Translation, book history and the transnational life of “street literature”

ABSTRACT

Translation studies has exposed the transnational dimension of literature by thoroughly investigating translation as a vehicle for cross-cultural textual transmission and for the formation of internationally shared literary repertoires. So far, investigations have largely been restricted to literature in the traditional book form. This article stresses that ephemeral street literature in the chapbook and broadside format also has an interesting transnational life and proposes the complementarity between the histories of translation and of the book as an optimal framework for exploring it. The article's rationale is underpinned by the assumption that research into translated street literature can lead to more accurate representations of the cross-cultural life of printed matter, as well as of translational practices and relations.

KEYWORDS:

• Translation and street literature
• book history
• chapbooks
• broadsides
• transnational mobility

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement no. 660143.

Note on contributor

Alice Colombo is associate teacher in translation in the School of Modern Languages at the University of Bristol. She spent two years (September 2015–August 2017) as a Marie Sklodowska-Curie postdoctoral fellow at the Moore Institute for Research in the Humanities and Social Studies, NUI Galway, working on the project “The Cross-Cultural Mobility of Cheap Print: British Chapbooks in Italy, 1800–1850”. The present article developed out of her postdoctoral research. Alice is further researching the transnational dimension of street literature in nineteenth-century Italy, combining translation studies and book history. She also extensively explored the British and Italian trajectories of Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels in her PhD thesis “Reworkings in the Textual History of Gulliver's Travels: A Translational Approach”. She has published on the relationship between translation and book illustration in Word and Image.

Notes

1 Karen Littau (2016) and Guyda Armstrong (2016) have highlighted the benefits of studying the relationship between the interlinguistic and intercultural movements of a given text and the meaning that it acquires as it is re-edited, reprinted and rewritten across time. Both Littau and Armstrong draw on Jerome McGann’s (1991) and D. F. McKenzie’s (1999) views of texts as fluid and unstable entities that undergo a “ceaseless process of [physical and interpretive] development and mutation” (McGann 1991, 9) under the influence of historical and sociocultural changes.

2 Darnton's model emphasizes the importance of studying texts in relation to the social context in which they are produced and circulated. Since its introduction in 1982, the model has been regarded as a solid point of reference within book history and textual studies. It has also been subject to further development and theorization (see e.g. Adams and Barker 1993; van der Weel 2001).

3 These approaches draw on Itamar Even-Zohar's “polysystem theory” (1979). This pictures literature as being constituted by heterogeneous and hierarchical conglomerates of systems distributed on a continuum between central/high/canonized/official/standard and peripheral/low/non-canonized/non-official/non-standard strata and in constant struggle with each other. Polysystem theory stresses that “peripheral” literary forms and genres including children's books, popular fiction, translated literature and any other type of derivative creation play a decisive part in the stabilization and evolution of the literary landscape. Indeed, according to Even-Zohar, in striving to achieve more central positions, low forms give canonized literature conservative or innovatory stimuli which help it preserve its high status. This point is reiterated by Mark Shuttleworth (2009, 198), who stresses that “the stimulus which [non-canonical literature] give[s] to the canonized forms occupying the centre is one of the main factors which determines the way in which the polysystem evolves”.

4 Children's literature is another genre whose translational dimension has gradually received increasing attention (see e.g. Oittinen 2000; Lathey 2006, 2010, 2016; Van Coillie and Verschueren 2006).

5 A good reflection of this situation is provided by the scant consideration (if any) paid to translated popular literature in encyclopaedias, handbooks, readers, or any other source intended to map the state of the art in translation studies. This underrepresentation does not occur only in translation studies. Reference sources of national literary disciplines only occasionally dedicate entries to some of the many subcategories, forms and modes of (non-translated) popular literature including chapbooks, broadsides, popular romance, detective and science fiction, sensational novels, street literature, folk tales, feuilletons, popular songs, children's literature (see e.g. France 1995; Hainsworth and Robey 2002; Kastan 2006). The Cambridge Companion to English Literature 1830-1914 (Shattock 2010) contains a chapter on “popular culture” (Newey 2010, 147–162). In general, however, compared to canonical literature, popular literature is very much neglected and marginalized.

