Victorian Literature and Translation

by

Annmarie Drury

• LAST MODIFIED: 22 November 2024
• DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199799558-0222

Introduction

Translating done in the Victorian era, as well as the later translation of Victorian literature out of English, has remarkable cultural, historical and theoretical significance. Until the early 2000s, scholarly thought about Victorian translation often focused on the debate in the 1850s between Matthew Arnold and Francis Newman (which took place in prefaces and lectures) about the best meter for translating Homer or on Edward FitzGerald’s widely read Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, which FitzGerald published in 1859 and repeatedly revised. Since the first decade of the 21st century, however, Victorianist scholarship has benefited from generative new approaches to understanding translation in the era. While this scholarship addresses the Arnold–Newman debates and FitzGerald, it reaches beyond those subjects. It is characterized by dynamic interplay between theoretical understandings of translation and literary-historical scholarship on translation practices, including the circulation of translations. To gain insight into Victorian literature and translation, it helps to identify spheres of inquiry which, while intrinsically related, are also distinct. One can think about Victorian literature and translation by asking what translations into English were made in the era, by whom, and how, and what their effects were in Victorian Britain—cultural and linguistic consequences, that is, or effects upon translation practice. One can ask about the traveling of texts—how did literature move, and why? What Victorian literature was translated into other languages during the era or, on a longer timeline, after the nineteenth century? One can ask how Victorian translation practices and notions of translation contributed to later understandings of what translation may be. From a similarly historical perspective, one might ask how understandings of language, and how practices of language learning, shaped translation in the Victorian era and later. One can investigate contemporary theories of translation and experiment with how bringing those to the Victorian context illuminates dimensions of translation practice, or one can ask how dimensions of the 19th-century translation experience might contribute a new insight to contemporary theory. The link between Victorian translation and Victorian imperialism, inextricably involved in many of the preceding questions, also comprises a subject in its own right. Inquiring into the link between translating and the cultural politics of imperialism illuminates issues of power pertinent to translation more broadly, concerning such matters as the relation between more and less dominant languages and the publishing market for world literature.

General Overviews

Addressing the myriad dimensions of literary translation while establishing a grounding in the Victorian era is a tall order, and overviews of Victorian literature and translation necessarily remain partial. It is a productive partiality, however. France and Haynes 2006 gives an unusually encompassing account of translation in the long nineteenth century. Reynolds 2011 and Venuti 1995 (revised in 2008 and 2017) think about translation across a long historical line that includes the Victorian era while developing claims about the nature and significance of literary translation. For Reynolds, discussion of metaphor—both the metaphors that we use to think about translation and the provocative work of translating metaphor—opens into an exploration of creativity in poetic translation. Venuti 1995 makes an early, influential argument for understanding translating as central to literary creation and against fictions of transparency between source text and translation.

• France, Peter, and Kenneth Haynes, eds. The Oxford History of Literary Translation in English. Vol. 4, (1790–1900). Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.

  A historical overview describing the readerships and literary markets of Britain and the United States and focusing on various categories of translator (e.g., “Professionals,” “Women,” and “Writers”) and of text. The volume’s cataloguing approach may be most helpful when it comes to languages (and language families), where it offers essays on translation from each of more than a dozen.

• Reynolds, Matthew. The Poetry of Translation: From Chaucer and Petrarch to Homer and Logue. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011.

  DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199605712.001.0001

  Considers translation from a series of vantages (as “interpretation” and as “friendship,” for example) while ranging in period from ancient Greece into the twentieth century. In the Victorian era, this book includes good discussions of Algernon Swinburne, Alfred Tennyson, Robert Browning, and Edward FitzGerald as poet-translators. An opening section on translation in relation to metaphor forms a basis for the book’s theoretical work.

• Venuti, Lawrence. The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation. London: Routledge, 1995.

  Revised in editions of 2008 and 2017, this volume covers the historical era from the seventeenth century to the present. It elaborates Venuti’s influential understanding of “domesticating” and “foreignizing” approaches to translation.