A Bookseller's Hobby-Horse, and the Rhetoric of Translation: Anthony Ernst Munnikhuisen and Bernardus Brunius, and the First Dutch Edition of "Tristram Shandy" (1776-1779) (review)

REVIEWS 241 Agnes M. Zwaneveld. A Bookseller's Hobby-Horse, and the Rhetoric of Translation: Anthony Ernst Munnikhuisen and Bernardus Brunius, and the First Dutch Edition of "Tristram Shandy" (1776-1779). Amsterdam and Atlanta: Rodopi, 1996. xii + 237pp. Hfl75; US$50.00. ISBN 905183 -956-1. "Translation Studies" is a relatively new but thriving academic discipline with subdivisions such as applied and pure, theoretical and descriptive translation studies. The latter (the description and comparison of existing translations) have proved particularly fruitful for research. Agnes M. Zwaneveld's book falls within such product-orientated studies. A Bookseller's Hobby-Horse and the Rhetoric of Translation has two parts. The first part, dealing with the publisher A.E. Munnikhuisen and the reception of Sterne in Holland, is mainly of interest to the book-historian, while the second part, on the translator Bernardus Brunius, his theory of translation, classical rhetoric, and the translation of Tristram Shandy, will especially interest the student of translation practice. Zwaneveld relates the comparatively late appreciation of Sterne in Holland to a number of socio-cultural factors, such as a preference for morally edifying literature among the prudish Dutch bourgeois. Munnikhuisen's publication of the first Dutch translation of Tristram Shandy (1776-79), sixteen years after its original appearance, is therefore seen as a daring and risky deed. It did not, however, make the publisher's fortune. The literary curious probably had read it by then, either in the original or in one of the two German translations which appeared between 1763 and 1774. The scarcity of documentation leads Zwaneveld to curious guesswork when she tries to assess the actual readership of Munnikhuisen's Dutch Tristram Shandy. It seems a strange suggestion that Munnikhuisen, "as a newcomer to the booktrade," should have aimed at "the middle and lower classes of merchants, shopkeepers and tradesmen" (p. 71) as potential clients, since earlier Zwaneveld characterized him as "an audacious and artistically ambitious publisher" who published expensive and richly illustrated books (which eventually caused his financial ruin). There is much guesswork in this chapter on Munnikhuisen's career, perhaps inevitably, but the constant use of the speculative phrases "he must have," "he may have," he probably did" becomes irksome in the long run. The second part deals briefly with the life of the translator Bernardus Brunius, who drank himself to death in 1785. Between his enrolment in 1765 at the University of Franeker, where "the foundation may have been laid for a drinking habit" (p. 79), and his emergence as a translator in Amsterdam in 1776, Zwaneveld found no record of him. There is no explanation of his knowledge of English, although here it would have been quite acceptable to have speculated that he spent some time in England. Brunius worked for Munnikhuisen until 1780 when, after the latter' s business went downhill, he switched to another publisher, for whom he translated six Shakespeare plays in a serial edition. In a short Preface (1781) to these six translations, Brunius announced his intention to improve on his predecessor in the series who had used a German translation of Shakespeare as his source-text: "since every language has its own, so 242 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 10:2 to speak characterising expressions," he is resolved "to follow the English as closely as possible" and to shun "the slavish copying" of the German translation ; but he will rely on it for the correctness of his rendering "as to the main issues." From the few rather casual remarks of this Preface, Zwaneveld derives Brunius's general principles of translation (also applicable in her eyes to his translation of Sterne, notwithstanding their having been written later and for a translation of poetry), claiming that they contain "several allusions to aspects of the rhetorical theory of translation" (p. 93). One wonders whether the author is not putting words into Brunius's mouth when she says that he is voicing nothing less here than the classical tenets of linguistic proprietas, and fidelitas ad res and ad verba. The rhetorical theory of translation, going back to Aristotle 's view on the relation between res and verba, was still current, we are told, and adhered to by translators in the eighteenth century...