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Johnson's Translation of Lobo

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 December 2020

Joel J. Gold
Joel J. Gold*
Affiliation:
University of Kansas, Lawrence
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Extract

For almost two centuries the nature and significance of Samuel Johnson's work in the translation of Lobo's Voyage to Abyssinia have been obscured. Both James Boswell and Sir John Hawkins denied that any traces of Johnson's style exist in the translation, and, following their lead, most scholars have been willing to accept at face value Johnson's explanation of what he had done:

In this Translation (if it may be so call'd) great Liberties have been taken, which, whether justifiable or not, shall be fairly confess'd, and let the Judicious part of Mankind pardon or condemn them.

In the first part the greatest Freedom has been used, in reducing the Narration into a narrow Compass, so that it is by no Means a Translation but an Epitome, in which whether every thing either useful or entertaining be comprised, the compiler is least qualified to determine.

In the Account of Abyssinia, and the Continuation, the Authors have been follow'd with more exactness, and as few Passages appeared either insignificant or tedious, few have been either shortened or omitted.

The Dissertations are the only part in which an exact Translation has been attempted, and even in those, Abstracts are sometimes given instead of literal Quotations, particularly in the first; and sometimes other parts have been contracted.

Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 80 , Issue 1 , March 1965 , pp. 51 - 61
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1965

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References

1 [Samuel Johnson, trans.], A Voyage to Abyssinia (London, 1735), p. xi. (Actually printed in Birmingham.)

2 Page numbers are inserted parenthetically in the text and refer, for the French, to either the Relation historique d'Abissinie or Voyage historique d'Abissinie (Paris, 1728, or Paris and the Hague, 1728) in quarto; the English quotations are from the 1735 edition.

3 This is the second and correct page 183. Misnumbering of pages on the inner forme of this gathering causes the following pagination: 177, 182, 183, 180, 181, 178, 183, 184.

4 James Boswell, Boswell's Life of Johnson, ed. G. B. Hill. rev. and enlarged by L. F. Powell (Oxford, 1934–50), i, 87.

5 The Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D. (London, 1787), p. 22.

6 I wonder, too, if this unique imaginative expansion was the seed from which Johnson's later narrative, “The Fountains,” grew. If the idea interested Johnson as much as his creative work on the passage would suggest, it may very well have emerged later, reshaped, in “The Fountains.”

7 A similar contrast appears between Le Grand, pp. 144–145, and Johnson, p. 156.

8 The Month, clxxxii (1946), 444.

9 Note also the difference between the French (p. 120) and English (p. 119) versions of the Jesuits' prayer.

10 Cf. Le Grand, p. 83—Johnson, p. 67; Le Grand, p. 103—Johnson, p. 94; Le Grand, p. 164—Johnson, p. 170.

11 Life, i, 71.