Literary Diplomacy, Vol. 1: The Role of Translation in the Construction of National Literatures in Britain and Germany, 1750–1830; Vol. 2: Translation without an Original (review)

Kristmannsson's Preface informs the reader that these two volumes have been 'distilled out of what was originally a doctoral dissertation submitted to the Johannes Gutenberg-University in Mainz/Germersheim'; 'naturally they bear some marks of these origins'. Since Germersheim is well known as a centre for translation and interpreting as well as Scottish Studies (and Kristmannsson's 'Britain' has a distinctly Scottish bias), it seems a uniquely appropriate location for the gestation of such a thesis. And a massive thesis it must have been, if this weighty work represents a 'distillation'. But the book does in fact give every indication of being the product both of exceptionally patient research and mature reflection over an extended period. It displays a surenessof touch in its judgements and a pithiness of expression not always associated with doctoral theses. The only remaining 'marks of its origins' might perhaps be an overabundance of subsections (and indeed sub-subsections) – at one point the first volume has four within two pages. The title of the first subsection of the third section in the second volume, 'Considerations on Herder and Smith', which has the ostensible aim of indicating Adam Smith's presence in the text of Herder's prize-winning Abhandlung über den Ursprung der Sprache, is no longer apt (assuming it ever was), since the section develops into a mini-essay on Herder and Adam Ferguson. But these are minor irritants, and a price well worth paying for what is both an absorbing read and a remarkable feat of scholarship.

The first and bulkier of the two volumes is divided into three major parts. The first part is entitled simply 'Translation'. After some general observations on translation and its historical significance in the development of native language and ideas of nationhood, there follow 'key concepts', twelve subsections including some which are to prove especially 'key' in the ensuing argument: 'Translation of Form', 'Translation as "Imitation"', 'Translation and Native Language', and particularly 'Translation as Forgery'. That they are closely interlinked is shown by the following passage from the conclusion of the section on 'Form':

the introduction of blank verse was a) translational in its conception, and b) an attempt to achieve the sophistication of form of the ancient sources being imitated or translated. This is the method that leads to translation without an original: the systematic and ideological application of ancient forms in writing 'original' content … In all these cases there was an attempt to increase the prestige of the poetry through the form adopted, and in many cases this was explicitly expressed as a national project, as an attempt to raise the native language and its modern literary tradition to Parnassian heights.

'Translation without an Original' is the subtitle of the second volume, but the notion is never far away in the first, recurring in a variety of guises. Nor does it mean what one might at first reasonably assume itto mean, particularly in a book that has much to say about James Macpherson and Ossian. In the subsection on 'Translation as Forgery' it is clearly distinguished from Gideon Toury's pseudo-translation or fictitious translation. For Kristmannsson a 'translation without an original' is 'usually an "original" text that translates/imitates a major element of a foreign poetic tradition without necessarily translating or pretending to translate a single identifiable text'. It is, in effect, the annexation of products of another literary culture, not through the appropriation of content, but of form, 'translating whilst removing all notions of translating', 'transformation of the foreign into an original of one's own'.

By far the longest and densest section in this part is 'Translation as Imitation'. As one might expect, it has much to say about attitudes to mimesis, with long discussions of Auerbach (and...