EBook For Asian Classics on the Victorian Bookshelf Flights of Translation 1st Edition By Alexander Bubb
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Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com Asian Classics on the Victorian Bookshelf Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com Asian Classics on the Victorian Bookshelf Flights of Translation A L E X A N D E R BU B B Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries The moral rights of the author have been asserted First Edition published in 2023 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: 2022947261 ISBN 978–0–19–886627–5 DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198866275.001.0001 Printed and bound in the UK by Clays Ltd, Elcograf S.p.A. Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work. Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com Contents Preface List of Illustrations List of Abbreviations Prologue: A Soldier’s Rubaiyat ix xvii xix xxi 1. A Century of Translation 1 2. Taking an Interest 33 3. Circulating 63 4. Canonizing 89 5. Translating 118 6. Publishing 166 7. Reading 192 Epilogue: Flights of Translation Appendix Index 228 235 241 Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com We Don’t reply in this website, you need to contact by email for all chapters Instant download. Just send email and get all chapters download. 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Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com List of Illustrations 0.1 Corporal Palmer’s Rubaiyat (with permission of the Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales) xxv 1.1 Frontispiece to The Rose Garden of Persia (author photograph) 14 2.1 West Norwood Cemetery, London (author photograph) 51 3.1 Brooklyn Museum, north-east corner (author photograph) 77 3.2 Los Angeles Central Library, detail of ‘Phosphor’ (author photograph) 79 4.1 Stewart Bruce Terry’s commentary on Mencius (author collection) 106 4.2 Confucian Analects with tram ticket (with permission of WM College) 113 5.1 Patten Wilson, ‘Sohrab Taking Leave of His Mother’ (courtesy of Yellow Nineties 2.0) 146 5.2 James Legge, The Chinese Classics, with a Translation, Critical and Exegetical Notes, Prolegomena, and Copious Indexes: Volume 4, Part 1, p. 53 (author photograph) 149 5.3 Helen Waddell, Lyrics from the Chinese, p. 1 (author photograph, copyright permission granted by Louise Anson) 150 6.1 Ernest Griset’s cover design for Vikram and the Vampire (1870) (courtesy of Hathitrust) 177 7.1 Way of the Buddha (1906) annotated by Duncan Lorimer Tovey (author photograph) 219 Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com List of Abbreviations AVaTARArchive of Victorian Translations from Asia and their Readerships (author’s personal collection) Beinecke Beinecke Library, Yale University Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection at the New York Public Library Berg BL British Library Bodleian Bodleian Library, University of Oxford Bristol Special Collections, University of Bristol Library Brotherton Library, Leeds University Brotherton Columbia Butler Library, Columbia University CUL Cambridge University Library Special Collections FSL Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington DC Houghton Houghton Library, Harvard University Huntington Huntington Library, San Marino, California HRC Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin JMA John Murray Archive, National Library of Scotland LMA London Metropolitan Archives LRO Liverpool Record Office Morgan Library, New York Morgan NLI National Library of Ireland NLS National Library of Scotland NSW State Library of New South Wales, Sydney NYPL Manuscripts & Archives Division, New York Public Library PforzheimerCarl H. Pforzheimer Collection of Shelley and his Circle, New York Public Library ReadingArchive of British Printing and Publishing, Special Collections, University of Reading SLV State Library of Victoria, Melbourne SOAS Special Collections, School of Oriental and African Studies, London Syracuse Special Collections Research Center, Bird Library, Syracuse University TCD1 Department of Manuscripts & Archives, Trinity College Dublin TCD2Department of Early Printed Books & Special Collections, Trinity College Dublin UCLA Young Research Library, University of California Los Angeles UNC Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Virginia Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library, University of Virginia WSRO West Sussex Record Office, Chichester Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com Prologue A Soldier’s Rubaiyat In the State Library of New South Wales is a very small book, 5cm × 8cm, bound in