°Materialist writing
While not published until 1996, Lucy Hutchinson’s (1620-1681) translation of De Rerum Natura in the late 1640s or 1650s was, it seems, the first English translation of the work.
Prompted, according to Hutchinson herself, by a “youthfull curiositie, to understand things I heard so much discourse of at second hand, but without the least inclination to propagate any of the wicked pernitious doctrines in it,” she insists that DRN is a work of “carnall reason”, impious, that it discourses on the “foppish casuall dance of atoms”. And she echoes St Jerome - Catholicism’s ‘Church father’ - in finally declaring Lucretius to be a lunatic. As Reid Barbour notes - in “Between Atoms and the Spirit: Lucy Hutchinson’s Translation of Lucretius” - no “two writers could seem more at odds than the puritan Lucy Hutchinson and the pagan Lucretius.”
And yet, Hutchinson labours away at the translation. She does indeed “propagate the wicked, pernicious doctrines in it”. Moreover, her translation is widely regarded as the most faithful to the rythmns, and not just sense, of the original. Which is to say, Hutchinson is alert what most other translators have perhaps regarded as too difficult to accomplish, that is, and as I remarked previously, the eminence of acoustics that the original, in both form and content, insists upon.
Barbour speculates that the paradox of Hutchinson’s translation might be explained as a consolatory exercise: Hutchinson translates DRN during the English Civil wars and its aftermath (DRN being written during the civil wars in Rome); that Hutchinson might have taken an interest because of the involvement of women in Epicurean philosophical circles, and so on.
However, in “Lucy Hutchinson Writing Matter”, Jonathon Goldberg insists that the translation be read in a Lucretian sense, which he parses by way of Deleuze (from the Logic of Sense). That is, not as a series of paradoxes which might be resolved through the manoeuvres of identity and contradiction, but as the movements of “coordination and disjunction”, “resemblances and differences, compositions and decompositions”.
Two fragments from Hutchinson’s translation, then:
Since various things have many passages
And penetrable pores, wee hence conclude
They are not with like natures all indued.
Each its owne nature hath, and its owne way
Which proper seeds to various things convey.
Here juices, sounds, more easily penetrate,
Then steame and sent themselves insinuate.
One kind of moysture through the rocks doth passe
Another sap, through wood; gold, silver, glasse,
Admitt transitions of another kind
For there the heate, here species passage find.[…]
So in our verse are common letters found
In severall transpositions sett, from whence
Words are producd, of severall sounds and sence.
And so - to emphasise earlier remarks on the radical sensoriousness of DRN, on the play between the visible and invisible, as well as on the eminence of touch and sound in materialist writing - a fragment from Goldberg’s essay:
To write is to trace, to make tracks, to copy. The activity of writing is to provide a trace, a track, a trail (vestigia). It leads from the visible to the invisible; we pursue “the track of truths retirement” (Q, 1.410) into the dark cave where the goddess hides unseen (call her Venus, Nature, Mother—Lucy, light in darkness). Going there, we “search those untrackt paths” (Q, 1.931). The track of the trace is what Deleuze after Leibniz calls a fold insofar as it doubles the invisible onto the visible while not collapsing one into the other. “I tread the muses by-paths yett untrac’t” (Q, 4.1). How so? “I first greate misteries disclose, / And soules from superstitions fast knotts loose; / . . . in such sweete verse I sing, / With easie words, soe difficult a thing” (Q, 1.937–40). First? “I follow thee, thy footestepps only trace” (Q, 3.4). Whose? Unnamed, Epicurus, god among men. The task in general? “We the footestepps of their tempers trace” (Q, 3.318), the unique combinatory difference, tempering sameness, pursuing “prints” that are not “quite blott out” (Q, 3.327, 328). The traces of the trace that remains. Epicureanism is also a cult of writing after Epicurus, writing in his name, supplying a biography of sorts, giving him a kind of life by returning him to the trace. He is the nameless one being copied, I alone doing what no one else has done, repeating what he has, treading anew the path that leads from the visible to the invisible. “Of former actions nothings known / But the darke footesteps by our reason shewne” (Q, 5.1500–1). In these lines about the invention of writing, before writing nothing is known except dark footsteps; and dark footsteps are what are made known in writing, the trace of reason, of mind in matter. [Q here refers to Hutchinson’s DRN.]
