Translations by Elizabeth I, 1592-98

"Yes, I wanted to give an example of some of her own writing because that is where we get closest to feeling that we know her and we get an insight into her own mind and attitude and ideas. I have been massively assisted in that because in the last ten years the University of Chicago has been publishing a series of volumes of Elizabeth’s collected works. From these you get a sense of her breadth and diversity as a writer: not just speeches and letters, but also prayers and poems, and all these translations. I have chosen the volume from the later part of her reign in the 1590s. I suppose you could think that translations don’t much give us insight into her own mind because she is translating someone else but, actually, if you look at the choice of works that she makes, and the spin she puts on them, they tell us a lot about her as a person. There is a constant theme running through her translations of stoicism and endurance, and that is reflected in a big translation from the 1590s, ‘The Consolation of Philosophy’ by Boethius, which she translated from Latin to English. What you get from this translation is her fantastic intellect and seriousness. She did this translation over a period of a month and she spent no more than 30 hours on it, according to her secretary. It’s massive, more than 100 pages in the modern edition, and she just seems to have dashed it off. This is what she did for her leisure when she was taking a break from ruling the country! There is a real sense of it being done in haste, the grammar is a bit wonky and it is a very knotty muscular translation which has a rugged engaging quality. So you get a sense of her intellect and her independence of mind, because, as the editors point out in all her translations, she seems to have done very little consulting of translations by other people or commentaries which had already been written on these texts. She does her own thing. I came away from her translations feeling a contact with the seriousness of her mind. She engaged in translations all through her life right from when she was a young girl when she gave translations away as gift books for members of her family. But there is a real shift from those early translations, when they are almost schoolroom exercises written in that beautiful italic hand that we associate with her and she is showing off her accomplishments in all areas. “I came away from her translations feeling a contact with the seriousness of her mind” With these later translations the feeling is that they are for her an intellectual workout, rather like some of us would get from going to the gym – a kind of mind gym. This is how she relaxes. Her handwriting is almost indecipherable and the grammar is all over the place, but this is something she is doing for herself and for her own indulgence."