Translators, Interpreters, Mediators

European Connections 25

Women Writers 1700-1900

von Gillian E Dow

1. Auflage

Translators, Interpreters, Mediators – Dow schnell und portofrei erhältlich bei beck-shop.de DIE FACHBUCHHANDLUNG

Peter Lang Bern 2007

Verlag C.H. Beck im Internet: www.beck.de ISBN 978 3 03911 055 1

Inhaltsverzeichnis: Translators, Interpreters, Mediators – Dow

GILLIAN DOW

Introduction

‘Women having just enough of learning to qualify them to figure over the wash-tub’

In a review of a translation of Stéphanie-Félicité de Genlis’s 1798 publication Les Petits Émigrés, the British critic writes mockingly of the ill-educated British women who undertake translations, seeing them as being qualified only ‘to figure over the wash-tub’.1 He is no less scathing of their male counterparts: these are ‘men fit only to handle a plough tail, or a porter’s knot’. The entire tone of this review of a translation is designed to warn the British reader away from foreign productions, more than to criticize the translators themselves. Translations are shown to be damaging even when rendered into the English tongue, and modified to suit British tastes: it is, says the reviewer of The Young Exiles, ‘one of the most one of the most important duties of reviewers, to check the negligence and licence of translation’, and licentiousness is more to be found in foreign works. The translator, herself, therefore, is shown to have an important role as moral guide for British readers, and should protect them from dangerous foreign texts. By the mid-nineteenth century, these lessons had been absorbed by, or perhaps rather on behalf of, British readers. In his Atlas of the European Novel 1800–1900, Franco Moretti discusses ‘how narrative England becomes an island, repudiating its eighteenth-century fam- iliarity with French books for Victorian autarky’.2 Moretti draws a comparison with the late twentieth-century American film market ‘expecting nothing from abroad; not curious, not interested’ and claims

1 New London Review 2 (1799), July, p.79. The translator of The Young Exiles, or, Correspondes of Some Juvenile Emigrants (London: Printed for J. Wright and H.D. Symonds, 1799) is unknown, explaining, perhaps, the speculation. 2 See Franco Moretti, Atlas of the European Novel 1800–1900 (London: Verso, 1998) p.156.

10 Gillian Dow that the resistance to foreign literatures ‘cannot but have had major effects on British narrative as a whole […] must have impoverished it’.3 The nineteenth-century women writers and translators under discussion in this collection show no such resistance to reading foreign literatures, and using these literatures as inspiration for their own texts: whether or not foreign texts should be translated for the target audiences in their own countries, and if so, how, is quite another matter. As Berry Chevasco argues in an article in this collection on what she terms Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s ‘Cultural Relativism’, the poet was all too aware of the ‘immorality’ that works of French fiction were felt to contain.4 Barrett Browning reads ‘naughty’ books in French, but does not wish them to be read by the British public at large. And she does not translate them herself.5 As Susanne Stark points out in her contribution on ‘Women’ in The Oxford History of Literary Translation in English: Volume 4 1790–1900, research on women translators is hampered by our lack of statistical information about ‘such topics as the proportion of women translators in the totality of translators’.6 Stark uses the information provided in the Nineteenth-Century Short Title Catalogue and takes literary samples from 1830, when 70 per cent of translations were attributed to men, 4 per cent to women, 16 per cent to translators of anonymous sex and 10 per cent anonymous. The figures for 1890 are 75 per cent men, 16 per cent

3 See Moretti, Atlas of the European Novel, p.157. 4 See Berry Chevasco, p.213. 5 The majority of Barret Browning’s translations were, in fact, of classical texts which had already been translated into English. Published posthumously, these texts were in some ways ‘safe’, having achieved a respectable canonization through the work of previous generations, and although the title of Barrett Browning Sonnets from the Portuguese (1850) suggests a translation from a modern language, these poems are of course not translations but original works. For a reading of the sonnets as a work that ‘proposes a translation […] remembers another poem […] echoes, perhaps, the highly literary disposition of the Portuguese nun [in the Portuguese Letters of 1678]’, see ‘An Act of Translation: Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Sonnets from the Portuguese’ in Ana Gabriela Macedo and Margarida Esteves Pereira (eds), Identity and Cultural Translation: Writing across the Borders of Englishness (Bern: Peter Lang, 2006). 6 See ‘3.5 Women’ in The Oxford History of Literary Translation in English: Volume 4, 1790–1900, Peter France and Kenneth Haynes (eds) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), p.125.

