1In a landmark article, Linda K. Hughes deplored the choice of the Wellesley Index to British Periodicals’ editors to exclude poetry for its unfortunate consequences on scholars’ apprehension of the reception of Victorian poetry. Arguably, poets published in periodicals by choice, strategy, and periodicals published poetry out of editorial and aesthetic interests. Houghton’s choice obscured the presence of poetry in many organs, inflecting the study of its publication and reception by diverse constituencies. Hughes, therefore, turned her attention to identifying and locating these poems, followed by ‘Digital Victorian Periodical Poetry’, a project led by Alison Chapman which offers ‘a digital index of all periodical poems and poetry translations in English across full runs of 21 periodicals, magazines, and newspapers; a digital edition of representative periodical poetry, encoded for poetic and material features; a personography based on poets, translators, and illustrators’ (Chapman).
2Arguably poetry is as much a part of periodical literature as literature in translation. However, most of the translations scattered in Victorian periodicals remain poorly documented. ‘Digital Victorian Periodical Poetry’, only succinctly documents them, and, in some cases, inaccurately. Translations are the subject of what follows since they are the main conduit of international cultural exchanges in the last third of the nineteenth century. More specifically, what follows deals with translations from and into English in periodicals on both sides of the Channel from the last third of the century to 1910, in a time when France was emerging from a long period of control over the printed word while Great Britain had abolished taxes on knowledge between 1853 and 1861, without, however, solving the problems of catering to different readerships’ taste. In 1886 the Berne Convention established a legal framework and protected authors and the right to translate. We first seek to locate translations in periodicals. The Wellesley Index mentions ‘translation’ or uses translation markers (‘translated from the French of X’) but does not identify translations within articles, as those are not its main purpose. It also mentions numerous articles published in French, reflecting sustained intellectual and editorial exchanges. However, the Wellesley volumes are not exhaustive, and assuming that British periodicals published translations from the French, the corpus of titles and formats (quarterly, monthly, weekly and daily) needs to be significantly broadened to reach a more accurate quantification of the presence of translations, as a first step.
3Here, translation should be understood as any segment identified as such, from a quotation to a longer text (poem, short story, extract from a play, essay), referring to a text published in French in a periodical or book form. In the diversity of translation sectors, I am interested in literary translation and take any occurrence in a periodical, in all the sections including the so unjustly neglected review of reviews, as the unit of measurement of translation presence. Just as the DVPP identifies a substantial number of poems in periodicals, my hypothesis is that literary translation of French into English constitutes a significant proportion of Victorian periodicals worthy of investigation: which periodicals published translations between 1870 and 1914? How often? Which texts were translated? If the translation was signed, by whom? For which readership(s)? The answers to these questions constitute the quantitative side of my project while the qualitative dimension, which is much better documented, albeit only in specific cases, is a matter for translatology.
4This issue is comparatively little addressed, partly because literature in translation still suffers from a lower status than original literature, and partly because it may be less easy to spot in a periodical. The table of contents may neglect it in favour of the contribution title; its embeddedness in a text may go completely unnoticed without a finely-grained examination. Additionally, we should mention the exorbitant (and unjustified) importance given to the volume as the unit of measurement compared with the periodical’s shorter but varied contents. Volumes are also easier to identify because of legal deposit in France and the 1842 and 1911 Copyright Acts in Great Britain. In both countries, recent ambitious publications on literary translation (Wilfert-Portal in Chevrel, D’Hulst & Lombez 255‒343; France and Haynes) still use the volume as the unit of measurement. The volumes of The Oxford Critical and Cultural History of Modernist Magazines mention the presence of translated texts without further comment.
- 1 ‘Decadence’ is understood in a broad sense: the ‘Décabase’ includes authors classified as non-decad (...)
- 2 Periodicals include: La Nouvelle Revue, La revue littéraire et artistique, La Revue contemporaine, (...)
- 3 This choice should not obscure the existence of periodicals that have not yet been digitized for va (...)
5In what follows, I propose to briefly present an ongoing project aiming at identifying and documenting the translation of British decadent literature1 in 10 literary and generalist periodicals published in France between 1880 and 1914 (Coste, Crépiat and Millereux),2 before suggesting avenues of research for translation from the French in Victorian periodicals. The ‘Décabase’ is a database of all translations, including fragmentary ones translated in the neglected journalistic genre of the review. It is based on human data mining to ensure particularly fine granularity. It can be searched by periodical, title, keywords, type of text, translation marker, type of reference, publication date, authors, translators, and publishers. Each of its 1,052 references is accompanied by a link to the text of the periodical on Gallica.3 Statistics are available by type of text, author, reference, translation marker, and keyword.
