Romantic Literature and the Colonised World

Lessons from Indigenous Translations

Nikki Hessell

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN:
  9783319709321
• eBook ISBN:
  9783319709338
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Asian Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This book considers indigenous-language translations of Romantic texts in the British colonies. It argues that these translations uncover a latent discourse around colonisation in the original English texts. Focusing on poems by William Wordsworth, John Keats, Felicia Hemans, and Robert Burns, and on Walter Scott's Ivanhoe, it provides the first scholarly insight into the reception of major Romantic authors in indigenous languages, and makes a major contribution to the study of global Romanticism and its colonial heritage. The book demonstrates the ways in which colonial controversies around prayer, song, hospitality, naming, mapping, architecture, and medicine are drawn out by translators to make connections between Romantic literature, its preoccupations, and debates in the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century colonial worlds.

© The Author(s) 2018

Nikki HessellRomantic Literature and the Colonised WorldPalgrave Studies in the Enlightenment, Romanticism and Cultures of Printhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-70933-8_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction

Nikki Hessell¹

(1)

Victoria University of Wellington, Wellington, New Zealand

End Abstract

Locations

When early nineteenth-century critics wished to indicate the potential influence and longevity of their favourite contemporary authors, they turned to the map of the colonised world. Felicia Hemans’s poetry was considered by the reviewers of Blackwood’s Magazine to have value “not only in her own land, but wherever the English tongue is spoken, whether on the banks of the eastern Ganges, or the western Mississippi” (Moir 1835, 96). Thomas De Quincey believed that Samuel Taylor Coleridge would shape “generations yet to come, of our England at home, of our other England on the St Lawrence, on the Mississippi, on the Indus and Ganges, and on the pastoral solitudes of Austral climes” (1891–1893, 2: 7) and wrote of William Wordsworth that “throughout the countless myriads of future America and future Australia, no less than Polynesia and Southern Africa, there will be situations without end fitted by their loneliness to favour his influence for centuries to come…” (1970, 144). James Currie thought that Robert Burns’s songs would be “sung with equal or superior interest, on the banks of the Ganges or of the Mississippi, as on those of the Tay or the Tweed” (1806, 1: 130n). And the politician Viscount Morpeth declared in a speech that Walter Scott was appreciated by colonial readers “from the Thames to the Neva, from the Ganges to the Mississippi” (cited in Trumpener 1997, 258). The authors thus praised were different, but the nature and terms of the praise were the same: literary success could be measured via geographic reach into the most unlikely locations.

Unlikely locations, perhaps, but not random ones. There are telling similarities in the examples cited above that suggest a collective understanding of the scope of British cultural influence globally. The territory that is being sketched here is repeatedly drawn with the Ganges and the Mississippi as its borders. It is a territory that consists, in part, of independent nations, and much of which would come to be marked in pink on maps showing the British Empire, but that already existed in the early nineteenth-century British mind as a surprisingly stable construct; as far away and as foreign as one could imagine, yet simultaneously bordered, fixed, knowable. Romantic literature would emanate out, from the Tay and the Tweed (and the Thames), from “our England at home” to a world of readers dispersed through time and space, but existing within a defined area: the Anglo-American colonised world.

These readers might be the settler populations, establishing new homes throughout what James Belich (2009) has termed “the Anglo-world,” or they might be the temporary administrators of colonies like India. Certainly these communities did take Romantic literature with them around the globe, as evidenced in the libraries, auction catalogues, and school rooms of the world; an 1849 advertisement in The New Zealander , for example, advertised works by Burns and Wordsworth alongside “1 crate COLONIAL CHEESE,” “1 Case American Eight Day Clocks,” and “Tongues in small barrels.” But the comments about Romantic authors cited above hint at another readership, not named but nevertheless present, since the English language was increasingly used by people who had only just encountered it. The “equal or superior interest” that the literary texts could claim in these new locales might not only have been that of those who brought the texts with them and to whom they were familiar, but those who read them with fresh eyes. Indigenous readers were encountering Romantic literature throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Moreover, they were not simply encountering that literature in English: across the colonised world, indigenous-language translations of Romantic texts were produced and disseminated, as a specifically indigenous print culture took hold.