Introduction 11 women, 2 per cent uncertain and 7 per cent anonymous. It is clear male translators are in the majority, and that by some considerable margin. Why, then, study the role of women translators at all, since such a study will only ever give us an incomplete picture of translation in any country at any given time? The case studies represented in this collection represent our attempt to define what function translation served for a range of women writers across Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. My own interest in the topic stems from an interest in British women writers of the Romantic period, and the fact that most eminent women writers of this period were conversant with and inspired by works from abroad. As Josephine Grieder points out, almost every prominent female writer in the late eighteenth century, ‘with the exception of Fanny Burney, tried her hand at translation, often as she was pursuing her own work independently’.7 Grieder lists Elizabeth Griffith, Charlotte Lennox, Charlotte Smith, Clara Reeve, Sophia Lee, Susannah Gunning, Helen Maria Williams and Mary Pilkington: she could also have made note of Mary Wollstonecraft, whose translation of Salz- mann’s Moralisches Elementarbuch is examined in Laura Kirkley’s article in this collection, or indeed of the prolific Maria Edgeworth, whose first full-length attempt at publication was a translation of Gen- lis’s Adèle et Théodore.8 Almost all the articles in this volume are the result of research undertaken and presented for the conference ‘Translators, Interpreters, Mediators: Women Writers 1700–1900’, held at Chawton House Library in March 2006. The conference was designed as a socio-historical study of women writers who translated, and with the intention of highlighting

7 See Josephine Grieder, Translations of French Sentimental Prose Fiction in Late Eighteenth-Century England: the History of a Literary Vogue (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1975), p.40. 8 For further details of Edgeworth’s unpublished translation of Adèle et Théodore as a first step in her writing career, see Marilyn Butler, Maria Edgeworth: A Literary Biography (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972) pp.147–9. The translation that beat Edgeworth to publication, by ‘some Ladies, who through misfortunes, too common at the time, are reduced from ease and opulence, to the necessity of applying, to the support of life, those accomplishments which were given them in their youth, for the amusement and embellishment of it’ has recently be reedited: see Adelaide and Theodore, Gillian Dow (ed.) (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2007).

12 Gillian Dow an aspect of the career of many individuals that has been neglected by modern criticism. Of necessity, articles in this volume use inter- disciplinary approaches to both the theory of translation, and to explaining the historical background to the work of the women writer under discussion. Hilary Brown’s article takes care to differentiate the milieu in which the German writer Luise Gottsched was translating from that of her French and English neighbours: unlike an English education, which had long emphasized the importance of French as a key accomplishment for girls, the German curriculum ‘was likely cover religious instruction, reading and writing but not the ancient or modern languages’.9 Gott- sched’s activities appear all the more exceptional in this light, although as Brown’s article takes care to demonstrate, she ‘was anxious not to be labelled a blue-stocking’ and ‘evidently felt more comfortable in her role as a translator or mediator of other people’s work than she did as an author of her own’.10 Eliza Haywood, on the other hand, had no such qualms about female authorship. The two articles on Haywood in this collection are testimony to the increasing interest in this author, and to the comparative neglect of her translations when set against studies of her original publications. In examining Haywood’s translation of Madeleine-Angel- ique de Gomez’s Journées amusantes, Séverine Genieys-Kirk sees a transgressive act: Haywood, Genieys-Kirk tells us, ‘conveys a more radical “feminist” stance than Gomez who wrote under the stylistic constraints of “vraisemblance”, entailing a carefully chosen lexicon that will not shock the chaste ears of the polite French readership’.11 Beatrijs Vanacker sees ‘female appropriation’ of the source text in her examination of Haywood’s translation of le chevalier de Mouhy’s La paysanne parvenue. Through a close reading of The Virtuous Villager, Vanacker demonstrates a ‘female, or rather feminist, quest for auton- omy’ which is more apparent in Haywood’s text than in the original French, and which ‘announces themes which seem to recur in her later work’.12

