Foreign Language in the Travel Writing of Cooper, Melville, and Twain
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TRANSNATIONAL TRANSLATION: FOREIGN LANGUAGE IN THE TRAVEL WRITING OF COOPER, MELVILLE, AND TWAIN A Dissertation Submitted to the Temple University Graduate Board In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY by Kate Huber May 2013 Examining Committee Members: Miles Orvell, Advisory Chair, English and American Studies James Salazar, English Michael Kaufmann, English David Waldstreicher, External Member, History, Temple University © Copyright by Kate Huber 2013 All Rights Reserved ii ABSTRACT This dissertation examines the representation of foreign language in nineteenth- century American travel writing, analyzing how authors conceptualize the act of translation as they address the multilingualism encountered abroad. The three major figures in this study—James Fenimore Cooper, Herman Melville, and Mark Twain—all use moments of cross-cultural contact and transference to theorize the permeability of the language barrier, seeking a mean between the oversimplification of the translator’s task and a capitulation to the utter incomprehensibility of the Other. These moments of translation contribute to a complex interplay of not only linguistic but also cultural and economic exchange. Charting the changes in American travel to both the “civilized” world of Europe and the “savage” lands of the Southern and Eastern hemispheres, this project will examine the attitudes of cosmopolitanism and colonialism that distinguished Western from non-Western travel at the beginning of the century and then demonstrate how the once distinct representations of European and non-European languages converge by the century’s end, with the result that all kinds of linguistic difference are viewed as either too easily translatable or utterly incomprehensible. Integrating the histories of cosmopolitanism and imperialism, my study of the representation of foreign language in travel writing demonstrates that both the compulsion to translate and a capitulation to incomprehensibility prove equally antagonistic to cultural difference. By mapping the changing conventions of translation through the representative narratives of three canonical figures, Transnational Translation traces a shift in American attitudes toward the foreign as the cosmopolitanism of Cooper and Melville transforms into Twain’s attitude of both cultural and linguistic nationalism. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ABSTRACT ....................................................................................................................... iii INTRODUCTION .............................................................................................................. v CHAPTER 1. JAMES FENIMORE COOPER’S LINGUISTIC COSMOPOLITANISM ................................................................... 1 2. EXPANSIONISM AND EXCHANGE IN COOPER’S LATER WORKS ......................................................................... 60 3. FRAUGHT TRANSLATION IN MELVILLE’S COLONIAL ENCOUNTERS ............................................... 114 4. FROM TRAVEL TO TOURISM: THE SHIFT AT MID-CENTURY ..................................................................... 182 5. MARK TWAIN, MASS TOURISM, AND AMERICAN NATIONALISM ................................................................. 240 CONCLUSION: THE NEW IMPERIALISTIC COSMOPOLITE ............................................................ 297 REFERENCES CITED ................................................................................................... 319 iv INTRODUCTION Throughout the nineteenth century, the number of Americans traveling to all parts of the world increased dramatically, and many of those travelers chose to write about their encounters with foreign lands, peoples, and cultures. Regular transatlantic service began in 1818, and the growing numbers sailing to Europe included businessmen, clergy, students, scholars, writers, and, of course, the wealthy classes who could afford a European Grand Tour (Dulles 26-30). At the same time, as the United States’ military and commercial interests expanded, the number of American whalers, merchants, and scientists visiting the Pacific and other “exotic” places was also increasing.1 While many American writers struggled to compete economically with the low cost of books pirated from England, travel writers could provide something unavailable from cheap British reprints—an American perspective on foreign locales (Melton 22). These travel writings included not only traditional, non-fictional accounts, but also novels dramatizing the experience of an American abroad, and all levels of fictionalized experience in-between. Indeed, as one scholar of the genre concludes, “there is no neat division between autobiographical and fictional narratives of travel” (Youngs 4).2 But however truthful, the various forms of travel literature share a common interest in how Americans perceive the foreign, and how they reconcile their own cultural identity with the incommensurable differences encountered abroad. 1 The description of this non-European travel is often classified as a “sea narrative.” Hester Blum’s The View from the Masthead provides an excellent introduction to the significance of the genre. See also Robert Foulke’s The Sea Voyage Narrative. 2 Accordingly, I will follow Justin D. Edwards, who takes the broadest possible definition of travel literature, including three categories that define a spectrum of fact and fiction: “conventional travel narrative,” “hybrid travel text,” and “[t]ouristic fiction” (13). v This project examines the representation, or, in other words, the treatment, of foreign language in texts set abroad, with emphasis on the works of James Fenimore Cooper, Herman Melville, and Mark Twain. An author need not be consciously fixated on the issue of language for evidence of his or her attitude toward linguistic difference to be evident in the text—although many of the authors I examine will prove to be quite interested in language. Encountering linguistic difference is a pervasive experience shared by travelers of all kinds. Whether facing an entirely foreign language, or only variations in accent or dialect, travel writers must decide both whether and how to represent this difference in their accounts. Moreover, most of the authors examined here engage in either some kind of translation or representation of translation. Because this transference, literally this “carrying across,” of meaning from one sign system to another requires that the translator negotiate not only linguistic but also cultural difference, both the practice and the concept of translation are concrete and yet particularly fertile subjects for examining an author’s ideas about the nature of language, the negotiation of difference, and the desirability, or even the feasibility, of cross-cultural exchange. The necessary decision to either translate the foreign into more familiar terms or to leave both foreign language and culture untranslated presents a new avenue for examining how nineteenth-century American authors viewed cultural difference and how they positioned their own nation in the world. Translation, Travel, and Cultural Difference The empirical subject of Transnational Translation is the way travel writers present foreign languages in their texts. Although no previous study has undertaken a comprehensive account of linguistic difference in nineteenth-century literature of travel, vi Lawrence Alan Rosenwald’s examination of how even literature set within the United States must account for a variety of dialects and languages provides a framework for examining the representation of multilingualism abroad. While some works may directly include languages other than standard English, allowing characters to speak just as they would in real life, other works use any number of representational methods to give the impression of multilingualism without relying on the linguistic knowledge of the reader, and still others ignore the existence of other languages entirely and present events as if they were occurring in a monolingual world. Rosenwald’s focus on works set within the United States not only provides a valuable reading of immigrant literatures, but also explores exceptions to the traditional vision of a monolingual America. My focus on American literature set outside of the country raises a complementary set of issues. In addition to clarifying Americans’ changing assessments of multiculturalism more broadly, the readings that compose this study reveal the way traveling Americans conceptualized the foreign and saw themselves in relation to other parts of the globe. This project will pay particular attention to both the act and the concept of translation, examining the many kinds of spatial and cultural transference they involve. While not all representations of multilingualism include an act of translation, either real or implied, many of them do. In his examination of translation in twentieth-century travel narratives, Michael Cronin outlines the varied forms of translation in which a traveler might engage: “meet[ing] fellow speakers of their language from a different country (intralingual), be[ing] able to communicate some ideas in the foreign language (interlingual) but, at other moments, be[ing] completely stymied and have to resort to gestures (intersemiotic)” (Across 4). All of these forms of translation make frequent vii occurrences the nineteenth-century travel literature I will examine. Furthermore, as Lawrence Venuti has shown in The Translator’s Invisibility, the way