INTERDISCIPLINARY JOURNAL OF DECADENCE STUDIES Volume 3, Issue 2, December 2020 Decadence and Translation ISSN: 2515-0073 Date of Publication: 21 December 2020 DOI: 10.25602/GOLD.v.v3i2.1462.g1575 volupte.gold.ac.uk This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution- ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Volume 3, Issue 2, December 2020 Decadence and Translation Preface by the Editor-in-Chief Jane Desmarais i The View from Strasbourg: Translational Readings of Decadence by the Guest Editors Matthew Creasy and Stefano Evangelista ii CRITICAL The Spirit and the Letter: Medico-Literary Uses of Translation (Lombroso and Nordau) Bertrand Marquer 1 Is there such thing as a ‘Decadent Translator’?: The case of Georges Hérelle (1848–1935) Guy Ducrey 11 Proust’s Translations of Ruskin: Generative Degeneration Emily Eells 28 Le ‘modern style’: un intraduisible dans les arts décoratifs Sophie Basch 46 L’Art Nouveau: Babel du bibelot ou espéranto décoratif? Cyril Barde 64 On Translating Verlaine’s Prose Richard Hibbitt 77 CREATIVE From Verlaine Derek Mahon 94 Stéphane Mallarmé, ‘Monologue of a Faun’: A New Translation Peter Manson 102 Auguste de Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, ‘Vox Populi’ (1880): A New, Annotated Translation Matthew Creasy and Jennifer Higgins 107 BADS ESSAY PRIZE WINNERS 2020 The Ecology of Suffering: Thinking with the Elements in Decadent Literature Joanna Cresswell 112 ‘Le Freak, c’est Chic’: Decadence and Disco William Rees 126 REVIEWS Michèle Mendelssohn, Making Oscar Wilde (Oxford University Press, 2018) & Matthew Sturgis, Oscar: A Life (Head of Zeus Ltd, 2018) Richard Haslam 143 Jeremy Coleman, Richard Wagner in Paris: Translation, Identity, Modernity (The Boydell Press, 2019) Michael Craske 150 Arthur Symons, Spiritual Adventures, ed. by Nicholas Freeman (MHRA, 2017) Lindsay Wilhelm 156 Walter Pater, The Collected Works of Walter Pater, Vol. IV: Gaston de Latour, ed. by Gerald Monsman (Oxford University Press, 2019) Catherine Maxwell 162 LETTER TO THE EDITORS Salomé Doesn’t Dance David Weir 167 Notes on Contributors 169 Preface As this merciless and traumatizing year draws to a close, I am pleased to welcome Volupté readers, new and old, to this bi-lingual issue on translation. I leave it to our Guest Editors, Matthew Creasy and Stefano Evangelista, to introduce the contributions and affirm the importance of decadence for translation studies, but I would like to acknowledge the work of their Decadence and Translation Network and the series of events in Oxford, London, Strasbourg, Glasgow, and Paris from 2018 to 2020 that brought translators, publishers, poets, curators, and academics together in convivial surroundings to share ideas about the way in which the concept and the practice of translation sit at the heart of British and French decadent literature. The Network events had so many highlights it is difficult to choose one that stands out, but the gathering of scholars in Strasbourg in June 2019 under the hospitable wing of Guy Ducrey is surely one of them. The Network has had considerable impact, inspiring new projects, partnerships, collaborations, and friendships, and it has provided a fruitful space for new thinking about the translational, transnational, and transcultural nature of decadence. It is my fervent hope that despite the petty- minded and destructive Brexit impulse international collaboration at individual and institutional levels continues to flourish and grow. We travel back and forth across the Channel in this issue, but our BADS Essay Prizewinners take us to new places, including the watery byways of Bruges and Venice at the fin de siècle and to the glittery disco dancefloors of New York in the 1970s. We received a good number of high-calibre essay submissions this year and we loved them all, but our published winners are Joanna Cresswell for her essay on ‘The Ecology of Suffering: Thinking with the Elements in Decadent Literature’ and William Rees for ‘“Le Freak, c’est Chic”: Decadence and Disco’. Joanna’s essay was praised for the way its ecocritical methodology applied to Rodenbach’s and Mann’s novellas ‘offers fresh ways of considering how decadence operates within them, while at the same time demonstrating their relevance to our contemporary moment’, and William’s comparative cultural study was described as ‘assured’ and ‘impressive’, ‘put[ting] into conversation decadence studies and popular musicology’. Our warm congratulations to them both, and our thanks to our wonderful judge who provided such full and thoughtful feedback on all the submissions. We are proud and delighted to include the work of creative practitioners in our journal and this issue is particularly rich for its new translations and artwork by Matthew Creasy, but it is with tremendous personal sadness that we acknowledge the passing of the great poet, Derek Mahon, who died on 20 October 2020 and whose last work, seven translations of Verlaine’s poems from Romances sans paroles, we publish here. He was characteristically tentative about the task of translating Verlaine, and in a jotted note he raised the issue of untranslatability. ‘I’ve always thought much of Verlaine untranslatable, like trying to rewrite music as language; but by (re-)writing language as “music”, perhaps it can be done. The results can have a fey quality in English, but that’s not inappropriate. I’m unsure if these versions work, but I hope they’re on the right track.’ They are, and we treasure them. Thank you to our Guest Editors, and to Caroline Crépiat for her editorial assistance. Undecadent it may be, but best wishes from the Volupté team for a peaceful and healthful 2021. Jane Desmarais Editor-in-Chief 21 December 2020 VOLUPTÉ: INTERDISCIPLINARY JOURNAL OF DECADENCE STUDIES | i The View from Strasbourg Translational Readings of Decadence by the Guest Editors Matthew Creasy and Stefano Evangelista Glasgow University and Trinity College, Oxford University This special issue of Volupté turns to France at the end of the nineteenth century to consider the ways that artists, writers, and critics associated with decadence probed and strained at the limits imposed by received linguistic and artistic forms through translation. The articles gathered here derive from a broader project to explore decadence and translation, funded by the AHRC during 2018 and 2019. Specifically, contributions relate to an event held at the Collège doctoral européen de Strasbourg within the University of Strasbourg during June 2019.1 The aim of this event was to bring together scholars from the United Kingdom and across Europe in an attempt to establish a comparative understanding of how decadence and translation are approached in different institutions within different countries and in different languages. Translation activity from the nineteenth century was an object of study at this event; it was also a mode of communication for scholars, who came from Belgium, Britain, France, Germany, Norway, and Russia. From the establishment of the Council of Europe and its role as seat for the European Parliament to the intimate philosophical gatherings and discussions around Jacques Derrida that took place there in 2004, Strasbourg has been a place of conversation and debate on questions of language, international relations, and identity.2 Simultaneously, it also has a long history as a place of tensions and disputes along the borderlines between languages and countries. Indeed, the loss of Strasbourg during the Franco-Prussian war was central to that sense of historical and political crisis within France which drove the emergence of modern decadence in the final decades of the nineteenth century. For these reasons, Strasbourg seems an apt point of origin for a collection of readings that draws out the ‘translational’ nature of decadence. Drawing on influential work in translation studies by Lawrence Venuti, Emily Apter, Barbara Cassin, Rebecca L. Walkowitz, and others, this approach posits that the crossings between languages are never simple or invisible. VOLUPTÉ: INTERDISCIPLINARY JOURNAL OF DECADENCE STUDIES | ii Waïl S. Hassan has defined ‘translational literature’ as consisting of ‘texts that straddle two languages, at once foregrounding, performing, and problematizing the act of translation’.3 Contributions to this issue interrogate the translational nature of decadent literature by exploring the consequences of attending to the frictions, overlaps, borrowings, and interconnections between languages, literary texts, and artistic forms in France at the fin de siècle. In so doing, they present French decadence as a transnational space, with several of the essays concentrating specifically on Anglo-French literary relations. This introduction will set out some of the tensions inherent in decadence itself that emerge through such a ‘translational’ understanding, in order to frame the readings and case studies in the articles that follow.4 Consider Anatole Baju’s opening proclamation in the first issue of Le Décadent in April 1886: Se dissimuler l’état de décadence ou nous sommes arrivés serait le comble de l’insenséisme. Religion, mœurs, justice, tout décade, ou plutôt tout subit une transformation inéluctable. La société se désagrège sous l’action corrosive d’une civilisation déliquescente. […] C’est dans la langue surtout que s’en manifestent les premiers symptômes. [To fool ourselves about the state of decadence at which we have arrived would be the height of stupidism. Religion, morals, justice – everything is decading, or rather undergoing an ineluctable transformation.