9 See Hilary Brown, p.24. 10 See ibid., p.28. 11 See Séverine Genieys-Kirk, p.51. 12 See Beatrijs Vanacker, p.68.

Introduction 13

Annie Cointre’s close comparison of two female-authored translations of Garrick and Colman’s Clandestine Marriage enables her to reach conclusions about aims of each work. If it was to transmit Garrick into French culture, neither can be seen to be a complete success: Vasse, Cointre tells us, ‘in spite of her admiration for Garrick […] had a different notion of a lively dialogue on stage’ and ‘Riccoboni’s lofty style dilutes the maids graphic speech’.13 Cointre’s article focuses primarily on how English plays were adapted for a French target audience which had quite a different expectation of what should be performed. Laura Kirkley, in her article on Mary Wollstonecraft’s translation of Christian Gotthilf Salzmann’s Moralisches Elementarbuch considers this work as one part of a larger picture that highlights the influence of European texts and travel on Wollstonecraft’s writings. Her appropriation of the ‘masculine voice’ and the German simplicity of Salz- mann’s narrator enable her to critique her own society: she refuses, Kirkley tells us ‘to copy the original author, opting for an “original spirit”’.14 This ‘original spirit’ is a defining characteristic of much of Wollstonecraft’s own fiction and polemic. By considering her translations as much more than mere hack-work, Kirkley privileges their place in a reading not only of Wollstonecraft’s revolutionary feminism, but of the multiple ‘voices’ she employs in her writings. It is through the lens of the French Revolutionary period, an age in which the émigré novel gained popularity Europe-wide, that Katherine Astbury examines the work of a German continuation of a French novella that the novelist had also translated. Using her close knowledge of Charrière’s Lettres trouvées dans des portefeuilles d’émigrés, a work which she had translated into German, Huber took ‘a framework already created for her by a successful writer’: for Huber, as for many of her female contemporaries, ‘the act of translation was the starting point for her own literary creativity’, a stepping-stone for her to find her own ‘original voice’.15 Anna Seward, Wollstonecraft, Huber and Charrière’s near contemporary, finds her ‘original voice’ in her translations of Horace’s odes.

13 See Annie Cointre, p.78. 14 See Laura Kirkley, p.98. 15 See Katherine Astbury, p.100.

14 Gillian Dow

Seward devoted hours to the study of English poetry, and it is therefore unsurprising, Adeline Johns Putra tells us, that we find Seward ques- tioning ‘whether a masculine education necessarily made men better readers of poetry’. Since Seward paints from nature, rather than copying from books, her lack of a classical education is a positive advantage: she ‘confidently takes up the task of translating poetry because, according to her, she is, as a woman, better at appreciating it and writing it’.16 In contrast to Seward’s determination to privilege her own experiences over her male counterparts, the Spanish translator of Amelia Opie’s novel The Father and the Daughter, whose work is examined in the article by María Jesús Lorenzo Modia and Begoña Lasa Álvarez, respected dominant opinions of woman’s role as cultural mediator, and was operating in a context in which women translators were increasingly represented through publication. Juana Barrera adhered to the dominant view of what was considered ‘suitable’ material: ‘religious texts, medical and hygien- ist works, and those for entertainment, especially sentimental novels’.17 Questions of female education and female genius are at the centre of Mary Orr’s article on Clémentine Cuvier’s translation of Barbara Hofland’s The Daughter of a Genius, a Tale for Youth. Cuvier was a Lutheran, and educated at home, thus escaping the limiting Catholic convent education. And as Orr points out, Cuvier had ‘the further advantage of a father who saw no gender distinctions in the education of his children, and no separation between domestic, family discussions and public, scientific, work and debate’.18 Her ‘career’ as assistant to her scientist father, Georges Cuvier, was remarkable, but, as Orr points out, ‘Clémentine “only” left a faithful translation of one story by a rather second-rate, early nineteeth-century woman children’s writer’.19 It was by translating that Cuvier left a permanent record her own female genius, and a way to express it, albeit indirectly. In her article on the Turkish novelist Fatma Aliye’s cultural negotiation through translation, Nagihan Halilolu examines Aliye’s treat- ment of women’s rights through her translation of Eugène Sue’s Orgeuil and alongside two of her novels. Like many of the writers in this

