© 2013 Jennifer R. Raterman ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
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© 2013 Jennifer R. Raterman ALL RIGHTS RESERVED THE NOVEL OF TRANSLATION: MULTILINGUALISM AND THE ETHICS OF READING By JENNIFER R. RATERMAN A Dissertation submitted to the Graduate School-New Brunswick Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Graduate Program in Comparative Literature written under the direction of David Kurnick Rebecca Walkowitz and approved by ________________________ ________________________ ________________________ ________________________ New Brunswick, New Jersey May 2013 ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION The Novel of Translation: Multilingualism and the Ethics of Reading by JENNIFER R. RATERMAN Dissertation Directors: Rebecca Walkowitz David Kurnick In nineteenth-century Europe, the nation emerged as the dominant organizing structure for cultural community. Languages became national languages and prominent intellectuals began to understand translation as a nationalist enterprise. But novelists increasingly used translation in another way: as a means to invite readers into potential group affiliation beyond national borders. The legacy of this challenge to national identification is the structural transformation of the novel’s address to its audience. My dissertation locates this transformation in the works of four major novelists who begin their careers as critics and translators but turn to narrative as the mode best suited to their examination of political and ethical sociality. I move from Thomas Carlyle’s fictional translation and Germaine de Staël’s Romantic-era theories of national character to George Eliot’s narratives of cosmopolitan sympathy and Virginia Woolf’s interrogation of the communicative potential of private or, as she calls them, “little” languages. In each case, I reveal how translation is central to the writer’s specifically narrative intervention in ii their readers’ conception of community, and I demonstrate that the novel’s turn to translation radically reorients the genre. Finally, I show that the novel’s investment in a newly sensitive reader anticipates the concerns of later translation theory, which also hinges on the capacity of its audience to be changed through encounters with unfamiliar words and stories. iii Acknowledgements I would like to thank my dissertation directors, Rebecca Walkowitz and David Kurnick, for taking on a comp lit dissertation and for being so generous with their guidance and encouragement as I found my way towards an argument. I am grateful to Rebecca for sparking my interest in translation and then making me believe my ideas were worth pursuing and even publishing. I thank David for all those clarifying and motivating discussions of my drafts and for pushing me to make the more ambitious claim, no matter how nervous I might be about it. Both have helped me tremendously to grow as a thinker, writer, and speaker. I thank Richard Serrano for his unfailing support, his confidence in my French language skills, and especially for his willingness to revisit so many long nineteenth-century French novels on my behalf back in 2010. I am grateful to Nicholas Dames for generously agreeing to read this work and participate at the defense. I thank Elin Diamond for bringing me to Rutgers and for believing so fiercely and warmly in my potential as a scholar. Her help navigating my graduate career has been invaluable. I would also not be where I am without Kenyon professors Sarah Heidt, Mortimer Guiney, and Raji Vallury, who showed me how exciting scholarship can be and inspired me to continue mine. My friends and family have made it possible for me to finish this long and winding degree. I thank Sarah Rodgers, my oldest friend, for being the best company I could ask for even in the hardest times. I thank Debapriya Sarkar, for her kindness, humor, and timely reminders that everything takes as long as it needs to. I thank my parents, for giving me wheels and understanding why I needed to be so far away, and my sisters, Sarah and Maggie, for loving me even when I get weird and bossy. And I thank Michael Friesenhahn, for everything he has done to keep me going—in short, for the pangolin, which I will not ever delete. iv Table of Contents Abstract ............................................................................................................................... ii Acknowledgements ............................................................................................................ iv Introduction ......................................................................................................................... 1 Translation as Foreign Experience in Thomas Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus ........................ 19 I. Foreignizing translation and the Bildungsroman ............................................... 24 II. Carlyle’s German criticism: from translator of fiction to fictional translator .... 32 III. The risks and rewards of foreign influence........................................................ 39 IV. Teufelsdröckh’s elusive biography .................................................................... 46 V. The Editor’s elusive translation ......................................................................... 51 Translating with Enthusiasm in Germaine de Staël’s Corinne, ou l’Italie ....................... 63 I. National character and European literatures ...................................................... 64 II. Corinne’s charming self-translation ................................................................... 73 III. Italian enthusiasm and communal improvisation .............................................. 85 IV. French as a language of translation .................................................................... 95 V. The promises and failures of enthusiasm ......................................................... 101 VI. Enthusiasm and teleopoiesis ............................................................................ 120 Translation and the Transfer of Impressions in George Eliot’s Late Fiction ................. 123 I. The “faithful traditions” of the translator ......................................................... 131 II. Narrator translation in Eliot’s epigraphs .......................................................... 135 III. Translation as temporal layering ...................................................................... 149 IV. Blindness and “self-betrayal” in Theophrastus’ autobiography ...................... 152 V. Fiction and the “non falsi errori” ..................................................................... 158 VI. From “screeching” consciousness to “communities of feeling” ...................... 161 Translation and Collaborative Reading in Virginia Woolf’s Novels and Essays ........... 167 I. Common reading .............................................................................................. 175 II. Outsider reading ............................................................................................... 182 III. Attachment ....................................................................................................... 192 IV. Little languages ................................................................................................ 207 V. Severed parts .................................................................................................... 216 Bibliography ................................................................................................................... 221 v 1 Introduction This dissertation examines works by four novelist-translators in order to make a larger argument about the shared history of the novel and translation theory. That argument relies on a series of four claims: first, the novel, even the monolingual novel, has been shaped by its use of multiple languages; second, novelists have used multilingualism and translation in an effort to reconceive of their audience as the pluralized subject of a collective, ongoing cultural development; third, these efforts brought about a structural transformation of the novel’s address to its audience; and fourth, the novel’s investment in a newly sensitive reader anticipates the concerns of contemporary translation theory, which also hinges on the capacity of its audience to be changed through encounters with unfamiliar words and stories. My argument, in both its historical and conceptual dimensions, points back to the literature and culture of Germany at the turn of the nineteenth century. A brief overview of some important intellectual trends of that period will illuminate the stakes of my own intervention. Inspired by the landmark works of Voss, who translated Homer, and A.W. Schlegel, who translated Shakespeare, German thinkers in this period began to understand translation as central to the movement to strengthen and define Germany’s emerging national literature. The embrace of translation as a particularly German enterprise was a deliberate rejection of the domesticating practices of French translations, known as “les belles infidèles.” Antoine Berman opens his history of German romantic translation theory with a list of quotes from Leibniz, Goethe, Schlegel, Novalis, Schleiermacher, and Humboldt, all articulating a fundamental connection between the practice of translation and German cultural identity; Berman concludes that translation 2 was an “acte générateur d’identité” [“activity that has generated an identiy”] and an “auto-affirmation de la langue allemande” [self-affirmation of the