Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-2brh9 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-30T14:51:33.076Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

Translational Decadence: Versions of Gustave Flaubert, Walter Pater, and Lafcadio Hearn

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 December 2021

Stefano Evangelista
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Literary decadence played an active role in promoting the increased circulation and critical scrutiny of literary translations in the second half of the nineteenth century. Building on Walter Benjamin's influential definition of translation as an autonomous literary form, this article examines Walter Pater's “Style” (1888) and Lafcadio Hearn's 1910 translation of Flaubert's Tentation de Saint Antoine (1874) in order to map a theory and practice of decadent translation founded on the aesthetic and ethical respect for the foreignness of the original. Paying closer attention to the aesthetics of decadent translation, as well as its social networks and material history, generates new insights on the cosmopolitan culture of decadence and Victorian literature more broadly.

Type
Research Article
Information
Victorian Literature and Culture , Volume 49 , Special Issue 4: Special Issue: Scales of Decadence , Winter 2021 , pp. 807 - 829
Check for updates
Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Works Cited

Apter, Emily. The Translation Zone: A New Comparative Literature. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Arnold, Matthew. “On Translating Homer.” In On the Classical Tradition, edited by Super, R. H., 97–216. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1960.Google Scholar
Baudelaire, Charles. “Edgar Allan Poe: His Life and Works.” In The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays, translated by Mayne, Jonathan, 69–92. New York: Da Capo, 1964.Google Scholar
Baudelaire, Charles. Selected Letters of Charles Baudelaire: The Conquest of Solitude. Edited and translated by Lloyd, Rosemary. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1986.Google Scholar
Benjamin, Walter. “The Task of the Translator.” In Illuminations, edited by Arendt, Hannah, translated by Zohn, Harry, 70–82. London: Fontana, 1992.Google Scholar
Bisland, Elizabeth. “Introduction.” In Gustave Flaubert, The Temptation of Saint Anthony, translated by Hearn, Lafcadio, n.p. New York: Alice Harriman, 1910.Google Scholar
Bisland, Elizabeth. Life and Letters of Lafcadio Hearn. 2 vols. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1906.Google Scholar
Coste, Bénédicte. “Pater as Translator.” In Pater the Classicist: Classical Scholarship, Reception, and Aestheticism, edited by Martindale, Charles, Evangelista, Stefano, and Prettejohn, Elizabeth, 47–61. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Cummins, Anthony. “Émile Zola's Cheap English Dress: The Vizetelly Translations, Late-Victorian Print Culture, and the Crisis of Literary Value.” Review of English Studies 60, no. 243 (2009): 108–32.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dessy, Clément. “Georges Khnopff ou la reconversion cosmopolite de l'homme de lettres.” Textyles 45 (2014): 47–67.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Dowling, Linda. Language and Decadence in the Victorian Fin de Siècle. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986.Google Scholar
Drury, Annmarie. Translation as Transformation in Victorian Poetry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017.Google Scholar
Eells, Emily. “‘Influence Occulte’: The Reception of Pater's Works in France before 1922.” In The Reception of Walter Pater in Europe, edited by Bann, Stephen, 87–116. London: Continuum, 2004.Google Scholar
Ellis, Havelock. “Huysmans.” In Affirmations, 158–210. London: Walter Scott, 1898.Google Scholar
Ely, George H. “French and English.” Macmillan's Magazine 496, no. 83 (November 1, 1900): 257–65.Google Scholar
Evangelista, Stefano. Literary Cosmopolitanism in the English Fin de Siècle: Citizens of Nowhere. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Flaubert, Gustave. The First Temptation of Saint Anthony by Gustave Flaubert: Being a Translation into English by René Francis from the 1849–1856 Manuscripts Edited by Louis Bertrand. London: Duckworth, 1910.Google Scholar
Flaubert, Gustave. The Temptation of St Antony. Translated by Hannigan, D. F.. London: Nichols, 1895.Google Scholar
Flaubert, Gustave. The Temptation of Saint Anthony. Translated by Hearn, Lafcadio. New York: Alice Harriman, 1910.Google Scholar
Flaubert, Gustave. The Temptation of Saint Anthony. Translated by Monkshood, G. F.. London: Greening, 1910.Google Scholar
Foucault, Michel. “Fantasia of the Library.” In Language, Counter-Memory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews, translated by Bouchard, Donald F. and Simon, Sherry, 87–109. Oxford: Blackwell, 1977.Google Scholar
Francis, René. “Translator's Preface.” In The First Temptation of Saint Anthony by Gustave Flaubert: Being a Translation into English by René Francis from the 1849–1856 Manuscripts Edited by Louis Bertrand, 53–55. London: Duckworth, 1910.Google Scholar
