Katherine Philips and Corneille: Of the Importance of Being a Translator

Résumé En

While Katherine Philips’ poetry has received a great deal of critical attention in the recent past, her translations of two Corneille plays have been relatively overlooked. When they had been scrutinized, however, it is their political dimension that has been mainly emphasized. Yet both Catherine Mambretti and Peter Beal have alerted us to the historical importance of these translations: Mambretti by showing that Philips was de facto responsible for the first heroic tragedy to be performed in the British Isles, and Beal by reminding us that the publication of Pompey in 1663 was vital in establishing Philips’ fame as a major woman poet. This chapter compares Philips’ translation of Pompey with its 1643 original to assess Philips’ strategy as a translator. It will then show how Philips’ poetry is in turn informed by her reading of Corneille and her experience of transliteration. It is my contention that her intimate knowledge of French literature was instrumental in her self-fashioning as a poet, and that it offered her an alternative, woman-friendly canon with new and fashionable models to imitate. In this respect, it is perhaps no accident that she chose Pompey, a play that had connections with Garnier’s Tragedie of Antonie (1595) – a play which had also allowed another Englishwoman, Mary Sidney, to become a literary author.