What Books Do You Read? Toru Dutt, A Sheaf Gleaned in French Fields (1876) or Imagining Francophone Intertextual Maps

Abstract

ABSTRACTReaders map the circulation of Francophone texts and transform the intellectual Francophone landscape. Toru Dutt (1856–1877) is a Francophone Bengali reader and translator; her translations of French poems into English, A Sheaf Gleaned in French Fields (1876), constitute a new reservoir of contacts between texts. The unpredictability of the act of reading as a multilingual reader allows for the emergence of new cultural contact zones. Toru Dutt reads French poetry that she will translate into English. Her personal anthology is composed of writers as diverse as J. du Bellay, Du Bartas, F. R. de Chateaubriand, A. de Lamartine, A. de Vigny, V. Hugo, G. de Nerval, A. de Musset, T. Gautier, Leconte de Lisle, C. Baudelaire, and S. Prudhomme. The work also includes lesser-known poets by today's standards. Among those names there is the French poetess Madame Desbordes-Valmore (1830–1871). Analyzing this intimate cartography of reading is a way of following the traces of readings, their travel and contact with other literary cultures. As a reader, traveler, and translator, Toru Dutt constructs imagined encounters between Victor Hugo and Kâlidâsa.