Periodic Reporting for period 1 - TRANSACT (Book History and Translation History: Copyright, Wages, Censorship, and the (Proto-)Professionalisation of Translators in Nineteenth-Century Britain and Ireland)
Periodo di rendicontazione: 2018-10-01 al 2020-09-30
I was a Marie Curie Fellow at the Institute of English Studies (IES) from 1 Oct 2018-30 Nov 2020 (including a two-month suspension due to Covid-19). The objectives of the project were to develop an innovative program of research, methods, analysis and public engagement events at the interdisciplinary crossroads of book history and translation, by conducting the following research and outreach activities:
1. An archival examination of the production of English translations in nineteenth-century Britain and Ireland, with a focus on copyright agreements, translator-publisher relationships and the professionalisation of literary translators. The research identified two interrelated strands of research or work packages - (a) translators’ earnings and copyright; (b) censorship.
2. Dissemination and public engagement activities that effectively exploit the synergies of book history and translation studies, addressing the above themes as well as other topics central to this interdisciplinary research cluster. A number of dissemination and public engagement activities conducted during the project were on poetry translation and its publishing aspects, and on the theme of women translators.
The project is important because it pushes interdisciplinary thinking, bridging the two disciplines and contributing to making translation less peripheral to book history. Interdisciplinary work, and the ability to think across subjects and disciplines and crossfertilize our ideas and experiences, has been increasingly recognized and deployed as a means to address societal issues. It is key to the ways in which we write the history of print and of communication. Translator-publisher relationships have been largely underresearched, and translation has been an undervalued yet crucial aspect of the production and dissemination of texts. The study generates new knowledge in the areas of copyright and professional literary translation, which are important to the ways in which texts and ideas circulate internationally today. The findings will be available in two publications – an article published in Meta (April 2021), a journal of translation studies, and a book published in the ‘Publishing and Book Culture’ series of Cambridge Elements (CUP), a series of short, accessible monographs (Fall 2021).
1. An archival examination of the production of English translations in nineteenth-century Britain and Ireland, with a focus on copyright agreements, translator-publisher relationships and the professionalisation of literary translators. The research identified two interrelated strands of research or work packages - (a) translators’ earnings and copyright; (b) censorship.
2. Dissemination and public engagement activities that effectively exploit the synergies of book history and translation studies, addressing the above themes as well as other topics central to this interdisciplinary research cluster. A number of dissemination and public engagement activities conducted during the project were on poetry translation and its publishing aspects, and on the theme of women translators.
The project is important because it pushes interdisciplinary thinking, bridging the two disciplines and contributing to making translation less peripheral to book history. Interdisciplinary work, and the ability to think across subjects and disciplines and crossfertilize our ideas and experiences, has been increasingly recognized and deployed as a means to address societal issues. It is key to the ways in which we write the history of print and of communication. Translator-publisher relationships have been largely underresearched, and translation has been an undervalued yet crucial aspect of the production and dissemination of texts. The study generates new knowledge in the areas of copyright and professional literary translation, which are important to the ways in which texts and ideas circulate internationally today. The findings will be available in two publications – an article published in Meta (April 2021), a journal of translation studies, and a book published in the ‘Publishing and Book Culture’ series of Cambridge Elements (CUP), a series of short, accessible monographs (Fall 2021).
