Translating Women

The Voice of Nature: British Women Translating Botany in the Early Nineteenth Century

The VoiCe of naTure: BriTish Women TranslaTing BoTany in The early nineTeenTh CenTury Alison E. Martin, Martin-Luther-Universität Halle-Wittenberg “ When the Elementary Letters on Botany first presented themselves to me,” noted Thomas Martyn in the preface to his translation of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Lettres élémentaires sur la botanique (1787: v), “their elegance and simplicity pleased me enough, to make me give them a second more attentive perusal.” “I then thought that they had considerable merit,” Martyn continued, “and translated into English, they might be of use to such of my fair countrywomen and unlearned countrymen as wished to amuse themselves with natural history” (ibid.). These were fine words of praise indeed from one of the greatest British botanists of the late eighteenth century, whose translation and continuation of Rousseau’s work as Letters on the Elements of Botany (1784) became one of his most successful publications. Martyn’s vision of botanical study was one that deliberately involved women in scientific activities, but not by relegating them to solitary study in quiet corners. His readers, he encouraged, “must go forth into the garden or the fields and there become familiar with Nature herself; with that beauty, order, regularity, and inexhaustible variety which is to be found in the structure of vegetables; and that wonderful fitness to its end, which we perceive in every work of creation” (ibid.: xi). Martyn’s concern to make botany accessible to “my fair countrywomen”—whom he mentioned in his opening dedication as being “no less eminent for their elegant and useful accomplishments, 12 Alison E. Martin than admired for the beauty of their persons”—was a reflection of the inclusive nature of natural philosophy in the second half of the eighteenth century (ibid.: Dedication). Salon culture and the practices of “polite” conversation in the Enlightenment had validated women’s involvement in intellectual discussion and thus legitimized the female voice in the public sphere (Klein 1993: 100–115).1 By the end of the eighteenth century the rise of botany as a “feminine” science increasingly saw women become producers rather than merely consumers of scientific literature, adopting the format of the conversation or letter (as Rousseau had done) as a valid way of engaging in intellectual debate. Works such as Maria Jacson’s Botanical Dialogues between Hortensia and her Four Children (1797) or Charlotte Smith’s Conversations Introducing Poetry Chiefly on the Subject of Natural History (1804) are key examples of women’s increasing visibility as producers of didactic botanical texts. Through the medium of these fictional conversations, the voice of the woman as a figure of intellectual inquiry and instruction in the natural sciences could be heard ever more clearly as the eighteenth century drew to a close. Recent scholarship on British women’s contribution to botany in this period has done much to illuminate women’s involvement in the development and shaping of botanical knowledge, despite the Linnaean classification of plants according to the sexual system making female botanising seem to some male critics of the time a prurient, licentious undertaking.2 But the voice of the scientific-minded woman was not just heard through the work she authored. It was equally well heard in the work she translated: an area only just beginning to be explored in translation studies and the history of science.3 As Sundar Sarukkai perceptively remarks, long after the sheer complexities of translation have been acknowledged by scholars of translation studies, scientific texts continue to be considered a form of writing that does not exhibit the same problems found in literary translation (Sarukkai 2001: 646–663; 651). Yet translators of texts we might consider “technical” or “scientific” encounter difficulties familiar to literary translators that relate to cultural mediation, national identity and vocabulary. They likewise grapple with problems concerning their own self-positioning in the target text as well as with issues of style and vocabulary, cultural difference and audience expectation. The Voice of Nature 13 In its discussion of two botanical texts translated from the French by British women—Stéphanie de Genlis’ La botanique historique et littéraire (1810; tr. 1826) and Charles François Brisseau de Mirbel’s Considérations générales sur la végétation (1815; tr. 1833)—this chapter explores the ways in which women’s voices are heard in their translations of botanical texts. It asks how they position themselves with regard to their subject matter...