English Responses to French Poetry 1880-1940: Translation and Mediation (review)

The critical study of translation within the fields of literary history, comparative literature, and reception studies is both essential and, arguably, still neglected. Jennifer Higgins's treatment of English 'responses' to French poetry in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries accords primary focus to the ebb and flow of translational activity around that poetry 'as a channel for such responses' (p. 2) while seeking to 'reinstate translation studies within a wider discourse of literary and cultural exchange from which it has frequently been excluded, and to assess the functions of translations of French poetry into English within discourses of exchange and as channels of influence and criticism' (p. 3). To an extent, then, responses are analysed here in terms of their contribution to English literary culture and consciousness, rather than as other-directed literary-critical 'feedback'. The initial problem thus circumscribed is subjected to a chronological treatment, with an opening chapter on the nineteenth-century portion of the period under analysis being followed by chapter-length surveys of each of the subsequent decades. One overarching strand in the responses charted is that of successive re-engagements with major canonical figures of the second half of the nineteenth century; thus each decade and/or generation is seen to negotiate its own revised view of Baudelaire, Rimbaud, Verlaine, and Mallarmé, with successive versions giving pointers to the self-constructions of contemporary English poetic culture. The study critically appraises at least one translation of a canonical poem in each of the time divisions studied, and thereby confirms the extent to which comparative translation studies can provide very probing insights into the contemporary state of the receiving culture. Another strand of the poetic receptions and responses charted is composed of the evolving category of the directly contemporary in the other culture (an example being T. S. Eliot's translation of Anabase, by the poet referred to consistently here as 'Saint-Jean Perse' (sic)). This is much more a question of direct literary relations, engagements, and patterns of exchange, and it affords special importance to individual literary figures who actively engage with the other culture — hence the French profile in his own working lifetime of an Arthur Symons, and the reception of a poet such as Jean de Bosschère through his connections with F. S. Flint, Ezra Pound, and the Imagists in England. In this respect, one clear phenomenon emerging from this study is that of the variable parameters of the urgent in a given literary culture, with different senses of what is important in poetic fields evolving contemporaneously. Phases of mutual ignorance or unilateral enthusiasm alternate with moments of mutual engagement and enrichment. In the years preceding the Second World War, discussed in the final chapter, we witness something of a convergence of the perspectives in the two poetic cultures, where a diminution in the quantity of translated material is compensated for by a greater acknowledgement of the centrality of translation to the development of national — and transnational — literary cultures. This study is to be commended for its consistent advocacy and demonstration of that centrality.