplore” (Hawkesworth 35); the Abbé Prévost (1697–1763) was a pre-Revolutionary novelist and the translator of Richardson's Pamela; Charlotte Corday (1768–1793) had fatally stabbed the revolutionary leader, Marat, and was sentenced to the guillotine during the Reign of Terror.

⁸This approval was especially strong among the Dissenters who were heirs of England's own Glorious Revolution of 1688.

⁹What Jerningham has, in fact, offered readers is both an abridgement and a translation.

¹⁰From Alexander Pope's “Eloisa to Abelard”: “Black melancholy sits, and round her throws/A death-like silence, and a dread repose:/Her gloomy presence saddens all the scene,/Shades ev'ry flow'r, and darkens ev'ry green./Deepens the murmur of the falling floods./And breathes a browner horror on the woods” (lines 165–70).

¹¹The original sermon is known under two titles, “Sermon du mauvais riche” and “Sur l'impénitence finale.” Jerningham's choice to translate the latter suggests a wish to downplay the sermon's vigorous denunciation of the upper classes.

¹²“… oportet aut de eo quod adversarii firmissimum sibi putarint … primum te dicturum polliceri …”

¹³III.1414b.

¹⁴In Jerningham's translation, all that remains is a watered-down version of the first sentence of this passage: “I entertain therefore little confidence in the abrupt repentance of an habitual sinner, or in those languid conversions which are born on the bed of an expiring sinner” (42).

¹⁵The irony in this quotation of course is that “bullion” is itself a French-derived word!

¹⁶“Blessed are the meek: for they shall inherit the earth.”

¹⁷The source for this quotation is “Thoughts on French Affairs” (1791).

¹⁸ “dicere ea quae indignentur adversarii tibi quoque indigna videri.”