The Reception of Sir Walter Scott in Europe, and: The Reception of Jane Austen and Walter Scott: A Comparative Longitudinal Study (review)

The first of these volumes, in the Athlone series on the reception of British authors in Europe, should prove a valuable resource for Scott scholars – and for students of European culture in the last two centuries. It covers his reception in French, Spanish, Catalan, German, Hungarian, Czech, Polish, Russian, Slovene, Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish. The last three are parcelled into a single chapter. Scott’s French reception, by contrast, gets two chapters, his Hungarian two, and his German three (covering respectively nineteenth-century Austria; ‘German Literary Histories, 1820–1945’; and Scott in East, West, and Reunified Germany, 1949–2005). Four synoptic chapters round off the volume. Tom Hubbard, surveying the translation of Scott’s poetry across Europe, raises some interesting issues in reception theory. Jeremy Tambling catalogues nineteenth-century operas inspired by Scott – and for the most part only catalogues. Beth Wright on Scott and nineteenth-century art, while doing likewise, acknowledges the problems of cataloguing in this field. She underlines the challenge Scott, as a writer ‘both hyper-visual and anti-visual’, poses for ‘visual translation’, and demonstrates the challenge met in Achille Devéria’s lithograph for Chapter 4 of The Abbot and the Quentin Durward paintings of Bonnington and Delacroix, where Scott text and visual translation each illuminate the other. Finally, Alastair Durie provides a sensible account of Scott’s contribution to the growth of nineteenth-century tourism, including his pivotal role in the fortunes of Thomas Cook. Chapters on Bulgarian, Greek, and Low Countries reception were not completed by the deadline, and the editor notes ruefully that ‘it proved impossible to get satisfactory coverage of Portugal or Italy’.

Reception history involves fundamental issues in hermeneutics and the practice of translation. These are touched on in the Series Editor’s preface but cannot be pursued here. At a less theoretical level, discussion of Scott’s reception in Europe can be focussed under five heads: (1) Which texts are translated, when, and how often? (2) How are they translated: beyond its basic competence or otherwise, what features of the original does a translation elide or transmute? This invokes (3) the shaping factors, in a culture and its language at a given point, that bear upon the translation. These can range from ‘the typical rhythm of Czech, in which trochaic and dactyllic feet prevail’ to the role of censorship in Metternich’s Austria, Franco’s Spain, and the pre-1990 GDR. Translation passes over into (4) the assimilation of Scott by subsequent writers, which proceeds in varied interaction with (5) the history of his influence upon receiving literatures and their culture.

In this volume no one account does, or could do, equal justice to all five foci. Only Paul Barnaby in ‘Another Tale of Old Mortality’ pursues (2) in detail. Translation is the sole area where reception of Scott continues fruitful into the later twentieth century, as is brought out, for example, in García-González’s and Toda’s careful cataloguing of the situation in Spain. The questions put under (1) are comprehensively answered in the chapters on individual literatures, whether incisively (Annika Bautz on modern Germany) or ploddingly ( Jørgen Nielsen on the Scandinavians). Chapter bibliographies, except those for Catalonia and Slovenia, list translations in chronological order (and give bibliographies of secondary reading), while Burnaby’s timeline for Scott’s reception in Europe 1802–2005 enables the plotting of patterns within and across national traditions. Here the volume provides the indispensable foundation for future work.

Mapping, in a work of this kind, the cultural factors that shape a translation is difficult. Most readers will be unfamiliar with the literary histories, let alone the wider political and cultural histories, of at least some of the areas surveyed. How does one sketch a meaningful literary history in...