worn green leather, with a chalky-white stain swirling along its reverse side. At some point, water, probably rain, has soaked through its pages, tinging them pink at the corners with the red ink of the pastedown. Its spine is only long enough to admit a stencilled name—‘Omar Khayyam’—and to that, turning inside, the title page adds just two further, scrupulously accented words: Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. There is no mention of the translator, nor indeed that the book’s contents were originally written in Persian—though if we turn to the back, a short biographical afterword gives us the few known facts about the eleventh-century astronomer to whom the collection of ruba‘i or quatrains are attributed. It also reveals this English version to be the first of four made by the Victorian poet and recluse Edward Fitzgerald. His 1859 translation ‘attracted very little attention at the time of its publication, but of recent years it has had an immense vogue, and has been read and appreciated by thousands.’ That is all, more or less, that the book carries by way of editorial baggage. Whereas in 1859 Fitzgerald himself had offered his reader ten pages of preface, by 1907 the Edinburgh firm of Nimmo, Hay & Mitchell seem to have felt that Omar Khayyam needed little introduction— or at least no more than did Thoughts from Emerson, Winnowings from Wordsworth, A Tennyson Treasury, and the five other literary works we find advertised in the rear endpapers as forming entries in their Miniature Series.1 This then was a cheap, one-shilling edition of an English classic author. Sized for the pocket, it was intended for a reader who was already familiar at least with the poem’s title, and who desired perhaps a portable copy that could be referred to at spare moments. The pocket in which this copy was carried was a soldier’s, Corporal Thomas Ambrose Palmer, a farmer from Mangain, New South Wales, who enlisted in 1915 at the age of thirty-six and was sent first to Egypt, then France.2 He returned safely from the Western Front, and the Rubaiyat is bundled with a collection of his war letters and diaries. He may have acquired the book before, during, or even after the war; but the way it has been archived, and the evident rain damage, would suggest that Palmer bore this book on his person across the battlefields of Europe. In this he was not alone. As we will see later, the 1 NSW: MLMSS 9831 (Thomas Ambrose Palmer letters, diary and papers, 1916–19). 2 For Palmer’s war record, see National Archives of Australia: B2455, Palmer, Thomas Ambrose. Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com xxii Prologue Rubaiyat was one of the poems most commonly read by First World War combatants (and not only English speakers). Indeed, Nimmo, Hay & Mitchell reissued their miniature Omar in 1914, possibly with a view to this vast and mobile readership, though the little book in Sydney is from the original 1907 print run.3 Palmer has crammed every available space in the tiny book with annotations, saving only those pages on which are printed the actual quatrains of the poem, which it appears he wanted to preserve clean. Shafquat Towheed and Edmund King describe how books were passed and swapped between soldiers in the trenches as part of a communal reading culture.4 Not so with this item. The annotations would be hard to read even without the water stains, and could not have been intended for another reader—unless it were a hypothetical future reader, such as a son or daughter. No, these quotations (for the notes consist entirely in extracts from other poems) were designed as supplementary material to Palmer’s own reading and re-reading of the Rubaiyat. Grouped together principally in the front endpapers, they signal the points of reference and ‘frame of mind’ with which he felt the text should be approached.5 This was what it originally meant to ‘illustrate’ a book, to cite Thomas Dibdin’s definition from 1809: ‘bringing together, from different works, (including newspapers and magazines, and by means of the scissars [sic], or otherwise by transcription) every page or paragraph which has any connexion with the character or subject under discussion.’6 As we lever open its crinkled pages, the book thus discloses a vista of its owner’s remarkable reading habits, and evokes too the bookshelf—actual or mental—on which it once assumed its place, the global bookshelf of Thomas Palmer. Appropriately, we find also that the principal subject this soldier wished to illustrate was ‘connexion’ itself—or rather, the resonances and sympathies he detected between poems drawn from distant parts of West, South, and East Asia. Of course, Palmer