6The ‘Décabase’ only deals with periodicals published in France, both for accessibility and historical reasons: the translational policies of other French-speaking countries towards British literature obeyed different nation-based and educational constraints (Dessy 2014). In addition, the fin de siècle literary cosmopolitanism had its reverse side in the rise of national and nationalist politics, as B. Wilfert-Portal notes (2012, 302‒43). The ‘Décabase’ demonstrates firstly that translations of English literary texts appear with an unsuspected degree in all the periodicals (admittedly selected for their hospitality to translations). Such frequency can be partly explained by changes in legislation on both sides of the Channel (including the law of 29 July 1881 in France liberalizing print), which encouraged the dissemination of printed works, while in 1886 the Berne Convention provided a more protective framework for translation between both countries.
7Secondly, translations cover all literary genres: poetry, prose, drama, and essays. Their size varies according to the periodical and its orientation: the Revue des Deux Mondes (1829/) enjoys the stability and solidity of a format that enables it to accommodate translations running to several pages; the same cannot be said of a review like L’Ermitage (1890/1910) or the 8 issues of Le Prisme (June 1905/March 1906) running to 24 pages only. In addition to a common cosmopolitan editorial policy, the format of the periodical and its sections are two important criteria for quantifying translations. In this respect, the rapid evolution of the French ‘little reviews’ studied by Yoan Vérilhac and the consolidation of editorial models and sections between the 1880s and 1890s constitute a third significant point: the Revue blanche (1891/1903) quickly found a stable format, which was not the case for all periodicals, especially in the 1880s.
8Another significant fact, testifying to the unprecedented development of communication means in the nineteenth century, is that translations appeared almost simultaneously with the publication of the original work. As early as March 1892, the recent Mercure de France published a selection from the Book of the Rhymers’ Club presented by ‘The Pilgrim’ (Remy de Gourmont), offering readers prose translations of poems by Symons, Johnson, Plarr, Greene, Rhys, Rolleston, Radford, and Le Gallienne, ‘at the same time as the volume appeared in London’ (The Pilgrim 200), and preceding a translation of Catullus by Ernest Raynaud. It was also in this review, a textbook case of fin de siècle literary cosmopolitanism, that Walter Pater’s imaginary portrait ‘Sebastian van Storck’ was first ‘translated from English’ by Georges Khnopff in July 1898 (Pater 1898), long before the publication of Philippe Néel’s translation of Pater’s collection in 1931. Near-simultaneity is another distinctive feature of periodical translation at the turn of the century.
9These two examples illustrate a fact bound to recur in the history of translations with not inconsiderable effects: between the first, often fragmentary translation in a periodical, and a translation in volume form, several decades may elapse, during which the first one is simply forgotten, therefore producing a somewhat erroneous perspective. Many volume translations are wrongly celebrated as first translations. Localizing the original translation in periodicals makes it possible to revisit many of the genealogies that structure literary history. Alain Vaillant’s demand that literary history be more inclusive by integrating periodicals (19) also applies to the translations those periodicals contain. Admittedly, the French reception of Walter Pater did not begin with Frédéric Roger-Cornaz’s translation of The Renaissance in 1917. Articles mentioning and partially translating his writings date back to the 1880s and 1890s: they should instead be seen as the first markers of reception and the translation triggers since they aroused the interest of translators and actors in the book sector, resulting in subsequent, longer translations (Wilfert-Portal 302‒43). Consequently, examining translations in periodicals is conducive to revising the literary and reception history of many authors which began in periodicals.
10The ‘Décabase’s translations are somewhat diverse, which may be accounted for by the heterogeneous status of translators. As an activity, translation was not structured as a profession with a curriculum of its own and legitimating bodies such as those developed in the twentieth century (Milan). For a variety of reasons, some of which have to do with the editorial policy of publishers or editors, the act of translation was highly variable in terms of fidelity or linguistic equivalence. Once again, the case of Pater is illuminating: when Theodor de Wyzewa set out to pay tribute to him in the Revue des Deux Mondes in 1896, he offered a translation that can be described as ‘synthetic’ since it compiled different paragraphs from ‘Vézelay’ (Coste) to create what appears as the translation of a false original. Wyzewa’s work was partly explained by the review’s format, partly induced by the diversity of practices, even if it comes as a surprise from the pen of such a distinguished polyglot translator.
