Outward bound: women translators and scientific travel writing, 1780–1800

SUMMARY

As the Enlightenment drew to a close, translation had gradually acquired an increasingly important role in the international circulation and transmission of scientific knowledge. Yet comparatively little attention has been paid to the translators responsible for making such accounts accessible in other languages, some of whom were women. In this article I explore how European women cast themselves as intellectually enquiring, knowledgeable and authoritative figures in their translations. Focusing specifically on the genre of scientific travel writing, I investigate the narrative strategies deployed by women translators to mark their involvement in the process of scientific knowledge-making. These strategies ranged from rhetorical near-invisibility, driven by women's modest marginalization of their own public engagement in science, to the active advertisement of themselves as intellectually curious consumers of scientific knowledge. A detailed study of Elizabeth Helme's translation of the French ornithologist François le Vaillant's Voyage dans l'intérieur de l'Afrique [Voyage into the Interior of Africa] (1790) allows me to explore how her reworking of the original text for an Anglophone reading public enabled her to engage cautiously – or sometimes more openly – with questions regarding how scientific knowledge was constructed, for whom and with which aims in mind.

Acknowledgements

The author wishes to thank her anonymous reviewer for swift and insightful feedback on an earlier draft of this article.

Notes

1 L. C. Rookmaker, François Levaillant and the Birds of Africa (Houghton, 2004), 14.

2 Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London, 1992), 38.

3 Stephen Behrendt, ‘Publishing and the Provinces in Romantic-Era Britain', in The Cambridge Companion to British Romanticism, edited by Stuart Curran, 2nd edn. (Cambridge, 2010), 153–68 (162).

4 Anon., The London Review, October 1790, 285–7 (285).

5 Anon., The English Review, September 1790, 254–60 (260).

6 Anon., The Critical Review, or, Annals of Literature, 1790, 34–45 (45).

7 Anon., Monthly Review; Or Literary Journal, N.S. 3 (1790), 28–9 (28).

8 Anon (note 7), 28.

9 Sherry Simon, Gender in Translation: Cultural Identity and the Politics of Transmission (London/New York, 1996), 29.

10 S. Simon (note 9), 30.

11 Barbara Godard, ‘Theorising Feminist Discourse/Translation’, in Translation, History and Culture, edited by Susan Bassnett and André Lefevere (London/New York, 1990), 87–96 (90).

12 Fania Oz-Salzberger, ‘The Enlightenment in Translation: Regional and European Aspects’, European Review of History – Revue européenne d'Histoire, 13.3 (2006), 385–409.

13 Scott L. Montgomery, Science in Translation: Movements of Knowledge through Cultures and Time (Chicago, 2000), 2.

14 S. L. Montgomery (note 13), 2.

15 See Patricia Phillips, The Scientific Lady: A Social History of Women's Scientific Interests 1520–1918 (New York, 1990), xii.

16 Jean Delisle, ‘Présentation’, in Portraits de traductrices, edited by Jean Delisle (Ottawa, 2002), 1–11.

17 Lori Chamberlain, ‘Gender and the Metaphorics of Translation’, in Rethinking Translation: Discourse, Subjectivity, Ideology, edited by Lawrence Venuti (London/New York, 1992), 57–74.

18 Susanne de Lotbinière-Harwood, Re-belle et infidèle. La traduction comme pratique de réécriture au feminine/The Body Bilingual: Translation as a Re-Writing in the Feminine (Montreal, 1991), 98–9.

19 Aphra Behn, Works: Volume 4 – Seneca Unmasqued and Other Prose Translations, edited by Janet Todd (London, 1993), 72.

20 A. Behn (note 19), 77.

21 Mirella Agorni, ‘The Voice of the “Translatress”: From Aphra Behn to Elizabeth Carter’, The Yearbook of English Studies, 28 (1998), 181–95 (182).

22 The most authoritative study of Meta Forkel to date remains Monika Siegen's PhD thesis from the University of Darmstadt, Ich hatte einen Hang zur Schwärmerey …: Das Leben der Schriftstellerin und Übersetzerin Meta Forkel-Liebeskind im Spiegel ihrer Zeit, http://d-nb.info/1001530438/34 (accessed 2 December 2013).