16 See Adeline Johns Putra, p.115. 17 See María Jesús Lorenzo Modia and Begoña Lasa Álvarez, p.133. 18 See Mary Orr, p.153. 19 See ibid., p.157.

Introduction 15 collection, Aliye uses themes in a foreign text to inspire her own fiction: as Halilolu points out, ‘Orgeuil and Aliye’s two novels have heroines who are unjustly treated by society and both writers are equally con- cerned with women’s emancipation and the way patriarchal society poses a threat to it’.20 Halilolu stresses the one-way nature of the act of translation when she points out that only two publications by this woman, the first female Muslim novelist, have been translated into a European language, French. In her article on Anna Bronwell Jameson, Christa Zeller Thomas shows how, in her Winter Studies and Summer Rambles, Jameson takes inspiration from her knowledge of German literature to inform her own prose. As Zeller Thomas succinctly puts it ‘no disappearing into some- one else’s voice for her – by using bits and pieces from different texts, all entirely according to her own choice, taste and needs, the material collectively becomes hers’.21 Jameson’s use of German texts, unlike Aliye’s use of French texts, is cultural appropriation rather than cultural negotiation. Only one North American writer is represented in this collection: the prolific Margaret Fuller. In her article on Fuller, Elisabeth Lenckos shows how Fuller made her name ‘by promoting male German talent’, but that she went on to privilege ‘the idea of women connecting, through words and letters’.22 Lenckos persuasively speculates that Fuller’s knowledge of Bettina von Arnim’s Die Günderode informs her feminist treatise Woman in the Nineteenth Century. Fuller’s admiration of both Goethe and Bettina von Armin, and the ways in which Fuller mediated German literature for an American audience can be seen as cultural transfer. It has already been noted in this introduction that Berry Chevasco’s study of what she calls Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s cultural relativism shows the English author’s admiration of French authors such as Balzac and Eugène Sue, even as she desired that these works should not be in the hands of the general public. Natalia Macfarren, on the other hand, was involved in quite a different project: that of making German operas accessible to English-speaking fans, without forcing these German

20 See Nagihan Halilolu, p.173. 21 See Christa Zeller Thomas, p.187. 22 See Elisabeth Lenckos, p.203.

16 Gillian Dow

‘texts’ into Italian, the operatic language par-excellence. As Pierre Degott points out, through a careful examination of reviews of Mac- farren’s translations, far from receiving criticism, she was universally lauded for this enterprise. Finally, Jenny Higgins’s article shows that in translating French poetry, both Anne Gilchrist and Alma Strettell show a striking originality in approach. As Higgins argues:

to describe the translations by Gilchrist and Stretell in terms of compromise or substitution would be to undervalue their innovative significance and to overlook their place in the developing relationship between English and French poetry. 23

In many ways, each of the writers discussed in the articles below can be seen to be breaking new ground. In an attempt to provide snapshots of translation activities Europe- wide, and across a broad time period, comprehensive coverage has been sacrificed to in-depth examinations of specific authors and texts. A discussion of all of Europe has, unfortunately, been impossible, and there is no mention in these pages of countries such as the Netherlands, where by the close of the nineteenth century, Dutch women writers had long been looking abroad for inspiration in their own texts.24 Moreover, many notable women translators from countries well-represented within these pages are not discussed in the collection. Anne Lefèvre, better known as Madame Dacier, celebrated translator of Homer, was well known outside her native France. When Ozell, Broome and Oldisworth published their translation of Homer’s Illiad in 1712, it was with homage to Dacier’s early work: ‘in her late Translation of Homer’s Iliad, we may truly say,

23 See Jenny Higgins, pp.239-40. 24 For a discussion of the situation in the Netherlands, including discussion of several notable Dutch women translators, see ‘I Have Heard About You’: Foreign Women’s Writing Crossing the Dutch Border ed. by Suzan van Dijk, Petra Broomans, Janet F. van de Meulen and Pim van Oostrum (Uitgeverij Verloren, Hilversum). In her foreword, Suzan van Dijk points out that it was rare ‘that the work of a Dutch woman writer exerted any influence abroad’ (p.18). The exception, of course, was Belle van Zuylen, better known under the name she took after marriage, Isabelle de Charrière, who published from Switzerland in French.

