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The Translation Studies Reader 4th Edition Lawrence
Venuti Digital Instant Download
Author(s): Lawrence Venuti
ISBN(s): 9780367235970, 0367235978
Edition: 4
File Details: PDF, 9.06 MB
Year: 2021
Language: english
The Translation Studies Reader
The Translation Studies Reader provides a definitive survey of the most important
and influential developments in translation theory and research, with an emphasis
on the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The introductory essays prefacing each
section place a wide range of seminal and innovative readings within their various
contexts, thematic and cultural, institutional and historical.
The fourth edition of this classic reader has been substantially revised and
updated. Notable features include:
• Four new readings that sketch the history of Chinese translation from antiquity
to the early twentieth century
• Four new readings that sample key trends in translation research since 2000
• Incisive commentary on topics of current debate in the field such as world
literature, migration and translingualism, and translation history
• A conceptual organization that illuminates the main models of translation
theory and practice, whether instrumental or hermeneutic
This carefully curated selection of key works, by leading scholar and translation the-
orist, Lawrence Venuti, is essential reading for students and scholars on courses
such as History of Translation Studies, Translation Theory, and Trends in Translation
Studies.
Lawrence Venuti, Professor Emeritus of English at Temple University, USA,

is a translation theorist and historian as well as a translator from Italian, French,
and Catalan. He is the author of The Translator’s Invisibility (Translation Classics
edition, 2018), The Scandals of Translation (1998), and Translation Changes
Everything (2013) as well as the editor of Teaching Translation: Programs, Courses,
Pedagogies (2017), all published by Routledge.
The
Translation
Studies
Reader
Fourth edition
Edited by
Lawrence Venuti
Fourth edition published 2021
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN
and by Routledge
52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2021 selection and editorial matter, Lawrence Venuti; individual chapters, the contributors
The right of Lawrence Venuti to be identified as the author of the editorial material,
and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with
sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised
in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or
hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information
storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers.
Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks,
and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe.
First edition published by Routledge 2000
Third edition published by Routledge 2012
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Venuti, Lawrence, editor.
Title: The translation studies reader/edited by Lawrence Venuti.
Description: Fourth edition. | Abingdon, Oxon; New York: Routledge, 2021. |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020045634 | ISBN 9780367235949 (hardback) |
ISBN 9780367235970 (paperback) | ISBN 9780429280641 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Translating and interpreting–History.
Classification: LCC P306 .T7436 2021 | DDC 418/.02–dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020045634
ISBN: 978-0-367-23594-9 (hbk)
ISBN: 978-0-367-23597-0 (pbk)
ISBN: 978-0-429-28064-1 (ebk)
Typeset in Perpetua
by Newgen Publishing UK
For Julius David Venuti
ma tu ci hai trovato
e hai scelto nel gatto

quei miagolii che
non lo fanno apposta!
Contents
Acknowledgements xi
I NTR O D U CTI O N 1
Foundational statements 11
1 [Zhi Qian?] 25
F R O M T H E P R E FA C E TO T H E S U T R A O F D H A R M A V E R S E S
Translated by Haun Saussy
2 Dao’an 27
F R O M T H E P R E FA C E TO A C O L L AT I O N O F T H E P E R F E C T I O N
O F G R E AT W I S D O M S U T R A
3 Jerome 29
L E T T E R TO PA M M A C H I U S
Translated by Kathleen Davis
4 Nicolas Perrot d’Ablancourt 39

P R E FA C E S TO TA C I T U S A N D L U C I A N
Translated by Lawrence Venuti
5 John Dryden 46
F R O M T H E P R E FA C E TO O V I D ’ S E P I S T L E S
viii CONTENTS
6 Friedrich Schleiermacher 51
O N T H E D I F F E R E N T M E T H O D S O F T R A N S L AT I N G
Translated by Susan Bernofsky
7 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe 72

T R A N S L AT I O N S
Translated by Sharon Sloan
8 Friedrich Nietzsche 75
T R A N S L AT I O N S
Translated by Walter Kaufmann
9 Lin Shu 77
PA R AT E X T S TO A R E C O R D O F T H E B L A C K S L AV E S ’
P L E A T O H E AV E N
Translated by R. David Arkush, Leo Ou-fan Lee,
and Michael Gibbs Hill
1900s– 1930s 81
10 Walter Benjamin 89
T H E T R A N S L ATO R ’ S TA S K
Translated by Steven Rendall
11 Ezra Pound 98
G U I D O ’ S R E L AT I O N S
12 Qu Qiubai and Lu Xun 106

A N E X C H A N G E O N T R A N S L AT I O N
Translated by Chloe Estep
13 Jorge Luis Borges 122

T H E T R A N S L ATO R S O F T H E T H O U S A N D A N D O N E N I G H T S
Translated by Esther Allen
1940s– 1950s 137
14 Vladimir Nabokov 143

P R O B L E M S O F T R A N S L AT I O N : O N E G I N I N E N G L I S H
15 Roman Jakobson 156

O N L I N G U I S T I C A S P E C T S O F T R A N S L AT I O N
CONTENTS ix
1960s– 1970s 163
16 Eugene Nida 171

PRINCIPLES OF CORRESPONDENCE
17 George Steiner 186

T H E H E R M E N E U T I C M OT I O N
18 Itamar Even- Zohar 191

T H E P O S I T I O N O F T R A N S L AT E D L I T E R AT U R E W I T H I N
T H E L I T E R A R Y P O LY S Y S T E M
19 Gideon Toury 197

T H E N AT U R E A N D R O L E O F N O R M S I N T R A N S L AT I O N
1980s 211
20 Hans J. Vermeer 219

S K O P O S A N D C O M M I S S I O N I N T R A N S L AT I O N A L A C T I O N
Translated by Andrew Chesterman
21 Andr é Lefevere 231

M O T H E R C O U R A G E ’ S C U C U M B E R S : T E X T, S Y S T E M A N D
R E F R A C T I O N I N A T H E O R Y O F L I T E R AT U R E
22 Antoine Berman 247

T R A N S L AT I O N A N D T H E T R I A L S O F T H E F O R E I G N
23 Lori Chamberlain 261

G E N D E R A N D T H E M E TA P H O R I C S O F T R A N S L AT I O N
1990s 277
24 Annie Brisset 289

T H E S E A R C H F O R A N AT I V E L A N G U A G E : T R A N S L AT I O N
A N D C U LT U R A L I D E N T I T Y
Translated by Rosalind Gill and Roger Gannon
25 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak 320

T H E P O L I T I C S O F T R A N S L AT I O N
26 Kwame Anthony Appiah 339

T H I C K T R A N S L AT I O N
x CONTENTS
27 Keith Harvey 352

T R A N S L AT I N G C A M P TA L K : G AY I D E N T I T I E S A N D
C U LT U R A L T R A N S F E R
28 Jacques Derrida 373

W H AT I S A “ R E L E V A N T ” T R A N S L AT I O N ?
2000s and beyond 397
29 Pascale Casanova 407

C O N S E C R AT I O N A N D A C C U M U L AT I O N O F L I T E R A R Y C A P I TA L :
T R A N S L AT I O N A S U N E Q U A L E X C H A N G E
Translated by Siobhan Brownlie
30 Ian Mason 424

T E X T PA R A M E T E R S I N T R A N S L AT I O N : T R A N S I T I V I T Y A N D
I N S T I T U T I O N A L C U LT U R E S
31 Vicente L. Rafael 436

T R A N S L AT I O N , A M E R I C A N E N G L I S H , A N D T H E
N AT I O N A L I N S E C U R I T I E S O F E M P I R E
32 Carla Nappi 453

F U L L . E M P T Y. S TO P. G O : T R A N S L AT I N G M I S C E L L A N Y I N
E A R LY M O D E R N C H I N A
33 Karen Van Dyck 466

M I G R AT I O N , T R A N S L I N G U A L I S M , T R A N S L AT I O N
34 Lawrence Venuti 486

G E N E A LO G I E S O F T R A N S L AT I O N T H E O R Y : S C H L E I E R M A C H E R
Works cited 501

Index 529
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to the following copyright holders for allowing me to use the materials
that comprise this book:
Kwame Anthony Appiah, “Thick Translation,” Callaloo 16: 808–819. Copyright ©
1993 by Johns Hopkins University Press. Reprinted by permission of Johns
Hopkins University Press.
Walter Benjamin, “The Translator’s Task.” Translation copyright © 2012 by Steven
Rendall. Used by permission of the translator.
Antoine Berman, “La Traduction comme épreuve de l’étranger,” Texte 4 (1985): 67–
81. “Translation and the Trials of the Foreign”: Translation copyright © 2000 by
Lawrence Venuti. Used by permission of Isabelle Berman.
Jorge Luis Borges, “The Translators of The Thousand and One Nights.” Trans.
Esther Allen. From Selected Non-Fictions by Jorge Luis Borges, edited by Eliot
Weinberger, pp. 92–109. Copyright © 1999 by Maria Kodama; translation and
notes copyright © 1999 by Penguin Putnam Inc. Reprinted by permission of
Viking Books, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin
Random House LLC. All rights reserved.
Annie Brisset, “The Search for a Native Language: Translation and Cultural Identity.”
Chapter 4 in A Sociocritique of Translation: Theatre and Alterity in Quebec,
1968–1988, trans. Rosalind Gill and Roger Gannon, Toronto: University of
Toronto Press, 1996, pp. 162–194. Copyright © 1996 by Rosalind Gill and
Roger Gannon. From Sociocritique de la traduction: théâtre et altérité au
Québec (1968–1988), Longueuil: Le Préambule, 1990. Reprinted by permis-
sion of the author and the translators.
xii ACKNOWLE DG E M E NTS
Pascale Casanova, “Consecration and Accumulation of Literary Capital: Translation