Gagnier, Regenia. Individualism, Decadence, Globalization: On the Relationship of Part to Whole, 1859–1920. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hannigan, D. F. “Introduction.” In Gustave Flaubert, The Temptation of St Antony, translated by Hannigan, D. F., v–vii. London: Nichols, 1895.Google Scholar
Hassan, Waïl S. “Agency and Translational Literature: Ahdaf Soueif's The Map of Love.” PMLA 121, no. 3 (2006): 753–68.Google Scholar
Haynes, Kenneth. “Translation and British Literary Culture.” In The Oxford History of Literary Translation in English, 1790–1900, edited by France, Peter and Haynes, Kenneth, 4:3–19. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.Google Scholar
Hearn, Lafcadio. “For the Sum of $25.” In Editorials of Lafcadio Hearn, 182–86. 1926. New York: Beekman, 1974.Google Scholar
Hearn, Lafcadio. “A French Translation of Edgar Allan Poe.” In Editorials of Lafcadio Hearn, 63–69. 1926. New York: Beekman, 1974.Google Scholar
Huysmans, J.-K. Against Nature. Translated by Baldick, Robert. London: Penguin, 1959.Google Scholar
La Clavière, René de Maulde. The Women of the Renaissance: A Study of Feminism. Translated by Ely, George Herbert. London: Swan Sonnenschein, 1900.Google Scholar
Lefevere, André. Translation, Rewriting and the Manipulation of Literary Fame. London: Routledge, 1992.Google Scholar
Lemoine, Bernadette. “Lafcadio Hearn as an Ambassador of French Literature in the United States and Japan.” Revue de littérature comparée 319 (2006): 299–317.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Mahoney, Kristin. Literature and the Politics of Post-Victorian Decadence. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Maxwell, Catherine. Scents and Sensibility: Perfume in Victorian Literary Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Pater, Walter. “Plato and the Doctrine of Motion.” In Plato and Platonism: A Series of Lectures, 5–26. Volume 6 of The Library Edition of the Works of Walter Pater. London: Macmillan, 1910.Google Scholar
Pater, Walter. Portraits imaginaires. Translated by Khnopff, Georges. Paris: Mercure de France, 1899.Google Scholar
Pater, Walter. “A Prince of Court Painters.” In Imaginary Portraits, edited by Østermark-Johansen, Lene, 59–79. Vol. 3 of The Collected Works of Walter Pater. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019.Google Scholar
Pater, Walter. “Style.” In Appreciations, with an Essay on “Style, ” 5–39. Volume 5 of The Library Edition of the Works of Walter Pater. London: Macmillan, 1910.Google Scholar
Potolsky, Matthew. The Decadent Republic of Letters: Taste, Politics, and Cosmopolitan Community from Baudelaire to Beardsley. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Prettejohn, Elizabeth. “Pater and the Classics.” In The Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature: After 1880, edited by Haynes, Kenneth, 5:78–107. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019.Google Scholar
Prins, Yopie. Ladies’ Greek: Victorian Translations of Tragedy. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017.Google Scholar
Reeder, Jessie. “Toward a Multilingual Victorian Transatlanticism.” Victorian Literature and Culture 49 no. 1 (2021): 171–95.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rees, Kathy. “The Heinemann International Library, 1890–7.” Translation and Literature 26, no. 2 (2017): 162–81.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Reynolds, Matthew. The Poetry of Translation. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013.Google Scholar
Reynolds, Matthew. Translation: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016.10.1093/actrade/9780198712114.001.0001CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Scholl, Lesa. Translation, Authorship, and the Victorian Professional Woman: Charlotte Brontë, Harriet Martineau and George Eliot. Farnham: Ashgate, 2011.Google Scholar
Snodgrass, Chris. “The Poetry of the 1890s.” In A Companion to Victorian Poetry, edited by Cronin, Richard, Chapman, Alison, and Harrison, Anthony H., 321–41. Malden: Blackwell, 2002.Google Scholar
Symons, Arthur. “The Decadent Movement in Literature.” In The Symbolist Movement in Literature, edited by Creasy, Matthew, 169–83. Manchester: Carcanet, 2014.Google Scholar
Venuti, Lawrence. “Local Contingencies: Translation and National Identities.” In Nation, Language, and the Ethics of Translation, edited by Bermann, Sandra and Wood, Michael, 182–207. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005.Google Scholar
Venuti, Lawrence. The Translator's Invisibility: A History of Translation. London: Routledge, 2008.Google Scholar
Walkowitz, Rebecca. Born Translated: The Contemporary Novel in an Age of World Literature. New York: Columbia University Press, 2015.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wilde, Oscar. The Complete Letters of Oscar Wilde. Edited by Holland, Merlin and Hart-Davis, Rupert. New York: Henry Holt, 2000.Google Scholar
W. P. J. “The Nemesis of Sentimentalism.” Macmillan's Magazine 60 (May 1, 1889): 191–98.Google Scholar
Yeats, W. B. The Letters of W. B. Yeats. Edited by Wade, Allan. New York: Macmillan, 1955.Google Scholar