Inexpensive ephemeral literature intended for a broad audience has always constituted a significant portion of the publishing business in Europe. Between the 16th and the 19th centuries such literature largely circulated in the form of chapbooks and broadsides. Chapbooks were booklets often issued unbound containing jokes, riddles, songs, practical advice, almanacs, stories of bandits and murderers, lives of saints, prophecies and tales inspired by medieval romances. Broadsides consisted of a single large sheet printed on one side and commonly contained ballads, proclamations and edicts, reports of trials, death sentences, and news. Chapbooks and broadsides frequently incorporated illustrations. They were often peddled in the street of urban and rural centres and read aloud during public events. Book historians have studied these publications in depth, stressing their social and cultural relevance and noticing that the chapbook and broadside repertoires of different European countries share genres, characters and themes. This study makes a first attempt to concretely and comprehensively explain how these similarities came about.
The study is built on two complementary premises. The first is that translation played an important role in making chapbooks and broadsides the carriers of the same narrative across different cultures and languages. The second is that the theoretical, methodological, conceptual and analytical tools devised in literary translation studies offer an optimal framework to explore the relationship between translation and the transnationalisation of chapbooks and broadsides. Translation studies has so far restricted its focus to ‘canonical’ works in the form of books. This project showed that by extending the attention to translation of cheap ephemeral publications, we can achieve a better understanding of the processes that led to the formation of a shared European heritage of non-canonical forms of literature. By doing so, it contributed towards more genuine and fuller representations of the transnational life of print culture.
The project’s objectives were primarily achieved through the analysis of a corpus of 19th-century Italian chapbooks and broadsides and their respective transnational correspondents. The texts included in the corpus represent a range of textual genres and translational relations, giving a good idea of the variety that underpins the relationship between translation and the cross-cultural mobility of cheap ephemeral print. Their examination made it possible to closely observe how translation of chapbooks and broadside literature linked the 19th-century Italian cultural and literary repertoire to that of other countries while enriching and diversifying it.