English literature formed a central part of the colonial project. From Thomas Babington Macaulay’s 1835 Minute on Indian Education, which prescribed the European canon and the English language as building blocks of the imperial education system in British India, to the curricula of the mission schools for indigenous children in the Pacific throughout the nineteenth century, English literary texts were synonymous with the experiences of colonisation.¹ Shakespeare and the Bible might have taken centre stage, but the major authors and texts of the Romantic period were also crucial to this project. For British administrators, settlers, and educators in the nineteenth century, Romantic texts represented some of the latest, most contemporary literary work. The poems of Felicia Hemans , Robert Burns , William Wordsworth , and John Keats , and the novels of Walter Scott , amongst other texts, travelled in the literal and figurative baggage of the diasporic British population . Improved transport networks and the flow of people and goods around the colonial world meant that books were arriving and departing all the time in places like Kolkata, Wellington, and Honolulu.² The rise of local printing industries, combined with the development of print runs in Britain aimed specifically at colonial markets, and the demands of newly established schools in the colonies, meant that one could find a Romantic text anywhere in the colonised world.³

Romantic scholarship has been considering indigenous peoples for some time. The earliest work in this area, such as Nigel Leask’s British Romantic Writers and the East: Anxieties of Empire (1992), Alan Richardson and Sonia Hofkosh’s 1996 edited volume Romanticism, Race, and Imperial Culture, 1780–1834, and Peter Kitson and Tim Fulford’s collection Romanticism and Colonialism (1998), tended to think of indigenous populations in their textual manifestations, examining the ways in which they were represented in the works of Romantic authors. More recent scholarship has considered actual indigenous people in the Romantic era, not simply literary characters, and has paid attention to their responses to Romantic literature; I am thinking here of critical works such as Tim Fulford’s Romantic Indians (2006) and Fulford and Kevin Hutchings’ collection Native Americans and Anglo-American Culture, 1750–1850 (2009). The indigenous responses in question, however, are all in English, and the indigenous thinkers who authored them are often speaking at least as much to the colonisers as the colonised. They also occupied a particular kind of space between two cultures. Figures like the Ojibwa writer Kahgegagahbowh George Copway and the Mohawk leader Teyoninhokarawen John Norton , both studied extensively by Fulford (2006), Hutchings (2009), and Kate Flint (2009), crossed over between the Native American and British worlds, producing writing in English that responded to British literature and that could be read by Anglophone readers. Scholars such as Manu Samriti Chander (2017) and Thomas C. Gannon (2009) have opened up new perspectives on British Romanticism’s influence on and overlaps with the work of colonised writers. But indigenous-language translations of Romantic texts offer a different avenue for examining the ways in which Romantic literature could be adapted to the literary traditions of colonised populations and speak to their concerns. They have the potential to resituate the critical discussion in ways that take account of new autonomous indigenous remakings of British literature, rather than simply the representation of indigenous peoples in that literature.

Indigenous translations also allow us to see how thoroughly Romantic literature was itself imbued with the discourses and experiences of colonisation. Scholars from Edward Said (1978) to Linda Colley (1992) have long since established that imperialism played a critical role in how Britain described itself and others, and that, as Bernard Cohn puts it, “metropole and colony have to be seen in a unitary field of analysis” (1996, 4). Romantic critics have subsequently deployed these ideas to show how colonisation dwells at the heart of the literature of the Romantic era.⁴ The argument of my book follows Saree Makdisi’s influential formulation of Romanticism as “a cultural discourse defining the mutual constitution of the modern imperial metropolitan center and its antimodern colonies and peripheries” (1998, 175). But it adds to Makdisi’s argument the important proposition that this “mutual constitution” was perceived by indigenous-language translators far earlier and more systematically than by modern Romantic critics. Poems like Wordsworth’s “The Forsaken Indian Woman ” or Hemans’s “The Indian with His Dead Child” are clearly influenced by the colonial project, but so too is a host of much less obvious texts, shaped by what Evan Gottlieb dubs “the global imaginary” in Romantic literature, a force that can be felt “regardless of whether the content of a given text is explicitly global” (2015, xvi).

Indigenous-language translations unlock these latent aspects of Romantic discourse. When we read these more opaque texts in their indigenous translations, we are suddenly made aware of the colonial context submerged in the English original. Moreover, we can see that context while stepping outside the body of work that James Mulholland has brilliantly dubbed “the archive of the inauthentic,” those texts that ventriloquise or attempt to reconstitute an indigenous voice in English (2013b, 156). We have the opportunity to share in the knowledge that appears to have been so obvious to many indigenous-language translators in the nineteenth and early twent...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction
• 2. Praying: Felicia Hemans at Third Sight
• 3. Singing: Global Indigeneity and Robert Burns
• 4. Naming: Aloha Ivanhoe
• 5. Mapping: Wordsworth and Poems on the Renaming of Places
• 6. Building: Relocating Wordsworth’s Architecture
• 7. Healing: Isabella, or The Pot of Tulāsi
• 8. Conclusion: Regenerating Romanticism
• Back Matter