Late Victorian Ballad Translation
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Late Victorian Ballad Translation by Letitia Henville A thesis submitted in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Graduate Department of English University of Toronto © Copyright by Letitia Henville 2016 Late Victorian Ballad Translation Letitia Henville Doctor of Philosophy Department of English University of Toronto 2016 Abstract This dissertation investigates late Victorian ballad translations that depict non-British people. It focuses on ballads published in the 1890s, at the height of imperialist expansion and at a peak of ballad collecting and editing. In this period, as recent criticism in the field has shown, many ballad scholars, collectors, and publishers treated this verse form like an artifact in a Victorian museum: they framed, bowdlerized, and decontextualized the ballad, as if it were an inanimate object, rendering it easily consumable for the middle classes. By looking at poets who translated the ballad rather than publishers who ‘artifactualized’ it, I show that the ballad remained a vital—even rebellious—politically engaged form, even during this period of intense collecting and cataloguing. My work contributes to the burgeoning field of global poetics through an investigation of four poets: William Morris, Rudyard Kipling, Robert Louis Stevenson, and E. Pauline Johnson. My first chapter, a study of Morris’s ballad translations from Danish and Icelandic, argues that Morris figured the ballad as embodying folk up-rising. My second chapter argues that Kipling’s ballad translations are from “Atkinsese,” a language named after Tommy Atkins, the soldier-speaker the “Barrack-Room Ballads.” Tommy sings of the experiences of empire, but, in the margins of the text, an editor- ii figure retranslates Tommy’s words in order to undercut the authority that Tommy establishes. In my third chapter, I show that Stevenson’s translations from Tahitian blend Indigenous rhythms with conventions of the classical epic in an attempt at translating ethically. Finally, in my fourth chapter, I argue that Johnson’s The White Wampum includes hybridized balladic monologues that not only translate Indigenous Canadian voices into fluent English, but also translate the concept of the wampum belt to create hybridized “verse-wampum.” This dissertation dwells in the thresholds of Victorian poetry—in the margins of pages, at the borders of nations and of languages—in order to suggest that these zones of interaction and interpretation were broader and more significant than currently conceived. iii Acknowledgments I extend my thanks to the support, encouragement and advice of my supervisor Christine Bolus-Reichert, my committee Cannon Schmitt and Alan Bewell, my examiners Daniel Wright, Alison Chapman and Lynne Magnusson, as well as the wide range of faculty and graduate students in the English Department at the University of Toronto who have read or listened to my work with generosity and care: Claire Battershill, Abigail Dennis, Heather Jessup, Mark Knight, Beth Martin, Jennifer McDermitt, Tara McDonald, Mary Nyquist, Jenny O’Kell, Kathleen Ogden, Erin Piotrowski, Brittany Pladek, Noa Reich, Terry Robinson, Joel Rodgers, Elisa Tersigni, Morgan Vanek, and Alisha Walters. I thank my friends and colleagues in the broader academic community for their conversations, help and support during the process of writing this dissertation, including Veronica Alfano, Peter Buchanan, Sarah Cappeliez, Yuri Cowan, Graeme Desrosiers, Elizabeth Helsinger, Sasha Kovaks, Sabrina Lau, George Logan, Julia Lum, Terris Lutter, Bronwyn McConnell, Natasha Moore, and Matthew Rowlinson. This research was supported by a University of Toronto Fellowship award; a McCuaig- Throop Bursary from the University of Toronto; an Ontario Graduate Scholarship; and both a Joseph-Armand Bombardier Canada Graduate Scholarship and a Michael Smith Foreign Study Supplement from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Parts of Chapter Three of this dissertation first appeared in Literature Compass 9.7 (2012): 489-501 and in the Journal of Stevenson Studies 11 (2014): 45-70. I am grateful to Heather Bergthold for granting permission to publish from Stevenson’s archival material. I extend my thanks as well to the staff and librarians at the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library; the Dansk Folkemindesamling (Danish Folklore Archives), especially Lene Halskov Hanson; the British Library; the National Library of Scotland; the Writers’ Museum, Edinburgh; the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University; iv the Morgan Library and Museum, New York; and the Mills Memorial Library, McMaster University, especially Olga Perkovic. For their advice and assistance with the linguistic