European Connections 25 Translators, Interpreters, Mediators 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 dis- cussion 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 ex- ception 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 ex- plaining 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 exam- ination 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 12 work’. 9 See Hilary Brown, p.24. 10 See ibid., p.28. 11 See Séverine Genieys-Kirk, p.51.