6  All translations into English are my own unless otherwise stated.

7 Infelise speaks of “libri per tutti” [books for everyone], where “books” is to be generally intended as “literature”.

8 Lüsebrink is not the only one to relate translation within the same culture to the broadening of a text's audience. Korning Zethsen (2009) investigates the role of “intralingual translation” in increasing the accessibility of the Bible in Dutch. In Colombo (2013) I read British and Italian “popularizations” and children's editions of Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels as the result of translational processes. The editions of Swift's work covered in that analysis include chapbooks.

9 La Marseillaise debuted as a marching song on 25 April 1792 to be sung by the armies of the Revolution and their supporters following France's declaration of war against Austria. Its authorship is attributed to the French army officer Claude Joseph Rouget de Lisle. Since 1792 the text of La Marseillaise has continuously transformed to accommodate revolutionary situations and protests not only in France (see, in particular, Hudde 1987 and Mason 1989, 259–260), but also, as highlighted later in this article, across Europe.

10 I have not been able to trace this edition.

11 I have not been able to trace any Italian version of the Marseillaise published before 1848. However, I found a broadside published by the Milanese Ranzini containing a free and highly adaptive version of the French anthem titled La Marsigliese dell’operaio e del contadino [The Marseillaise of the factory worker and of the peasant]. There is also evidence that translations of the Marseillaise circulated in chapbook format too. The Florentine publisher Salani, for instance, included the same version published by Giliberti and contained in Gori's Canzoniere in his “popular” series “Collezione di 300 libretti di storie, di canzonette, di giuochi e da ridere” [Collection of 300 booklets of tales, songs, games and amusing anecdotes]. I have located two editions of the chapbook, one published in 1891 and one in 1904.

12 So far I have tracked down thirty-five Evangelical tracts translated into Italian. Reports compiled by the religious tracts societies (see e.g. American Tract Society 1824, 196; Jones 1850, 373), catalogues (see e.g. Religious Tract Society 1820, xv–xvi; Tracts and Handbills etc. 1843) and indexes of forbidden books (see e.g. Ponza 1838, 126; De Bujanda 2002, 352) list many other Italian versions, suggesting that translation of tracts into Italian was far from being a marginal phenomenon.

13 The Waldensians have inhabited the Pellice, Germanasca e Chisone valleys in the Piedmont Alps since the Middle Ages and have managed to survive centuries of persecution mainly thanks to the support of the British Protestants. For more information about the Waldensians, see in particular Spini (1956, 1–26), Molnar, Hugon, and Vinay (1974–1980) and Tourn (2008). The historical and cultural reasons that lead me to speculate about the agents responsible for the circulation of Evangelical tracts in Italy are extremely complex and involve a combination of factors whose in-depth discussion would go beyond the scope of this article.

14 The Proceedings of the First Twenty Years of the Religious Tract Society, issued in 1820, lists The History of William Black among the tracts of the “second series”.

15 Diodati translates “heavy laden” and “red like crimson” with “oppressi” and “grana” respectively; in Lo Spazzacammino these are replaced by “aggravati” and “mela grana”.

16 The British Museum indicates “1840 (ca)” as the year of publication.

17 In the twentieth century, the narrative of the soldier's deck of cards endured in the popular imaginary taking up new afterlives. In the 1940s it became the subject of a recitation song that was performed, among others, by American singers T. Texas Tyler, Wink Martindale and Tex Ritter. Modernised versions of the tale are still circulating in different languages on the Web (see e.g. http://www.agerecontra.it/2015/11/il-mazzo-di-carte-e-il-soldato/; http://www.discoversouthside.com/deckofcards.asp; https://combatdesvainqueurs.eg2.fr/index.php/post/2014/09/19/Le-Soldat-et-le-Jeux-de-Cartes).

18 Examples of online repositories of street literature include the Bodleian Libraries’ “Broadside Ballads Online” (http://ballads.bodleian.ox.ac.uk), the McGill Library's Chapbook Collection (https://digital.library.mcgill.ca/chapbooks/) and the Scottish Chapbooks Project (http://scottishchapbooks.org/).