Introduction 17 she has out-done herself’.25 Also absent is Dacier’s counterpart, the formidably learned Elizabeth Carter, prominent Bluestocking, whose translation of Epictetus was unsurpassed well into the twentieth century.26 Nor is there mention of Isabelle de Montolieu, so well-known for her translations in Europe in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries that on the frontispiece of her translation La Famille Elliot, Montolieu’s name appeared in print double the size of that used for the original English author, Jane Austen.27 Another admirer of English literature, the German Benedikte Naubert, is absent from the discussion below. The translator of around fourteen English novels, including works by Ann Howells and Susannah Gunning, Naubert identified with the female writer in England.28 Work on all of these women translators has been published in other collections or in monographs, and therefore has been omitted here. The publication of extensive editorial and critical commentary about the English poet, novelist, and translator Charlotte Smith in recent years may, on the surface, seem to be a good reason for not including a discussion of her translations here: Smith has been fully reclaimed for the British Romanticism, and even her translations of French texts have recently been reedited.29 This privileged position in the late eighteenth- century canon, has, however, been hard won. As late as 1931, George Saintsbury, eminent Victorian francophile, wrote an introduction to a

25 See The Iliad of Homer translated from the Greek into Blank Verse by Mr Ozell, Mr Broom and Mr Oldisworth, to which is added, A Preface, the Life of Homer, and Notes by Madame Dacier (London: printed for Bernard Lintott, 1714), n.p. 26 See Carolyn D. Williams, ‘Poetry, Puddings and Epictetus: The Consistency of Elizabeth Carter’, pp.3–24, Alvaro Ribeiro and James G. Basker (eds), Tradition in Transistion: Women Writers, Marginal Texts, and the Eighteenth-Century Canon. 27 La Famille Elliot (1821) is a translation of Austen’s posthumously published Persuasion (1817). For a full discussion of early French translations of Austen’s fiction, as a discussion of Montolieu’s role in the cultural assimilation of the English novelist, see Valérie Cossy, Jane Austen in Switzerland: A Study of the Early French Translations (Geneva: Slatkine Editions, 2006). 28 See Hilary Brown, Benedikte Naubert (1756–1819) and her Relations to English Culture (London: Maney Publishing, 2005). 29 See The Works of Charlotte Smith, gen. ed. Stuart Curran, vol.I, Manon l’Escaut or The Fatal Attachment, The Romance of Real Life, Michael Gamer (ed.) (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2005). The notes to this edition include instances where Smith dramatically altered Prévost’s prose.

18 Gillian Dow new translation of the 1731 edition of Prévost’s Manon Lescaut, by a woman translator Helen Waddell. His comments on previous translations are worth quoting at length, inasmuch as they are revealing about the place Smith’s translation of Manon has in the intellectual history of the reception of Prévost in Britain:

The virtuous but sometimes rather pragmatical literary activity of modern times has, as one might expect, busied itself with Prévost as with others; and one result of this is the discovery of a great deal more translation certainly, and imitation possibly, in English than had been suspected. Manon herself, indeed, – though translated more than once and on one of these occasions by such a more than nobody as Charlotte Smith – exercised little or no influence.30

