The Other Use of Latin: the Network of Agents in Clement Egerton’s English Translation of Jin Ping Mei

Latin has a history of being used in English translations of erotic literary works, but the process of producing and incorporating the Latin into the English target texts has so far remained unexplored. Based on the Routledge archival materials, this paper uncovers the sophisticated network of agents that is responsible for the use of Latin in Clement Egerton’s 1939 English translation The Golden Lotus from the classic Chinese novel Jin Ping Mei. Due to the literary censorship, the publishers – together with their printers and proofreaders, spontaneously assumed the role of pre-publication censors. The Latin passages in The Golden Lotus, which have always been attributed to Egerton, are nevertheless revealed by the archives to be relayed by a Latin scholar from Egerton’s initial English version. The production of Latin in The Golden Lotus is therefore a most telling example of the complexity of the network of agents in translation. The research makes recourse to knowledge from such diverse areas of study such as sociology, cultural studies, book history, and translation studies.