Travel Narratives in Translation, 1750-1830

Nationalism, Ideology, Gender

Alison Martin, Susan Pickford

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780415539944
• eBook ISBN: 9781136244667
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Translating & Interpreting
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

This book examines how non-fictional travel accounts were rewritten, reshaped, and reoriented in translation between 1750 and 1850, a period that saw a sudden surge in the genre's popularity. It explores how these translations played a vital role in the transmission and circulation of knowledge about foreign peoples, lands, and customs in the Enlightenment and Romantic periods. The collection makes an important contribution to travel writing studies by looking beyond metaphors of mobility and cultural transfer to focus specifically on what happens to travelogues in translation. Chapters range from discussing essential differences between the original and translated text to relations between authors and translators, from intra-European narratives of Grand Tour travel to scientific voyages round the world, and from established male travellers and translators to their historically less visible female counterparts. Drawing on European travel writing in English, French, German, Spanish, and Portuguese, the book charts how travelogues were selected for translation; how they were reworked to acquire new aesthetic, political, or gendered identities; and how they sometimes acquired a radically different character and content to meet the needs and expectations of an emergent international readership. The contributors address aesthetic, political, and gendered aspects of travel writing in translation, drawing productively on other disciplines and research areas that encompass aesthetics, the history of science, literary geography, and the history of the book.

Part I
Translation, Identity, and Ideology

1
The Travels and Translations of Marc-Antoine Eidous (1724–80), Encyclopedic Mediator of Enlightenment Texts

Clorinda Donato

Travel literature and its translation have long been considered complementary partners, occupying a dominant place in the history of reading and of the book at least as far back as Marco Polo’s Description of the World (1298), recorded in some 140 different manuscript versions in a dozen different languages and dialects. Even hundreds of years before the invention of the printing press, the desire to travel, learn, share, and circulate established a transnational community of potential travelers. This chapter explores the unique features of the travel-translation nexus in the eighteenth century through the figure of Marc-Antoine Eidous (1724–80), whose career as translator of travel and travel-related texts is paradigmatic for scores of translators who worked from a similar perspective and impetus.¹ Travel writing and geographical accounts of the eighteenth century were driven by curiosity and the discovery, exchange, and circulation of knowledge. What, then, constituted travel literature in the eighteenth century, how did travel literature travel, and what role did a European facilitator of knowledge circulation like the translator play?

This chapter offers an answer to these questions by presenting and analyzing the career of one of the most ubiquitous translators of the eighteenth century. This case study of the translator as purveyor of the Enlightenment through the act of rendering accessible a wide variety of texts that “placed the Enlightenment” adds to Charles W. J. Withers’ sage assessment of how the Enlightenment “took place in and over space”, and how it “traveled between places to be worked with and thought about by other people”.² Withers is concerned with “the traveling nature of knowledge”, arguing that there is no knowledge without issues of translation and displacement. A closer inspection of Marc-Antoine Eidous’ work as translator of geographical and travel texts provides a concrete example of the processes Withers has described. The present chapter thus attempts to capture the nature of the enigmatic figures, such as Eidous, who operated as agents of Enlightenment in their translated texts, through the many genres of translated texts, including cultural geography, law, medicine, history, military history, natural history, novels, and travel literature, that were pertinent to the cause of travel and the transmission of its findings.

The significance of translation is often overlooked by scholars seeking to understand the nature of eighteenth-century travel writing and its hegemonic potential. Yet translation, and in particular translation into French, plays a key role, for the nodes of translation activity, dissemination, and consumption are precisely those sites that tell us the most about knowledge transfer and its transformation, making it all the more surprising that translation has been so little studied in the criticism of travel writing. The portent of Withers’ statement that, “[t]ranslation as a practice reflected the transformation of the book and printing industries across Europe … [a]lmost every important Enlightenment work not originally written in French was translated into it”,³ is enormous for the topic of travel and translation during the eighteenth century. While the political control of the globe was Spanish and British, the intellectual control was French. Who were the foot soldiers in this army of intellectual warriors? Translators, such as the tireless, brash, bold, and curious infantryman Marc-Antoine Eidous, educated in multiple languages as a means of interpreting and communicating geographical information for direct application to government and military operations. By studying his career and the reach and content of his translating activity, we may trace the trajectory of how almost the entire world came to be formed, imagined, and descriptively mapped in French, providing the foundation for late eighteenth-century colonial, Romanticizing, and questioning discourses that would localize the foreign.

