The Reception of Jonathan Swift in Europe

Hermann J. Real

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781441143945
• eBook ISBN: 9781623561383
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Jonathan Swift has had a profound impact on almost all the national literatures of Continental Europe. The celebrated author of acknowledged masterpieces like A Tale of a Tub (1704), Gulliver's Travels (1726), and A Modest Proposal (1729), the Dean of St Patrick's, Dublin, was courted by innumerable translators, adaptors, and retellers, admired and challenged by shoals of critics, and creatively imitated by both novelists and playwrights, not only in Central Europe (Germany and Switzerland) but also in its northern (Denmark and Sweden) and southern (Italy, Spain, and Portugal) outposts, as well as its eastern (Poland and Russia, Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria) and Western parts - from the beginning of the 18th century to the present day.

1 Swift’s First Voyages to Europe: His Impact on Eighteenth-Century France

Wilhelm Graeber

I

In his Letters Concerning the English Nation of 1733, which were published in France a year later under the title of Lettres philosophiques, Voltaire passed a judgement on Jonathan Swift which was to leave its mark on the Dean’s French reception for a long time to come: ‘DEAN Swift is Rabelais in his Senses, and frequenting the politest Company’ (Voltaire 1926, 158; Voltaire 1964, 143).¹ That this view of Swift as ‘the English Rabelais’ is based on a misunderstanding, however, may be seen from Voltaire’s endeavours to unveil the very deceptiveness of the authors’ intellectual affinity. As a neoclassicist, Voltaire condemns Rabelais as extravagant, as ‘the Prince of Buffoons’, and as ‘an intoxicated Philosopher’ only to set off Swift’s ‘Delicacy, Justness, Choice, [and] good Taste’ against this foil (Voltaire 1926, 158).² To be sure, Voltaire’s praise for Swift remains rather general, failing as it does to mention any thematic details and focusing on the Dean’s ‘good taste’, a reference which was important to the French: ‘The poetical Numbers of Dean Swift are of a singular and almost inimitable Taste; true Humour whether in Prose or Verse, seems to be his peculiar Talent’ (Voltaire 1926, 159; Voltaire 1964, 143).³

In this assessment, Voltaire was far ahead of his time since Swift’s French reception, throughout the eighteenth century, was marked by the criticism of his allegedly (bad) taste, which did not meet the requirements of Parisian, in fact Franco-centrist, aesthetics. Yet even Voltaire seems to have anticipated certain problems for Swift’s reception in France. Only a voyage to the British Isles, he argued, would provide readers with a more solid basis for a proper understanding of the Dean’s highly allusive works. In stating this, Voltaire makes it clear that his view of Swift, around 1730, after his own voyage to Britain, was not in any way guided by Desfontaines’s Voyages de Gulliver, which by 1730 was enjoying a wide circulation in France (Teerink-Scouten 383–390), but by A Tale of a Tub (Goulding 1924, 46). In comparing Swift with Rabelais, Voltaire moves a foreign author closer to somebody with whom his readership was already familiar and, at the same time, in referring to what was typically English about him, he emphasizes Swift’s ‘otherness’.⁴ It is between these two poles that the reception of Swift oscillates in eighteenth-century France. The history of this reception is a chronicle of manipulation, more particularly, of ‘free’, naturalizing translations, defamatory biographical discourses, and iconologically telling anglophobe stereotypes, and it is for this reason that the reception of Swift’s satirical works in France illuminates Anglo-French literary and cultural relations in an exemplary way.

The most essential facts of Swift’s reception in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century France are well known, as regards both the early history of translation and the history of criticism (Goulding 1924). However, a new angle has been added to these by more recent developments in comparative criticism. If, as one no doubt must view it, any ‘mediation’ of a foreign author through criticism or translation is an interpretation by the receiving culture, the result usually is an evaluation of deviations, possibly even distortions, which is decidedly less emotional an issue than was once the case when the comparative study of literature was dominated by national institutions. They are now known as ‘creative misreadings’. Besides, it is safe to focus any survey of the early reception of Swift in France on A Tale of a Tub and Gulliver’s Travels. Although his bibliography records French renderings of Sir William Temple’s Letters, Miscellanea, and Memoirs, edited by Swift in 1700 (Teerink-Scouten 469–476), as well as, somewhat later, Some Remarks on the Barrier Treaty (1712), The Conduct of the Allies (1712), and The Publick Spirit of the Whigs (1714) (Teerink-Scouten 563, 547–552, 601; Lautel 1991, 2), Swift’s early fame in France almost exclusively rests on A Tale, and his later one, additionally, on that of Gulliver. His French reception, in other words, is essentially the history of two books.