as Unequal Exchange.” Trans. Siobhan Brownlie. From Mona Baker (ed.) Critical
Readings in Translation Studies, Abingdon and New York: Routledge, 2010,
pp. 287–303. “Consécration et accumulation de capital littéraire: La traduction
comme échange inégal,” Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales 144
(2002): 7–20. Translation copyright © 2010 by Siobhan Brownlie. Reprinted
by permission of the translator and the French publisher.
Lori Chamberlain, “Gender and the Metaphorics of Translation,” Signs 13: 454–
472. Copyright © 1988 by the University of Chicago. Reprinted by permission
of the University of Chicago Press.
Dao’an, “From the Preface to A Collation of the Perfection of Great Wisdom
Sutra.” Translation copyright © 2021 by Haun Saussy. Used by permission of
the translator. Source text: Sengyou, Chu sanzang jiji, chapter 8 in Takakusu
Junjiro (ed.) Taisho shinshu Daizokyo (Tokyo: Taisho issaikyo kankokai, 1924–
1932), text 2145, vol. 55, p. 52.
Jacques Derrida, “What Is a ‘Relevant’ Translation?” trans. Lawrence Venuti, Critical
Inquiry 27: 174–200. Copyright © 2001 by The University of Chicago. Reprinted
by permission of the author’s estate and the University of Chicago Press.
Itamar Even-Zohar, “The Position of Translated Literature within the Literary
Polysystem,” Poetics Today 11 (1990): 45–51. Copyright © 1990 by the
Porter Institute for Poetics and Semiotics, Tel Aviv University. All rights reserved.
Reprinted by permission of the copyright holder and the present publisher,
Duke University Press.
Johann von Wolfgang Goethe, “Translations” (1819), trans. Sharon Sloan. From
Rainer Schulte and John Biguenet (eds) Theories of Translation: An Anthology
of Essays from Dryden to Derrida, Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1992, pp. 60–63. Copyright © 1992 by the University of Chicago. Reprinted
by permission of the publisher.
Keith Harvey, “Translating Camp Talk: Gay Identities and Cultural Transfer,” The
Translator 4/2: 295–320. Copyright © 1998 by St Jerome Publishing; copy-
right © 2014 by Taylor and Francis Ltd. Reprinted by permission of the author
and the publisher.
Roman Jakobson, “On Linguistic Aspects of Translation.” Reprinted by permission of
the publisher from On Translation by Reuben Brower (ed.), Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press, pp. 232–239. Copyright © 1959 by the President
and Fellows of Harvard College. Copyright © 1987 by Mrs. Helen P. Brower.
Jerome, “Letter to Pammachius.” Translation copyright © 2004 by Kathleen Davis.
Used by permission of the translator.
André Lefevere, “Mother Courage’s Cucumbers: Text, System and Refraction in a
Theory of Literature,” Modern Language Studies 12/4 (1982): 3–20. Reprinted
by permission of Ria Vanderauwera.
ACKNOWLE DG E M E NTS xiii
Lin Shu, “Paratexts to A Record of the Black Slave’s Cry to Heaven.” Excerpts from
“Translator’s Notes to Uncle Tom’s Cabin.” Trans. R. David Arkush and Leo Ou-
fan Lee. From Leo Ou-fan and R. David Arkush (eds) Land Without Ghosts:
Chinese Impressions of America from the Nineteenth Century to the Present,
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989, pp. 77–80. Copyright @ 1989
by the Regents of the University of California. Reprinted by permission of the
publisher. “Principles of Translation”: Translation copyright © 2021 by Michael
Gibbs Hill. Used by permission of the translator.
Ian Mason, “Text Parameters in Translation: Transitivity and Institutional Cultures.”
From Eva Hajicova, Peter Sgall, Zuzanna Jettmarova, Annely Rothkegel,
Dorothee Rothfuß-Bastian, and Heidrun Gerzymisch-Arbogast (eds) Textologie
und Translation (Jahrbuch Übersetzen und Dolmetschen 4/2), Tübingen: Narr,
2003, pp. 175–188. Reprinted by permission of the author.
Vladimir Nabokov, “Problems of Translation: Onegin in English,” Partisan Review
22 (1955): 496–512. Copyright © 1955 by Vladimir Nabokov. Reprinted by
permission of the Wylie Agency (UK) Limited.
Carla Nappi, “Full. Empty. Stop. Go: Translating Miscellany in Early Modern China.”
From Karen Newman and Jane Tylus (eds) Early Modern Cultures of Translation,
Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2015, pp. 206–220. Reprinted
by permission of the University of Pennsylvania Press.
Eugene Nida, “Principles of Correspondence.” From Eugene Nida, Toward a
Science of Translating, Leiden: E.J Brill, 1964, pp. 156–171. Reprinted by
permission of the publisher.
Friedrich Nietzsche, “Translation.” From Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science,
trans. Walter Kaufmann, New York: Vintage, 1974, pp. 136–138. Copyright ©
1974 by Penguin Random House LLC. Used by permission of Random House,
an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.
Ezra Pound, “Guido’s Relations.” From Literary Essays by Ezra Pound. Copyright
1918, 1920, 1935 by Ezra Pound. Reprinted by permission of New Directions
Publishing Corporation and Faber and Faber Ltd.
Qu Qiubai and Lu Xun, “An Exchange on Translation.” Translation copyright © 2021
by Chloe Estep. Used by permission of the translator.
Vicente L. Rafael, “Translation, American English, and the National Insecurities of
Empire,” Social Text 101 27/4 (Winter 2009): 1–23. Copyright © 2009 by
Duke University Press. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission of Duke
University Press.
Friedrich Schleiermacher, “On the Different Methods of Translating.” Translation
copyright © 2004 by Susan Bernofsky. Used by permission of the translator.
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “The Politics of Translation.” From Gayatri Chakravorty
Spivak, Outside in the Teaching Machine, London and New York: Routledge,
1993, pp. 179–200. Reprinted by permission of the author and the publisher.
xiv ACKNOWLE DG E M E NTS
George Steiner, “The Hermeneutic Motion.” From George Steiner, After Babel:
Aspects of Language and Translation, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975,
pp. 296–303. Copyright © 1975 by George Steiner. Reprinted by permission
of the publisher.
Gideon Toury, “The Nature and Role of Norms in Translation.” From Gideon Toury,
Descriptive Translation Studies–and Beyond, Amsterdam and Philadelphia:
Benjamins, 1995, pp. 53–69. Copyright © 1995 by John Benjamins B.V.
Reprinted by permission of the publisher.
Karen Van Dyck, “Migration, Translingualism, Translation.” Copyright © 2021 by
Karen Van Dyck. Used by permission of the author.
Lawrence Venuti, “Genealogies of Translation Theory: Schleiermacher.” From
Bethany Wiggin and Catriona MacLeod (eds) Un/Translatables: New Maps
for Germanic Literatures, Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2016,
pp. 45–62. Copyright © 2016 by Northwestern University Press. Reprinted by
permission of the publisher.
Hans J. Vermeer, “Skopos and commission in translation theory.” From Readings
in Translation Theory, ed. and trans. Andrew Chesterman, Helsinki: Oy Finn
Lectura Ob, 1989, pp. 173–187. Reprinted by permission of the editor and
translator.
[Zhi Qian?], “From the Preface to the Sutra of Dharma Verses.” Translation copy-
right © 2021 by Haun Saussy. Used by permission of the translator. Source
text: Sengyou, Chu sanzang jiji, chapter 8 in Takakusu Junjiro (ed.) Taisho
shinshu Daizokyo, Tokyo: Taisho issaikyo kankokai, 1924–1932, text 2145,
vol. 55, pp. 49–50.
I would like to thank a number of colleagues for evaluating new translations and
articles and for responding to queries about materials included in the fourth edition:
Joe Allen, Leo Tak-hung Chan, Eileen Cheng, Christoph Harbsmeier, Michael Gibbs
Hill, Lydia Liu, Reine Meylaerts, Eleni Papargyriou, David Robinson, Paul Rouzer, and
Haun Saussy.
Louisa Semlyen, my editor at Routledge, not only saw the need for this revision,
but believed in the value of the form I wanted to give it. Eleni Steck was superbly
efficient in getting a very complicated book into production.
The Italian verse in the dedication is drawn from Milo De Angelis’s poem “Un
maestro” in Millimetri (Torino: Einaudi, 1983).
L.V.
New York City
September 2020
Introduction
Translation studies: an emerging field
This reader gathers documents that represent many of the main approaches to
understanding translation from antiquity to the present, emphasizing European and
North American trends but including developments that have occurred in Asia with
a broad sampling from Chinese traditions. It concentrates on approaches that have
been formulated during the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, focusing on the
past fifty years. It was during this period that translation studies began to emerge
as a new academic field, at once international and interdisciplinary. The need for
a reader is thus partly institutional, created by the rapid growth of the field, espe-
cially as evidenced by the worldwide proliferation of translation programs in and
outside of the academy. A recent estimate indicates more than 500, offering a
variety of certificates and degrees, undergraduate and graduate, training not only
professional translators, but also scholar-teachers of translation and of languages
and literatures (see the list on https://est-translationstudies.org).
This growth has been accompanied by diverse forms of translation research,
some oriented toward pedagogy, yet most falling withinಧor crossingಧtraditional
academic disciplines, such as linguistics, literary criticism, philosophy, and anthro-
pology. The principal aim of the reader is to bring together a substantial selection
from this varied mass of writing, but in the form of a historical survey that invites
sustained examination of key theoretical developments.
Of course, edited volumes always work to define a body of knowledge, an area
of research, and a textbook market, and so they create as much as satisfy institu-
tional needs, especially in the case of an emergent field. In translation studies, the
wide spectrum of theories, research methodologies, and pedagogies may doom
any assessment of its current state to partial representation, superficial synthesis,
2 I NTROD UCTION
and optimistic canonization. This reader is intended, nonetheless, to be an intro-

duction to the field recognizable to the scholars who work within it, even if specific
inclusions and omissions might provoke disagreement.
Recognition, as this qualification suggests, must not be construed as mirror
reflection. The intention is also to challenge any disciplinary complacency, to
produce a consolidation that interrogates the ways in which translation is currently
researched and taught by revealingಧeven if implicitlyಧthe limitations of scholarly
knowledge and pedagogical practices, to show what the study of translation has
been and to suggest what it might be. Perhaps the most effective way to issue this
challenge is to enable a historical perspective. “A translator without historical con-
sciousness,” wrote the French translator and translation theorist Antoine Berman,
“is a crippled translator, a prisoner of his representation of translation and of those
carried by the social discourses of the moment” (Berman 2009: 46). In assembling
this reader, I am suggesting that scholars of translation, as well as translators, can
significantly advance their work by taking into account the historical contexts in
which translation has been studied and practiced.
The readings are organized into seven chronological sections; the date of
publication for each reading appears at the foot of its first page. The documents
gathered in the first section, up till roughly 1900, have exerted such a powerful
influence on later practices and commentary as to warrant the term “foundational.”
The next six sections are divided into decades of the twentieth and twenty-first cen-
turies. Whether a decade stands on its own or is combined with others depends,
in the first instance, on the volume of translation commentary published within
it, sheer bibliographical quantity (cf. the bibliographies in Morgan 1959, Steiner
1975, Schulte and Biguenet 1992, Gambier and van Doorslaer 2004–). But there
is also a qualitative standard: as the readings move towards the present, the level
of sophistication and inventiveness does in fact rise, and new concepts, methods,
and research projects are developed, justifying separate sections for the 1980s,
the 1990s, and the first decades of the twenty-first century.
The sections are each prefaced by introductory essays which describe main
trends in translation studies, establishing a context for concise expositions of the
readings and calling attention to the work of influential writers, theorists, and scholars
who are not represented by a reading. The section introductions present historical
narratives that refer to theoretical and methodological advances and occasionally
offer critical evaluations. Yet the stories they tell avoid any evolutionary model of
progress, as well as any systematic critique. I want to outline, however rapidly,
the history of the present moment in translation studies. And to some degree this
means asking questions of the past raised by the latest tendencies in theory and
research.
The map of translation studies drawn here, its centers and peripheries,
admissions and exclusions, reflects the current fragmentation of the field into
subspecialties, some empirically oriented, some speculatively oriented, many
influenced by various forms of linguistics, literary criticism, cultural studies, phi-
losophy, and sociology. The effort to cast a wide net has not encompassed certain
areas of translation research which, although considered in some chapters, demand
I NTROD UCTION 3
separate coverage because of their degree of specialization (e.g. interpreting and

machine translation). And breadth of coverage has limited depth of representa-
tion for particular theories and approaches. The section introductions aim, in brief
space, to supply some omissions and to sketch a historical setting. It will be clear
that I have tried to cover much (for some, no doubt, too much; for others, too little)
in an effort to suggest the variety of translation studies.
The image of the field fashioned by this reader reflects the contemporary
scene all the more closely because it has been produced in consultation with many
translators, theorists, and scholars. They commented on various versions of the
table of contents, responded to questions about particular translation traditions and
forms of research, suggested specific authors and texts, and criticized my rationale
and principles of selection and organization. Any author or text that received a rela-
tively large number of recommendations earned some sort of representation here.
In some cases, my consultants encouraged me to collect research that fell outside
their specialty. And some helped simply, but most tangibly, by allowing their work to
be reprinted without charge. As the reader moved from one edition to the next, not
only did the list of consultants become longer, but their specialties became more
varied, reinforcing my sense that the changing configuration of readings has been
influenced, whether positively or negatively, by the different constituencies within
the field.
These constituencies, despite their differences, do share some basic
assumptions which underpin the reader: that translation studies constitutes an emer-
gent field whose self-definition has been complicated by the institutional divisions of
academic labor; that even if disciplines do not share paradigms and methods, they
might nonetheless be joined together to advance a project on translation, forming
a variety of interdisciplines; that many cultures have strong traditions of transla-
tion theory and commentary, but to exert an international influence today, writing
about translation needs to be written in or translated into an internationalized lan-
guage such as English (cf. the rich traditions of translation commentary in Russian,
Chinese, Brazilian Portuguese, and Catalan, among many other languages).
These assumptions did not make any easier the difficult process of selecting
texts. On the contrary, they led to an effort to limit the inevitable drift toward English-
language traditions by considering various untranslated materials, by gathering pre-
viously published translations, and by presenting new and improved translations of
classic documents. In the end, this reader shows that native speakers of English
wrote relatively little of the translation theory and commentary that have proven
influential over the past two millennia.
What is a translation theory?
The increasingly interdisciplinary nature of translation studies has multiplied the-

ories of translation. A shared interest in a topic, however, is no guarantee that what
is acceptable as a theory in one discipline or approach will satisfy the conceptual
requirements of a theory in others. From antiquity to the late nineteenth century,
4 I NTROD UCTION
what we would today regard as theoretical statements about translation fell into
traditionally defined areas of thinking about language and culture: rhetoric, literary
theory, philosophy, religion. And the most frequently cited theorists comprised a
fairly limited group. One such catalogue might include: Cicero, Horace, Quintilian,
Dao’an, Jerome, Augustine, Dryden, Goethe, Schleiermacher, Arnold, Nietzsche,
Yan Fu. Since the beginning of the twentieth century, translation theory has revealed
a much expanded range of disciplines and approaches in line with the differenti-
ation of modern culture: not only varieties of linguistics, literary criticism, philosoph-
ical speculation, and cultural theory, but experimental studies and anthropological
fieldwork as well as translator training and translation practice. Any account of the-
oretical debates and trends must acknowledge the disciplinary sites in which they
arose in order to understand and evaluate them. At the same time, it is possible
to locate recurrent themes and celebrated topoi, if not broad areas of agreement.
Louis Kelly has argued that a “complete” theory of translation “has three
components: specification of function and goal; description and analysis of
operations; and critical comment on relationships between goal and operations”
(Kelly 1979: 1). Kelly is careful to observe that throughout history theorists have
tended to emphasize one of these components at the expense of the others. The
component that receives the greatest emphasis, I would add, often devolves into a
recommendation or prescription for good translating.
The Roman poet Horace asserted in his Ars Poetica (c. 18 BCE) that the poet
who resorts to translation should avoid a certain operationಧnamely, word-for-word
renderingಧin order to write distinctive poetry. Here the function of translating is to
construct poetic authorship, and the immediate goal is a good poem in Horatian or
Roman terms. In a lecture entitled “On the Different Methods of Translating” (1813),
the German philosopher and theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher advocated word-
for-word literalism in language that “departs from the quotidian” to create an effect
of foreignness in the translation: “for the more precisely the translation adheres to
the turns and figures of the original, the more foreign it will seem to its reader” (this
volume: 61). For Schleiermacher, textual operations produce cognitive effects and
serve cultural and political functions. These operations, effects, and functions are
described and judged according to values that are literary and nationalist, according
to whether the translation helps to build a German language and literature during
the Napoleonic wars. Even with modern approaches that are based on linguistics
and tend to assume a scientific or value-free treatment of language, the emphasis
on one theoretical component might be linked to prescription. From the 1950s to
the 1970s, linguistics-oriented theorists stressed the description and analysis of
translation operations, constructing typologies of equivalence that act as normative
principles to guide translator training.
The surveys of theoretical trends in the section introductions have both bene-
fited from and revised Kelly’s useful scheme. To my mind, however, the key cat-
egory in any translation research and commentary is what I shall call the relative
autonomy of translation, the factors that distinguish it from the source text and
from texts initially written in the translating language. These factors include textual
features and strategies performed by the agents who produce the translation, not
I NTROD UCTION 5
only the translator but editors too. We must also figure in the practices of circulation
and reception by which the translation continues to accrue meanings and values
that differ from those invested in the source text: forms of publication, marketing,
and promotion, editions and adaptations, academic research and course adoptions,
reviews and blogs. These complicated factors are what prevent translating from
being unmediated or transparent communication; they both enable and set up
obstacles to cross-cultural understanding by working over the source text in the
receiving culture. They substantiate the arguments for the impossibility of trans-
lation that recur throughout the twentieth century and beyond. Yet without some
sense of distinctive features, strategies, and practices, translation can never be
defined as an object of study in its own right.
The history of translation theory can in fact be imagined as a set of changing
relationships between the relative autonomy of the translated text and two other
categories: equivalence and function. Equivalence has been understood as
“accuracy,” “adequacy,” “correctness,” “correspondence,” “fidelity,” or “identity”; it
is a variable notion of how the translation is connected to the source text. Function
has been understood as the potentiality of the translated text to release diverse
effects, beginning with the communication of information and the production of a
response comparable to the one produced by the source text in its own culture.
The effects of translation are also social, and they have been harnessed to cultural,
economic, and political agendas: evangelical programs, commercial ventures, colo-
nial projects, and social activism, as well as the development of languages, national
literatures, and avant-garde literary movements. Function is a variable notion of how
the translated text is connected to the receiving language and culture. In some
periods, such as the 1960s and 1970s, the autonomy of translation is limited by the
dominance of thinking about equivalence, and functionalism becomes a solution to
a theoretical impasse, the impossibility of fixing relations of equivalence for every
text type and every translation situation. In other periods, such as the 1980s and
1990s, autonomy is limited by the dominance of functionalisms, and equivalence
is rethought to embrace what were previously treated as shifts or deviations from
the source text.
The changing importance of a particular theoretical category, whether
autonomy, equivalence, or function, may be determined by various factors, linguistic
and literary, cultural and social. Yet the most decisive determination is a particular
theory of language or textuality. George Steiner has argued that a translation theory
“presumes a systematic theory of language with which it overlaps completely or
from which it derives as a special case according to demonstrable rules of deduc-
tion and application” (Steiner 1975: 280–281). He doubted whether any such
theory of language existed. But he nevertheless proceeded to outline his own “con-
viction” before offering his reflections on translation.
A translation theory always rests on particular assumptions about language
use, even if they are no more than fragmentary hypotheses that remain implicit or
unacknowledged. For centuries the assumptions seem to have fallen into two large
categories, which have been called “instrumental” and “hermeneutic” (Kelly 1979:
chap. 1), but which we might more precisely call “empiricist” and “materialist,”
6 I NTROD UCTION
according to the philosophical discourses to which they are allied, reserving the
terms “instrumental” and “hermeneutic” for the paradigm or model of translation
that each concept of language makes possible (see Venuti 2019: 1–4). Theories
based on the instrumental model treat translation as the reproduction or transfer
of an invariant contained in or caused by the source text, whether its form, its
meaning, or its effect; they assume an empiricist concept of language as directly
expressing thought or referring to reality. Theories based on the hermeneutic
model treat translation as an interpretation that varies the form, meaning, and effect
of the source text; they assume a materialist concept of language as mediated by
cultural and social determinants and constitutive of thought and reality. Empiricism
leads to translation theories that privilege the communication of information and for-
mulate typologies of equivalence, minimizing and sometimes excluding altogether
any question of function beyond communication. Materialism leads to translation
theories that privilege the creation of values and therefore describe the translating-
language inscription in the source text, often explaining it on the basis of cultural
functions and social effects.
These concepts of language and models of translation are ideal constructions,
formulated abstractly so as to be distinguished with precision. In actual theories
and practices they might exist in uneasy combination, resulting in logical tensions
or contradictions. Before they can contribute to any explanation or interrogation of
theories and practices, they must be situated in specific historical contexts. In the
section introductions they have been used as analytical tools to describe different
theoretical texts and trends.
Classroom applications
The primary audience imagined for this reader is academic: instructors and students
in advanced undergraduate or graduate courses in translation theory and history,
as well as theorists and scholars of translation and practitioners with a theoret-
ical inclination. The institutional sites of such courses vary widely today, including
not only translator training programs, but various other departments and programs,
such as linguistics, modern languages, comparative literature, philosophy, and cul-
tural studies. Instructors will of course have their own ideas about how to use a
book they decide to require or recommend. In selecting and mulling over the texts
that compose the reader, I thought often about potential uses in the classroom.
Here are a few suggestions.
Read historically
The chronological organization encourages historical surveys of theoretical trends

