Thomas De Quincey, Translation, and the “Philosophy of Reconstruction”

Mrs. Dangle Mr. Dangle, here are two very civil gentlemen trying to make themselves understood, and I don’t know which is the interpreter.

Mr. Dangle Egad, I think the interpreter is the hardest to be understood of the two.¹

Mr. De Quincey The unit itself that should facilitate . . . becomes itself elusive of the mental grasp: it comes in as an interpreter; and (as in some other cases) the interpreter is hardest to be understood of the two.²

Thomas de quincey’s translations have often been regarded as little more than supporting acts to his far more compelling original work. The strongest expression of this view may be traced back to the very beginnings of comparative Romanticist scholarship.³ When René Wellek briefly considers De Quincey’s translations of German idealist authors in his seminal Immanuel Kant in England, he faintly praises De Quincey for his “comparative exactness of reproduction,” but castigates him for his “preposterous conclusions” and “gross misunderstanding of the purpose of Kantian philosophy.”⁴ All in all, he concludes, De Quincey’s “hopelessly erratic and eccentric” essays on the intersecting topics of translation, literature, and language are “rightly forgotten”: no one could possibly “extract a coherent scheme of ideas from the multifarious and confessedly casual utterances of De Quincey.”⁵ The best defense of a contrary view, and the best illustration of its continuing rarity, is still to be found in Frederick Burwick’s work. As early as 1968, Burwick expressed his surprise at the critical neglect of De Quincey’s direct and indirect translations, urging “a careful comparative study.”⁶ It is almost solely in French and German criticism that his exhortation has hitherto found a receptive audience, spurred on by Baudelaire’s influential translation of De Quincey in Les Paradis Artificiels and De Quincey’s close engagement with the German idealists.⁷ While English-language criticism has long expanded its compass from De Quincey’s biographic essays to include his philosophical, political, and rhetorical writings, his translations generally continue to be either ignored or mentioned only in passing. On those rare occasions that De Quincey’s translations come in for analysis, they are barely acknowledged as translations: Josephine McDonagh, for instance, prefaces her analysis of De Quincey’s version of Herder’s Laokoon with a declaration that her “interest is not in comparing the two texts, but rather in the point that De Quincey’s version presents a theoretical outline for [his] aesthetic of force.”⁸

Yet De Quincey did translate plentifully, and he did so to a purpose that exceeds the straightforward transfer of information: he translated in search of his identity as an author. He announces as much in his 1821 “Confessions of an English Opium-Eater,” his deeply self-conscious entry onto the literary scene. This text presents its author not as a creative visionary in the Wordsworthian vein, but as a commentator, explicator, and translator. De Quincey highlights his “classical attainments . . . owing to the practice of daily reading of the newspaper into the best Greek I could furnish extempore,” and further emphasizes his credentials by packing two specific pieces of luggage when he departs on a walking tour of Wales, a journey designed to confirm him in his literary ambitions: “a favorite English poet in one pocket; and a small 12 mo. volume, containing about nine plays of Euripides, in the other.”⁹ The “Confessions,” that is, imagine their authorial voice to be one that quite literally issues from a space in between two languages, genres, and cultures. De Quincey accordingly sets out to translate voraciously, choosing as his specialization German (pre-)Romanticism: Kant, Schiller, Lessing, and Jean Paul, for instance, as well as lesser-known writers like Niebuhr, Wasianski, and Laun. However, after a five-year flurry of activity, which culminates in 1824, in an intricately self-conscious rendition of Willibald Alexis’s Walladmor, De Quincey suspends most of his direct translations: he continues larding his texts with quotations from foreign texts, and he continues holding forth on the certain benefits of translation, but his output slows to...