An Irish diasporic translator: Louise Swanton Belloc and the diffusion of Irish writing in nineteenth-century France

ABSTRACT

Translation rarely features in modern Irish diaspora studies, which have sometimes been accused of an Anglophone monolingual bias. This article draws attention to Irish diasporic translators in the modern period through the neglected figure of Louise Swanton Belloc (1796–1881). Besides producing French versions of English classics, this daughter of an Irish expatriate did much to disseminate Irish writing in nineteenth-century France. An examination of several translations, of their paratexts, and of archival material charts Swanton Belloc’s evolution as a diasporic translator and shows how she increasingly underscored the Irish dimension of what she translated. The Franco-Irish translator’s twofold affiliation to Irish causes and to the English language further highlights the paradoxes of mediators whose bilingualism provides an interface between more than two national cultures. If attachment to national origins can act as a spur to diasporic translators, their praxis may equally serve to blur their cultural identity.

KEYWORDS:

• Diaspora
• translation
• paratext
• Louise Swanton Belloc
• Irish nationalism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Note on contributor

Raphaël Ingelbien is associate professor of literary studies at KU Leuven and a member of CETRA, the Leuven Centre for Translation Studies. He is the author of Irish Cultures of Travel. Writing on the Continent, 1829–1914 (Palgrave, 2016) and has published widely on the transnational contexts of Irish writing, on translation and cultural transfer in the nineteenth century, and on the European reception of Shakespeare.

ORCID

Raphaël Ingelbien http://orcid.org/0000-0002-3820-2770

Notes

1 Much of Swanton Belloc’s surviving correspondence and other personal papers are held by Girton College, Cambridge, and will be referred to here as GCPP Parkes 17a.

2 The title of Lépouchard’s biography (1994) Louise Swanton Belloc (1796–1881). Du bon usage des modèles anglais et américains dans les milieux intellectuels français du XIXe siècle [On the considered use of English and American models in French intellectual circles in the nineteenth century] highlights her relation to English and American cultures, while in a recent discussion Pickford writes of how she adopted “une véritable posture de médiatrice entre les cultures française et anglo-saxonne” [a full-fledged persona as a mediator between French and Anglo-Saxon cultures] (2012, 150).

3 Biographical information on Swanton Belloc is mostly based on Lépouchard 1994 or, where indicated, on archival material.

4 See e.g. “Lettre à Monsieur Eymery, Paris, le 8 août 1825”; and a letter dated “Paris, le 1er février 1833” (GCPP Parkes 17a/2/7).

5 Swanton Belloc underestimates the number of French versions of The Vicar of Wakefield; there were dozens of these by the mid-nineteenth century (Lambert and Van Bragt 1980).

6 On the turn away from Irish themes among novelists like Edgeworth and Lady Morgan after the achievement of Catholic Emancipation, see Lloyd (1993, 134) and Deane (1994, 99). Sheil, whose passionate eloquence for Ireland Swanton Belloc had celebrated in 1830, served in British cabinets in the 1830s and 1840s.

7 Swanton Belloc does not feature in Joannon and Whelan (2017), Reznicek (2017), or Maher and Neville (2004).