by focusing on particular traditions, disciplines, and discourses. Selections can
be grouped to show the important impact of the German translation tradition
(Schleiermacher, Goethe, Benjamin, Steiner, Berman), modernism (Pound, Borges,
I NTROD UCTION 7
Lu Xun), Russian formalism (Jakobson, Even-Zohar, Toury, Lefevere), linguistics

(Jakobson, Harvey, Mason), poststructuralism (Spivak, Derrida, Rafael), gender and
sexuality studies (Chamberlain, Spivak, Harvey), postcolonialism (Spivak, Rafael),
and diaspora studies (Lin Shu, Van Dyck).
Theoretical trends can be framed according to different, even opposing,
narratives of development. The historical narratives might be problem-solving:
earlier theorists pose problems that are reformulated more precisely and possibly
solved by later theoretical advances (Nida’s “dynamic equivalence” is recast in
practical terms by Vermeer’s emphasis on the translator’s goal and commission);
or theoretical approaches based on seemingly incompatible assumptions are
joined in an innovative synthesis (Mason combines linguistic analysis and ideo-
logical critique). The emphasis on continuity and progress in such narratives can
be replaced by an emphasis on discontinuity and present insufficiencies. Thus a
later theorist might be seen as posing a problem for which earlier theories pro-
vide a viable solution (Pound recommends that the translator devise a stylistic
analogue with literary texts in the receiving culture to compensate for the loss of
source textual features that Nabokov laments). Or a theoretical advance in one
field might be treated as a limitation in another (Grice’s conversational “maxims”
enable Harvey’s recourse to politeness theory but undergo Appiah’s philosophical
critique). Historical groupings are most productive, in other words, when they are
accompanied by an awareness of the different narratives that might structure the
critical reading of the selections.
Read thematically
The chronological organization can also be set aside in favor of tracing specific
themes in translation studies. Selections can be grouped to explore assumptions
about language use (empiricist vs. materialist), models of translation (instrumental
vs. hermeneutic), theoretical concepts (translatability and relative autonomy,
equivalence and shifts, reception and function), translation strategies (free vs. lit-
eral, sense-for-sense vs. word-for-word), particular genres or text types (humanistic,
pragmatic), and various cultural and political issues (identity and ideology, minority
and nationalism, disciplines and institutions).
A particular theme will bring together a spectrum of differing approaches from
various periods and cultures. The problems posed by translating sacred texts, for
example, are considered by Jerome and by Zhi Qian and Dao’an. Poetry is central
to the chapters by Benjamin, Pound, and Nabokov, but also to those by Dryden
and Goethe. Schleiermacher, Derrida, and Venuti address the translation of phil-
osophy. Language policy, including recommendations for a particular style and
the codification or improvement of a language or dialect, is an important topic in
Brisset and Rafael, but also in D’Ablancourt, Schleiermacher, and the exchange
between Qu Qiubai and Lu Xun. A theme can provide a cross-section of work in a
specific period. Political agendas for translation are described and theorized from
different perspectives and situations (Spivak, Appiah, Harvey, Rafael). Selections
8 I NTROD UCTION
can be made contrapuntally, bringing together diverging treatments. The practices

advocated by both D’Ablancourt and Nida raise ethical questions when juxtaposed
to Berman; Chamberlain includes a feminist critique of Steiner; Mason’s exam-
ination of European Union documents suggests that Vermeer’s functionalism
becomes ideologically complicated in political institutions.
Use supplementary readings
Any approach to this reader will be strengthened by a fuller historical or theor-

etical context. Histories of translation theory and practice now exist for many
languages, traditions, and periods (e.g. van Hoof 1991, Ballard 1992, Vermeer
1992, Tymoczko 1999, Kothari 2003, Lafarga and Pegenaute 2004, Hung and
Wakabayashi 2005). Collections of theory and commentary have been published,
some devoted to particular translation traditions (e.g. Störig 1963, Horguelin 1981,
Bacardí, Fontcuberta and Parcerisas 1998, Chan 2004, Cheung 2006, Baker
2009). Reference works, including encyclopedias (e.g. Baker and Saldanha 2020)
and companions or handbooks (e.g. Munday 2008a, Malmkjær and Windle 2011),
can be useful in situating particular texts in the field of translation studies: they
provide detailed entries on theoretical concepts and research methodologies and
include historical surveys of translation traditions in various linguistic communities.
An instructor might create more language-specific contexts with such reference
works as France and Gillespie’s history of literary translation in English (2005–
2013) and Chan and Pollard’s encyclopedia (1995) of theories and practices
focusing on translation between Chinese and English.
Supplementary readings can be strategic in deepening the representation
of a tradition, concept, or theme. The philosophical debates on translatability vs.
untranslatability are represented in the reader by Appiah and Derrida. They might
be developed further with texts by Quine (1960), Davidson (1984), and MacIntyre
(1988) or from Large et al. (2018). Meschonnic’s hermeneutic orientation (1973,
2011) is important for understanding Berman, and Brown and Levinson’s polite-
ness theory (1987) for Harvey. The different approaches to the historiography of
translation theory and practice that animate Lefevere, Brisset, Nappi, and Venuti
might be illuminated through a juxtaposition to Pym (1998) or D’hulst (2010) or
to chapters in Rundle (2021). Spivak’s postcolonial reflections can be extended
through the historical and theoretical links between translation and colonial dis-
course established by Niranjana (1992) and Bhabha (1994). And of course an
instructor might assign influential theorists who are not represented here by a text,
but nonetheless discussed in the section introductions. Sperber and Wilson’s
revelance theory (1986) informs the approach to translation in Gutt (1991), which
might be productively studied in relation to Derrida’s notion of relevant translation.
Previous editions of this reader might also be mined for material that continues to
be regarded as important, but that has been omitted for reasons of space.
The lists of “Further reading” that conclude each introduction can be useful
in initiating classroom debates. These very selective lists, updated in each edition,
I NTROD UCTION 9
refer to critical commentary on theoretical trends and concepts and on the work of
specific theorists.
Anthologies are always judged by what they exclude as well as include. This
reader, given its space limitations and selection criteria, will prove no exception.
I am keen, therefore, to hear from instructors who have adopted it for classroom
use, whether successfully or with frustration. Information concerning actual reading
assignments, the helpfulness of the introductory material, and the usefulness of
particular texts will be invaluable in considering revisions for subsequent editions.
Please feel free to contact me via email: [email protected].
Foundational statements
T R A N S L A T I O N T H E O R Y A S W E K N O W I T today, the formulation of concepts
designed to illuminate and to improve the practice of translation, did not exist
in antiquity. When commentary about translation first began to appear, it tended
to take the form of passing remarks, not systematic arguments, and it was linked
to cultural practices and institutions that depended on translation to function and
develop. Sima Qian’s Records of the Grand Historian, for instance, a history of
imperial China that dates from the second century BCE, makes a cursory refer-
ence to Central Asian peoples “translating and retranslating their strange tongues”
into Chinese when they “come to pay their respects” to the Han emperor (Sima
1961: 285). The Letter of Aristeas from the same period goes further in describing
the circumstances surrounding the Septuagint, the Greek version of the Hebrew
Bible produced by seventy-two Jewish scholars in Alexandria during the third cen-
tury BCE. Yet when the letter touches on the translation, we learn only that it was
done “in such noble and holy manner, and accurately in every respect” (White and
Keddie 2017: 167). As these examples suggest, ancient documents addressing
commerce, diplomacy, and religion might contain references to translation and the
purposes for which it was performed, but they stop short of offering comprehensive
accounts.
In Rome translation commentary emerges in the academic discipline of rhet-
oric. The influential commentatorsಧCicero, Quintilian, Pliny the Youngerಧwere
distinguished orators who considered translation as a pedagogical exercise for
aspirants to their profession. In On the Best Kind of Orators (46 BCE), Cicero
describes how, in order to “be useful to students,” he composed Latin versions of
speeches by the Greek orators, Aeschines and Demosthenes (Cicero 1949: 365).
“I did not translate them as an interpreter [nec converti ut interpres],” he observes,
but as an orator, keeping the same ideas and the forms, or as one might
say, the “figures” of thought, but in language which conforms to our
14 F O U N D A T I O N A L S TA T E M E N T S
usage. And in so doing I did not hold it necessary to render word for
word, but I preserved the general style and force of the language.
(Ibid.)
Here translation serves the study and imitation of rhetorical models, it is a spring-
board for the invention of new and better speeches, and this function requires a
discursive strategy that is free, paraphrastic, focused on both “the ideas and the
forms” of the source text while adhering to Latin norms. These features are regarded
as invariant, somehow “preserved” or remaining “the same” in the translated text.
Cicero’s remarks assume an instrumental model of translation.
They also point to another discipline in which translation was practiced at this
time: grammar. The grammarian or “interpreter” likewise used translation to serve an
academic function, which in this case was limited to linguistic analysis and textual
exposition. Roman education was bilingual, students were taught Greek as well as
Latin, and translation exercises were routinely implemented in language learning and
literary study. Because of such uses, the grammarian favored a rather different dis-
cursive strategy, interpreting the source text much more closely, rendering it “word
for word.”
The sparse comments about Roman translation reflected the peculiar institu-
tional status of this writing practice. It was subordinated to the procedures and
educational aims of two academic disciplines, rhetoric and grammar. Yet it was
also imprinted by their rivalry for cultural authority. In distinguishing his use of trans-
lation from that of the grammarian, Cicero suggests that grammatical translation
was not useful to the orator. It was rhetoric, moreover, that achieved dominance,
mainly because of its capacity to deploy various kinds of knowledge for social and
political purposes. Orators argued legal cases and occupied government office;
grammarians worked in a strictly academic capacity.
The use that Cicero assigned to translation makes clear that it enacted another,
more emulative rivalry between Roman and Greek cultures. In the Republic and
early Empire, Roman authors sought to capitalize on the cultural prestige of Greece
by submitting Greek texts to various forms of translation and adaptation. Thus they
implicitly expressed their admiration for those texts while aggressively rewriting
them to create a distinctively Latin literature. Horace’s poem, The Art of Poetry (c.
18 BCE), not only assumes the disciplinary rivalry that informed Roman translation
(he sided with the orators), but also indicates how the free translation of Greek texts
might aid poetic composition:
It is difficult to treat common matter in a way that is particular to you;