French became a medium of dissemination of Enlightenment texts and the translator was an active agent in the transformation and transfer of the travel narrative, connecting groups of readers far and wide. These readers became second- and third-tier audiences of both the author and the translator, or in some cases, of the hybrid author-translator figure. Translators who transferred knowledge into French played a key role in establishing the République des lettres. Yet the impact of such translators, particularly in the non-canonical genres of geography and travel writing, has been grossly underestimated. The translators of geography and travel writing—the literary genres that construct space, its inhabitants, its flora and fauna—engaged in discursive practices of considerable significance. As Livingstone and Withers have observed, geography was not a fixed and unified scientific discipline; rather, it became the discursive ‘map’ that departed from myth with the intention of providing descriptive, utilitarian knowledge about peoples, places and things.⁴ As a result, the degree of its overlap with the travel genre is extensive. The cultural dominance of French meant that translations into French of these reportable facts about the globe and its inhabitants created a descriptive French world that was exported further and wider than would be the case for, say, Linnaeus’s original writings in Swedish.

Marc-Antoine Eidous’ career as a translator of travel texts includes his numerous translations of travel narratives as well as the copious production of geographical, cultural, and medical histories, not to mention novels and Jesuit accounts. In reality, these various genres are not so terribly distant when one contemplates their relation to the travel enterprise as related in books. Indeed, any scholar of eighteenth-century encyclopedic compilations knows how often the travel narratives of the Jesuits are cited to give credence to anthropological, religious, and scientific narratives, while medical treatises were often grounded in discussions of air, soil, and climate quality and their potentially deleterious effects on human beings. The thirst for knowledge drove the flourishing book trade in eighteenth-century Europe. High demand for best-selling or eagerly anticipated texts drove a dizzying production of translations, compilations, and translations of compilations that in many cases were commissioned by several publishing houses at the same time, with the aim of being the first to hawk a particular translation at the twice annual book fair in Leipzig.⁵ A perusal of the Leipzig Book Fair Catalogs over a number of years shows that multi-volume compilations such as dictionaries and encyclopedias were the number-one sellers. Publishers of dictionaries, encyclopedias, and compilations of every kind required not only a first-tier set of writers and editors, but also second- and third-tier literary figures who worked in teams to compose, translate, copy, and adapt text in response to market demand across Europe as a whole and within discrete pockets of demand for specific literary products. Enter the translator, who multiplied and moved these texts into ever expanding and shifting contact zones.⁶

The eighteenth century marked the birth of a number of new sciences and technologies whose terminology lexicographers attempt to codify. Among these burgeoning fields, geography and travel occupied a central position. Thanks to the carefully compiled statistics in Yasmine Marcil’s La fureur des voyages: Les récits de voyage dans la presse périodique (1750 –1789) [Travel Mania: Travel Narratives in the Periodical Press (1750–1789)] (2006), we now know far more about the reception of translation and what drove translation into or from particular languages at certain times in the eighteenth century. According to Marcil, translations into French dominated the market both in the 1750s and the 1780s; the production of travel narratives published in England diminished over the same period, falling from 23% to 18%, whereas in Germany they represented practically a quarter of books sold in the 1780s compared with a mere 7% or so three decades earlier.⁷ The importance of these figures lies in the role of translation as a means of keeping knowledge circulating among new audiences; additionally, the increase in German market sales of French translations coincides with the moment when French had taken hold as the lingua franca among the literate classes in the German States. Marcil credits the evolution from ‘anglophobie’ to ‘anglomanie’ during the eighteenth century to the familiarity that the reading public had acquired with the British world through French translation. As Paul Van Tieghem noted in a monograph addressing the role of the Année littéraire [Literary Year] (1754–90) in the spread of foreign literatures, the presence of the phrase “traduit de l’anglais” on the frontispiece of a work was often enough to prompt sales and attract readers.⁸ This phrase appears on no fewer than 20 of the over 50 works (folio and smaller formats alike) translated by Marc-Antoine Eidous, hinting at his status as a recognized name in French translation throughout Europe in the eighteenth century. Who was this minor-level celebrity and what were his intellectual roots?