The first year of my project was devoted to archival research and training. I explored the archives further in the second year, until the coronavirus pandemic erupted. After processing and analysing the data, I wrote proposals for the article and the book. I organised public engagement activities and a short online symposium on “Women Translators and Authorship”. With IES, I had a chance to convert my learning and research into a lecture, which I delivered to students of the M.A. in Book History. With its sheer amount of materials, the archive of Richard Bentley & Son (British Library), one of the most enduring and significant publishing businesses in nineteenth-century Britain, quickly proved to present both a mine of information on the production of Victorian translations and a source of methodological questions. Although I also visited the archives at Trinity College, Dublin and University of Reading, I decided to focus on the Bentley archive to conduct an in-depth analysis. The results are manifold. First, using translator-publisher correspondence, costs of translations and copyright agreements, the project contributes a theoretical and empirical perspective on both what I term the ‘professional turn’ in translation studies and on the Archive as a concept. It offers a book-translation perspective on the usefulness of archives to the work of uncovering neglected agents and processes in the production of texts. These aspects are discussed in the Meta article ‘Towards a Professional Identity: Translators in the Victorian Publisher’s Archive’. The findings provide a range of copyright and contractual patterns, showing that the English copyright of translations was purchased, shared or given in a variety of ways. They also unveil various agents in the process – foreign publishers and authors, British or Irish editors, and many (often anonymous) translators. Materials include half-profit share agreements, authors’ formal authorizations, outright purchase of copyrights, commissioned work, and other, less common arrangements. Situated at the interdisciplinary junction where translation history and book history meet, the CUP book, titled Translation and Book History: Theoretical, Historical and Archival Perspectives, provides fresh insights into this under-conceptualized area.
Most of the available archival data and findings relate to Work Package 1 (translators’ earnings and copyright). I conducted WP 2 (censorship) in the form of a book exhibition in collaboration with Senate House Library, thus gaining skills in curation and public engagement. By interconnecting three distinct yet related stories of Victorian censorship – Aubrey Beardsley’s drawing of ‘The Toilette of Salomé’ (1894); the censorship of English translations published by Henry Vizetelly (1880s); and novelist George Moore’s pamphlet Literature at nurse: or, Circulating morals (1885), a critique of the brand of censorship exerted by circulating libraries – the display, Censorship, Translation and Obscenity in Late Victorian Times, took a novel, interdisciplinary approach to the subject of Victorian censorship and its treatment of obscenity.
Most of the available archival data and findings relate to Work Package 1 (translators’ earnings and copyright). I conducted WP 2 (censorship) in the form of a book exhibition in collaboration with Senate House Library, thus gaining skills in curation and public engagement. By interconnecting three distinct yet related stories of Victorian censorship – Aubrey Beardsley’s drawing of ‘The Toilette of Salomé’ (1894); the censorship of English translations published by Henry Vizetelly (1880s); and novelist George Moore’s pamphlet Literature at nurse: or, Circulating morals (1885), a critique of the brand of censorship exerted by circulating libraries – the display, Censorship, Translation and Obscenity in Late Victorian Times, took a novel, interdisciplinary approach to the subject of Victorian censorship and its treatment of obscenity.
The project has pushed the interdisciplinary and cross-disciplinary offerings of translation and book history by applying book history and archival methods to translation. The research generates new knowledge that will inform book and translation studies, archival and publishing studies, literary and copyright history. For example, its investigation of multi-handed, anonymous translations in the early Victorian era contributes to the history of literary anonymity. The study unveils a complex and fascinating web of transactions and relationships between a Victorian publisher, his translators, foreign publishers, authors, and other key mediators. Using qualitative, quantitative and statistical data, the project's publications offer new data about copyright patterns for English translations as well as translators’ various rates of pay. Relatedly, the research documents the growing contribution of women to the profession of translation, showing a higher rate of female participation than a bibliographical survey would indicate. The study elucidates aspects of a generally undervalued and underresearched profession, while also developing a conceptually and empirically informed gender dimension to the history of that profession. Drawing on largely untapped materials from the archives of Victorian publishers, the forthcoming book includes a novel adaptation of Robert Darnton’s “Communications Circuit” (1982) – a highly influential model for studying book history – which bears relevance to other contexts too. The project contributes towards changing general perceptions of translators as shadowy and passive agents with linguistic abilities, by making their profession, their history and their role in the “communications circuit” more visible. The book breaks new ground by bringing publishing theory and translation theory into a dialogue that builds on common issues such as the selection, mediation, filtering and (re-)framing of content – issues that are crucial at all levels of society today.