and you would do better to turn a song of Troy into dramatic acts than
to bring forth for the first time something unknown and unsung. Public
material will be private property if you do not linger over the common
and open way, and if you do not render word for word like a faithful
translator [interpres].
(Trans. in Copeland 1991: 29)
F O U N D A T I O N A L S TA T E M E N T S 15
Horace advocates a rhetorical imitation of the source text whereby the Homeric
epics (“a song of Troy”) become sites of invention for the Latin poet, the “public
material” from which poems are produced to establish a “private” reputation, pos-
sibly through a change in genre. These poems are not so much “new” as different
in a way that exhibits the poet’s individual talent.
The cultural functions of Roman translation stressed the relative autonomy of
the translated text, minimizing the importance of equivalence by defining it as a
semantic and stylistic correspondence. In late antiquity, however, patristic com-
mentary moved equivalence to the center of thinking about translation because the
source texts at issue were often key religious documents, notably the Bible. In On
Christian Doctrine (428 CE), Augustine argued for the authoritative accuracy of the
Septuagint. He rehearsed the legend of how a group of Hellenistic Jews working
independently, “separated in various cells,” had nonetheless written the exact same
translations (Augustine 1958: 49). “In all the more learned churches,” Augustine
remarks, “it is now said that this translation was so inspired by the Holy Spirit that
many spoke as if with the mouth of one,” leading him to conclude that “even though
something is found in Hebrew versions different from what they have set down,
I think we should cede to the divine dispensation by which they worked” (ibid.).
Augustine’s standard of accuracy was not so much close adherence to the source
text as an institutional validation that the translation is divinely inspired regardless
of its deviations.
Early Christian commentators took up the paraphrastic translation typical of
their Roman predecessors, but it was detached from the disciplinary and cultural
rivalries that determined its value for orators, poets, and playwrights. Translating
that focused on the sense of the source text, when that text was the Bible, inevitably
assumed a religious significance: the resulting translation was seen as a transparent
representation of a semantic invariant, divine meaning. Word-for-word renderings
came to be stigmatized not simply because they contained infelicities, given the
lexical and syntactical differences between languages, but because they interfered
with the transmission of God’s word. Nonetheless, the Christian appropriation of
the Roman tradition mystified the extent to which meaning-oriented translation actu-
ally revised source texts.
This mystification can be glimpsed below in Jerome’s indignantly defensive
Letter to Pammachius (395 CE). His treatment of Bible translation turns contra-
dictory in its attempt to synthesize pagan and Christian sources. In justifying his
“sense for sense” version of a papal letter, he evinces his respect for the Roman
commentators while reserving a “word for word” method for Scripture because,
as he states, “the very order of the words is a mystery.” Yet he also relies on the
authority of the Gospels, which are shown to contain various free renderings of
the Hebrew Bible that differ from the Septuagint. Ultimately he asserts that “in
Scripture one must consider not the words, but the sense.”
Behind this contradiction lies the close connection between sense-for-sense
translation and Biblical exegesis. Jerome’s examples from the Gospels include
renderings of the Old Testament that do not merely express the “sense” but rather fix
it by imposing a Christian interpretation. Thus Matthew’s version of a sentence from
the Book of Hoseaಧ“Out of Egypt I have called my son”ಧinscribes a prophetic

meaning that refers to the Holy Family’s flight from Herod, whereas the Hebrew text
reads quite differently (in Jerome’s version and Kathleen Davis’s translation): “When
Israel was a child I loved him, and out of Egypt I called my son.” Jerome’s Latin
version of the Bible, the Vulgate, similarly Christianizes Judaic themes (Kelly 1975:
162). It finally replaced the Septuagint and became the translation authorized by
the Catholic Church.
In Asia commentary on translation similarly arose with the transmission of
sacred texts. During the second century CE the Buddhist scriptures were first
translated into Chinese by monastic missionaries and scholars from Central Asia
and Northwest India who collaborated with Chinese assistants. The process typi-
cally began with a recitation of a text or an actual manuscript that was probably not
written in Sanskrit but in such languages as Pali and Parthian, followed by an oral
Chinese rendering which was transcribed and edited (Zürcher 1959: 31; Saussy
2017: 68–69). Indian proper names and Buddhist technical expressions were
initially handled through phonetic renderings and then gradually through system-
atic transcriptions that used a limited range of Chinese characters (Zürcher 1959:
39–40). Translations interpolated terms, explanations, analogies, and citations that
assimilated Buddhist concepts to Chinese ethical and philosophical principles,
including Confucianism, Daoism, and what was called the “Dark Learning” (玄學
xuanxue), a body of metaphysical speculation on notions of “emptiness” and “non-
being” (ibid.: 46; Nattier 2008: 129–131, 151–152; Saussy 2017: 76–82).
This translation practice was informed by a method of scriptural exegesis called
“matching meanings” (格義 geyi). Hui Jiao’s Biographies of Eminent Monks (c. 530
CE) describes how the method was deployed at the end of the third century:
Since at that time the disciples who followed Zhu Faya were all well-
versed in the secular canons, but had not yet become conversant with
the principles of Buddhism, Faya together with Kang Falang and others
took the numerical categories of the sutras and matched these with
(terms from) secular literature, as a method to make them understand.
(Trans. in Zürcher 1959: 184)
The “disciples” of monks like Zhu Faya and Kang Falang came from a cultural elite
composed of gentry, scholars, and imperial officials who had been educated in
“secular literature,” canonical texts such as the Yijing (The Book of Changes, ninth
century BCE), the Daode jing (The Book of the Way and its Virtue, sixth century
BCE), and the Zhuangzi (Master Zhuang, third century BCE). Because the elite were
Sinocentric, likely to view foreign thinking as not merely strange but barbaric, the
Chinese literature with which they were familiar was exploited in interpretations of
Buddhism for the purpose of instruction and conversion (see Zürcher 1959: 264–
280; Zürcher 2013: 344, 382).
Equivalence, nonetheless, was foregrounded in commentary on translating
Buddhist texts into Chinese precisely because sacred truths were being conveyed.
Zhi Qian, a prolific translator and reviser of translations during the third century
CE, is thought to have authored the revealing preface to the Chinese version of
the Sutra of Dharma Verses (included here) where meaning-oriented translation
is recommended. To lend authority to this approach, he cites not only the Indian
monk Vighna but also the Chinese sages Confucius and Laozi. Although Zhi Qian
seems to accept the dictum that translations should adhere closely to the scriptural
text and avoid literary ornament, his work was actually paraphrastic: it appealed to
an elite readership by mixing the vernacular with stylistic elegance, deleting repe-
tition and imposing metrical regularity (Zürcher 1959: 50). In the fourth century,
when Dao’an carefully edited and catalogued a huge body of Chinese Buddhist
translations, he described the free practices of translators like Zhi Qian in the preface
to A Collation of the Perfection of Great Wisdom Sutra which appears below. Yet
Dao’an felt that Zhi Qian “captured the authenticity of the foreign text,” preserving
a semantic invariant that might suffer “loss,” but that could be reproduced despite
the translator’s revisions. Early in the fifth century these developments culminated
in the influential Buddhist translations of the Kuchean Kumarajīva and his army of
assistants, who created a distinct, easily readable idiom and standardized Chinese
equivalents for Sanskrit terms (Zürcher 2013: 119, 550).
In Europe commentators tended to follow Jerome’s validation of sense-
for-sense translation through the Middle Ages and into the Renaissance, so
that when the translating language was no longer classical but vernacular, his
precepts were still echoed. His influence extended even to heretical sects who
challenged the authority of the Vulgate. The prologue to the Wycliffite Bible
(c. 1395) asserts that “the beste translating is, out of Latyn into English, to trans-
late aftir the sentence and not oneli aftir the wordis, so that the sentence be as
opin either openere in English as in Latyn” (Hudson 1978: 68). The emphasis
on intelligibility, on making the language of the translation even more “opin”
than Jerome’s Latin, shows that the avoidance of word-for-word translation was
a proselytizing move designed to increase access to the sacred text. Martin
Luther’s version of the Bible (1522, 1534) sought to displace the Vulgate by
relying on High German, a dialect spoken by “the mother in the home, the chil-
dren on the street, the common man in the marketplace” (Luther 1960: 189). Yet
he applied Jerome’s sense-for-sense strategy and inscribed Protestant theology
through subtle revisions. In his 1530 letter on translating, for example, Luther
admits that he inserted a word (allein, meaning “alone” or “only”) in Jerome’s
version of a Pauline epistle, arguing that the addition “conveys the sense of the
text” (ibid.: 188). In effect, however, the apostle was transformed into an advo-
cate of the Lutheran doctrine of justification by faith alone.
The spread of humanist curricula in Europe ensured that during the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries the classical commentators would dominate the dis-
cussion and practice of literary translation. Occasionally citing Cicero and Horace
as their models, poets produced free versions that were not always distinguished
from original compositions and would today fall into the category of adaptations.
This development derived partly from a prevalent conception of authorship as imi-
tation (Greene 1982). Hence the versions of Petrarch’s sonnets written by Tudor
courtiers such as Sir Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard, earl of Surrey, were not
identified as translations when they initially circulated in manuscript and finally saw
print in Richard Tottel’s Miscellany (1557). Meanwhile translation was regarded as
a practice that could be useful in the construction of a national culture. Elizabethan
translators such as Sir Thomas Hoby and Philemon Holland displayed a deep
nationalist investment in their work: in making available classical and contemporary
texts such as Castiglione’s The Courtier (1561) and Pliny’s Natural History (1601),
they saw themselves as performing the public service of educating their coun-
trymen (Ebel 1969).
The functionalism that accompanied sense-for-sense translation since antiquity
was now redefined to fit different cultural and social realities. Translators were forth-
right in stating that their freedoms were intended not merely to imitate features of
the source texts, but to allow the translation to work as a literary text in its own
right, exerting its force within native traditions. As a result, translation was strongly
domesticating, assimilating foreign literatures to the linguistic and cultural values
that were dominant in the receiving situation. The French translator Nicolas Perrot
d’Ablancourt was exemplary in elevating acceptability in the translating culture
over adequacy to the source text.
In the prefaces that are included in this volume, Perrot d’Ablancourt
rationalizes his substantial revisions of Tacitus (1640) and Lucian (1654) by
appealing to the canons of French literary taste that his translations helped to
form. “Diverse times,” he argues, “require not only different words, but different
thoughts.” This view resulted in translations that were clearer and more stylistic-
ally felicitous than the source texts, but also bowdlerized. Perrot d’Ablancourt
tells his reader that he wished to avoid both “offending the delicacy of our
Language” and causing moral offense. He is very much aware that his discursive
strategies flouted conventional notions of equivalence. Yet he makes clear that
his domesticating choices are not arbitrary, but based on an interpretation that
displays an acute sense of historical difference. He just does not feel that this
difference is worth preserving in itself and certainly not at the cost of departing
from an elegant style as he conceives it.
Perrot d’Ablancourt initiated a translation tradition whose products were
soon labelled “les belles infidèles,” beautiful but unfaithful. His ideas gained pres-
tige from his membership in the Academie Française, and throughout the eigh-
teenth century they were given diverse formulations and applications, some more
extreme than others. Antoine Houdar de La Motte prefaced his version of the Iliad
(1714) by frankly describing his many revisions in accordance with neoclassical
values. “I have tried to ensure continuity of character,” he remarks, “since it is this
pointಧwhich has become so well established in our timeಧto which the reader
is most sensitive, and that also makes him the sternest judge” (Lefevere 1992a:
30). Pierre Le Tourneur similarly introduced his version of Edward Young’s Night
Thoughts (1769) by stating his “intention to distill from the English Young a French
one to be read with pleasure and interest by French readers who would not have
to ask themselves whether the book they were reading was a copy or an original”
(ibid.: 39).
Le Tourneur’s comment is remarkable for its conceptual sleight of hand. It does

not distinguish between a translation that produces an effect equivalent to that of
the source text and a translation that produces the illusion of originality by effacing
its translated status. The tradition of les belles infidèles repeatedly collapsed this
distinction, asserting a correspondence to the author’s intention or to the essen-
tial meaning of the source text while performing revisions that answer to what was
intelligible and interesting in French culture. The sheer familiarity of the translation,
of its language and style, enabled it to seem transparent and thereby pass for the
“original.”
English commentary during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was
decisively influenced by French developments. Poets such as Abraham Cowley,
Sir John Denham, and Sir Richard Fanshawe most likely encountered Perrot
d’Ablancourt’s work in France, where they followed the exiled court of Charles I after
the Civil War. Denham’s preface to The Destruction of Troy (1656), his version of
the second book of the Aeneid, announced his allegiance to a sense-for-sense
strategy that avoids literal renderings, “the vulgar error” of “being Fidus Interpres
[the faithful translator],” and instead rewrites the source text in English cultural
terms (Denham 1656: A2v). “If Virgil must needs speak English,” Denham asserts,
“it were fit he should speak not only as a man of this Nation, but as a man of this
age” (ibid.: A3r). Denham made good his pronouncement by casting the unrhymed
Latin verse in the heroic couplets that were beginning to dominate English poetry,
while likening Trojan architecture to the royal buildings in England.
After the Restoration, John Dryden revised the classical distinction between
rhetorical and grammatical translation to take into account the practices employed
by his English predecessors. The extract reprinted here, drawn from the preface
to his anthology Ovid’s Epistles (1680), shows him tracing an English tradition of
notable poet-translators which stretches back to the start of the seventeenth cen-
tury. Dryden situates himself in this tradition, although he is careful to declare his
preference for a moderately free strategy, “Paraphrase, or Translation with Latitude,”
which seeks to render meanings. He rejects not only word-for-word versions as
lacking fluency or easy readability (“either perspicuity or gracefulness will frequently
be wanting”), but also “Imitations” that adapt the source text so as to serve the
translator’s own literary ambitions.
All the same, Dryden underestimated the extent to which paraphrase falls
short of maintaining a semantic correspondence and is actually transformative.
He suggests that when structural differences between languages complicate the
translator’s task, the goal should be “to vary but the dress, not to alter or destroy
the substance”ಧas if a change in the means of expression did not change the
substance expressed, especially with literary genres such as poetry. The clothing
metaphor assumes an empiricist concept of language whereby communication is
untroubled by linguistic and cultural differences.
It is precisely this assumption that underlies Alexander Fraser Tytler’s Essay on
the Principles of Translation (1791), the first systematic treatise in English. For Tytler,
intercultural communication is possible because he relies on the Enlightenment
notion of an essential human nature endowed with reason. Thus he defines “good”
translation as producing an equivalent effect that transcends the differences
between languages and cultures:
the merit of the original work is so completely transfused into another

