The Oxford History of Literary Translation in English, Volume 4, 1790-1900, edited by Peter France and Kenneth Haynes

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Oxford History of Literary Translation in English, Volume 4, 1790–1900 Simon Dentith (bio) The Oxford History of Literary Translation in English, Volume 4, 1790–1900, edited by Peter France and Kenneth Haynes; pp. xvi + 595. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2006, £93.00, $199.00. At the conclusion of one of the many essays in this volume, Susan Bassnett and Peter France offer this surprising assertion: “in the nineteenth century,” they write, “translation played a vital role in the establishment of new national cultures in many countries; in English-speaking culture, by contrast, despite the vast number of works translated from all over the world and the interesting debates about how to translate, the role of translation was relatively marginal” (57). The surprise comes not only from the potentially self-defeating nature of this admission in a six-hundred-page volume devoted to the history of translation but also from an intuitive sense that it was precisely the nineteenth century’s insatiable demand for print that generated so many major feats of translation to sit alongside other monuments of Victorian scholarship in impressive multiple volumes on the library shelves. But a more benign notion of the republic of letters still has a persistent place in Victorian culture and a presence in the volume also, implicitly informing the many essays that tell the story of successful moments of intercultural translation, however hedged about they may have been by misunderstanding, bowdlerisation, or religious and national prejudice. The canonical stories are well told here: Carlyle famously advised his compatriots to “Close thy Byron; open thy Goethe,” and various essays in the Oxford History duly tell you with what translations and editions they might have done so, along with the many versions of Dante, the blossoming available translations of the Russian novelists at the end of the century, and the pace at which the French novelists and poets became available in English. All of these instances indicate the ways that translation can potentially initiate a genuinely dialogic relationship between languages and therefore cultures. Whatever the impossibilities of translation, and however compromised by domesticating practices, it is just as possible (or impossible) to use translation to escape the solipsism of a national culture as it is to use dialogue to escape the solipsism of the self. The forty-one essays in this volume cover a very wide variety of languages, kinds of writing, and periods of literature, and do so from many perspectives, including a useful dose of book history. It’s hard to avoid an element of ad hoc judgment in this situation; translation from the European classical languages is so evidently a different enterprise than translation from the classical languages of the East, or from minority European languages, or from the oral literatures of the past or the present, that wide conclusions become difficult. The volume has some excellent sections on all these cases and notes the widely differing dynamics that govern a translation from, for example, a Latin poet where the translator assumes a whole past history of Englished versions and can assume a readership with a knowledge of the original language, or from a translation from Japanese or the languages of the Indian subcontinent, where neither of these conditions are present and where intercultural relations are infinitely more fraught. The importance of translation to different sections of the population is also recognised at various moments in the volume; any reader of Jonathan Rose’s The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes (2001) will understand the importance of translation to readers who never had the chance to learn languages, perhaps especially not the standard version of their own. But other models of intercultural relations emerge from this volume than the binaries of power and subordination, or indeed from the “domesticating/foreignising” [End Page 511] binary currently prevalent. The curious nature of British popular theatre in the nineteenth century, for example, so heavily dependent upon (usually unacknowledged) translation and adaptation from French models, is well discussed here, and suggests a wholly different relationship between Paris and London than that implied by the scandalised reception of the French novel—though even here the story at the popular...