- 4 Ernest Dowson, ‘Les trois sorcières’ (juillet 1905), 21, ‘Sagesse’, traduction anonyme, Le Prisme ( (...)
11Poetic translation fragmented poetic collections into solitary pieces punctuating an issue, with significant consequences for the recognition of British poets. Translations of the poems of the highly Francophile and gifted French-speaking Ernest Dowson were infrequent in French periodicals: Le Prisme published five of them in July 1905 that were unsigned,4 while quite simultaneously Vers et Prose printed some, signed by the Franco-American poet Stuart Merrill (Dowson). Dowson’s poetry volumes were never translated and this decadent poet par excellence has remained hardly known outside specialist circles. When translations are too fragmentary or scattered the appetite of readers and publishers may not be aroused. The translation of poetry is indeed an important issue, at the end of the century it ceased to be translated into prose, and French translators, mostly poets, began to privilege translation into unrhymed verse. A few poems of Swinburne, quite popular in France at the time, were translated into verse, including one by Jacques Baignères (Swinburne) in Le Banquet (1892‒1893), a very short-lived review.
12Translations vary greatly in terms of practice and quality. While translation is no longer reduced to linguistic equivalence, the latter nevertheless remains an important criterion in their evaluation. The translation of Walt Whitman’s poetry is a textbook case, since the American poet inspired several translators whose practices and conceptions diverged, giving rise to a plurality of works well before the twentieth-century canonical translations of Jacques Darras and Roger Asselineau. Even before Léon Bazalgette and Jules Laforgue, Louis Etienne, Thérèse Bentzon and Francis Vielé-Griffin were Whitman’s first translators, whose only mistake seems to have published their translations in periodicals. Bentzon liberally translated his poetry into prose in the Revue des Deux Mondes as early as 1872, and Franco-American poet Francis Vielé-Griffin translated several poems, this time into verse, emphasizing that he was translating ‘from the American’ (1888, 279–86) in the Revue indépendante. Another anonymous translation in unrhymed verse, ‘A quelque révolutionnaire d’Europe dans la défaite par Walt Whitman’, was published in Entretiens politiques et littéraires, a review with anarchist leanings, in 1892 (Whitman, 1892).
13As Margaret Lesser points out, the professional/amateur distinction was irrelevant at the end of the nineteenth century: ‘The concept of the “nineteenth-century translator” certainly refers to a mixed group of “professionals” and “amateurs”’ (Lesser 85). Some translators saw themselves primarily as authors, translation being a secondary activity or one with an undefined status between communicative activity and genuine creative work in the target language (Lesser 85). Other translators, often teachers, translated from time to time. Arguably, language teaching stood often as a gateway to translation. As Michelle Milan suggests, the sociology of translators in periodicals has yet to be developed from a variety of archival sources (Milan).
14The periodicals in the ‘Décabase’ corpus abound in a largely invisible population of male and female translators. While most translations are signed—French practice differing markedly from British practice—the majority of translators remain little known. Of the 84 ‘Décabase’ translators who signed, 9 do not appear in the BNF catalogue (possibly because they used a pseudonym), while others appear, not for their work in periodicals but for other volume publications, whether novels, essays or translations, reflecting the predominance of books over periodicals, which also remain the unit of literary recognition. A small number of these translators used a pseudonym, but most signed their name, testifying to both an established practice and a desire for recognition, whether at their own request or that of the editors. Preliminary research also reveals different socio-professional profiles: poets (Vielé-Griffin, Stuart Merrill), literary critics, secondary school teachers, individuals whose main professional activity seems to have been translation (Henry Davray), authors who abandoned translation for other activities (lawyer Gabriel Sarrazin, for example), and even teachers, antiquarians who were increasingly involved in their translation activity, as in the case of Georges Hérelle, d’Annunzio’s translator (Ducrey). Alongside age and generations, gender is central. Again, periodicals have variable policies: for one Thérèse Bentzon, a literary journalist and translator based at the Revue des Deux Mondes, how many women published in the ‘Décabase’ periodicals corpus, the majority of which were avant-garde, and largely run by men? 11 out of 84 identified translators publish under a female name. The nature of the periodical thus influences gender distribution: magazines publishing translations or press organs would perhaps show a different distribution by opening their columns more largely to women. The fact remains, however, that a prosopography of ‘Décabase’ translators should shed light on the sociology of translators and the gendered distribution at a time when the activity was undergoing dramatic change including professionalization.