language, as to be as distinctly apprehended, and as strongly felt, by a
native of the country to which that language belongs, as it is by those
who speak the language of the original work.
(Tytler 1978: 15)
The effect is an invariant caused by the source text. To achieve it in the transla-
tion, Tytler recommends a paraphrastic strategy that imitates source “ideas” and
“style” and possesses the “ease of original composition,” or such fluency as to
seem untranslated (ibid.).
Yet the “merit” of the source text was judged, not according to universal reason,
but according to the standards of the receiving culture, pre-empting any equivalent
effect. Tytler applauds Alexander Pope’s translations of the Homeric epics (1715–
1726) for deleting passages that “offend, by introducing low images and puerile
allusions” (ibid.: 79). Tytler’s standards were not simply British; they also reflected
the taste of the cultural elite of which he was a member. He urges the translator to
“prevent that ease [of original composition] from degenerating into licentiousness”
by refusing to render classical literature into popular dialects and discourses:
If we are justly offended at hearing Virgil speak in the style of the Evening
Post or the Daily Advertiser, what must we think of the translator, who
makes the solemn and sententious Tacitus express himself in the low
cant of the streets, or in the dialect of the waiters of a tavern.
(ibid.: 119)
Tytler’s “principles” entailed the inscription of the source text with linguistic and cul-
tural values that prevail in the receiving situation, starting with the current standard
dialect of the translating language.
During the eighteenth century, a growing body of German commentary
presented a striking alternative to the French and English traditions. In 1766 Johann
Gottfried Herder complained that “the French, who are much too proud of their own
taste, adapt all things to it, rather than try to adapt themselves to the taste of another
time” (Lefevere 1992a: 74). Language is conceived, not as expressing thought and
meaning transparently, but as shaping them according to linguistic structures and
cultural traditions which are in turn shaped by language use. Consequently, trans-
lation is viewed less as communicating the source text than as offering an inter-
pretation that can take diverse forms according to the translator’s aims, the genre,
and the cultural and social situation in which the translating is done. A hermeneutic
model of translation underpins this view.
Among the German writers who adopted it, the function that was most often
assigned to translating was the improvement of the German language. Johann
Heinrich Voss’s versions of the Odyssey (1781) and the Iliad (1793) were fre-
quently cited as exemplary: they were the first in German to recreate the hexam-
eter. Wilhelm von Humboldt included an homage to Voss in the preface to his
own version of Aeschylus’ Agamemnon (1816). “What strides has the German
language not made,” observes Humboldt, “since it began to imitate the meters of
Greek, and what developments have not taken place in the nation, not just among
the learned, but also among the masses, even down to women and children, since
the Greeks really did become the nation’s reading matter in their true and unadul-
terated shape?” (Lefevere 1992a: 137).
The fullest theoretical statement in this German trend is Friedrich
Schleiermacher’s 1813 lecture to the Berlin Academy of Sciences (included
here). For Schleiermacher, the ideal translation creates an “image” (Bild) that
incorporates the knowledge and taste of “an amateur and connoisseur, a man who
is well acquainted with the foreign language, yet to whom it remains nonetheless for-
eign.” In assigning importance to a sense of foreignness, Schleiermacher excluded
not only commercial and pragmatic uses of translation, but the sorts of paraphrase
and imitation that long prevailed in translation practice and commentary. He most
valued humanistic genres and disciplines, especially literature and philosophy. And
he at once revived and rehabilitated literalizing strategies. There can be no doubt
that he spoke for an elite cultural taste and aimed to set it up as a standard for
translators and readers of translations. Like Humboldt, he imagined foreignizing
translation as a nationalist practice that can build a German language and litera-
ture and overcome the cultural and political domination that France exercised over
German-speaking lands.
In the passage from the West-Easterly Divan (1819) that appears below,
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe surveys the emerging German tradition by
distinguishing between three different kinds of translation. He describes them not
in terms of how closely the translator’s strategies adhere to the form and meaning
of the source text, as Dryden had done, but rather in terms of how much the trans-
lation preserves the linguistic and cultural differences that constitute the foreign-
ness of that text. Although he observes that the three kinds may occur in the same
period, his treatment is both historical and progressive: he moves from Luther to
Voss and beyond, so that foreignizing translation becomes “the final and highest”
of the three “epochs.” For Goethe, this kind of translation issues from a Romantic
transcendence in which the translator loses his national self through a strong iden-
tification with a cultural other.
In the history of translation theory, the German tradition marked an important
watershed. It abandoned the conceptual categories that were repeatedly used since
antiquity and developed others that were not only linguistic and literary, but cultural
and political. Given Friedrich Nietzsche’s incisive critique of Western thinking,
it is not surprising that he too should display an acute awareness of how a trans-
lator might efface the differences of the source text. The pithy reflections from The
Gay Science (1882) that appear in this section return to ancient Rome, describing
how poets like Horace and Propertius appropriated their Greek predecessors and
linking their rhetorical use of translation to Roman imperialism. “What was past and
alien was an embarrassment for them,” remarks Nietzsche, “and being Romans,
they saw it as an incentive for a Roman conquest.”
Yet Nietzsche might have levelled a similar criticism at the German tradition as
well. For although German theorists and practitioners brought an increased self-
awareness to translation, treating it as a decisive encounter with the foreign, they
translated to appropriate, enlisting the source texts in German cultural and political
agendas. The social functions they assigned to their work reveal the imperialistic
impulse that may well be indissociable from translationಧeven when a translation
project is designed to combat imperialism.
Chinese translation near the end of the Qing dynasty, roughly contemporary
to Nietzsche, offers an exemplary case. Reacting against the foreign domination
of China by Western powers as well as by Japan and Russia, Chinese translators
aimed simultaneously to build a national culture and to pursue a program of mod-
ernization by introducing numerous Western works of fiction and philosophy. They
saw themselves as reformists, not revolutionaries: they used ancient-style prose
(guwen) modelled on the classical literary language to appeal to the academic
and official elite, and they submitted foreign texts to revision, abridgement, and
interpolated comment so that Western values and their own nationalist agenda
might become acceptable to that elite. In 1898, for instance, Yan Fu published On
Evolution, his translation of T.H. Huxley’s Evolution and Ethics (1893), which Yan
viewed as a contribution to “self-strengthening and the preservation of the race”
(Schwartz 1964: 100). He wrote his paraphrastic version in guwen, yet when his
preface describes his method as maintaining “faithfulness (xin), comprehensibility
(da) and elegance (ya),” he could be invoking either an ancient Buddhist commen-
tator like Zhi Qian or an Enlightenment thinker like Alexander Tytler, whose treatise
Yan could have discovered during a trip to England in the 1870s (Yan 1898: 69;
Gunn 1991: 33n5). Thus he asserts that his translation “does not deviate from
the original ideas,” even though “it does not follow the exact order of words and
sentences of the original text but reorganizes and elaborates” (Yan 1898: 69). Yan,
like most of his predecessors, whether Asian or European, makes the instrumen-
talist assumption that the source text contains a semantic invariant which his trans-
lation reproduces despite his obvious manipulation.
The most prolific translator of the late Qing dynasty was Lin Shu, credited with
rendering over 180 foreign-language literary texts into Chinese, including the novels
of Daniel Defoe, Sir Walter Scott, Victor Hugo, Leo Tolstoy, and H. Rider Haggard.
Since Lin himself knew no foreign languages, he worked in tandem with linguistic-
ally proficient collaboratorsಧas was customary in the periodಧwhose oral versions
he quickly turned into guwen. His investment in traditional Chinese values included
family-centered Confucian ethics. Lin read Charles Dickens’s The Old Curiosity
Shop (1841) as an exemplum of the Confucian reverence for filial piety, and so he
retitled his 1908 version, The Biography of Nell, A Filial Girl. His translations were
intended to reinforce imperial culture just as its authority was being severely eroded
by such developments as the Chinese defeat in the Sino-Japanese War (1894–
1895) and the repression by an international force of the Boxer Rebellion against
the foreign presence (1898–1900).
The broad scope of Lin’s political aims becomes apparent in A Record of the
Black Slaves’ Plea to Heaven (1901), a translation of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s
Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) on which he collaborated with Wei Yi. Their version
constitutes a formal and thematic reorientation of Stowe’s novel, downplaying the
Christian quietism of Tom’s attitude toward slavery so as to highlight the utopian
nationalism of the escaped slave, George Harris, who dreams of establishing a
black community in newly independent Liberia (Cheung 1998). In the paratexts to
the translation that conclude this section, Lin encourages his reader to treat the
plight of African American slaves as an image of the hardship suffered by Chinese
people at home and abroad, especially in the United States, where legal measures
like the Chinese Exclusion Act (1882) enforced racial discrimination. Lin criticizes
the weakness of the current Qing government in failing to address these problems
and calls for the creation of a modern nation-state that can challenge the oppression
inflicted by “the white race.” Although he asserts that “Chinese and Western styles
of writing have similarities in their differences,” he in effect elevates ancient-style
prose into a national language capable of communicating Western knowledge even
as he raises questions about the abolitionist movement as well as imperial culture.
When translation is enlisted in political activism, both the source and the translating
cultures register the impact, which, however, can never be entirely controlled.
Further reading
Berman 1992, Copeland 1991, Hayes 2009, Hill 2013, Lefevere 1977, McElduff 2013,
Morini 2006, Saussy 2017, Steiner 1975a, Venuti 2010
Chapter 1
[Zhi Qian?]
FROM THE PREFACE TO THE SUTRA

OF DHARMA VERSES
the essential meaning of the scriptures.1

T H E P O E M S O F T H E TA N B O G I V E
Tan means “dharma” and bo means “verse.” These dharma-verses exist in several
collections, some of nine hundred verses, some of seven hundred, some of five hun-
dred. Gathas are stanzas, like the Odes and Laudes [of China]. They were composed
by the Buddha on various occasions, not at any one time. Each is complete; they are
scattered through the many sutras. […]
In recent times a seven-hundred-verse edition was translated by someone named
Ge. The meaning of these gathas is extremely profound, but in that translation, they
were vague and undefined. Nowadays it is impossible to approach the Buddha or to
hear his words. Moreover, the many incarnations of the Buddha arose in India, and the
languages of India differ from Chinese in sound. […] The names of things differ, and
thus the transfer of content is difficult. […]
Some time ago Vighna set out from India. In the third year of the Huangwu era
he settled in Wuchang.2 From him I learned the five-hundred-verse version presented
here. I asked his travel companion Zhu Jiangyan to translate it. Jiangyan was skilled
in the language of India but had not acquired much Chinese. As he translated, some
expressions came out in the foreign language, and sometimes he rendered the
meanings by [Chinese] sounds. The result, you might say, was raw and direct [質直
zhizhi], and at first I found his expressions awkward and inelegant [不雅 buya].
Vighna said: “For the words of Buddha, we should stick to his meaning and not
add any ornament, follow his teachings and not be too strict about the means of
conveyance. A sutra should be easy to understand, without losing the meaning; that
is good.”
Those present said: “Laozi said that ‘Beautiful words cannot be trusted, trust-
worthy words cannot be beautiful’; Confucius likewise said, ‘Writing does not fully
convey speech, and speech does not fully convey meaning’; clearly, the Sages’ meaning
must be immeasurably profound and remote. Now when translating from the foreign
language, we should do so directly [徑 jing] and clearly [達 da].”3 Therefore I took the
c. 220–252 CE
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followed Rose; while Stephen, after denouncing as a foul libel the
charge that the orders had been invented to extend the commerce
of Great Britain, also yielded to the committee “as a negative good,
and to prevent misconstruction.”
Stimulated by the threatening news from America, Brougham
pressed with his utmost energy the victory he had won. The
committee immediately began its examination of witnesses, who
appeared from every quarter to prove that the Orders in Council and
the subsequent non-importation had ruined large branches of British
trade, and had lopped away a market that consumed British
products to the value of more than ten million pounds sterling a
year. Perceval and Stephen did their best to stem the tide, but were
slowly overborne, and seemed soon to struggle only for delay.
Then followed a melodramatic change. May 11, as the prime
minister entered the House to attend the investigation, persons
about the door heard the report of a pistol, and saw Spencer
Perceval fall forward shot through the heart. By the hand of a lunatic
moved only by imaginary personal motives, this minister, who
seemed in no way a tragical figure, became the victim of a tragedy
without example in modern English history; but although England
had never been in a situation more desperate, the true importance
of Spencer Perceval was far from great, and when he vanished in the
flash of a pistol from the stage where he seemed to fill the most
considerable part, he stood already on the verge of overthrow. His
death relieved England of a burden. Brougham would not allow his
inquiry to be suspended, and the premier’s assassination rather
concealed than revealed the defeat his system must have suffered.
During the negotiations which followed, in the midst of difficulties
in forming a new Ministry, Castlereagh received from Jonathan
Russell Napoleon’s clandestine Decree of Repeal. Brougham asked,
May 22, what construction was to be put by ministers on this paper.
Castlereagh replied that the decree was a trick disgraceful to any
civilized government, and contained nothing to satisfy the conditions
required by England. Apart from the subordinate detail that his view
of the decree was correct, his remarks meant nothing. The alarm
caused by news that Congress had imposed an embargo as the last
step before war, the annoyance created by John Henry’s revelations
and Castlereagh’s lame defence, the weight of evidence pressing on
Parliament against the Orders in Council, the absence of a strong or
permanent Ministry,—these influences, gaining from day to day,
forced the conviction that a change of system must take place. June
8 Lord Liverpool announced that he had formed an Administration,
and would deal in due course with the Orders in Council. June 16
Brougham made his motion for a repeal of the orders. When he
began his speech he did not know what part the new Ministry would
take, but while he unfolded his long and luminous argument he
noticed that James Stephen failed to appear in the House. This
absence could mean only that Stephen had been deserted by
ministers; and doubt ceased when Brougham and Baring ended, for
then Lord Castlereagh—after Perceval’s death the leader of the
House—rose and awkwardly announced that the Government,
though till within three or four days unable to deliberate on the
subject, had decided to suspend immediately the Orders in Council.
Thus ended the long struggle waged for five years by the United
States against the most illiberal Government known in England
within modern times. Never since the Definitive Treaty of Peace had
America won so complete a triumph, for the surrender lacked on
England’s part no element of defeat. Canning never ceased taunting
the new Ministry with their want of courage in yielding without a
struggle. The press submitted with bad grace to the necessity of
holding its tongue. Every one knew that the danger, already almost a
certainty, of an American war chiefly caused the sudden and silent
surrender, and that the Ministry like the people shrank from facing
the consequences of their own folly. Every one cried that England
should not suffer herself to be provoked by the irritating conduct of
America; and at a moment when every word and act of the
American government announced war in the rudest terms, not a
voice was heard in England for accepting the challenge, nor was a
musket made ready for defence. The new Ministry thought the war
likely to drive them from office, for they were even weaker than
when Spencer Perceval led them. The “Times” of June 17 declared
that whatever might be the necessity of defending British rights by
an American war, yet it would be the most unpopular war ever
known, because every one would say that with happier talents it
might have been avoided. “Indeed,” it added, “every one is so
declaring at the present moment; so that we who have ever been
the most strenuous advocates of the British cause in this dispute are
really overwhelmed by the general clamor.” Bitter as the mortification
was, the headlong abandonment of the Orders in Council called out
reproaches only against the ministers who originally adopted them.
“We are most surprised,” said the “Times” of June 18, “that such
acts could ever have received the sanction of the Ministry when so
little was urged in their defence.”
Such concessions were commonly the result rather than the
prelude of war; they were not unlike those by which Talleyrand
succeeded, in 1799, in restoring friendly relations between France
and America. Three months earlier they would have answered their
purpose; but the English were a slow and stubborn race. Perhaps
that they should have repealed the orders at all was more surprising
than that they should have waited five years; but although they
acted more quickly and decidedly than was their custom, Spencer
Perceval lived three months too long. The Orders in Council were
abandoned at Westminster June 17; within twenty-four hours at
Washington war was declared; and forty-eight hours later Napoleon,
about to enter Russia, issued the first bulletin of his Grand Army.
CHAPTER XIV.
For civil affairs Americans were more or less trained; but they
had ignored war, and had shown no capacity in their treatment of
military matters. Their little army was not well organized or
equipped; its civil administration was more imperfect than its
military, and its military condition could hardly have been worse. The
ten old regiments, with half-filled ranks, were scattered over an
enormous country on garrison service, from which they could not be
safely withdrawn; they had no experience, and no organization for a
campaign, while thirteen new regiments not yet raised were
expected to conquer Canada.
If the army in rank and file was insufficient, its commanding
officers supplied none of its wants. The senior major-general
appointed by President Madison in February, 1812, was Henry
Dearborn, who had retired in 1809 from President Jefferson’s
Cabinet into the Custom-House of Boston. Born in 1751, Dearborn at
the time of his nomination as major-general was in his sixty-second
year, and had never held a higher grade in the army than that of
deputy quartermaster-general in 1781, and colonel of a New
Hampshire regiment after active service in the Revolutionary War
had ended.
The other major-general appointed at the same time was
Thomas Pinckney, of South Carolina, who received command of the
Southern Department. Pinckney was a year older than Dearborn; his
military service was chiefly confined to the guerilla campaigns of
Marion and Sumter, and to staff duty as aide to General Gates in the
Southern campaign of 1780; he had been minister in England and
Envoy Extraordinary to Spain, where he negotiated the excellent
treaty known by his name; he had been also a Federalist member of
Congress in the stormy sessions from 1797 to 1801,—but none of
these services, distinguished as they were, seemed to explain his
appointment as major-general. Macon, whose opinions commonly
reflected those of the Southern people, was astonished at the
choice.
“The nomination of Thomas Pinckney for major-general,” he wrote,
[227] “is cause of grief to all men who wish proper men appointed;
not that he is a Federal or that he is not a gentleman, but because he
is thought not to possess the talents necessary to his station. I
imagine his nomination must have been produced through the means
of P. Hamilton, who is about as fit for his place as the Indian Prophet
would be for Emperor of Europe. I never was more at a loss to
account for any proceeding than the nomination of Pinckney to be
major-general.”
Even the private report that Pinckney had become a Republican