II

A Tale of a Tub was reviewed soon after publication by French-language journals such as the Nouvelles de la République des Lettres, which was published in Amsterdam.⁵ Even so, it took almost another twenty years before it was first translated into French (Teerink-Scouten 262). This delay cannot sufficiently be accounted for (Goulding 1924, 16) through the criticism showered on the Tale since its appearance in England (Williams 1970, 31–46). Significantly, the reviewer proved eager to defend Swift against the charges of irreligion and atheism, justifying some rather ‘free expressions’ with A Tale’s genre. This, the reviewer claimed, was apparently ‘modelled on Rabelais’ (September 1705, 343).⁶ With this claim, however, he did Swift a disservice; Rabelais did not conform to contemporary French taste. Consequently, the comment, well-intended though it was, did not result in arousing the interest of potential French translators at the time.

In 1721, two French translations of A Tale finally appeared, presumably by accident in the same year. They differ considerably from one another. The first, by René Macé, a French traveller to Ireland, is a free adaptation entitled Les Trois Justaucorps: Conte Bleu, Tiré de l’Anglois du Révérend Mr. Jonathan Swift (Teerink-Scouten 262), which does not even mention The Battle of the Books, published together with A Tale in 1704. In the Preface, Macé admits to having been chiefly interested in the retelling of the adventurous parts. Using the generic label ‘conte bleu’, he classifies Les Trois Justaucorps as light fiction. Rather than argue for English otherness, Macé emphasizes the divergent customs of the capitals, London and Paris, which led him, he points out, to lay the scene in Paris, ‘in order to adjust [himself] to the language and the genius of [his] nation’ (Macé 1721, ‘Avertissement’).⁷ In this view, translation is not an art of transmitting foreign literature and culture but primarily an art of entertaining a French-speaking audience. Macé demonstrates his misunderstanding of Swift’s satire by aligning A Tale thematically with Boccaccio’s Story of the Three Rings (Guthkelch-Smith 1958, xxxvi–xxxviii), and reprinting it in his work. On the other hand, Macé was the first to point out that Swift’s ‘stylistic graces [and] beauties’ were almost impossible to express in any language but English (Macé 1721, ‘Avertissement’);⁸ an assessment that was to recur again and again in Swift’s French reception throughout the eighteenth century.

In contrast, the second translator, Justus van Effen (1684–1735), was primarily motivated by a preoccupation with mediating a foreign culture. A Dutch journalist and multilingual man of letters, who in addition to Mandeville and Shaftesbury translated Steele’s Guardian and parts of Robinson Crusoe (Pienaar 1929; Schorr 1982), van Effen published his version of A Tale, Le Conte du Tonneaú with Henri Scheurleer at The Hague, in two volumes, supplemented by another eight of Swift’s early satires (Teerink-Scouten 263). It is no exaggeration to say that, in so doing, he became the first to introduce Swift to a Continental readership on a larger scale.

Van Effen’s achievement as a translator of Swift rests on his national impartiality. Although his education was deeply rooted in the culture of French neoclassicism and although he fought in the camp of the Moderns in the Querelle des Anciens et des Modernes, he recognized the innovative potential of British authors and their intellectual autonomy. In his translations, he shows himself aware of the probable prejudices of his French audience, trying to overcome the obstacles in the process of reception by a compromise which combines a plea for English alterity with the stylistic ideals of French aesthetics. Van Effen’s role as an intermediary between the two cultures is made explicit in the ‘Préface du Traducteur’, the translator’s preface in which he praises Swift, who was almost unknown in France at the time, as both a typically English writer and ‘one of Britain’s greatest wits’ (1721, 1: *sigs 7v-8r).⁹ Enlarging on the English national character, van Effen deduces stylistic peculiarities from it. The English, he claims, boast an almost limitless liberty of thought, of conduct, and of manners. This liberty, he continues, results in a language characteristically rich in images and metaphors. Despite this assessment, van Effen refuses to side with either culture. Instead, he employs an argument of reader-response criticism (unusual in the early eighteenth century) which commits translators to a consideration of their readers’ ‘horizons’: ‘Although these passages strike and charm English readers whose intellectual horizon corresponds to that of the authors, they can only be displeasing to foreigners with a mind more exact and less volatile’ (1721, 1: *sig. 9r-v).¹⁰ According to van Effen, any responsible translator utilizes this insight into the varying national tastes and reading habits to mitigate what may be stylistically alien in foreign writers, thus facilitating their reception in France. In this way, van Effen distances himself from the French tradition of belles infidèles, implicitly refusing to regard French translations as superior to foreign originals. It is more than a mere topos of affected modesty when he emphasizes the almost insurmountable problems of translating Swift’s texts (1721, 1: sig. *8r). These, he argues, have to be considered by anybody trying to explain why no translator has dared to tackle the Dean.