23 M. Siegen (note 22), 92.

24 M. Siegen (note 22), 95.

25 Geneviève Roche, ‘“Völlig nach Fabrikenart”: Handwerk und Kunst der Übersetzung bei Georg Forster', in Weltbürger – Europäer – Deutscher – Franke, Georg Forster zum 200. Todestag, edited by Rolf Reichardt and Geneviève Roche (Mainz, 1994), 101–19.

26 See Alison E. Martin, ‘“Natural Effusions”: Mrs J. Howorth's English Translation of Albrecht von Haller's Die Alpen’, Translation Studies, 5.1 (2012), 17–32.

27 William Thomas Lowndes, The Bibliographer's Manual of English Literature Containing an Account of Rare and Useful Books, 2 vols (London, 1834), II, 567.

28 See Appendix I in Dorothy Blakey, The Minerva Press, 1790-1820 (London, 1939 [1935]), particularly 140–57.

29 Glenn Hooper, ‘Anne Plumptre: An Independent Traveller’, in Gender Perspectives in Nineteenth-Century Ireland: Public and Private Spheres, edited by Margaret Kelleher and James H. Murphy (Dublin, 1997), 129–39 (132).

30 Susan Pickford, ‘Writing with “manly vigour”: Translatorial Agency in Two Early Nineteenth-Century English Translations of François Pouqueville's Voyage en Morée, à Constantinople et en Albanie (1805)’, in Travel Narratives in Translation, 1750-1830: Nationalism, Ideology, Gender, edited by Alison E. Martin and Susan Pickford (London, 2012), 197–217 (209).

31 S. Pickford (note 30), 211.

32 For details of Helme's biography see http://extra.shu.ac.uk/corvey/corinne/1Helme/BioHelme.html (accessed 26 November 2013), http://orlando.cambridge.org/public/svPeople?person_id=helmel (accessed 26 November 2013), and http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/emforum/projects/brieflives/elizabeth_helme/ (accessed 26 November 2013).

33 Anon., The Critical Review, or, Annals of Literature, February 1797, 227.

34 Quoted in Fiona Harlow's ‘Author Biography: Elizabeth Helme’, http://www.chawton.org/library/research/helme_louisa_biog.pdf (accessed 30 March 2012).

35 Material relating to the publisher George Robinson is held in the archives of Manchester Public Library, currently closed for refurbishment. G. E. Bentley junior's detailed article ‘Copyright Documents in the George Robinson Archive: William Godwin and Others, 1713–1820’, Studies in Bibliography, 35 (1982), 67–110, suggests these archives could hold valuable information about the translators who worked for Robinson, including the individual who provided the competing translation of Vaillant's Travels.

36 François Vaillant, Travels from the Cape of Good-Hope, into the Interior Parts of Africa, Including Many Interesting Anecdotes, with Elegant Plates, 2 vols, trans. by Elizabeth Helme (London, 1790), I, vi–vii.

37 F. Vaillant (note 36), I, ix–x.

38 François Vaillant, Voyage dans l'intérieur de l'Afrique, par le Cap de Bonne-Espérance (Paris, 1790), I, xii.

39 F. Vaillant (note 36), I, xvi.

40 François Vaillant, Travels into the Interior Parts of Africa by the Way of the Cape of Good Hope; In the Years 1780, 81, 82, 83, 84 and 85, 2 vols, trans. anon (London, 1790), I, 6.

41 F. Vaillant (note 38), I, 16.

42 F. Vaillant (note 36), I, 38

43 F. Vaillant (note 40), I, 45.

44 F. Vaillant (note 38), I, 174–5.

45 F. Vaillant (note 36), I, 287.

46 F. Vaillant (note 40), I, 259.

47 F. Vaillant (note 36), I, 433; F. Vaillant (note 40), I, 387.

48 F. Vaillant (note 36), I, 262.

49 F. Vaillant (note 40), I, 237.

50 F. Vaillant (note 38), I, 158.

51 F. Vaillant (note 36), II, 3.

52 F. Vaillant (note 40), II, 3.

53 Elizabeth Helme, The Farmer of Inglewood Forest (London, 1841), 75.

54 Virginia Blain, Patricia Clements and Isobel Grundy (eds.), The Feminist Companion to Literature in English: Women Writers from the Middle Ages to the Present (London, 1990), 509.