Translation Studies: The Novel and Other Enlightenment Crossings

Lynn Festa ("Sentimental Bonds and Revolutionary Characters: Richardson's Pamela in England and France" in The Literary Channel) observes that translations are normally relegated to footnotes in histories of a national literature (76). She contends that national narratives, when initially written in the nineteenth century, left out the important fact that external voices had earlier entered their geographies and influenced the thinking and imaginations of their populations. Thus national literary histories contributed to a myth that original users of the language were the only ones capable of articulating that essence; the new state quickly appropriated this view of linguistic unity and in-country genius for its legitimation.

Festa and the other essayists in the collection (McMurran among them), however, argue that throughout the eighteenth century national borders were porous and translations swept across them, contributing to an Enlightenment consciousness of a larger humanity and universality. They single out the novel that was frequently translated and widely distributed then as having facilitated this cultural trade. Along with commerce and political exchanges, the translated novel helped to produce the "imagined communities" that Benedict Anderson identified. Anglomania in France and Francophilia in Britain existed alongside hostilities, but the essayists believe that the constant viewing of one another across the French-English Channel, permitted by translations of one another's novels, was instrumental in rousing home sentiment as citizens set themselves off from the Other.

Up to this point, many readers will consent to, and approve of, this portion of the Cohen and Dever thesis. However, those with experiences of other cultural traditions will be skeptical when the essayists also argue that the modern novel originated in the interculturality of the Channel in the eighteenth century. They assert that varieties of premodern prose fiction were merged then into the sentimental novel, which in turn evolved into the historical novel and Balzacian realism. This typology defines the genre in terms of those countries' preference for sentimentality and interiority; and the essayists show a curve of development into the twentieth century.

This review will discuss those essays in Cohen and Dever's collection that deal with the eighteenth-century novel, McMurran's essay and book, and the essays on transfer studies and translation in Stockhorst's gathering. I begin with McMurran's essay, "National or Transnational? The Eighteenth-Century Novel," which preceded her book and succinctly sets out the importance of translation to this idea of an important cultural bloc. Her thesis is based on several considerations. First is the discussion of the book business in London. As regards the novel, "my survey of novel publishing from 1660 to 1770 shows that translations of French romances and novels constituted as much as 36% of the published prose fiction in a given year and hovered around 15–30% up to the late eighteenth century" (53). In France "before 1750 there were very few translations of British novels, but then their share increased to approximately 20% of the published prose fiction in a given year through the rest of the century." However, she quotes a study of private libraries in France that showed that British novels were as popular as French (53).

In her book, McMurran's foremost concern is to define translation as it was understood in the eighteenth century, how noblemen's leisure pastime of taking the classical languages into the vernacular evolved into the business of transfers between vernaculars. At first, word lists made believe that languages were equal and that mere replacement of one word for another could easily be done. However, translators for the market were beginning to recognize that differing cultural tastes required more work...