Introduction: Romanticism, Reading, and Translation: The Processes of Literacy

Abstract

The correct translation of the Bible and of classical literature are among the roots of translation theory. With the Bible, faith was at stake: the major question was whether a translation was faithful and accurate, whether it was or wrong. Therefore, the ideal of the good translator as the one gets it right has influenced popular notions about translation. Most English readers rely on translation when reading the scriptures, or Homer, or Virgil, and so they expect to be dealt with adequately, to receive a correct, a true English version, an accurate preservation--or do readers prefer an aesthetically pleasing transformation? Where does accuracy end, where does pleasure begin? In linguistic terminology, a successful translation would ensure that the equivalent of the source language is reproduced in the target language (Nida/Taber, 12). Yet since Romantic writers are fundamentally concerned with the very nature of language, Romantic theories of translation, which constitute the foundation of modern translation theory, presume that translations must provide more than equivalents. Recent approaches have looked upon translation as cultural transfer (Bassnett/Lefevere, Snell-Hornby), cultural adaptation, or acculturation, and thus, the translator is no longer seen as working towards the higher aim of mediating between the divine and the human but as undertaking the secular task of linking two cultures. The centrality of translation to European Romanticism is undisputed. Through their reading and writing, individuals connected across linguistic and national boundaries, in fact, across the centuries, as Keats's sonnet On First Looking into Chapman's Homer illustrates, a poem which stages several acts of translation: a translation from ancient Greek into English, a transposition from Elizabethan English into Keats's linguistic presence, which was still under the influence of classicist ideals, and a transcendence of mundane concerns aiming at a union of poetic minds. Of the six papers presented on the two panels organized by the Wordsworth-Coleridge Association at the MLA in Chicago in December 2007, four (by Frederick Burwick, Michael R. Edson, Michael Macovski, Gillen D'Arcy Wood) testify to the necessity of probing much more deeply into issues of Romantic translation, whereas the other two (by Lee Erickson and myself) map out contexts of Romantic reading. While all of the first four papers share the belief that translation studies must be context-sensitive, they constitute case studies of transfer, adaptation, not just of mere language but also of national tradition, gender roles, the perception of Self and Other. Drawing on Schleiermacher, Stael, Goethe, Carlyle, Austin as well as Novalis, Burwick's paper maps out theories of Romantic translation and proves that the combat between fidelity, aesthetic pleasure, and cultural adaptation is by no means new. He highlights Stael's demand to keep the ambience in a translation, to make the reader aware of the text as translation, an idea that has recently reappeared in Venuti's much-quoted term foreignization (1995). If Stael's position sounds benign and wants to accept the alien into one's own intellectual horizon, to learn from the Other, Macovski's reference to Nietzsche, who likened pre-Romantic translation to conquering, introduced an inimical note and posed the question whether translations were necessarily always friendly acts of intercultural communication. Only in the late 18th century did the autonomy of the foreign source text, the original, come to be recognized. Thus, a translation could be politically and intellectually liberating because it would import new viewpoints. Drawing on Byron's Armenian writings, which include translations and a grammar, Macovski showed how the poet evokes associations with the Turkish oppression of Greece and eventually provides a mirror for a classic British past. …