Translation, Resistance, Activism

Secret Literary Societies in Late Victorian England

108 During the second half of Queen Victoria’s reign, social fragmentation was being generated by antagonistic social and political forces, creating what Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe have referred to as a “fissure ” of ideological constructs in need of being “filled up” (1985:7). Not surprisingly this was also a period of intense translation activity, one response to the sociopolitical context. At least at the outset, the 1880s were a period of optimism; writers and thinkers believed that the time was ripe for greater scientific curiosity and literary openness to heretofore taboo subjects after more than a century of predominant puritan values, with duty and self-control the watchwords of public decorum.1 Attempts were made to import texts that communicated alternative worldviews and innovative ideas about sex and sexuality in an effort to renew British literature and culture; during the period translation appears as a force for cultural (trans)formation (Gentzler 2001:194) or as a reaction to a perceived “intellectual/ cultural lack” (Ellis and Oakley-Brown 2001:5). At the same time, when texts contested the overarching patriarchal worldview of the British Empire during this period of (sociological) tensions at home and (colonial) contestations abroad, they were often perceived as threats to the preservation of the Victorian status quo, and socially sanctioned presses continued to refuse to publish them. In view of these constraints, it is reasonable to expect that all foreign texts would have been subjected to close censorial scrutiny. In fact such was not the case. Untranslated foreign texts circulated freely in Britain (Speirs DENISE MERKLE Secret Literary Societies in Late Victorian England Secret Literary Societies in Late Victorian England 109 2003:85), but the same cannot be said for translated foreign texts. Writers such as André Theuriet and Octave Feuillet, whose novels had won morality prizes in France (Portebois 2003:66), were approved by British moral authorities. But novels that did not serve as innocent entertainment or that were socially disruptive and sexually explicit were condemned. Those who wished to publish the latter did so at the risk of being prosecuted. One alternative available to translators was clandestine publishing, at times financed completely or in part through the creation of a secret literary society made up of the publication’s subscribers. Émile Zola’s writings which were censored in translation were published by such a society in the 1890s; similarly, Eastern sex manuals as well as two unexpurgated translations of the Arabian Nights were published by such societies in the 1880s. In this essay I explore whether translators who had their translations published in connection with Victorian secret literary societies were resisting the constraints imposed by the cultural hegemony of Victorian England and, if so, to what degree. Two figures are closely tied to these secret societies: the imperialist adventurer and explorer Richard Burton (associated with the Kamashastra Society of London and Benares), and the publisher of pornography Leonard Smithers (associated with the Erotika Biblion Society of Athens and the Lutetian Society). The questions that underpin this study are the following . Were Burton and Smithers “submissive translators,” to use the terminology of Theo Hermans (1999:134), simply reinforcing Victorian norms by dominating through translation the imperial rival (France) and the colonized Other (the Orient)? Were they instead “self-conscious resistant” and subversive translators (Hermans 1999:134), actively trying to renew their culture and to fill a gap by freeing the readers of their translations “from the cultural constraints that ordinarily govern their reading and writing” (Venuti 1995:305)? Or were they perhaps both submissive and resistant translators responding to the coexistence of dominant and emergent cultural transformations associated with the complex sociocultural dynamic of which they were products and in which they worked? Before examining their respective translation projects, let us consider the social and discursive constraints facing the translators. Victorian Control of Discourse and Obscenity Victorian England permitted the free circulation of a great deal of foreign literature, for example, Zola’s so-called pornographic novels and Henrik 110 Denise Merkle Ibsen’s revolutionary plays, as well as Greek and Latin erotic—often homoerotic—classics, without the threat of legal prosecution, provided that the works were not translated.2 Translations, however, were subject to prosecution , for, as Dorothy Speirs explains, “those who were sufficiently cultured to read [foreign books] were less likely to suffer moral damage than were the less well-educated, who could read only a translation” (2003:85). The...