Charles Brockden Brown, Translator

Abstract

TN HIS LIFETIME Charles Brockden Brown translated one work Ilonly: C. F. de Volney's A View of Soil and Climate of United States. For novelist-editor-critic and, as of I803, political pamphleteer, translation of Volney in I804 seems an odd choice. Although he was America's foremost litterateur, Brown rendered into English no romantic tale in tradition of Chateaubriand's Atala, but the first book to give an organized synthesis of physiographic and geologic regions of United States and of climatology of continent.' The choice for translation seems doubly puzzling when we consider that a London English language edition was already available in America even as Brown labored at its American counterpart. And without engaging in perpetual debate over noblesse oblige of literary translators, one must upon examination of Brown's work concur with a reviewer for Monthly Anthology and Boston Review that Brown omitted notes that did not accord with his own ideas and wholly altered form of one of appendices.2 But while his biographers have viewed Brown's effort as an anomalous, quasi-literary interlude between his novels and his political-historical activities, such easy dismissal of translation may leave neglected a significant aspect of Brown's thought. The Monthly Anthology reviewer had denounced Brown's alterations of Volney as wholly unpardonable, both dishonorable and unjust. Yet a close look at eccentricities of Brown's translation suggests that Volney stimulated Philadelphian both to define American in relation to his nation and continent, and to attempt actuation of territorial expansion which, as of his first political pamphlet, Brown evidently believed would insure national progress. Indeed, special biases Brown reveals in his translation make it quite clear that effort was no perfunctory exercise in a language self-