Translation as Transformation in Victorian Poetry

Explores how Victorian poetry and translation dynamically influenced one another in an age of empire.

Annmarie Drury (Author)

9781107437463, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 31 August 2017

309 pages, 5 b/w illus.
23 x 15.3 x 1.4 cm, 0.5 kg

'Drury's book is also perforce engaged with political questions about imperial subjugation and the global distribution of power, as expressed in linguistic terms. One of the valuable aspects of Drury's book is its attention not just to Victorian translation practice but also to the theories of translation, implicit and explicit, that were developed and enacted in this era, predominantly in the periodical press.' William A. Cohen, Victorian Literature and Culture

Translation as Transformation in Victorian Poetry illuminates the dynamic mutual influences of poetic and translation cultures in Victorian Britain, drawing on new materials, archival and periodical, to reveal the range of thinking about translation in the era. The results are a new account of Victorian translation and fresh readings both of canonical poems (including those by Browning and Tennyson) and of non-canonical poems (including those by Michael Field). Revealing Victorian poets to be crucial agents of intercultural negotiation in an era of empire, Annmarie Drury shows why and how meter matters so much to them, and locates the origins of translation studies within Victorian conundrums. She explores what it means to 'sound Victorian' in twentieth-century poetic translation, using Swahili as a case study, and demonstrates how and why it makes sense to consider Victorian translation as world literature in action.

Introduction: Victorian translations, poetic transformations
1. Discovering a Victorian culture of translation
2. Idylls of the King, the Mabinogion, and Tennyson's faithless melancholy
3. In poetry and translation, Browning's case for innovation
4. The Rubáiyát and its compass
5. The persistence of Victorian translation practice: William Hichens and the Swahili world
Epilogue: Victorian translators and 'the epoch of world literature'
Bibliography.

Subject Areas: Literary studies: poetry & poets [DSC], Literary studies: c 1800 to c 1900 [DSBF], Translation & interpretation [CFP]