The translator’s mediatory interactions with both a source text and the target audience’s expectations bring together cultural, linguistic, and narrative threads to create a dynamic conversation. This “dialogic triangulation” (Amith and Malshe 116) simultaneously acknowledges and challenges cultural exchange, national identity and the social, moral, and ethical complexities of encountering alternative ideologies. Translation takes on a practical as well as ideological role in this sense, and it is particularly relevant to nineteenth-century literature and culture, in a time when the idea of translation itself changed dramatically, and when translation was instrumental in bringing Continental philosophies into the centre of British intellectual constructs. The act of translation became controversial, as new understandings of how it operated in relation to cultural production focalised the tensions of faithfulness: to original authors and cultures; to the target culture; or to the translator's own agenda, which often existed somewhere between the two. When examining Victorian literature as cultural history, it is crucial to equip students to take into consideration the impact of translation upon what they are reading: what texts have been made accessible to the author through translation, as well as what foreign ideas are being translated by the author through his or her text.

It has been well-established in contemporary translation theory that the act of translation is not derivative, but a legitimate act of creation in its own right, separate from the original text but in response to it. Yet because of the translator's "illusion of transparency" (Venuti, Invisibility 1), the integral role of translation in cultural and cross-cultural production has been understated. Further work needs to be done through literary studies to establish the implications translation has for the transmission of meaning beyond translators working between two national languages. This chapter will provide a theoretical and historical context for the relevance of contemporary translation theory in examining literature of the long nineteenth century, as well as offering practical means for bringing translation theory into the centre of conversation in the graduate Victorian Studies classroom. This move is timely given the impetus toward interdisciplinarity across the academy, as well as the growing acknowledgement of the importance of multilingual and cross-cultural understandings within the global community.

The role of translation in nineteenth-century literature can be examined in three key ways: the significance of literal translations within the British sphere; the practical and ideological opportunities made available to those able to translate, especially female translators; and broader, more metaphorical forms of translation that furthered the production of alternative cultural threads, such as travel writing, editing, and reviewing. In the latter forms, the authors appropriate translational techniques in their writing, such as displacing their accountability for their text onto an assumed original author/thinker. There is a self-conscious appreciation of the plurality of voices that exist within a given text, with the translator carefully selecting and arranging "pre-existing cultural materials [. . .] in order of priority, and rewrit[ing] (or elaborat[ing]) according to specific values" (Venuti, Scandals 43). I have argued elsewhere that this process of manipulating and rewriting pre-existing cultural materials is facilitated as much by so-called original authors as by translators (Scholl, Translation 2), opening up the possibility for fictional literary texts to be read as a form of intersemiotic translation—similar to translating religious ideas into visual art, or translation between genres, such as Blake's politics being translated into poetry. By enabling ideas of translation in this more metaphorical sense, as well as the concept of cultural translation, students are led more readily to identify and tease apart the threads of the different voices in the texts: threads of Continental philosophy; British scientific thought; and the complexities of identity created by external or foreign experiences derived from the colonies, the Americas, and the Orient. The understanding of the Victorian culture of the mind is therefore enriched through examining the ways in which Britain was influenced from without at a time when British imperialism seemed an unpenetrable global force.

Taking a translational approach to literary fiction potentially redefines literary studies, focalising its innate interdisciplinarity and significance as cultural history. Through reading novels alongside philosophical and scientific texts, the dynamic interplay between British and European ideas is revealed in the wake of the unprecedented breakdown of national borders after the Napoleonic Wars that led to a flourish of cultural exchange across national boundaries, challenging previous notions of identity, progress,and civilisation. In The Country and the City, when Raymond Williams defended Jane Austen's apparent neglect of major historical events by claiming that there are many streams of history and that she provided that of the landed gentry (166), he played a significant role in bringing about the cultural turn in literary studies and the importance of cultural and historical contexts in analysing texts. The application of translation theory takes this contextualisation further by recognising the polyphony of international cultural voices within the text, beyond the heterogeneity of the target culture. Translation thus plays a crucial role in the development of nineteenth-century intellectual culture as a hybrid, polycultural conversation.

The Primacy of Translation in Nineteenth-Century British Intellectualism

My understanding of translation is heavily influenced by Bakhtinian notions of utterance and dialogism. Like Bakhtin's utterance, I see translation as a response to the original text, in that it "refutes, affirms, supplements, and relies on [earlier utterances/texts], presupposes them to be known, and somehow takes them into account" (91). The "addressivity" of utterance, that is, its "quality of being directed to someone" (95), resonates with translation, and even more pertinently, as Cheyne and Tarulli observe, "Our utterances are thereby inhabited by the voices of others. An utterance, however, not only reaches backwards to preceding utterances in the chain of speech communion, but also speaks to future possible utterances" (12). Cheyne and Tarulli position the utterance in a mediatory role, between past and future, just as the translator is positioned between the source and target texts. The translator enters into a dialogue with the past, answering the original author, but in a way that is consciously speaking to the future: the readers of the translation.