15Admittedly the ‘Décabase’ mines a limited corpus, which produces significant biases. Its value is essentially exploratory, hence the choice of a finely-grained human-sourced analysis to assess and quantify the undeniable presence of translations in order to establish a yardstick and criteria for other research projects using text-mining tools.
16Turning to translations from the French in British periodicals, and limiting research to literary translation, questions present themselves under the same aspects, but the constraints are partially different. Victorian periodicals are first the product of political history, legal framework, and commercial practices. In Britain, French literature in translation mainly appeared in books (France; France & Haynes), which ensured its recognition. It was also widely present in Victorian periodicals, through criticism and reviews, despite its poor reputation, which grew with the moral conservatism of the 1880s. Using the above-mentioned criteria, its presence in periodicals is difficult to measure, whether in quarterlies such as the Quarterly and the Edinburgh Review, or monthly generalist journals such as the Contemporary and the Nineteenth Century, which published little fiction but offered reviews of literary writings that might contain a few translations. Magazines that sprang up in the 1860s, such as Macmillan’s or The Cornhill, and women’s magazines (Belgravia) or the press might be fruitful terrains. Cultural weeklies such as The Athenaeum and The Spectator discussed French publications, including literature and poetry, and welcomed French contributors. The Saturday Review had a section devoted to French volumes.
17The case of the Fortnightly Review deserves attention, not simply because of the editorial model it constituted from 1865 onwards. A manual search of the Wellesley Index between 1888 and 1900 provides 116 entries (excluding articles on politics) showing that not a month went by without the review discussing various aspects relating to France: history, economics, culture and, of course, literature. Arguably, it did so because from 1886 to 1894, the editor was the very Francophile Frank Harris, underscoring the cardinal function of editors. However, the editorship of W. L. Courtney shows no difference in the Fortnightly’s appetite for French issues. Not only did it report on the French cultural and literary situation thanks to women contributors such as Marie Anne de Bovet, Ouida, and Yetta Blaze de Bury, but it also published translations. Although these are referenced as such in the Wellesley Index, the review did not print any translation markers or identify translators.
18This was the case with Paul Verlaine discussing ‘Shakespeare and Racine’ (Verlaine). Likewise, when Augustin Filon, literary critic and journalist, wrote about Lord Rosebery (1894, 761–70) in the first issue under Courtney’s editorship, his contribution was labelled ‘Author of Profils Anglais’, but authorship of the translation by Janet Hogarth (Courtney’s spouse), did not appear. As a characteristic of the Fortnightly, signature did not extend to the translators who generally remained invisible.
19The situation was somewhat different when Arthur Symons contributed a series of articles on French authors between 1892 and 1899. These were full of fragmentary translations, as in the case of A Rebours by J.-K. Huysmans (Symons 1892). Drawing on an article in French by Arvine Barède and Remy de Gourmont’s edition of his poetry, Symons discussed Gérard de Nerval and translated his prose, leaving ‘Artémis’ and ‘Vers dorés’ in French (Symons 1898a). Building this time on his own review of Divagations in the Saturday Review, he offered his own translations of Mallarmé’s ‘Sigh’ and ‘Autumn Lament’ (Symons 1898b). In ‘Balzac’ and ‘Villiers de l’Isle-Adam’ he mixed fragmentary translations with fragments in French (Symons 1899a; Symons 1899b). By blurring the distinction between author and translator, Symons made the presence of translation much more difficult to detect.
20As a journalist and literary translator, Symons was one of the leading Anglo-French mediators, contributing to an incredible range of British periodicals including fin-de-siècle magazines, which also published translations, mainly of poets and modern authors considered avant-garde. With an undisguised appetite for the French language, The Yellow Book privileged Belgian poetry and printed some translations of Emile Verhaeren’s poems (Dessy 2014). However, the Irishwoman Ellen M. Clerke (1840‒1906) offered an archaizing translation of ‘Fleurs de Feu’ by ‘José Maria de Heredia, of the French Academy’, presented as ‘a translation’ (Clerke). The practice of translating poetic fragments alongside foreign-language quotations also appeared in critical articles such as Maurice Baring’s ‘M. Anatole France’ alongside ‘L’évêché de Tourcoing par Anatole France’, this time in French (1895, 283‒9).
