Julie Candler Hayes's new book is an important contribution to an unjustly neglected field of scholarly enquiry. Translation itself, as both theory and practice, is still often misunderstood, its role within literary and cultural history all too frequently ignored, misrepresented, or undervalued. Comparative studies of translation theories and practices in different countries at similar periods are also rare and often limited in scope. Hayes's book, comparing translation in France and England over two centuries, 1600–1800, thus takes on a significant and challenging task.

As Hayes explains in her introduction, the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were an important period in the cultural interactions between England and France “not only because of the significant place each country had in the other's political and social imagination … but also because during this period translators in the two countries were extremely aware of each other's practice” (3). Scholars of British literature and history will be well aware that English culture, in particular, was much influenced by French fashions and norms from the mid- to late seventeenth century onward and that translations from French literature played a large part in establishing this sense of French cultural authority. Hayes's study both amplifies and complicates this traditional picture of a largely one-way cultural conversation, making it clear that, even in the early years of the seventeenth century, French and English scholars were engaged in similar debates and faced many of the same literary pressures and imperatives. Later, when the balance of interest between the two nations began to shift and French translations of works such as Oroonoko, Gulliver's Travels, Tom Jones, and the plays of Shakespeare started to appear, they did so in versions that were heavily abridged and redacted to meet the somewhat different requirements of French literary taste. Thus the abbé Desfontaines's astonishingly early translation of Gulliver's Travels (1727; first English publication, 1726) corrects Swift's vulgarity, improves his language, and tempers his misanthropy; Gulliver, at the end, is reconciled both to his family and to society at large. Such civilizing changes, inimical as they were to Swift's pessimistic vision of humanity, were evidently seen by Desfontaines as essential to gaining a readership for Gulliver amid the politesse of eighteenth-century France.

Translation, Subjectivity and Culture begins with a theoretical introduction, comparing translational practice and theory pre- and post-1600 and outlining Hayes's own discursive and analytical methods. Her approach leans heavily on the evidence of translators’ prefaces and also seeks to bring insights from such postmodern theorists as Bourdieu, de Man, and Derrida to bear on the dilemmas and debates current in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century discussions of translation. Her seven subsequent chapters include studies of the belles infidèles and Port-Royal schools of translation, English royalist translators, Dryden's “Dedication of the Aeneis,” Anne Dacier and the Homer debate, women translators, and the differing discourses surrounding translation from classical literature and from texts in modern languages. Recurring topics, in both France and England, include the issue of literalism versus free translation, the importance of translation for national identity, attitudes toward language change, and the politics of translation. Hayes claims, for instance, that translation was more often imbued with the internal politics of the nation in England than in France; she sees no French equivalent for the clear cultural association between translation and royalism in mid-seventeenth-century England. She is, however, somewhat readier to identify “ethnocentrism and exclusionary politics” (239) as characteristic of French, rather than English, attitudes toward translation, though preface writers from both nations liked to claim that their translations were an improvement on their originals. Women were active in translation in both England and France, but no English female translator—even the celebrated Elizabeth Carter—enjoyed anything like the eminence and authority ascribed to the French Anne Dacier, whose “name was synonymous with erudition” (138) and whose example did much to change attitudes about women's abilities, not least among women themselves.

Hayes, by origin, is a specialist on French enlightenment literature, and the limits of her expertise are sometimes (albeit faintly) visible in her discussions. She is, as one might expect, happier in her analysis of French rather than English translations; her sections on England occasionally have a somewhat secondhand air and show a mild tendency toward repetition of the same themes. Dryden, although the subject of one of her chapters, is discussed more narrowly than his centrality within the history of English translation would seem to warrant, and Roscommon's injunction to translators to “chuse an Author as you chuse a Friend”— admittedly, much cited by later theorists—is repeated rather too often. Her observation that La Place's translation of Oroonoko has been criticized for its “attenuation of Behn's abolitionist message” (227) reads oddly in the light of recent Oroonoko scholarship, which tends to doubt that Behn had any such message. Hayes is also rather less confident at the beginning of her period than at the end, and her attempts to differentiate seventeenth-century translation from earlier practices rely unduly on a homogenizing and oversimplifying account of Renaissance translation practices. Thus, Hayes's claim that sixteenth-century translators favored literalist methods (4) extrapolates too far from a somewhat tendentious reading of Du Bellay's Deffence without adducing any English examples to justify her application of French norms to English texts. Her statement that translators’ prefaces “arose in Italy and France in the Renaissance and became popular in England in the course of the seventeenth century” (7) understates the importance attached to prefaces by such leading sixteenth-century English translators as Ralph Robinson and Arthur Golding.

Such caveats, however, are of relatively minor significance. Hayes has produced a detailed and fascinating book that will be of interest to scholars of both English and French literature and not merely to specialists in translation studies. Her research casts light on an intriguing and surprisingly varied period of cultural interaction, and it should help to stimulate further scholarship in this important field.