Translation and Nation
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View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by Texas A&M Repository TRANSLATION AND NATION: THE QUESTION OF IDENTITY IN THE AMERICAN RENAISSANCE A Dissertation by KOHEI FURUYA Submitted to the Office of Graduate and Professional Studies of Texas A&M University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY Chair of Committee, Larry J. Reynolds Committee Members, Richard Golsan David McWhirter Mary Ann O’Farrell Head of Department, Nancy Warren May 2015 Major Subject: English Copyright 2015 Kohei Furuya ABSTRACT This dissertation investigates the significance of translation in the making of American national literature. Translation has played a central role in the formation of American linguistic, literary, cultural, and national identity. The authors of the American Renaissance were multilingual, involved in the cultural task of translation in many different ways. But the importance of translation has been little examined in American literary scholarship, the condition of which has been exclusively monolingual. This study makes clear the following points. First, translation served as an important agency in the building of American national language, literature, and culture. Second, the conception of translation as a means for domesticating foreign influences in antebellum American literary culture was itself a translation of a traditionally European idea of translation since the Renaissance, and more specifically, of the modern German concept of it. Third, despite its ethnocentric, nationalistic, and imperialistic tendency, translation sometimes complicated the identity-formation process. The American Renaissance writers worked in the complex international culture of translation in an age of world literature, a nationalist-cosmopolitan concept that Goethe promoted in the early nineteenth century. Those American authors’ texts often take part in and sometimes come up against the violence of translation, which obliterates the marks of otherness in foreign languages and cultures. To elucidate these points, this dissertation focuses mainly on the works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Herman Melville, each of whom embodies some unique characteristics of the American theories and practices of literary and cultural translation in antebellum America. ii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ABSTRACT ......................................................................................................... ii TABLE OF CONTENTS ...................................................................................... iii CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION: TRANSLATION AND AMERICAN LITERATURE ..................................................................................... 1 Translation Studies and American Literary Scholarship ............... 8 II “ARISTOPHANES & HAFIZ & RABLAIS FULL OF AMERICAN HISTORY: EMERSON, TRANSLATION, TRANSNATION, AND TRANSCENDENCE ............................................................................ 26 Translating World Histories into His Story ................................... 45 The Remains of the Untranslatable ............................................... 62 World Disaster Literature .............................................................. 70 III “SUCH A WRETCHED MEDIUM AS WORDS”: HAWTHORNE, JOHN ELIOT, AND THE QUESTION OF TRANSLATION ............ 91 John Eliot in The Scarlet Letter ..................................................... 101 John Eliot and Miles Coverdale: The Two Translators in The Blithedale Romance ....................................................................... 133 Septimius the Translator ................................................................ 146 IV “ALL INTERWEAVINGLY WORKING TOGETHER”: MELVILLE, WORLD LITERATURE, AND THE ETHICS OF TRANSLATION .................................................................................. 168 iii Ishamel’s Translation of Queequeg’s Story .................................. 170 US Monolingualism and Melville after Moby-Dick ...................... 189 V SUMMARY .......................................................................................... 218 WORKS CITED ................................................................................................... 221 iv CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION: TRANSLATION AND AMERICAN LITERATURE Translation played a central role in the formation of American language, literature, culture, and nation in the history of antebellum America. Writers of historical, political, philosophic, scientific, religious, and literary writings since the time of the earliest settlements were polyglot, engaged in the task of translation in many different fields. The list of translators in the early republic includes, to name but a few, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, John Quincy Adams, James Fenimore Cooper, and Washington Irving. The authors of the American Renaissance, such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Henry David Thoreau, Herman Melville, and Nathaniel Hawthorne, were also multilingual, involved in the cultural task of translation in their unique ways. But the importance of translation in classic American literature has been little investigated in American literary scholarship, the condition of which has been exclusively monolingual. As theorists of the nation and nationalism have suggested, language has been an essential constituent for the building of modern nations.1 In his classic study of nationalism, Nations and Nationalism since 1780, E. J. Hobsbawm stresses that national languages are “almost always semi-artificial constructs and occasionally, like modern Hebrew, virtually invented” (54). In the case of the United States, English became the 1 For the analyses of the role of vernacular national languages in the formation of modern nations and nationalism, see Hobsbawm 51-63; and Benedict Anderson 67-82. 1 dominant language very early on. In the course of the country’s development from the earliest settlements through independence, English-speaking settlers established ascendency over non-English-speaking natives and incomers. Consequently, English came to be perceived as the virtual national language. The history of the expansion of US territory roughly coincides with that of the spread of English language.2 And, in the making of a national language, translation often served as a means for the domestication of indigenous and immigrant languages, literatures, cultures, and peoples. It may sound ironic that the founding of classic American literature and culture was inseparably entwined with translation activities. But translation was demanded and provided at varied occasions and locations in antebellum America. Since the “discovery” of America, indeed, translation had been always a necessary tool for European settlers to communicate with aboriginal people as well as other groups of Europeans. The literature on indigenous people written by the Europeans is essentially a work of translation. In their cultural tradition, Native American people did not use alphabetic writing systems.3 The translation of indigenous languages into English and other European languages often involved the problematic politics of assimilation and domestication.4 “Virtually all examples of recorded Native American literature prior to the twentieth century were,” Eric J. Sundquist argues, “a combination of transcription and translation, with the attendant potential for misrepresentation, intentional or not, that those processes imply” 2 In Imagined Communities, a classic study of nationalism, Benedict Anderson claims that there is “an almost perfect isomorphism between the stretch of the various empires and that of their vernaculars” (77) in the nation-building projects in the Americas. 3 See Woodsworth, “Translation in North America.” 4 For example, see Todorov, The Conquest of America. 2 (Empire and Slavery in American Literature 89).5 Eric Cheyfitz even claims that “translation was, and still is, the central act of European colonization and imperialism in the Americas” (The Poetics of Imperialism 104). Many translation activities since the early colonial period were driven by an evangelical fervor for spreading God’s words and a missionary conviction that God’s truths would eventually transcend all language barriers, which were considered to be inessential but superficial. Edward Gray argues that Protestant missionaries, including John Eliot as a notable example in America, generally believed that “[w]ords were merely the utterances that harbored that [divine] truth, but they in no way determined its meaning” (New World Babel 83). As Gray also suggests, this idea of the translatability of divine truth was based “on the Christian assumption that all languages were descended from the same original language given by God to Adam” (24), and “language change was a process of degradation and decay” (24). As I will show in the following chapters, this Protestant view of language and translation was resurrected in the antebellum nationalist cultural movement for making the American language and literature, in which all the literary authors that I refer to as the main subjects of this study more or less participated. Translation was also practiced widely in the locus of high culture. Since the Renaissance, the reading of Greek and Latin had been considered an invaluable part of higher education in the Humanities. The literacy of Greek and Latin constituted valuable 5 In a similar vein, Joshua Bellin claims that “it is imperative to recognize