did not reconcile Macon, whose belief that the “fighting secretaries”
would not do for real war became stronger than ever, although he
admitted that some of the military appointments were supposed to
be tolerably good.
Of the brigadier-generals the senior was James Wilkinson, born in
1757, and fifty-five years old in 1812. Wilkinson had recently been
tried by court-martial on a variety of charges, beginning with that of
having been a pensioner of Spain and engaged in treasonable
conspiracy; then of being an accomplice of Aaron Burr; and finally,
insubordination, neglect of duty, wastefulness, and corruption. The
court acquitted him, and February 14 President Madison approved
the decision, but added an irritating reprimand. Yet in spite of
acquittal Wilkinson stood in the worst possible odor, and returned
what he considered his wrongs by bitter and contemptuous hatred
for the President and the Secretary of War.
The next brigadier was Wade Hampton, of South Carolina, who
entered the service in 1808, and was commissioned as brigadier in
1809. Born in 1754, he was fifty-seven years old, and though
understood to be a good officer, he had as yet enjoyed no
opportunity of distinguishing himself. Next in order came Joseph
Bloomfield of New Jersey, nominated as brigadier-general of the
regular army March 27, 1812; on the same day James Winchester, of
Tennessee, was named fourth brigadier; and April 8 William Hull, of
Massachusetts, was appointed fifth in rank. Bloomfield, a major in
the Revolutionary War, had been for the last ten years Governor of
New Jersey. Winchester, another old Revolutionary officer, originally
from Maryland, though mild, generous, and rich, was not the best
choice that might have been made from Tennessee. William Hull,
civil Governor of Michigan since 1805, was a third of the same class.
All were sixty years of age or thereabout, and none belonged to the
regular service, or had ever commanded a regiment in face of an
enemy.
Of the inferior appointments, almost as numerous as the
enlistments, little could be said. Among the officers of the regiment
of Light Artillery raised in 1808, after the “Chesapeake” alarm, was a
young captain named Winfield Scott, born near Petersburg, Virginia,
in 1786, and in the prime of his energies when at the age of twenty-
six he saw the chance of distinction before him. In after life Scott
described the condition of the service as he found it in 1808.
“The army of that day,” he said,[228] “including its general staff,
the three old and the nine new regiments, presented no pleasing
aspect. The old officers had very generally sunk into either sloth,
ignorance, or habits of intemperate drinking.... Many of the
appointments were positively bad, and a majority of the remainder
indifferent. Party spirit of that day knew no bounds, and of course was
blind to policy. Federalists were almost entirely excluded from
selection, though great numbers were eager for the field, and in New
England and some other States there were but very few educated
Republicans; hence the selections from those communities consisted
mostly of coarse and ignorant men. In the other States, where there
was no lack of educated men in the dominant party, the appointments
consisted generally of swaggerers, dependants, decayed gentlemen,
and others, ‘fit for nothing else,’ which always turned out utterly unfit
for any military purpose whatever.”
This account of the army of 1808 applied equally, said Scott, to
the appointments of 1812. Perhaps the country would have fared as
well without a regular army, by depending wholly on volunteers, and
allowing the States to choose general officers. In such a case
Andrew Jackson would have taken the place of James Winchester,
and William Hull would never have received an appointment from
Massachusetts.
No one in the government gave much thought to the military
dangers created by the war, yet these dangers seemed evident
enough to warrant keen anxiety. The sea-shore was nowhere
capable of defence; the Lakes were unguarded; the Indians of the
Northwestern Territory were already in arms, and known to be
waiting only a word from the Canadian governor-general; while the
whole country beyond the Wabash and Maumee rivers stood nearly
defenceless. At Detroit one hundred and twenty soldiers garrisoned
the old British fort; eighty-five men on the Maumee held Fort
Wayne; some fifty men guarded the new stockade called Fort
Harrison, lately built on the Wabash; and fifty-three men, beyond
possibility of rescue, were stationed at Fort Dearborn, or Chicago;
finally, eighty-eight men occupied the Island of Michillimackinaw in
the straits between Lake Huron and Lake Michigan. These were all
the military defences of a vast territory, which once lost would need
another war to regain; and these petty garrisons, with the settlers
about them, were certain, in the event of an ordinary mischance, to
be scalped as well as captured. The situation was little better in the
South and Southwest, where the Indians needed only the support of
a British army at New Orleans or Mobile to expel every American
garrison from the territory.
No serious preparations for war had yet been made when the
war began. In January, Congress voted ten new regiments of
infantry, two of artillery, and one of light dragoons; the recruiting
began in March, and in June the Secretary of War reported to
Congress that although no returns had been received from any of
the recruiting offices, yet considering the circumstances “the success
which has attended this service will be found to have equalled any
reasonable expectations.”[229] Eustis was in no way responsible for
the failure of the service, and had no need to volunteer an opinion
as to the reasonable expectations that Congress might entertain.
Every one knew that the enlistments fell far below expectation; but
not the enlistments alone showed torpor. In February, Congress
authorized the President to accept fifty thousand volunteers for one
year’s service. In June, the number of volunteers who had offered
themselves was even smaller than that of regular recruits. In April,
Congress authorized the President to call out one hundred thousand
State militia. In June, no one knew whether all the States would
regard the call, and still less whether the militia would serve beyond
the frontier. One week after declaring war, Congress fixed the war
establishment at twenty-five regiments of infantry, four of artillery,
two of dragoons, and one of riflemen,—making, with the engineers
and artificers, an army of thirty-six thousand seven hundred men;
yet the actual force under arms did not exceed ten thousand, of
whom four thousand were new recruits. Toward no part of the
service did the people show a sympathetic spirit before the war was
declared; and even where the war was most popular, as in Kentucky
and Tennessee, men showed themselves determined to fight in their
own way or not at all.
However inexperienced the Government might be, it could not
overlook the necessity of providing for one vital point. Detroit
claimed early attention, and received it. The dangers surrounding
Detroit were evident to any one who searched the map for that
remote settlement, within gunshot of British territory and
surrounded by hostile Indian tribes. The Governor of Michigan,
William Hull, a native of Connecticut, had done good service in the
Revolutionary War, but had reached the age of sixty years without a
wish to resume his military career. He preferred to remain in his civil
post, leaving to some officer of the army the charge of military
operations; but he came to Washington in February, 1812, and
urged the Government to take timely measures for holding the
Indians in check. He advised the President and Cabinet to increase
the naval force on Lake Erie, although he already had at Detroit an
armed brig ready to launch, which he thought sufficient to control
the upper lakes. The subject was discussed; but the delay necessary
to create a fleet must have risked, if it did not insure, the loss of the
whole Northwestern Territory, and the President necessarily decided
to march first a force to Detroit strong enough to secure the frontier,
and, if possible, to occupy the whole or part of the neighboring and
friendly British territory in Upper Canada. This decision Hull seems to
have suggested, for he wrote,[230] March 6, to Secretary Eustis,—
“A part of your army now recruiting may be as well supported and
disciplined at Detroit as at any other place. A force adequate to the
defence of that vulnerable point would prevent a war with the
savages, and probably induce the enemy to abandon the province of
Upper Canada without opposition. The naval force on the Lakes would
in that event fall into our possession, and we should obtain the
command of the waters without the expense of building such a force.”
This hazardous plan required energy in the American armies,

timely co-operation from Niagara if not from Lake Champlain, and,
most of all, assumed both incompetence and treason in the enemy.
Assuming that Hull would capture the British vessels on the Lakes,
the President made no further provision for a fleet; but, apparently
to provide for simultaneous measures against Lower Canada, the
Secretary of War sent to Boston for General Dearborn, who was to
command operations on Lake Ontario and the St. Lawrence River.
Dearborn hastened to Washington in February, where he remained
until the last of April. He submitted to the Secretary of War what
was called a plan of campaign,[231] recommending that a main army
should advance by way of Lake Champlain upon Montreal, while
three corps, composed chiefly of militia, should enter Canada from
Detroit, Niagara, and Sackett’s Harbor. Neither Dearborn, Hull,
Eustis, nor Madison settled the details of the plan or fixed the time
of the combined movement. They could not readily decide details
before Congress acted, and before the ranks of the army were filled.
While these matters were under discussion in March, the
President, unable to find an army officer fitted to command the force
ordered to Detroit, pressed Governor Hull to reconsider his refusal;
and Hull, yielding to the President’s wish, was appointed, April 8,
1812, brigadier-general of the United States army, and soon
afterward set out for Ohio. No further understanding had then been
reached between him and Dearborn, or Secretary Eustis, in regard to
the military movements of the coming campaign.
The force destined for Detroit consisted of three regiments of
Ohio militia under Colonels McArthur, Findlay, and Cass, a troop of
Ohio dragoons, and the Fourth Regiment of United States Infantry
which fought at Tippecanoe,—in all about sixteen hundred effective
men, besides a few volunteers. April 1 the militia were ordered to
rendezvous at Dayton, and there, May 25, Hull took command. June
1 they marched, and June 10 were joined at Urbana by the Fourth
Regiment. Detroit was nearly two hundred miles away, and the army
as it advanced was obliged to cut a road through the forest, to
bridge streams and construct causeways; but for such work the
militia were well fitted, and they made good progress. The energy
with which the march was conducted excited the surprise of the
British authorities in Canada,[232] and contrasted well with other
military movements of the year; but vigorous as it was it still lagged
behind events. Hull had moved only some seventy-five miles, when,
June 26,[233] he received from Secretary Eustis a despatch,
forwarded by special messenger from the Department, to warn him
that war was close at hand. “Circumstances have recently occurred,”
wrote Secretary Eustis, “which render it necessary you should
pursue your march to Detroit with all possible expedition. The
highest confidence is reposed in your discretion, zeal, and
perseverance.”
THE
SEAT OF WAR ABOUT LAKE ERIE.
Engraved from a Map Published
by John Conrad.
Struthers & Co., Engr’s, N. Y.
The despatch, dated June 18, was sent by the secretary on the
morning of that day in anticipation of the vote taken in Congress a
few hours later.[234] Hull had every reason to understand its
meaning, for he expected to lead his army against the enemy. “In
the event of hostilities,” he had written June 24,[235] “I feel a
confidence that the force under my command will be superior to any
which can be opposed to it. It now exceeds two thousand rank and
file.” On receiving the secretary’s pressing orders Hull left his heavy
camp-equipage behind, and hurried his troops to the Miami, or
Maumee, River thirty-five miles away. There he arrived June 30, and
there, to save transportation, loading a schooner with his personal
baggage, his hospital stores, entrenching tools, and even a trunk
containing his instructions and the muster-rolls of his army, he
despatched it, July 1, up the Lake toward Detroit. He took for
granted that he should receive from his own government the first
notice of war; yet he knew that the steamboat from New York to
Albany and the road from Albany to Buffalo, which carried news to
the British forces at Malden, was also the regular mode of
conveyance for Detroit; and he had every reason to suspect that as
his distance in time from Washington was greater, he might learn of
war first from actual hostilities. Hull considered “there was no
hazard” in sending his most valuable papers past Malden;[236] but
within four-and-twenty hours he received a despatch from Secretary
Eustis announcing the declaration of war, and the same day his
schooner was seized by the British in passing Malden to Detroit.
This first disaster told the story of the campaign. The declaration
made at Washington June 18 was published by General Bloomfield
at New York June 20, and reached Montreal by express June 24; the
same day it reached the British Fort George on the Niagara River
and was sent forward to Malden, where it arrived June 30. The
despatch to Hull reached Buffalo two days later than the British
express, for it went by ordinary mail; from Cleveland it was
forwarded by express, June 28, by way of Sandusky, to Hull, whom
it reached at last, July 2, at Frenchtown on the river Raisin, forty
miles below Detroit.
The slowness of transportation was made conspicuous by
another incident. John Jacob Astor, being engaged in extensive trade
with the Northwestern Indians, for political reasons had been
encouraged by government. Anxious to save the large amount of
property exposed to capture, he not only obtained the earliest
intelligence of war, and warned his agents by expresses, but he also
asked and received from the Treasury orders[237] addressed to the
Collectors on the Lakes, directing them to accept and hold such
goods as might be brought from Astor’s trading-posts. The business
of the Treasury as well as that of Astor was better conducted than
that of the War Department. Gallatin’s letters reached Detroit before
Eustis’s despatch reached Hull; and this incident gave rise to a
charge of misconduct and even of treason against Gallatin himself.
[238]
Hull reached Detroit July 5. At that time the town contained

about eight hundred inhabitants within gunshot of the British shore.
The fort was a square enclosure of about two acres, surrounded by
an embankment, a dry ditch, and a double row of pickets. Although
capable of standing a siege, it did not command the river; its
supplies were insufficient for many weeks; it was two hundred miles
distant from support, and its only road of communication ran for
sixty miles along the edge of Lake Erie, where a British fleet on one
side and a horde of savages on the other could always make it
impassable. The widely scattered people of the territory, numbering
four or five thousand, promised to become a serious burden in case
of siege or investment. Hull knew in advance that in a military sense
Detroit was a trap.
July 9, four days after his arrival, Hull received orders from
Washington authorizing him to invade Canada:—
“Should the force under your command be equal to the enterprise,
consistent with the safety of your own post, you will take possession
of Malden, and extend your conquests as circumstances may justify.”
He replied immediately the same day:[239]—