The addressivity of utterance or translation, and the simultaneous dialogue with past and present, is particularly useful in the context of Victorian intellectualism when the expectations of translation were changing. Previously the emphasis had been on classical languages, such as Greek and Latin, yet with the growing interest in German and French schools of thought, translation became a vehicle for bringing Continental ideas into Britain. While the focus had been on Latin and Greek, languages predominantly contained within educational and religious institutions, the act of translation had been seen as an intellectual practice for the improvement of language skills and a purely receptive act: receiving understanding from the original, for one's own intellectual benefit. With the move toward both acknowledging the original author and the translator's audience, as well as the new focus on translating living languages, the power relations of translation changed. Whereas a scholar translating Tacitus could not literally speak to the Roman scribe, George Eliot translating Strauss's Life of Jesus (1846) could actually correspond with him, and receive his response to her translation. The act became an actual dialogue, "upset[ting] traditional assumptions about the hierarchy between primary and secondary forms of writing, about writing and reading a text, and about the production and reception of literature" (Stark 29). Within the target audience, there was an assumption that many of them would be able to read the original, and that they would be able to access variant translations. The idea of accuracy became more tied to meaning or message than to words, opening up the possibility to see a translation as a form of literary criticism—the translator's interpretation of the original work. This kind of literary criticism takes into account close reading—word choice, metaphors, similar idioms across cultures, and the dynamics of cultural and historical understanding. Students can begin to recognise the connections between literary criticism and translation through this historical perspective of Victorian translational activities.

The derivativity of translation was also being challenged, along with the emphasis on word-for-word translation, which was closely related to biblical translation and the importance of not altering the word of God. Matthew Arnold played a significant role in the repositioning of translation, arguing that "[t]he language of the Bible, then, is literary, not scientific language; language thrown out at an object of consciousness not fully grasped, which inspired emotion" (Literature and Dogma 30). Later he would write that it is "the language of poetry and emotion, approximate language thrown out, as it were, at certain great objects which the human mind augurs and feels after, and thrown out by men very liable, many of them, to delusion and error" (God and the Bible 6). For Arnold, the Bible is no longer reified as an immoveable, unalterable sacred text, but is opened up to literary criticism as a dynamic work of poetry. This nexus between religion, philosophy, literature, science and translation speaks to the very centre of the cultural crisis of Victorian Britain; yet through ethical trauma and the conversation that took place between different cultural fragments, intellectual progress was made: "It is from differences in understanding that dialogue and thought are productive; moreover, productivity is not necessarily measured by consensus [. . .]. For Bakhtin, self—other differences, rather than impeding communication, motivate and generate dialogue" (Cheyne and Tarulli 14). I contend that this dialogue was made possible in the nineteenth century through translation.

Translation theory, influenced by Bakhtin's utterance, provides a tangible point of correspondence in criticism. From a student perspective, literary theory can seem inaccessible and even irrelevant to the so-called real world. Bakhtin himself spoke about the abstraction of theory as a deliberate means for theoreticians to remain in safe intellectual spaces, in which they did not have to consider real-world implications: ‘In practice, [Bakhtin] believed, [theoretisms] usually replace real engagement with the application of a theory [. . .]. For Bakhtin, such an approach betrays cowardice. It reflects a desire to avoid psychological and intellectual risk. It is too painful to rethink one's convictions, and doing so may put one at odds with those with whom one wants to associate. (Morson 351)’ For the twenty-first-century student, there is an evident dissatisfaction with those very points that Bakhtin termed cowardice. The immediacy of the culture of the age, with technological advancement and global financial crises, leaves students with a hunger to know how an area of study is directly relevant to them. This has been an increasing challenge in the Literary Studies classroom, with literature in many cases being relegated to entertainment, or a luxury intellectual item for those with the financial and time capacity to study an area that does not guarantee direct employment in a specific profession. What does attract students to the literary classroom is the ability to gain a sense of their identity within the global context, both geographically and in terms of the history of humanity. Bakhtin's approach to teaching literature and even more so, translation theory create this capacity. Gary Saul Morson takes up the idea of cultural translation in his classroom: ‘First, translation: Given the essential moral issues the character faces, what would be the equivalent situation today? One wants to avoid comments like: if only Russia had had more enlightened divorce laws, Anna Karenina's fate would have been different. Given her character and the choices she makes, can we imagine situations today in which those character traits have an important effect, and analogous choices raise important psychological and moral problems? (355)’ This kind of equivalency may seem to broach too close to a type of word-for-word translation—cultural equivalencies are just as tenuous as linguistic ones. This example is also complicated in that it refers to a text that has been linguistically translated from Russian to English. Yet it is a matter of seeking out similarities and differences across time and culture, seeing possible connections, as well as where the cultures depart from each other. The point of identification comes by reflecting upon both self and other, departing, as the translator does, from both the source culture and the target culture, being alienated from both in order to understand both more objectively. It is in this space of departure that the dialogue between cultures begins: "Only if such works provided something that departs from—or as Bakhtin liked to say, 'exceeds'—already known truths would they be worth the effort" (Morson 352).

