"Translation does not often demand genius": George Eliot e il ruolo del traduttore vittoriano


Abstract


George Eliot’s formative years were characterised by her intense activity as a translator which she carried out with methodological scrupulousness and profound sense of responsibility. In her ambition to make a name for herself in the English cultural world she understood, from a very early age, that translation would be the best means of expanding her knowledge while measuring herself against original texts that had made an important impact on European culture. Although Eliot was proficient in several modern and ancient languages (namely, German, French, Italian and Spanish, Latin, Greek and Hebrew), most of her translations were from German. It was with her translation of Strauss’s Das Leben Jesu that she proved her skill as a translator. Through this work her name also became familiar in Victorian theological debates. No less important was her translation of Feuerbach’s Das Wesen Christentums which, in many respects, led to her acceptance into the most advanced literary and philosophical circles in London. On the strength of this, in 1855, Eliot published the essay Translations and Translators which she wrote from her point of view as an affirmed journalist who was perhaps already contemplating the idea of becoming a novelist. The essay reveals both Eliot’s acute awareness of translation as a demanding work and of the role of the translator as a mediator between different linguistic and cultural realities. By indicating Germany as an example to follow, since in that nation the great poets and novelists translated the English classics into German, Eliot bluntly declared that the translator must work with a sense of responsibility and moral commitment and always aim for perfection.

DOI Code: 10.1285/i22390359v15p201

Keywords: George Eliot; Translations and Translators; translation studies; authorship and gender; Victorian culture.

References


Ashton R. 1980, The German Idea: Four English Writers and the Reception of German Thought 1800-1860, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.

Bassnett S. 2005, “Preface to the Third Edition”, Translation Studies, London and New York, Routledge.

Blind M. 1883, George Eliot, London, W. H. Allan.

Cross J.W. (ed.) 1885, George Eliot’s Life as Related in Her Letters and Journals, 3 vols., New York, Harper & Brothers.

Eliot G. (1990), Translations and Translators, in A. S. Byatt and N. Warren (eds.) Selected Essays, Poems and Other Writings, London, Penguin, pp. 339-342.

Ermarth E. D. 1997, George Eliot and the World as Language, in J. Rignall (ed.), George Eliot and Europe, Aldershot/Burlington, VT, Ashgate, pp. 33-43.

Fraser H. 1986, Beauty and Belief: Aesthetics and Religion in Victorian Literature, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1986.

Graver S. 1984, George Eliot and Community. A Study in Social Theory and Fictional Form, Berkeley/Los Angeles, University of California Press.

Haight G.S. (ed.) 1954-5, The George Eliot Letters, 9 vols., New Haven, CT, Yale University Press.

Haight G.S. 1969, George Eliot: A Biography, New York/Oxford, Oxford University Press.

Hill S.E. 1997, Translating Feuerbach, Constructing Morality: The Theological and Literary Significance of Translation for George Eliot, in “Journal of the American Academy of Religion”, 65 (3), pp. 635-653.

Homans M. 1986, Bearing the Word: Language and Female Experience in Nineteenth-Century Women’s Writing, Chicago, University of Chicago Press.

Hughes K. 1998, George Eliot: The Last Victorian, London, Fourth Estate.

Kadish D.Y. and Massardier-Kenney F. (eds.) 1994, Translating Slavery: Gender and Race in French Women’s Writing, 1783-1823, Kent, OH, Ohio State University Press.

Larson K.E. 1987, The Origin of the ‘Schlegel-Tieck’ Shakespeare in the 1820s, in “German Quarterly”, 60(1), pp 19-37.

Leopardi G. (1987), Prefazione alla traduzione del secondo libro dell’Eneide, in R. Damiani e M. A. Rigoni (a cura di), Poesie e prose, a cura di R. Damiani e M. A. Rigoni, Vol. I.

Nestor P. 2002, George Eliot, London, Palgrave.

Peterson L. 2009, Becoming a Woman of Letters: Myths of Authorship and Facts of the Victorian Market, Princeton/Oxford, Princeton University Press.

Pinney T. (ed.) 1963, Essays of George Eliot, New York, Columbia University Press.

Redinger R. V. 1976, George Eliot: The Emergent Self, London, The Bodley Head.

Rignall J. 2011, George Eliot, European Novelist, Farnham/Burlington, VT, Ashgate.

Scholl L. 2011, Translation, Authorship and the Victorian Professional Woman: Charlotte Brontë, Harriet Martineau and George Eliot, Farnham/Burlington, VT, Ashgate.

Simon S. 1996, Gender in Translation: Cultural Identity and the Politics of Transmission, London, Routledge.

Uglow J. 1987, George Eliot, London, Virago.

Willey B. 1973, Nineteenth-Century Studies: Coleridge to Matthew Arnold, Harmondsworth, Penguin.

Williams W.S: 2014, George Eliot, Poetess, Farnham/Burlington, VT, Ashgate.


Full Text: pdf

Refbacks

  • There are currently no refbacks.


Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribuzione - Non commerciale - Non opere derivate 3.0 Italia License.