21The Savoy, which claimed to take up The Yellow Book’s radical approach after April 1895, employing Aubrey Beardsley as art editor, only lived for a year. As Laurel Brake notes, contemporary French literature appeared continuously in the magazine through Symons’s regular ‘causeries littéraires’ (Brake 98). Above all The Savoy was distinguished by its translations. In the first volume, Symons translated Verlaine’s ‘Mandoline’ (1896, 44). The second volume printed a trio of articles still on Verlaine where, again, Symons translated ‘My Visit to London’ (where Verlaine humorously recounts his visit to England in November 1893) but carefully printed Verlaine’s poems in French. George Moore tried his hand at translating Mallarmé with ‘The Future Phenomenon A Prose Poem translated from the French of Stéphane Mallarmé’, while Gabriel Gillett chose the lesser-known Moréas. ‘“O Petites Fées” a Translation by Gabriel Gillett into English Verse from the French of Jean Moréas’, which appeared without the original. ‘The Epitaph in Form of a Ballade A translation by Theodore Wratislaw into English Verse from the French of François Villon’ was accompanied by a stunning pen and ink drawing by William F. Norton: ‘Ballade des pendus A Pen and Ink sketch’. Finally, in December, Symons offered his own translation of ‘Hérodiade A Translation into English Verse from Stéphane Mallarmé’s Poem’. Not only did The Savoy publish translations but it also highlighted them with markers and put the translators in the limelight. The same applies to the two volumes of The Pageant (1896-97), peppered with translations from the French, all with translation markers, including A. Teixeira de Mattos’s translation of Villiers de l’Isle-Adam’s ‘Queen Ysabeau’.
22Of course, these beautifully illustrated magazines differ from their French counterparts by the brevity of their existence as well as by their format and editorial project. Verlaine, Mallarmé, Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, Moréas, and even François Villon were translated with the same velocity as French translators set about translating British contemporary literature in several periodicals. French prose and poetry were translated by writers and poets such as Symons, and others, ‘mediators and translators (who frequented) the restricted circles of a cosmopolitan cultural elite that is both literary and artistic’ (Dessy 2014a, translation mine). They shared with their French counterparts an undisguised love of foreign literature, a sometimes marginal or less established position in the literary and editorial landscape, an international education, and frequent trips to the country whose language they translated from (Symons, Ellis, Dowson).
23On both shores of the Channel, periodicals with editorial teams, policies, and contributor profiles of their own (and many similarities) published translations from and into French. Some differences pertain to different education systems with interesting effects in periodical terms. In contrast to French periodicals launched by high school pupils, British magazines were set up by undergraduates but the language policies of both are similar: The Spirit Lamp (1892/1893; North ed 2009) published texts in French (‘La Baigneuse’, ‘Sonnet’ by Louÿs), translations from the Greek and Latin, as well as from the French such as Baudelaire’s ‘Harmonie du soir’ by the intriguing P. L.O under the title ‘Harmony of Evening’ in verse.
24A comparative study would exceed the limits of this article; it is worth noting and also nuancing the convergence of practices, formats, and profiles, as well as the corpus translated in Britain and France. Convergence may have been more marked in the 1890s, a decade of stabilization for new little reviews as the French press was experiencing its golden age. In Great Britain, the ‘yellow’, ‘mauve’, or ‘lavender’ decade was marked by a revival of the art of the book and illustration, against a backdrop of literary innovation designed to nurture 20th-century modernism.
25Periodicals may be key witnesses to the intensification of cultural exchanges, but translation is the main vehicle for the circulation of literary works. Before using the ‘old’ medium of the book (Vaillant), dissemination primarily occurred both through periodicals and translation. The latter still needs to be located across millions of pages, positioning the venture firmly within digital humanities (Creasy). Translators need to be more finely documented before the frequent experimental character of their activity can be explored. Along with digital humanities, big translation history proposed by Diana Roig-Sanz and Laura Folica appears quite promising.