Repellent though we may find George Saintsbury’s dismissal of Smith as ‘more than nobody’, there are some echoes with the eighteenth- century reviewer I quoted at the beginning of this introduction lamenting the prominence of ‘women having just enough of learning to qualify them to figure over the wash-tub’ in the production of translations. Saintsbury was, however, partially correct when he claimed that pre- twentieth century translations of Manon Lescaut exercised ‘little or no’ influence on British literature. Smith’s own translation – which was withdrawn almost immediately after publication, and of which only one copy now exists – cannot be said to have had a far-reaching impact on the British reception of Manon Lescaut, preceded as it was by two alternative translations, and followed by a nineteenth-century translation that had a lasting popularity with the reading public. In the context of the articles below, what must interest us is the effect that translating Prévost’s prose had on Smith. Prior to the translation of Manon, she was a poet. Through wrestling with the plight of Manon, and in turning Prévost’s text into a feminocentric novel for British readers, Smith taught herself the craft which was to enable her to make a living as one of the leading British novelists of the late eighteenth century. The translators and mediators in this volume did not all, like Charlotte Smith, go on to careers as novelists or poets who published original works under their own names. Indeed, it is apparent from the

30 See The History of the Chevalier des Grieux and of Manon Lescaut, translated from the original text of 1731 by Helen Waddell. With an introduction by George Saintsbury (London: Constable and Co, 1931), p.ix.

Introduction 19 articles in this collection that the women translators discussed within come to their projects from varied backgrounds and with different agendas, and that they have quite different positions in the literary histories of their respective countries of origin. On the surface, little links the German Luise Gottsched, for whom, as Brown argues, translation offered a ‘safe’ way to participate in the cultural life of eighteenth- century Germany to even her British near-contemporary Eliza Haywood, an amatory novelist who addressed her works primarily to a female audience.31 Fatma Aliye’s established position at the centre of an elite Turkish family enables her to offer a commentary on the position of women in her contemporary society, and is quite different to Anna Brownwell Jameson’s extreme isolation and estrangement as she translates Eckermann’s Gespräche mit Goethe in the harsh Canadian environment. In the case of Mary Wollstonecraft, her work as radical polemicist and novelist has eclipsed the importance of her translations; as Orr points out, both Barbara Hofland, the author of the source-text she examines in her article, and Clémentine Cuvier, its French translator ‘have been written out of the plot of female genius by cultural and feminist critics alike’.32 The work of Natalia Macfarren, seems, Degott tells us, outdated today, even though her role in the development of Opera in English is irrefutable.33 Anna Seward unapologetically dared to ‘translate’ Horace, despite not reading Latin, whereas Juana Barrera, the Spanish translator discussed in the article by María Jesús Lorenzo Modia and Begoña Lasa Álvarez, had the text of Amelia Opie’s The Father and the Daughter filtered through the work of a French translator, Louise Marguerite Jeanne Madeleine Brayer de Saint-Léon, since Spanish translators of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries rarely had any command of the English language. Marie Jeanne Riccoboni and the Baronne de Vasse quite literally put their work on the stage, albeit anonymously, when they adapted the work of Garrick and Colman to suit the taste of their French audience. Over a century later, Alma Strettell need not resort to anonymity on publication, although, as Higgins points out in her article, Strettell ‘makes the modest claims for

31 See Ros Ballaster, Seductive Forms: Women’s Amatory Fiction from 1684 to 1740 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), p.158. 32 See Mary Orr, p.146. 33 See Pierre Degott, p.235.

20 Gillian Dow her translations common to most of her prefaces’.34 Therese Huber adapted and continued the work of Isabelle de Charrière, an author she knew well, and corresponded with, and in her article, Astbury shows that permission to mediate the Lettres trouvées dans des portefeuilles d’ém- igrés was asked for, and granted, albeit with some slight reluctance.35 Margaret Fuller, on the other hand, never met the leading exponents of the German Romantic Movement whose work she championed and made available to an English-speaking readership in the United States. What does link the diverse writers discussed in this collection is an intellectual curiosity and a feminized cosmopolitanism, that is to say, a refusal to be confined within national boundaries when it comes to their own creativity. The practice of translating, interpreting and mediating other worlds for monolingual readers has long been an activity that women writers held dear. In this age of increased monolingualism – in the Anglo-American world, at any rate – the careers of the women discussed below can only inspire.

34 See Jenny Higgins, p.245. 35 See Katherine Astbury, p.101.