“I am preparing boats, and shall pass the river in a few days. The
British have established a post directly opposite this place. I have
confidence in dislodging them, and of being in possession of the
opposite bank.... The British command the water and the savages. I
do not think the force here equal to the reduction of Amherstburg
(Malden); you therefore must not be too sanguine.”
Three days later, July 12, his army crossed the river. Not a gun
was fired. The British militia force retired behind the Canard River,
twelve miles below, while Hull and his army occupied Sandwich, and
were well received by the inhabitants.
Hull had many reasons for wishing to avoid a battle. From the
first he looked on the conquest of Canada as a result of his mere
appearance. He began by issuing a proclamation[240] intended to
win a peaceful conquest.
“You will be emancipated,” said the proclamation to the Canadians,
“from tyranny and oppression, and restored to the dignified station of
freemen.... I have a force which will break down all opposition, and
that force is but the vanguard of a much greater.... The United States
offer you peace, liberty, and security,—your choice lies between these
and war, slavery, or destruction. Choose then; but choose wisely.”...
This proclamation, dated July 12, was spread throughout the

province with no small effect, although it contained an apparently
unauthorized threat, that “no white man found fighting by the side
of an Indian will be taken prisoner; instant death will be his lot.” The
people of the western province were strongly American, and soon to
the number of three hundred and sixty-seven, including deserters
from the Malden garrison, sought protection in the American lines.
[241] July 19 Hull described the situation in very hopeful terms:[242]
—
“The army is encamped directly opposite to Detroit. The camp is
entrenched. I am mounting the 24-pounders and making every
preparation for the siege of Malden. The British force, which in
numbers was superior to the American, including militia and Indians,
is daily diminishing. Fifty or sixty (of the militia) have deserted daily
since the American standard was displayed, and taken protection.
They are now reduced to less than one hundred. In a day or two I
expect the whole will desert. The Indian force is diminishing in the
same proportion. I have now a large council of ten or twelve nations
sitting at Brownstown, and I have no doubt but the result will be that
they will remain neutral. The brig ‘Adams’ was launched on the 4th of
July. I have removed her to Detroit under cover of the cannon, and
shall have her finished and armed as soon as possible. We shall then
have the command of the upper lakes.”
To these statements Hull added a warning, which carried at least
equal weight:—
“If you have not a force at Niagara, the whole force of the
province will be directed against this army.... It is all important that
Niagara should be invested. All our success will depend upon it.”
While Hull reached this position, July 19, he had a right to
presume that the Secretary of War and Major-General Dearborn
were straining every nerve to support him; but in order to
understand Hull’s situation, readers must know what Dearborn and
Eustis were doing. Dearborn’s movements, compared day by day
with those of Hull, show that after both officers left Washington in
April to take command of their forces, Hull reached Cincinnati May
10, while Dearborn reached Albany May 3, and wrote, May 8, to
Eustis that he had fixed on a site to be purchased for a military
station. “I shall remain here until the erection of buildings is
commenced.... The recruiting seems going on very well where it has
been commenced. There are nearly three hundred recruits in this
State.”[243] If Dearborn was satisfied with three hundred men as the
result of six weeks’ recruiting in New York State in immediate
prospect of a desperate war, he was likely to take his own duties
easily; and in fact, after establishing his headquarters at Albany for a
campaign against Montreal, he wrote, May 21, to the Secretary
announcing his departure for Boston: “As the quartermaster-general
arrived here this day I hope to be relieved from my duties in that
line, and shall set out for Pittsfield, Springfield, and Boston; and shall
return here as soon as possible after making the necessary
arrangements at those places.”
Dearborn reached Boston May 26, the day after Hull took
command at Dayton. May 29 he wrote again to Eustis: “I have been
here three days.... There are about three hundred recruits in and
near this town.... Shall return to Albany within a few days.” Dearborn
found business accumulate on his hands. The task of arranging the
coast defences absorbed his mind. He forgot the passage of time,
and while still struggling with questions of gunboats, garrisons, field-
pieces, and enlistments he was surprised, June 22, by receiving the
declaration of war. Actual war threw still more labor and anxiety
upon him. The State of Massachusetts behaved as ill as possible.
“Nothing but their fears,” he wrote,[244] “will prevent their going all
lengths.” More used to politics than to war, Dearborn for the time
took no thought of military movements.
Madison and Eustis seemed at first satisfied with this mode of
conducting the campaign. June 24 Eustis ordered Hull to invade
West Canada, and extend his conquests as far as practicable. Not
until June 26 did he write to Dearborn,[245]—
“Having made the necessary arrangements for the defence of the
sea-coast, it is the wish of the President that you should repair to
Albany and prepare the force to be collected at that place for actual
service. It is understood that being possessed of a full view of the
intentions of Government, and being also acquainted with the
disposition of the force under your command, you will take your own
time and give the necessary orders to the officers on the sea-coast. It
is altogether uncertain at what time General Hull may deem it
expedient to commence offensive operations. The preparations it is
presumed will be made to move in a direction for Niagara, Kingston,
and Montreal. On your arrival at Albany you will be able to form an
opinion of the time required to prepare the troops for action.”
Such orders as those of June 24 to Hull, and of June 26 to
Dearborn, passed beyond bounds of ordinary incapacity, and
approached the line of culpable neglect. Hull was to move when he
liked, and Dearborn was to take his own time at Boston before
beginning to organize his army. Yet the letter to Dearborn was less
surprising than Dearborn’s reply. The major-general in charge of
operations against Montreal, Kingston, and Niagara should have
been able to warn his civil superior of the risks incurred in allowing
Hull to make an unsupported movement from an isolated base such
as he knew Detroit to be; but no thought of Hull found place in
Dearborn’s mind. July 1 he wrote:[246]—
“There has been nothing yet done in New England that indicates
an actual state of war, but every means that can be devised by the
Tories is in operation to depress the spirits of the country. Hence the
necessity of every exertion on the part of the Government for carrying
into effect the necessary measures for defence or offence. We ought
to have gunboats in every harbor on the coast. Many places will have
no other protection, and all require their aid. I shall have doubts as to
the propriety of my leaving this place until I receive your particular
directions after you shall have received my letter.”
Dearborn complained with reason of the difficulties that
surrounded him. Had Congress acted promptly, a large body of
volunteers would have been already engaged, general officers would
have been appointed and ready for service, whereas no general
officer except himself was yet at any post north of New York city.
Every day he received from every quarter complaints of want of
men, clothing, and supplies; but his remaining at Boston to watch
the conduct of the State government was so little likely to overcome
these difficulties that at last it made an unfavorable impression on
the Secretary, who wrote, July 9, a more decided order from
Washington:[247]—
“The period has arrived when your services are required at Albany,
and I am instructed by the President to direct, that, having made
arrangements for placing the works on the sea-coast in the best state
of defence your means will permit, ... you will then order all the
recruits not otherwise disposed of to march immediately to Albany, or
some station on Lake Champlain, to be organized for the invasion of
Canada.”
With this official letter Eustis sent a private letter[248] of the

same date, explaining the reason for his order:—
“If ... we divide, distribute, and render inefficient the force
authorized by law, we play the game of the enemy within and
without. District among the field-officers the seaboard!... Go to Albany
or the Lake! The troops shall come to you as fast as the season will
admit, and the blow must be struck. Congress must not meet without
a victory to announce to them.”
Dearborn at Boston replied to these orders, July 13,[249] a few

hours after Hull’s army, six hundred miles away, crossed the Detroit
River into Canada and challenged the whole British force on the
lakes.
“For some time past I have been in a very unpleasant situation,
being at a loss to determine whether or not I ought to leave the sea-
coast. As soon as war was declared [June 18] I was desirous of
repairing to Albany, but was prevented by your letters of May 20 and
June 12, and since that time by the extraordinary management of
some of the governors in this quarter. On the receipt of your letter of
June 26 I concluded to set out in three or four days for Albany, but
the remarks in your letter of the 1st inst. prevented me. But having
waited for more explicit directions until I begin to fear that I may be
censured for not moving, and having taken such measures as
circumstances would permit for the defence of the sea-coast, I have
concluded to leave this place for Albany before the end of the present
week unless I receive orders to remain.”
A general-in-chief unable to decide at the beginning of a
campaign in what part of his department his services were most
needed was sure to be taught the required lesson by the enemy.
Even after these warnings Dearborn made no haste. Another week
passed before he announced, July 21, his intended departure for
Albany the next day, but without an army. “Such is the opposition in
this State as to render it doubtful whether much will be done to
effect in raising any kind of troops.” The two months he passed in
Boston were thrown away; the enlistments were so few as to
promise nothing, and the governor of Massachusetts barely
condescended to acknowledge without obeying his request for militia
to defend the coast.
July 26, one week after Hull had written that all his success
depended on the movements at Niagara, Dearborn reached Albany
and found there some twelve hundred men not yet organized or
equipped. He found also a letter, dated July 20, from the Secretary
of War, showing that the Government had begun to feel the danger
of its position.[250] “I have been in daily expectation of hearing from
General Hull, who probably arrived in Detroit on the 8th inst.” In fact
Hull arrived in Detroit July 5, and crossed into Canada July 12; but
when the secretary wrote, July 20, he had not yet heard of either
event. “You will make such arrangements with Governor Tompkins,”
continued Eustis, “as will place the militia detached by him for
Niagara and other posts on the lakes under your control; and there
should be a communication, and if practicable a co-operation,
throughout the whole frontier.”
The secretary as early as June 24 authorized Hull to invade
Canada West, and his delay in waiting till July 20 before sending
similar orders to the general commanding the force at Niagara was
surprising; but if Eustis’s letter seemed singular, Dearborn’s answer
passed belief. For the first time General Dearborn then asked a
question in regard to his own campaign,—a question so
extraordinary that every critic found it an enigma: “Who is to have
command of the operations in Upper Canada? I take it for granted
that my command does not extend to that distant quarter.”[251]
July 26, when Hull had been already a fortnight on British soil, a
week after he wrote that his success depended on co-operation from
Niagara, the only force at Niagara consisted of a few New York
militia, not co-operating with Hull or under the control of any United
States officer, while the major-general of the Department took it for
granted that Niagara was not included in his command. The
Government therefore expected General Hull, with a force which it
knew did not at the outset exceed two thousand effectives, to march
two hundred miles, constructing a road as he went; to garrison
Detroit; to guard at least sixty miles of road under the enemy’s
guns; to face a force in the field equal to his own, and another
savage force of unknown numbers in his rear; to sweep the
Canadian peninsula of British troops; to capture the fortress at
Malden and the British fleet on Lake Erie,—and to do all this without
the aid of a man or a boat between Sandusky and Quebec.
CHAPTER XV.
General Hull, two days after entering Canada, called a council of
war, which decided against storming Malden and advised delay. Their
reasons were sufficiently strong. After allowing for the sick-list and
garrison-duty, the four regiments could hardly supply more than
three hundred men each for active service, besides the Michigan
militia, on whom no one felt willing to depend. Hull afterward
affirmed that he had not a thousand effectives; the highest number
given in evidence two years later by Major Jesup was the vague
estimate of sixteen or eighteen hundred men. Probably the utmost
exertion could not have brought fifteen hundred effectives to the
Canadian shore. The British force opposed to them was not to be
despised. Colonel St. George commanding at Malden had with him
two hundred men of the Forty-first British line, fifty men of the Royal
Newfoundland regiment, and thirty men of the Royal Artillery.[252]
Besides these two hundred and eighty veteran troops with their
officers, he had July 12 about six hundred Canadian militia and two
hundred and thirty Indians.[253] The militia deserted rapidly; but
after allowing for the desertions, the garrison at Malden, including
Indians, numbered nearly nine hundred men. The British had also
the advantage of position, and of a fleet whose guns covered and
supported their left. They were alarmed and cautious, but though
they exaggerated Hull’s force they meant to meet him in front of
their fortress.[254] Hull’s troops would have shown superiority to
other American forces engaged in the campaign of 1812 had they
won a victory.
MAP
OF
Detroit River
and
ADJACENT COUNTRY,
From an Original Drawing
by a British Eng’r.
Struthers & Co., Engr’s and Pr’s, N.Y.
Philadelphia: Published by JOHN MELISH, Chestnut Street, 26 August, 1813.
The Ohio militia, although their officers acquiesced in the opinion