In practice, van Effen’s translation of the Tale is characterized by a tendency towards stylistic elevation and euphemism: numerous ‘mots bas’, low words, which lend Swift’s satire its distinctive character, were eliminated or reproduced in a milder form, or in a paraphrase bordering on the prim and proper (Graeber 2002, 43–48). For example, Swift’s ‘Bawdy-Houses’ (Prose Works, 1: 47) reappear in van Effen’s rendering in elegant and graceful mythological guise as ‘temples de Cythère’, temples of Venus (1721, 1: 86); the ‘Windows of a Whore’ (Prose Works, 1: 104) are euphemistically rewritten as ‘les vitres d’une Femme de mediocre vertu’, the windows of a woman of modest virtue (1721, 1: 211); and a ‘dirty’ word like ‘Dunghil’ (Prose Works, 1: 102) disappears altogether. In his Preface, van Effen justified this kind of toning down with his endeavour to meet the expectations of his French readers, more particularly, with ‘his hope’ that his audience’s ‘sense of shame’ will not be ‘up in arms against my expressions’ (1721, 1: *sig. 7v).¹¹

A second characteristic of van Effen’s translation is its ‘explicative’ bias. This is noticeable as early as the Preface, in which van Effen tries hard to ensure that his readers understand Swift’s allegory of the clothes correctly (1721, 1: sig. *5r-v). This tendency to ‘explicate’ is continued throughout the whole of Le Conte du Tonneau, and on aggregate results in a considerable amplification of Swift’s text. Van Effen clearly believed that he had to ‘decode’ the English original with its numerous allusions, topographical and biographical references, and mythological comparisons, more often concise and laconic than not, in order to put his French audience in a position to come to grips with a hermeneutically demanding work. A brief example must suffice. In Section IV, Swift ridicules the innovations of the Roman Catholic Church when describing the many and varied preservative qualities of Lord Peter’s ‘Universal Pickle’, the practice, as a note added to the fifth edition of 1710 explains, of using ‘Holy Water’, which is reminiscent of a pagan magic ritual rather than a Christian ceremony: ‘For Peter would put in a certain Quantity of his Powder Pimperlim pimp, after which it never failed of success. The Operation was performed by Spargefaction in a proper Time of the Moon’ (Prose Works, 1: 67–68). Endeavouring to make Swift’s meaning unmistakably clear, van Effen not only amplifies the passage but also introduces a new ingredient, transubstantiation: ‘Dès que Pierre y avoit mis une petite pincée de sa poudre prelimpimpim, elle changeoit de nature, & produisoit des effets miraculeux. L’Operation étoit faite par aspersion & pour être sur du succès il falloit la mettre en œuvre dans un certain tems de la Lune’ (1721, 1: 129–30). He removes the sexual innuendo unmistakable in the English ‘pimp’ with the sonorous and religiose chant of ‘prelimpimpim’. This example is altogether typical of van Effen’s method of translating: his desire for clarity makes him add to his text whenever he thinks that additions contribute to the elucidation of Swift’s terse allusions and style, or even provide explanatory glosses of his own (for example, 1721, 1: 182; Graeber 2002, 48–57), all serving the purpose of facilitating Swift’s reception in France.

The hostile criticism that Le Conte du Tonneau met with among contemporary reviewers was rarely directed towards the charge of atheism and irreligion, and even more rarely towards van Effen’s stylistic errors, which reveal him as a non-native speaker of French (Goulding 1924, 32–44). Rather, it was directed towards Swift’s eccentric sense of humour, which to many seemed representative of the bizarre English humour in general and which at first reinforced French national stereotypes. When the translation was put on the Papal Index in 1734, the lure of forbidden fruits that it seemed to promise made it additionally attractive to specific groups of readers (Goulding 1924, 38). The tables were turned only as late as 1776 when, in the Journal Anglais, a reviewer praised Swift for his wealth of ideas, at the same time taking French critics to task for blaming an English work for its ostensible ‘lack of good taste’ (Goulding 1924, 44),¹² of which they knew only in translation.

