Helen Maria Williams: the Purpose and Practice of Translation, 1789-1827
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HELEN MARIA WILLIAMS: THE PURPOSE AND PRACTICE OF TRANSLATION, 1789-1827 PAUL HAGUE BA (FIRST CLASS HONS), MA (MERIT) A thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements of the University of Wolverhampton for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy December 2015 The work or any part thereof has not previously been presented in any form to the University or to any other body for the purposes of assessment, publication or for any other purpose (unless otherwise indicated). Save for any express acknowledgements, references and/or bibliographies cited in the work, I confirm that the intellectual content of the work is the result of my own efforts and of no other person. The right of Paul Hague to be identified as author of this work is asserted in accordance with ss. 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. At this date copyright is owned by the author. Signature…………………………………. Date………………………………………. 1 2 Abstract The French Revolution has long been recognised as the crucial turning point in modern European history. The event is often cited as the beginning point for European Romanticism. Helen Maria Williams occupied a unique position at the crucible of events in post- revolutionary Paris. Having visited the capital in 1790 to attend the Fête de la Fédération on the first anniversary of the storming of the Bastille, she was to spend the rest of her life endeavouring to communicate the originating ideals which she had first encountered there. Returning to France in 1791, she was naturalised as French in 1817 and remained in Paris until her death in 1827. Renowned for her poetry and most famously for the extensive body of political reportage contained in the 8 volumes of her Letters from France, Williams was also a translator, an aspect of her corpus which has been largely overlooked in academic research. It is in the collection of translations in which she finds her most Romantic expression. In the translations produced from Paris, Williams experiments with progressive European thought, both philosophically and linguistically, working towards a political and literary universalism influenced by contemporary French culture and by German thought arriving in France from members of the pre-unification states. As a successful salonnière, Williams became acquainted with many of the period’s leading figures, absorbing and reinterpreting spheres of influence in her translations. Literary translations, such as Paul and Virginia and The Leper of the City of Aoste, reside among the more prosaic works such as The Confidential and Political Correspondence of Lewis the Sixteenth to form a body of work which reveals Williams’s idiosyncratic practices and, most readily in the paratextual material of her many prefaces, her ideas as to the purpose of translation. 3 The idea of liminality is fundamental to our understanding of Williams’s life and work. Occupying the mysterious middle-ground, Williams resides in the space between nations, between cultures, languages, literary movements and historical-temporal thresholds. From this position she operates as mediator, not only of French literature, but of socio-political realities. Throughout her time in France she remained convinced of the truth of the originating revolutionist ideals she had first encountered in 1790 and she strived always to mediate and to re-inscribe, indeed to translate the French Revolution of 1789. The translations of Helen Maria Williams serve as the appropriate locus from which to suggest a reconfiguration of her importance in the canon of Romantic women writers and translators. 4 Table of Contents Acknowledgements p. 7 Chapter 1. Romantic Mediator: Helen Maria Williams Found in Translation. p. 9 Chapter 2. Paul and Virginia. p. 44 Chapter 3. Translation, Traduction and the Language of Betrayal: Eighteenth Century European Translation, Theory and Practice. p. 78 Chapter 4. ‘With what different feelings has she made this selection!’: Williams and The Strange Case of the Letters of Louis XVI. p. 118 Chapter 5. Prefaces and Purpose(s): Skopos-Aequivocus and Williams, Revolutionary Theoros. p. 153 Chapter 6. The Leper of the City of Aoste. p. 190 Chapter 7. Revolutionary Memory and Translation of the self: Souvenirs de la Révolution française. p. 219 Chapter 8. Conclusion. p. 235 Bibliography. p. 244 5 6 Acknowledgements My thanks to Cambridge Scholars Publishing for granting permission to publish parts of ‘The Prospect of Translation: Helen Maria Williams and Xavier de Maistre’s Le Lépreux de la cité d’Aoste’ from Foreign Correspondence (Cambridge Scholars, 2015) in chapter 6 here, ‘The Leper of the City of Aoste.’ My thanks to Deborah Kennedy for providing me with copies of some of Williams’s letters and for generous assistance early on in the project. My thanks to Devoney Looser for copies of extracts from The Sentinel or British Miscellany and Review and The British Critic, which were invaluable in the chapter concerning the letters of Louis XVI. A special thank you to my supervisor, Ben Colbert, il miglior fabbro. Thank you to a kind, gentle and generous guide, a man possessed of all of the qualities of a great father. Your belief and support has always been greatly cherished and your scholarship is the mark to which I shall always aspire. Thank you to my second supervisor, Glyn Hambrook, a great mind and a man whose love of languages has always been infectious and inspiring. Your enthusiasm and encouragement sent me to Paris and for that I will always be grateful. Je te remercie infiniment. Vive la France! Thank you to my father for all your love and faith. Thanks most of all for always, always listening. Thank you to my mother for life, live and the gift of literature. Thanks to my wife. Amour pour la vie, merci d’être toujours là. À notre avenir! 7 Thank you to my sister. Meilleure amie qui m’a toujours soutenue. Thank you to Roy and Barbara for your infinite kindness and generosity and for the rent-free office space. Thanks to Kelly, Jon, David, Shannon, Jonny, Madeleine and Penelope for love and laughter outside the library. Thanks to all those in Alcoholics Anonymous without whom nothing is possible. This thesis is dedicated to my children, Evelyn and Alastair, semblables aux rayons du soleil, and to number three whomsoever you will be. 8 Chapter 1 Romantic Mediator: Helen Maria Williams Found in Translation Literature is the gateway through which we travel into hitherto unknown realms of the imagination. We are, however, restricted in our adventures by the borders of our cultural- linguistic horizons. The continuation of our literary voyages across socio-political divides is enabled by the mystery of translation. The Romantic period saw the development of much of the theory of translation which attempted to analyse and to reinvigorate the discourse concerning translational function and purpose. The importance of translation to the intertextualities of European Romanticism at play in the epoch surrounding the French Revolution of 1789 should not be overlooked. As a long-term resident of France with ties to politicians and thinkers from across Europe, Helen Maria Williams was a proponent of translation as a means of circulating a progressive political ideal and of challenging ideological orthodoxies and her work in the genre remains testament to its power. ‘Translation’, asserts Peter Ackroyd, ‘can be a kind of liberation, releasing an older work into the contemporary world and thereby infusing it with new life.’1 The idea, resonating with echoes of Walter Benjamin’s notion of a textual afterlife, speaks directly to the regenerative relationship between texts over time and across cultures. In historicising Helen Maria Williams, the statement offers a broader interpretive nexus. Williams found personal and political liberation following her emigration to France, with translation (both literary and, more broadly, cultural transfer), providing her with the artistic and psychological freedom with which to explore and publish her formulation of the Revolution of 1789. Writing of the Enlightenment as a ‘pan-European movement genuinely striving to create and further discursive relations’, Stefanie Stockhorst argues that in its intention to override 1 Peter Ackroyd, trans., The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer (London: Penguin Books, 2010), p. xix. 9 national and language barriers, ‘guided by cosmopolitan and universalist interests, [the Enlightenment project] inherently possessed a dimension of transfer.’2 The same concerns guided Williams and, as a unified conception, she inherently possessed and mediated cultural transfers throughout her time in France. Stockhorst takes her model of the term cultural transfer from Michel Espagne and Michael Werner’s defintion of information exchange and representation through networks, which, for Stockhorst ‘accurately characterises the situation of intellectual life in the eighteenth century.’3 The idea is that transfer and transformation are stimulated not only by textual and linguistic exchange, but by the dynamic interaction of individuals in interactive socio-cultural milieus. In 2010, as a result of shifting emphasis in Translation Studies and Compratative Literature Manuela Rossini and Michael Toggweiler broadened the concept towards a more holistic understanding of European cultural relationships, characterising their conception of cultural transfer as ‘the global mobility of words, concepts, images, persons, animals, commodities, money, weapons, and other things.’4 Perfectly encompassing aspects of Williams’s