aspects of this dissertation, I also extend my deep gratitude to Sune Auken, Department of Nordic Studies and Linguistics, University of Copenhagen; Cat Criger, Aboriginal Elder-in-Residence, University of Toronto Scarborough; Swathi Swaminathan, Department of Psychology, University of Toronto; Liselotte Kidston; Sarah Knudson; Birthe Jorgensen; and Anne Toft Sorenson. My PhD would have been a very different experience without the love of the Massey College community, which I cherish greatly. And, finally, I thank my family for their innumerable contributions to my dissertation and my life. v Table of Contents Acknowledgments ........................................................................................................ iv Table of Contents ......................................................................................................... v List of Figures .............................................................................................................. vi Introduction .................................................................................................................. 1 1 Golden Ballads: William Morris’s Translations in A Book of Verse and Poems by the Way ................................................................................................. 24 2 “The Banjo Bard of Empire”: Bardic Nationalism and Kipling’s “Barrack-Room Ballads” ...................................................................................... 61 3 Englishing Boldly: Robert Louis Stevenson’s Polynesian Ballads ....................... 101 4 E. Pauline Johnson’s “Verse-Wampum” .............................................................. 152 5 Coda ...................................................................................................................... 202 Works Consulted .......................................................................................................... 207 vi List of Figures Figures 1a and 1b: From The Loving Ballad of Lord Bateman. Ill. George Cruikshank ................................................................................................................... 7 Figure 2: From Child, The English and Scottish Popular Ballads .............................. 9 Figures 3a and 3b: From Grundtvig, Danmarks gamle Folkeviser .............................. 29 Figure 4: From Morris, “A Garden By the Sea” and “The Ballad of Christine,” A Book of Verse ........................................................................................................... 39 Figure 5: From Morris, “The Lay of Christine” and “Hildebrand and Hellelil,” Poems by the Way ........................................................................................................ 42 Figure 6: From Morris, “The Son’s Sorrow,” A Book of Verse .................................. 49 Figure 7: From Morris, “The Son’s Sorrow” and “Agnes and the Hill-man,” Poems by the Way ........................................................................................................ 51 Figure 8: From Kipling, “Route Marchin’,” Barrack-Room Ballads and Other Verses ........................................................................................................................... 81 Figure 9: From Kipling, “Gunga Din,” The Scots Observer ........................................ 84 Figures 10a and 10b: From Stock’s Muscial Score of “Route Marchin’” ................... 94 Figure 11: From Kipling, “The ‘Eathen,” The Seven Seas .......................................... 97 Figure 12: Reverse of Stevenson, “Song of Tefari [sic],” Manuscript, Yale University ..................................................................................................................... 123 Figure 13: From Stevenson, “Song of Clan Departure,” “Song of Tefari,” “Another [Song],” and“Song of the Two Chiefs,” Manuscript, Yale University ........ 141 Figures 14a and 14b: From Johnson, The White Wampum .......................................... 167 Figure 15: Two Row Wampum, Six Nations Public Library ....................................... 172 Figure 16: Friendship Belt, Six Nations Public Library .............................................. 172 vii 1 Introduction When scholars of Victorian literature write about translation, and when scholars of translation theory write about the Victorians, both groups invariably include a discussion of Matthew Arnold’s On Translating Homer. Written in response to Francis William Newman’s 1856 balladic translation of the Iliad, Arnold’s three-part essay— delivered as a lecture series at Oxford in 1860, but not published until 1861—condemns Newman for failing to render Homer’s nobility. This failure, Arnold argues, is due to Newman’s archaic “odd diction” (40) and to his choice of genre, the ballad: “the ballad- style and