In his letters, Voltaire, a chief intermediary of Swift in France, reverted again and again to A Tale of a Tub, which, with regret, he took to be untranslatable (Voltaire 1971, 400). Comparing Swift with Pascal who, Voltaire argued, was only amusing at the expense of the Jesuits, Voltaire described Swift as a satirist who ‘entertained and instructed at the cost of humankind’ (Voltaire 1971).¹³ The reason for this, Voltaire continued, was that Dean Swift enjoyed a liberty and audacity of thinking which was utterly unknown in France. Significantly, Voltaire turns the fact of Swift’s limited reception in his country into a compliment to Swift and the English nation, which permitted them to make many concerns the object of his criticism and satire.

On the other hand, the reservations of contemporary French critics are more than counterbalanced by some ten reissues of Le Conte du Tonneau, which was most avidly read particularly after the success of Gulliver’s Travels in 1727, and which was even reprinted as late as 1962 (Lautel 1991, 26). Moreover, van Effen’s translation not only made an impact in French-speaking language areas but also in Germany, where it became a base for Georg Christian Wolf’s Mährgen von der Tonne, published at Altona in 1729 (Graeber 2002, 39–61). As a creative work, however, A Tale of a Tub does not seem to have left any traces, excepting Jean-Louis Fougeret de Montbrun’s Le Cosmopolite of 1753, which was likewise uninfluential, though (Goulding 1924, 50). At any rate, there are unmistakable references to Swift’s Tale in Fougeret de Montbrun’s narrative framework, in which two quacks named Martin and Jean cheat an equally fraudulent charlatan-magician who specializes in vending healing charms and soul-purifying stones (Fougeret de Montbrun 1753, 50–51), no doubt echoing Lord Peter’s machinations in Sections II and IV of the Tale.

III

Swift’s most famous work was translated almost simultaneously at The Hague and Paris. Although the Abbé Pierre-François Guyot Desfontaines brought out the Paris edition of Voyages de Gulliver only some six months after the editio princeps of late October 1726, he was even preceded by the anonymous Hague translator, whose own version had been published in late January 1727 (Teerink-Scouten 371–388). Clearly, both translations were rushed into print.

In its success, the Paris translation outshines all later ones, its many deficiencies notwithstanding. Half a dozen reprints and reissues appeared in the same year, and at least another nine till the end of the century (Teerink-Scouten 389–397A). All told, some 180 editions as well as adaptations of Desfontaines’s version are on record (Goulding 1924, 92; Lautel 1991). The reader who was most eager to see Gulliver’s Travels translated into French was Voltaire, who responded enthusiastically to the Dean’s poignant wit and satire. In February 1727, from his exile in London, he had sent a copy of the first two parts to his protégé Thiériot, urging him to translate Gulliver into French (Williams 1970, 73–74). Three months later, he blamed Thiériot for his sluggishness, at the same time praising Swift’s imagination, style, and universal appeal and again pressing him to seize the opportunity. It is in this letter that Voltaire first compares Swift to Rabelais (Voltaire 1968, 314), suggesting that thi...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Series Editor’s Preface
• Acknowledgements
• List of Contributors
• Abbreviations
• Timeline: European Reception of Jonathan Swift
• Introduction
• 1 Swift’s First Voyages to Europe: His Impact on Eighteenth-Century France
• 2 The Italian Reception of Swift
• 3 Swift’s Horses in the Land of the Caballeros
• 4 A Lusitanian Dish: Swift to Portuguese Taste
• 5 The Dean’s Voyages into Germany
• 6 Swiftian Presence in Scandinavia: Denmark, Norway, Sweden
• 7 No Swift beyond Gulliver: Notes on the Polish Reception
• 8 From Russian ‘Sviftovedenie’ to the Soviet School of Swift Criticism: The Dean’s Fate in Russia
• 9 Detecting Swift in the Czech Lands
• 10 The Dean in Hungary
• 11 Swift’s Impact in Bulgaria
• 12 From the Infantile to the Subversive: Swift’s Romanian Adventures
• 13 Swiftian Material Culture
• Bibliography
• Index
• Footnotes