2 - ‘Original Spirit’: Translating the Maternal Educator

Summary

Mrs Mason is not the only maternal educator in Wollstonecraft's early works. She has a counterpart in Mrs Jones, who also articulates many of Wollstonecraft's pedagogical principles. Mrs Jones is distinct, however, because she has a German foremother: Christian Gotthilf Salzmann's Sophie Herrmann. In the same year as she published Rights of Men, Wollstonecraft translated Salzmann's Moralisches Elementarbuch into Elements of Morality, for the Use of Children. In doing so, she anglicised his maternal educator and established connections between her pedagogical practices and those of her autofictional persona in Original Stories. As Chapter 1 has demonstrated, Wollstonecraft appropriates and transforms material from foreign source texts; her translations are the most overt manifestation of this writing practice. Just as her textual personae should be read as different sides of her Rousseauvian self-portrait, so her translation of Salzmann's Elementarbuch should be read as a creative work that speaks to her other texts. Sophie Herrmann becomes Mrs Jones, another mouthpiece for Wollstonecraft's developing feminism and philanthropic philosophy. Recalling Mrs Mason, Mrs Jones engages in instructive dialogue with a number of other char-acters, each of whom amplifies the subtly politicised voice of the ideal maternal educator.

Historically, translation has been associated with inauthenticity – with the distortion or even betrayal of an original text. In recent years, however, translation theorists have sought to reclaim the discourse of translation, celebrating the creative rewriting of texts in new cultural contexts or in response to political and aesthetic agendas, and examining how this rewriting can grant the translator power to ‘effect cultural change’ and ‘penetrate reified worldviews’. In common with many writers of the period, Wollstonecraft demonstrates just such a creative and ideologically engaged approach to translation. In her Advertisement to Elements, she states that, although she ‘term[s] it a translation’, she does ‘not pretend to assert that it is a literal one’ (II, 5). On the contrary, she suppresses and reworks many aspects of her source text, as well as interpolating her own material, both to domesticate the translation for her English readership, and to ‘give it the spirit of an original’ (5). For this professionally confident Wollstonecraft, translation presents an opportunity to innovate, to assert her critical acumen and to comment on the different cultural identities she perceived in the nations of eighteenth-century Europe.