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  • A Diplomatic Salto Mortale:Translation Trouble in Berne, 1884-1886
  • Eva Hemmungs Wirtén (bio)

When government representatives from Belgium, France, Germany, Great Britain, Haiti, Italy, Liberia, Spain, Switzerland, and Tunisia signed the Berne Convention for the Protection of Literary and Artistic Works on September 9, 1886, they instigated a framework for international copyright relations that remains influential to this day.1 As formative moments go, however, it proved more than a milestone in legal history. Equally important, the convention marked formal acknowledgment that those invested in print culture—be they publishers, authors, or readers—were international by default, and that the texts they published, wrote, and read moved with ease across national and linguistic borders. Granted, all of this was old news. The fact that such movements had entered into a phase where their trajectories from now on required the governance of an international legal regime, however, was new.

At the end of the nineteenth century, the novel had triumphed, printing technology was sophisticated enough to facilitate large-scale piracy, the reading public displayed an appetite for foreign works, and European authors and publishers operated in a market Franco Moretti describes as highly uneven. Crystallized around the two narrative superpowers, Great Britain and France, was a core group of exporting nations and a very large group of importing ones.2 Consequently, as Sam Ricketson and Jane C. Ginsburg put it, there were "considerable gulfs between what may be called the 'producing' nations—that is, those nations, such as the French, that were net exporters of literary and artistic products—and those nations, such as the Scandinavians, which were 'users'—that is, net importers—of these products."3 Against this general backdrop, a small group of Old World diplomats, lawyers, and professors met in Berne during three diplomatic conferences in 1884, 1885, and 1886 with the aim of returning home signatories of the world's first multilateral copyright treaty.4 They had a number of problematic issues to consider, none of which would cause them as much headache as translation.5 That the author's exclusive right of translation, [End Page 88] the author's right to authorize translations of his or her work as well as the right of the translator to his or her translation, warranted the label "la question internationale par excellence"6 is not surprising. Translation made new works out of old. A prerequisite for the continued circulation of texts, it was the primary vehicle by which authors multiplied their works and, even more significant, produced new readers. Yet translation was a double-edged sword, a problem in search of a legal solution. On the one hand, there was the promise of new markets and readers, but, on the other, there was the possibility that unless somehow regulated, the transformation into a new language could result in substandard or even corrupt texts that in extension alienated the author from his or her work.

The purpose of this essay is to revisit these three diplomatic conferences in order to engage further with the producer/user infrastructure and the conflicts translation triggered within that matrix. France and Sweden play an especially important part in this story. As the quotation from Ricketson and Ginsburg above illustrates, these two nations stood on opposite sides of the export/import gap, and they arrived in Berne with two incompatible views concerning the kinds of public interest translation actually served: authors' or readers'? In the following, I consider this native conflict by way of its link with three ubiquitous concerns in copyright as well as book history.

First, there is the ability of translation to call into question the very nature of the work. Translation is one of the first instances of transformative uses of cultural works and their treatment in international copyright, but it is not the last. Discussions on the legal and cultural ramifications of translation more than a century ago could shed light on how we view the instability of digital works and their relationship to authors and readers today.

Second, while authors and their relationship to readers have been and continue to be a primary focus for copyright scholars, translation, a contentious site of authorship and ownership, has not...

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