The comparative approach to nineteenth-century Russian literature suggested by Morson is necessary in teaching students at the undergraduate level to recognise cultural and historical contexts—to move them away from ideas of time and space transcendence. At the graduate level, however, once the grounding in cultural and historical materiality has been firmly established, the students should be capable of moving toward more complex ideas of cultural malleability: the cultural and historical sureties they have learned need to be broken down, as they explore the various influences on cultural identity at any given time. It would be expected that students entering graduate nineteenth-century literary studies would have a solid general understanding of the connections and deviations between their contemporary society and Victorian England. The application of translation studies will refine both their comprehension of literary criticism and literary influence, as well as their historical grounding in the streams of culture that entered Britain at that time, for example, the connections between political revolutions and the revival of Romanticism and European philosophy. As a further connection, they will be able to identify how those streams have evolved in terms of current international relations, and political and sociocultural relations. These real-life applications allow students to delve more deeply within theoretical structures, but also firmly establish the theory within the pragmatic world around them. To take a translational approach to nineteenth-century culture, students should read translations (in a broad definition), works about translation, and literary fiction in order to examine how the Victorian culture of the mind was being translated and created by the written word. Students should consider the perceived cultural value of translation as an activity, as well as specific key translations that impacted British culture: what texts were translated and why. The translator's agenda is also entered into, and by looking at "original" works of the translators—by which I mean published works not described as translations of other authors—students can begin to see the ways in which the role of translation filters through other literary activities that espouse and respond to translated messages.

Female Translators

My approach to translation and literary culture has focused primarily on the position of female translators, and the professional and intellectual pathways that translation opened up for them in the nineteenth century. While it is crucial that students are exposed more widely to translation theory than feminist translation studies, the position of women in relation to the translated text is invaluable in terms of understanding the development of theories of translation (including ideas of derivativity), as well as the history of translational activities that had such an integral impact on nineteenth-century Britain. Alongside Lawrence Venuti's seminal texts The Translator's Invisibility (1995) and The Scandals of Translation (1998), Sherry Simon's Gender in Translation (1996) provides a history of the way women have related to translational activities specifically within Judeo-Christian Western culture, positioning it as a key female intellectual activity. This premise is central to my approach to Victorian intellectualism, as in a very real sense women were able to use their skills as translators to move into the professional literary world in a radical way. These professions often moved from translation to editing and reviewing, activities that have strong resonances with the act of translation itself in the way they respond to and shape specific discrete texts.

Simon addresses the way in which the Judeo-Christian tradition links women to the act of translation as both inferior and derivative: "Translators and women have historically been the weaker figures in their respective hierarchies: translators are handmaidens to authors, women inferior to men" (1). This perspective provides a useful starting point for examining the role of the translator. Through then comparing the idea of translation as derivative to the theories of Venuti, as well as Susan Bassnett and André Lefevere, the students can begin to see that the "myth" of translation's subservience "traditionally made room for women writers to take on a role that inadvertently gives them a public voice" (Scholl, Translation 4). Students are led via this comparison to see that "translation is not just linguistic transmission, but an ambiguous, problematic and sometimes acrimonious cultural exchange," in which the original author's voice is heard through the voice of the translator (3). The possibilities for rewriting, and literary and philosophical manipulation of the text are then opened up within the nineteenth-century context. Within the graduate classroom, there would be an assumption that the students are aware of the importance of the Woman Question in the Victorian era in general; the idea of female translators entering into intellectual conversations through translational activities broadens the scope of influence for professional women, but also for translation itself: "That a nineteenth-century woman should enter into such a role seems radical enough; in translating a celebrated male philosopher, for example, she enters into an intimate discourse with him, often challenging and critiquing the ideas presented, so they become nuanced by her translation" (3). This idea of translation as mediated dialogue and an exchange of ideas connects closely with Bakhtinian notions of utterance, and the productivity of different voices speaking to and against each other. The notion of productivity precludes that of derivativity, thus translation is seen as expanding and creating new space, rather than rehashing the old in another tongue.

