Late Victorian Ballad Translation
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.
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