of the council of war, were very unwilling to lose their advantage. If
nothing was to be gained by attack, everything was likely to be lost
by delay. Detachments scoured the country, meeting at first little
resistance, one detachment even crossing the Canard River, flanking
and driving away the guard at the bridge; but the army was not
ready to support the unforeseen success, and the bridge was
abandoned. Probably this moment was the last when an assault
could have been made with a chance of success. July 19 and 24
strong detachments were driven back with loss, and the outlook
became suddenly threatening.
Hull tried to persuade himself that he could take Malden by
siege. July 22 he wrote to Eustis that he was pressing the
preparation of siege guns:[255]—
“I find that entirely new carriages must be built for the 24-
pounders and mortars. It will require at least two weeks to make the
necessary preparations. It is in the power of this army to take Malden
by storm, but it would be attended in my opinion with too great a
sacrifice under the present circumstances.... If Malden was in our
possession, I could march this army to Niagara or York (Toronto) in a
very short time.”
This was Hull’s last expression of confidence or hope.
Thenceforward every day brought him fatal news. His army lost
respect for him in consequence of his failure to attack Malden; the
British strengthened the defences of Malden, and August 8 received
sixty fresh men of the Forty-first under Colonel Proctor from Niagara;
[256] but worse than mutiny or British reinforcement, news from the
Northwest of the most disastrous character reached Hull at a
moment when his hopes of taking Malden had already faded. August
3 the garrison of Michillimackinaw arrived at Detroit as prisoners-of-
war on parole, announcing that Mackinaw had capitulated July 17 to
a force of British and savages, and that Hull must prepare to receive
the attack of a horde of Indians coming from the Northwest to fall
upon Detroit in the rear.
Hull called another council of war August 5, which,
notwithstanding this news, decided to attack Malden August 8, when
the heavy artillery should be ready; but while they were debating
this decision, a party of Indians under Tecumthe crossing the river
routed a detachment of Findlay’s Ohio regiment on their way to
protect a train of supplies coming from Ohio. The army mail-bags fell
into British hands. Hull then realized that his line of communication
between Detroit and the Maumee River was in danger, if not closed.
On the heels of this disaster he received, August 7, letters from
Niagara announcing the passage of British reinforcements up Lake
Ontario to Lake Erie and Malden. Thus he was called to meet in his
front an intrenched force nearly equal to his own, while at least a
thousand Indian warriors were descending on his flank from Lake
Huron, and in the rear his line of communication and supply could
be restored only by detaching half his army for the purpose.
Hull decided at once to recross the river, and succeeded in
effecting this movement on the night of August 8 without
interference from the enemy; but his position at Detroit was only
one degree better than it had been at Sandwich. He wished to
abandon Detroit and retreat behind the Maumee, and August 9
proposed the measure to some of his principal officers. Colonel Cass
replied that if this were done every man of the Ohio militia would
refuse to obey, and would desert their general;[257] that the army
would fall to pieces if ordered to retreat. Hull considered that this
report obliged him to remain where he was.
This was the situation at Detroit August 9,—a date prominent in
the story; but Hull’s true position could be understood only after
learning what had been done in Canada since the declaration of war.
The difficulties of Canada were even greater than those of the
United States. Upper Canada, extending from Detroit River to the
Ottawa within forty miles of Montreal, contained not more than
eighty thousand persons. The political capital was York, afterward
Toronto, on Lake Ontario. The civil and military command of this vast
territory was in the hands of Brigadier-General Isaac Brock, a native
of Guernsey, forty-two years old, who had been colonel of the Forty-
ninth regiment of the British line, and had served since 1802 in
Canada. The appointment of Brock in October, 1811, to the chief
command at the point of greatest danger was for the British a piece
of good fortune, or good judgment, more rare than could have been
appreciated at the time, even though Dearborn, Hull, Winchester,
Wilkinson, Sir George Prevost himself, and Colonel Proctor were
examples of the common standard. Brock was not only a man of
unusual powers, but his powers were also in their prime. Neither
physical nor mental fatigue such as followed his rivals’ exertions
paralyzed his plans. No scruples about bloodshed stopped him
midway to victory. He stood alone in his superiority as a soldier. Yet
his civil difficulties were as great as his military, for he had to deal
with a people better disposed toward his enemies than toward
himself; and he succeeded in both careers.
Under Brock’s direction, during the preceding winter vessels had
been armed on Lake Erie, and Malden had been strengthened by
every means in his power. These precautions gave him from the
outset the command of the lake, which in itself was almost
equivalent to the command of Detroit. Of regular troops he had but
few. The entire regular force in both Canadas at the outbreak of the
war numbered six thousand three hundred and sixty rank and file, or
about seven thousand men including officers. More than five
thousand of these were stationed in Lower Canada. To protect the
St. Lawrence, the Niagara, and the Detroit, Brock had only fourteen
hundred and seventy-three rank and file, or including his own
regiment,—the Forty-ninth, then at Montreal,—two thousand one
hundred and thirty-seven men at the utmost.[258]
When the news of war reached him, not knowing where to
expect the first blow, Brock waited, moving between Niagara and
Toronto, until Hull’s passage of the Detroit River, July 12, marked the
point of danger and startled the province almost out of its
dependence on England. Sir George Prevost, the governor-general,
reported with much mortification the effect of Hull’s movement on
Upper Canada:
“Immediately upon the invasion of the province,” wrote Sir George,
August 17,[259] “and upon the issuing of the proclamation by General
Hull, which I have the honor of herewith transmitting, it was plainly
perceived by General Brock that little reliance could be placed upon
the militia, and as little dependence upon the active exertions of any
considerable proportion of the population of the country, unless he
was vested with full power to repress the disaffected spirit which was
daily beginning to show itself, and to restrain and punish the disorders
which threatened to dissolve the whole militia force which he had
assembled. He therefore called together the provincial legislature on
July 27 in the hope that they would adopt prompt and efficient
measures for strengthening the hands of the Government at a period
of such danger and difficulty.... In these reasonable expectations I am
sorry to say General Brock has been miserably disappointed; and a
lukewarm and temporizing spirit, evidently dictated either by the
apprehension or the wish that the enemy might soon be in complete
possession of the country, having prevented the Assembly from
adopting any of the measures proposed to them, they were
prorogued on the 5th instant.”
Brock himself wrote to Lord Liverpool a similar account of his
trials:—
“The invasion of the western district by General Hull,” he wrote
August 29,[260] “was productive of very unfavorable sensations
among a large portion of the population, and so completely were their
minds subdued that the Norfolk militia when ordered to march
peremptorily refused. The state of the country required prompt and
vigorous measures. The majority of the House of Assembly was
likewise seized with the same apprehensions, and may be justly
accused of studying more to avoid by their proceedings incurring the
indignation of the enemy than the honest fulfilment of their duty.... I
cannot hide from your Lordship that I considered my situation at that
time extremely perilous. Not only among the militia was evinced a
disposition to submit tamely, five hundred in the western district
having deserted their ranks, but likewise the Indians of the Six
Nations, who are placed in the heart of the country on the Grand
River, positively refused, with the exception of a few individuals,
taking up arms. They audaciously announced their intention after the
return of some of their chiefs from General Hull to remain neutral, as
if they wished to impose upon the Government the belief that it was
possible they could sit quietly in the midst of war. This unexpected
conduct of the Indians deterred many good men from leaving their
families and joining the militia; they became more apprehensive of
the internal than of the external enemy, and would willingly have
compromised with the one to secure themselves from the other.”
Brock’s energy counterbalanced every American advantage.
Although he had but about fifteen hundred regular troops in his
province, and was expected to remain on the defensive, the moment
war was declared, June 26, he sent to Amherstburg all the force he
could control, and ordered the commandant of the British post at the
island of St. Joseph on Lake Huron to seize the American fort at
Michillimackinaw. When Hull issued his proclamation of July 12,
Brock replied by a proclamation of July 22. To Hull’s threat that no
quarter should be given to soldiers fighting by the side of Indians,
Brock responded by “the certain assurance of retaliation;” and he
justified the employment of his Indian allies by arguments which
would have been more conclusive had he ventured to reveal his
desperate situation. In truth the American complaint that the British
employed Indians in war meant nothing to Brock, whose loss of his
province by neglect of any resource at his command might properly
have been punished by the utmost penalty his Government could
inflict.
Brock’s proclamation partly restored confidence. When his
legislature showed backwardness in supporting him he peremptorily
dismissed them, August 5, after they had been only a week in
session, and the same day he left York for Burlington Bay and Lake
Erie. Before quitting Lake Ontario he could not fail to inquire what
was the American force at Niagara and what it was doing. Every one
in the neighborhood must have told him that on the American side
five or six hundred militia-men, commanded by no general officer,
were engaged in patrolling thirty-six miles of river front; that they
were undisciplined, ill-clothed, without tents, shoes, pay, or
ammunition, and ready to retreat at any sign of attack.[261] Secure
at that point, Brock hurried toward Malden. He had ordered
reinforcements to collect at Long Point on Lake Erie; and August 8,
while Hull was withdrawing his army from Sandwich to Detroit, Brock
passed Long Point, taking up three hundred men whom he found
there, and coasted night and day to the Detroit River.
Meanwhile, at Washington, Eustis sent letter after letter to
Dearborn, pressing for a movement from Niagara. July 26 he
repeated the order of July 20.[262] August 1 he wrote, enclosing
Hull’s despatch of July 19: “You will make a diversion in his favor at
Niagara and at Kingston as soon as may be practicable, and by such
operations as may be within your control.”
Dearborn awoke August 3 to the consciousness of not having
done all that man could do. He began arrangements for sending a
thousand militia to Niagara, and requested Major-General Stephen
Van Rensselaer of the New York State militia to take command there
in person. In a letter of August 7 to the Secretary of War, he showed
sense both of his mistakes and of their results:[263]—
“It is said that a detachment [of British troops] has been sent from
Niagara by land to Detroit; if so, I should presume before they can
march two hundred and fifty miles General Hull will receive notice of
their approach, and in season to cut them off before they reach Fort
Malden. It is reported that no ordnance or ammunition have reached
Niagara this season, and that there is great deficiency of these
articles. Not having considered any part of the borders of Upper
Canada as within the command intended for me, I have received no
reports or returns from that quarter, and did not until since my last
arrival at this place give any orders to the commanding officers of the
respective posts on that frontier.”
The consequences of such incapacity showed themselves without
an instant’s delay. While Dearborn was writing from Albany, August
7, General Brock, as has been told, passed from Lake Ontario to
Lake Erie; and the next morning, when Brock reached his
detachment at Long Point, Hull evacuated Sandwich and retired to
Detroit. Had he fallen back on the Maumee or even to Urbana or
Dayton, he would have done only what Wellington had done more
than once in circumstances hardly more serious, and what Napoleon
was about to do three months afterward in leaving Moscow.
Desperate as Hull’s position was, Dearborn succeeded within
four-and-twenty hours by an extraordinary chance in almost
extricating him, without being conscious that his action more than
his neglect affected Hull’s prospects. This chance was due to the
reluctance of the British government to accept the war. Immediately
after the repeal of the Orders in Council the new Ministry of Lord
Liverpool ordered their minister, Foster, to conclude an armistice in
case hostilities had begun, and requested their governor-general to
avoid all extraordinary preparations. These orders given in good faith
by the British government were exceeded by Sir George Prevost,
who had every reason to wish for peace. Although he could not
make an armistice without leaving General Hull in possession of his
conquests in Upper Canada, which might be extensive, Prevost sent
his adjutant-general, Colonel Baynes, to Albany to ask a cessation of
hostilities, and the same day, August 2, wrote to General Brock
warning him of the proposed step.[264] Colonel Baynes reached
headquarters at Albany August 9, and obtained from Dearborn an
agreement that his troops, including those at Niagara, should act
only on the defensive until further orders from Washington:—
“I consider the agreement as favorable at this period,” wrote
Dearborn to Eustis, “for we could not act offensively except at Detroit
for some time, and there it will not probably have any effect on
General Hull or his movements.”[265]
What effect the armistice would have on Hull might be a matter
for prolonged and serious doubt, but that it should have no effect at
all would have occurred to no ordinary commander. Dearborn had
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The Translator s Invisibility A History of Translation 2nd

The Disability Studies Reader 4th Edition Lennard J. Davis

The Black Studies Reader 1st Edition Rhoda Barnes

The Curriculum Studies Reader 2nd Edition Flinders & Thor

Translation and Creativity Perspectives on Creative

The Improvisation Studies Reader Spontaneous Acts 1st

Routledge encyclopedia of translation studies 2nd ed

Legal Translation in Context Professional Issues and

Lawrence Venuti, Professor Emeritus of English at Temple University, USA,

e hai scelto nel gatto

4 Nicolas Perrot d’Ablancourt 39

7 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe 72

12 Qu Qiubai and Lu Xun 106

13 Jorge Luis Borges 122

1940s– 1950s 137

14 Vladimir Nabokov 143

15 Roman Jakobson 156

1960s– 1970s 163

16 Eugene Nida 171

17 George Steiner 186

18 Itamar Even- Zohar 191

19 Gideon Toury 197

20 Hans J. Vermeer 219

21 Andr é Lefevere 231

22 Antoine Berman 247

23 Lori Chamberlain 261

24 Annie Brisset 289

25 Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak 320

26 Kwame Anthony Appiah 339

27 Keith Harvey 352

28 Jacques Derrida 373

2000s and beyond 397

29 Pascale Casanova 407

30 Ian Mason 424

31 Vicente L. Rafael 436

32 Carla Nappi 453

33 Karen Van Dyck 466

34 Lawrence Venuti 486

Works cited 501

Pascale Casanova, “Consecration and Accumulation of Literary Capital: Translation

Translation studies: an emerging field

and optimistic canonization. This reader is intended, nonetheless, to be an intro-

separate coverage because of their degree of specialization (e.g. interpreting and

What is a translation theory?

The increasingly interdisciplinary nature of translation studies has multiplied the-

The chronological organization encourages historical surveys of theoretical trends

Lu Xun), Russian formalism (Jakobson, Even-Zohar, Toury, Lefevere), linguistics

can be made contrapuntally, bringing together diverging treatments. The practices

Use supplementary readings

Any approach to this reader will be strengthened by a fuller historical or theor-

It is difficult to treat common matter in a way that is particular to you;

the Book of Hoseaಧ“Out of Egypt I have called my son”ಧinscribes a prophetic

Le Tourneur’s comment is remarkable for its conceptual sleight of hand. It does

the merit of the original work is so completely transfused into another

FROM THE PREFACE TO THE SUTRA

Translated by Haun Saussy

the essential meaning of the scriptures.1

Even the private report that Pinckney had become a Republican

This hazardous plan required energy in the American armies,

Hull reached Detroit July 5. At that time the town contained

He replied immediately the same day:[239]—

This proclamation, dated July 12, was spread throughout the

With this official letter Eustis sent a private letter[248] of the

Dearborn at Boston replied to these orders, July 13,[249] a few

The Ohio militia, although their officers acquiesced in the opinion

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