“Translations and Translators” is a useful place to begin examining Eliot in this context, providing a mid-Victorian understanding of the values, workings, and purpose of translation. Susanne Stark suggests Eliot "shied away from grappling with the subject [of translation] in any depth" (47), yet I would argue that even beyond the explicit example of this particular essay, Eliot's preoccupation with translation infuses all her literary activities—from her editing, reviewing, and journalism to her fiction-writing. “Translations and Translators” reveals her very powerful understanding of the significance of translation, as well as the provocative debates that were taking place around its role in intellectual progress. Eliot begins her essay with allusions to the religious implications of the changing ideas of translation, and goes on to discuss the possibilities and limitations for translation, as well as the skills translators require in order to succeed in their craft. Significantly, Eliot elevates translation and suggests the possibility of the translation exceeding the original, which lends itself to Bakhtin's idea of productivity: ‘It is true the Germans think a little too highly of their translations, and especially are under the illusion, encouraged by some silly English people, that Shakespeare according to Schlegel is better than Shakespeare himself—not simply better to a German as being easier for him to understand, but absolutely better poetry [. . .].Sometimes the German is as good as the English—the same music played on another but as good instrument. But more frequently the German is a feeble echo, and here and there it breaks down in a supremely fine passage. (341)’ As a translator herself, Eliot takes this opportunity to critique the quality of Schlegel's work; yet she also addresses the cultural positioning of translation: in England it is seen as a derivative task, possible to anyone who can operate within the foreign language, whereas in Germany it is "more often undertaken by men of genius" (341). Moreover, she shows her consciousness that cultural exchange takes place through translation, although often with flawed understanding. As she elucidates the flaws in Schlegel's translation, she implies that Shakespeare according to Schlegel is a text separate from Shakespeare himself. The idea the Germans get of Shakespeare in their tongue is not the same Shakespeare that the English have.

“The Morality of Wilhelm Meister” and “German Wit: Heinrich Heine” are natural progressions from Eliot's essay on translation. They both address the role of translation in terms of cultural impact, explicitly confronting the widespread British fear of a German cultural and philosophical invasion. They can also be read in conjunction with Eliot's “The Natural History of German Life” (Westminster Review, July 1856), which goes further, introducing an approach to translation that resonates with what would become known more specifically in the late twentieth century as cultural translation. Through looking at cultural and historical connotations of words, Eliot begins to connect translation to the understanding of other living cultures, instead of a theoretically based intellectual activity such as translating ancient texts written in dead languages. Translation takes on a pragmatic and immediate role in international relations. By introducing students to the cultural theory of Mary Louise Pratt, particularly in regard to travel writing, which I address in the next section, they will be able to connect Eliot's approach more closely to contemporary criticism.

Eliot's review of Froude's The Nemesis of Faith (1849) has a clear translational approach. In order to observe the ways in which Eliot's voice protrudes through, even in the extended quotations she provides from Froude's text, students should read this review alongside Eliot's “Evangelical Teaching: Dr. Cumming” (Westminster Review, October 1855), which espouses a similar message to that which she attributes to Froude. Discussions around the ways in which Eliot's voice mediates Froude's in the review can be positioned within the discourse of translation: blurring the lines of authorship; rewriting the text for a new audience; and the translator affecting to step back from the translation, hiding behind the veil of the original author. Although she states that she cites extensively from Froude in order to allow her readers "to assess Froude for themselves" (266), like the translator she brushes over the crucial factor that she has carefully selected the specific passages she includes. The passages no longer belong to the context of Froude's work, but the context of Eliot's critique. By understanding how this blurring of voices takes place in this case, students will begin to see the ways in which translators manipulate the contexts and meanings of the original work in their translation.

Cultural Translation: Geographical and Imaginative Travel

As my epigraph from Voltaire suggests, the primacy of ideology—of meaning—is problematic in translation. Hans Vermeer argues that the translator does not merely "imitate" the original text in another language, but "convey[s] a message" (29). From Bakhtin's theory of utterance, it becomes clear that this message is double-voiced, influenced by interpretation derived from the translator's cultural heritage. The purpose of introducing translation theory in the literary classroom, or the cultural history classroom, is to highlight the pervasive nature of translation and expose the mediatory (translational) role of the literary author. While students are encouraged from their undergraduate careers to show a healthy distrust of narrative voices and to identify difference voices and motives, translation theory provides tangible positions for the different voices, creating new understandings and ways of looking at the text: "The co-existence of two different cultural voices and the phenomenon of double-voicedness encourage creative translation strategies between cultures" (Amith and Malshe 120). Linguistic and cultural translation were crucial to the development of the Victorian culture of the mind, with unprecedented movement through the globe, physically through travel and imperialism and the breakdown of national borders, and ideologically through the increase of communication and translation of scholarly material. Through the perspective of translation, the globalisation of the Victorian age resonates with the twenty-first-century student, and creates a greater sense of the relevance of understanding Victorian literary culture as foundational to contemporary understandings of globalisation and the polycultural nature of human civilisation.