With the exception of two contributions in the Encyclopédie, and a quirky turn as ghost author in Chapter 47 of Diderot’s Les Bijoux indiscrets [The Indiscreet Jewels] (1748), Eidous never figures as an author. He went to Paris to work not as an author but as a translator, a potentially lucrative position for someone with the linguistic skills, real-life experience, and contacts in the Republic of Letters to attract commissions he had acquired. Far from being an indigent hack, Eidous was a well-traveled polyglot who demonstrated his linguistic prowess as a translator not only of travel narratives, but also works on moral philosophy, history of religion, geography, the history of New World peoples and their customs, and the new global economy.

He translated from no fewer than five languages into French; he also practiced ‘intertranslation’, that is, the act of translating from a previously existing translation of the text in question, rather than from the original. His translations into French, his native language, at times met with mixed reviews, and were criticized as inaccurate or dull, though this judgment may be a function of his intention to translate into a register of French that appealed to the broadest spectrum of French readers, including those in other countries, in line with the language’s central role in the dissemination of knowledge across Europe. Not surprisingly, this register tended to elicit a certain degree of condescension among those who appreciated the satirical wit of the philosophes. Nonetheless, despite the less than glowing opinion of some of his peers, Eidous’s career continued forward at a fast clip, a testament to the mania of translating important texts into French. Judging from the number of texts that have been attributed to his translator’s pen, his services were in high demand from authors, printers, and booksellers located in a range of different countries, including England, Italy, the Netherlands, Germany, Scotland, Spain, Sweden, and Switzerland, in their quest for ever-greater market shares through the translation of works (especially travel literature) that would enjoy success on other markets.⁹ Eidous was an asset to publishing houses about to embark on the large-scale publication works from English into French. He was capable of translating quickly, and of working on several translations at the same time from a variety of languages: consequently, his services were much in demand.¹⁰ The life and work of Marc-Antoine Eidous give us important indications of how market-driven translation operated within the context of the eighteenth-century book trade.¹¹

Eidous owed his translation skills to his military and technical background, having worked previously as an engineer for the Spanish crown. Eidous was presumably trained in France, where the career of military engineer grew in importance over the span of the ancient régime. These ingénieurs-géographes “were taught mathematics and foreign languages and instructed to combine field and archival research with assessment of the answers to questions directed to appropriately chosen locales. [Their] maps were combined with written descriptions.”¹² His career had taken him from one corner of the empire to the other; he had thus acquired his linguistic prowess through application more than through book learning. Even his knowledge of Latin, acquired at school in Marseilles, possessed a practical character due to its application in the deciphering of military-oriented texts in his work for the Spanish crown. Indeed, his work as an engineer for Spain in all likelihood consisted of extensive travel in the New World, fortifying ports so that Spanish flotillas would be safe as they loaded their cargo. In Eidous’ life, travel and translation therefore complemented each other: his voyages enabled him to gain a wider knowledge of the world and to become acquainted with a range of different peoples, cultures and languages, which he then applied successfully to the translation of quite demanding, technical texts.

EID...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• PART I Translation, Identity, and Ideology
• PART II Extra-European Travel Writing and Translation
• PART III Women in Translation
• Contributors
• Index