could hardly carry a library in his knapsack, and he may have decided to use his Rubaiyat as a commonplace book to preserve the chance fruits of his browsing in YMCA huts and hospital day-rooms. But there is clearly a more deliberate selection and ordering at work. The miniature Omar does serve as a substitute for weightier pages, because the excerpts all bear some analogous relationship to the longer text in whose wings they shelter. Moreover, several of them appear to have been transcribed from memory. On the front pastedown can be recognized the preamble to Tennyson’s late poem ‘Akbar’s Dream’ (1892), given 3 The copy bears no date of publication, but may be dated from its characteristics, as described in A.G. Potter, A Bibliography of the Rubāiyāt of Omar Khayyām (1929; repr. Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag, 1994), p. 15. 4 Shafquat Towheed and Edmund G.C. King, ‘Introduction’, in Towheed and King (eds), Reading and the First World War: Readers, Texts, Archives (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), p. 12. 5 H.J. Jackson, Marginalia: Readers Writing in Books (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001), p. 25. 6 Thomas Frognall Dibdin, Bibliomania; or Book Madness: a Bibliographical Romance, in Six Parts (London: privately printed, 1809), p. 669. Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com Prologue xxiii here verbatim on the left, with the original for comparison (the book’s cramped dimensions obliged Palmer to split each line in two). O God in every temple I see people that see Thee feel after Thee each religion says Thou art one—without equal if it be a mosque people murmur the holy prayer has people ring the bell from love of Thee sometimes I frequent the Christian church & sometimes the mosque But it is Thou whom I seek from temple to temple Thy elect have no dealings either with heresy or orthodoxy for neither of them stands behind the screen of your truth Heresy to the heretic and Religion to the orthodox O god in every temple I see people that see thee, and in every language I hear spoken, people praise thee. Polytheism and Islam feel after thee Each religion says, ‘Thou art one, without equal.’ If it be a mosque people murmur the holy prayer, and if it be a Christian Church, people ring the bell from love to Thee. Sometimes I frequent the Christian cloister, and sometimes the mosque. But it is thou whom I search from temple to temple. Thy elect have no dealings with either heresy or orthodoxy; for neither of them stands behind the screen of thy truth. Heresy to the heretic, and religion to the orthodox, But the dust of the rose-petal belongs to the heart of the perfume seller.7 ‘Akbar’s Dream’ is a dramatic monologue spoken by the Mughal emperor (1542–1605), a Muslim ruler celebrated for the pluralist approach he adopted in governing his multi-faith Indian empire. Tennyson read about Akbar’s Sufiinfluenced beliefs and his attempt to synthesize a unitary religion in the Ain-iAkbari, an account of his reign translated into English in 1873 by the orientalist Heinrich Blochmann.8 Corporal Palmer has not transcribed Tennyson’s own poem, however, but rather the preamble or epigraph that he extracted from Blochmann’s introductory essay. This was a Persian composition produced by the emperor’s vizier Abu’l-Fazl (Palmer renders the name ‘Abdul Fazi’), which he apparently meant to be inscribed on a Hindu temple as a deterrent to would-be Muslim iconoclasts. In preference to the English poem with its oriental colouring, then, Palmer has chosen as his first insert a primary text from the same linguistic 7 Christopher Ricks (ed.), The Poems of Tennyson (London: Longman, 1969), p. 1441. Tennyson abridged Blochmann’s text, and so must have been Palmer’s source. For the original, see H. Blochmann and H.S. Jarrett, The Ain i Akbari, by Abul Fazi ’Allami, translated from the original Persian (3 vols, Calcutta: Asiatic Society, 1873–94), I, xxxii. 8 For Tennyson’s sources for ‘Akbar’s Dream’ and his wider interests in non-Christian literature, see Kirstie Blair, Form and Faith in Victorian Poetry and Religion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 189–96. Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com We Don’t reply in this website, you need to contact by email for all chapters Instant download. Just send email and get all chapters download. Get all Chapters For E-books Instant Download by email at etutorsource@gmail.com You can also order by WhatsApp https://api.whatsapp.com/send/?phone=%2B447507735190&text&type=ph one_number&app_absent=0 Send email or WhatsApp with complete Book title, Edition Number and Author Name. Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com xxiv Prologue tradition as the Rubaiyat. Indeed, he has not quoted Tennyson’s verses at all, but only ‘An inscription by Abdul Fazi on a temple in Kashmir’. And if he mistook the name of the Persian vizier in English, his attempt two pages later to transcribe it in the Perso-Arabic script was a little nearer the mark.9 As we delve deeper into Palmer’s notes, let us think about the rationale for his choice of ‘illustrations’. Omar Khayyam’s nineteenth-century translators, and to a degree his readers, can be divided into two parties: those who honoured him as a sceptical hedonist, preferring the company of cupbearers to that of the clergy; versus those who insisted that he was a Sufi, and his wine and taverns mystic symbols of a higher spiritual reality. They represent two Victorian responses to the erosion of Christian doctrine, the first rejecting religion outright, the second adopting non-Christian faiths or pursuing (like the Theosophical Society, founded in 1875) a monist or pantheist solution. Palmer evidently fell into the latter camp and, mirroring the comparative practices of the Theosophists, seeks to illustrate or ratify Omar’s beliefs by citing a number of writers past and present. His second quotation, following Abu’l-Fazl, reflects the same tradition of Indian religious syncretism, as expounded by the medieval Hindi poet Kabir. My brother kneels—so says Kabir To stone & brass in heathenwise But in my brothers voice I hear Mine own unanswered agonies His God is as his fate assigns His prayer is all the world’s—& mine. It is possible that Palmer had come across the One Hundred Poems of Kabir translated in 1914 by Rabindranath Tagore. But these lines are not Tagore’s—in fact they are not a translation at all, but rather an imitation of Kabir written by Rudyard Kipling, and used as a chapter heading in his novel Kim (1901).10 Nevertheless, they do faithfully recreate one of the poet’s distinctive mannerisms,11 and Palmer, who may have considered them genuine, must have intended them to complement Abu’l-Fazl. They also find their pendant at the other end of the book, in a contemporary quotation from the American dialect poet Joaquin Miller: ‘In men whom men condemn as ill / I find so much of goodness still, / I[n] 9 I am conjecturing here, as the writing is so awkward as to be almost unintelligible. ‘Fazl’ has been spelt using the medial fā’ instead of its initial, followed by sīn instead of ẓā. Whoever wrote these characters knew his limitations, however, and used pencil (Palmer’s notes are otherwise in pen). 10 Rudyard Kipling, Kim (London: Macmillan, 1902), p. 358. As with ‘Akbar’s Dream’, Palmer has slightly misquoted—Kipling’s text has ‘saith Kabir’, ‘My own’ and ‘as his fates assign’. 11 Nearly all of Kabir’s vanis conclude with ‘kahat Kabir’ or ‘kahe Kabir’ (Kabir says). Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com Prologue xxv men whom men pronounce divine / I find so much of sin & blot— / I hesitate to draw a line / Between the two, where God has not.’ Though Miller refuses to draw a line between sinner and saved, these tolerant lines draw a line under the Rubaiyat itself, for Palmer has written them out directly below the Persian slogan with which Fitzgerald chose to conclude his translation: TAMÁM SHUD (‘it is all’). All Victorian readers of the Rubaiyat, whether sceptic or Sufi, recognized the poem’s message that one must savour the wine of life, and die gladly upon hearing the fatal beat of Azrael’s wings: ‘While the Rose blows along the River Brink, / With old Khayyám the Ruby Vintage drink: / And when the Angel with his darker Draught / Draws up to Thee—take that, and do not shrink.’12 This simple credo seems to have consoled more than one soldier of the Great War, and Palmer’s response is to choose perhaps the most prominent space in the volume—the blank verso facing the poem’s opening page—for the third of his oriental pendants (Figure 0.1). This quotation is drawn not from the Perso-Indian tradition, however, but from the Japanese: Figure 0.1 Corporal Palmer’s Rubaiyat (with permission of the Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales) 12 Edward Fitzgerald, Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, the Astronomer-Poet of Persia (London: Bernard Quaritch, 1859), p. 10. Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com xxvi Prologue Fire of the Autumn turns to Red & Gold the greeness [sic] of the leaves before their grave receive them but for ever pure & cold the white foam blossoms on the tossing wave Yasuhide The verses are by the ninth-century poet and official Fun’ya no Yasuhide, and an English reader of the 1910s enjoyed multiple routes of access to them. They were available in a standard scholarly text edited by Professor Basil Hall Chamberlain, as well as in a slim number of John Murray’s cheap ‘Wisdom of the East’ series, Clara Walsh’s Master-Singers of Japan (though her decorous Georgian style is markedly different from the proto-Imagism of the lines above).13 Palmer may even have read an article by the brilliant young poet-critic Yone Noguchi, printed in the Melbourne Herald six months before the outbreak of war, which mocks Yasuhide and his overblown style. But his actual source was an Anglo-Japanese collaborative translation, Sword and Blossom Poems, printed on crêpe paper at Tokyo by the ingenious Hasegawa Takejiro, a publisher who specialized in packaging Japanese literature for European audiences.14 Whether or not Palmer drew any formal connection between the five-line tanka and four-line ruba‘i, he chose it as an autumnal pendant to the Persian, and as a touchstone perhaps for the growing melancholy he expressed in letters home to his fiancée Nell: Trust you are O.K. & not worrying unduly. It’s a sad old world this and the best anyone gets is a few years together with those they love & if I get through this business all right I’ll have reason to be grateful, remembering all the boys who have gone under . . .15 The Textual Horizon Out of this tiny volume opens a vast horizon of possible intertexts, and from artefacts like it we may achieve a global outlook on cultural production and 13 Basil Hall Chamberlain, The Classical Poetry of the Japanese (London: Trübner, 1880), p. 121; Clara Walsh, The Master-Singers of Japan (London: John Murray, 1910), p. 87. For the possible influence of Sword and Blossom Poems on the Imagists, see Yoshiko Kita, ‘Imagism Reconsidered, with Special Reference to the Early Poetry of H.D.’, PhD thesis, Durham University (1995), p. 38. 14 Yone Noguchi, ‘Japanese Essays: Poetical Vulgarity’, Herald (Melbourne), 31 Jan. 1914, p. 4 (reprinted from the Westminster Gazette); Shotaro Kimura and Charlotte M.A. Peake, Sword and Blossom Poems, from the Japanese (3 vols, Tokyo: Hasegawa, 1907–10), II, 18. Yasuhide’s lyric is also quoted by a reviewer in the Bookman, XXXV/205 (Oct. 1908), 61. 15 NSW: MLMSS 9831, T.A. Palmer to Ellen Honora Wilson, 21 Apr. 1918. Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com Prologue xxvii consumption in the nineteenth century. Palmer’s reference points are not exclusively Asian (the rear endpapers also bear some words of Ruskin on the power of education), but the bulk of the annotation, grouped prominently at the front of the book, testifies to his evident interest in non-Western literature. His curiosity may have predated the war, or it may have been inspired by his three months’ gunnery training in the Middle East. But of greater significance is the likelihood that he cultivated this interest privately, without formal instruction, using the literature at his disposal in the 1910s. This book takes its impetus from readers like Corporal Palmer, who invested their time and money in studying what Victorians conceived as the ‘classic’ literature of the major Asian languages, and who were motivated to do so not because of any professional commitment (academic, mercantile, missionary, or otherwise), but by spiritual yearning, imperial enthusiasm, speculative philosophy, or eccentric theories, a search for alternative sexual and gender norms, travel, friendship, escapism, and various other forms of personal curiosity. This is what I mean by a ‘general reader’—not a category defined by class or intellect, but by a relationship of amateurism to the source-languages. Such readers were often obliged to resort to dense and technical books which were never intended for use by non-experts. But when possible, they consumed the accessible, affordable, popular translations that began to appear in the 1840s and multiplied rapidly during Palmer’s lifetime. Traditionally denigrated by specialists, these popular editions enabled an important and remarkable transition whereby, in the course of a few decades, many texts that had been hitherto the preserve solely of orientalists and antiquaries spread their boards and executed a dramatic flight from the scholar’s desk to the domestic bookcase. It is generally accepted now that the ‘common’ or ‘general’ reader has been a label of convenience which obscures the ‘obstinate, irreducible individualism’ of every historical person, and the particular conditions shaping their response.16 The individuals who populate these pages, and include country gentry, urban bourgeoisie, working men and women, children and adolescents, British, Irish, American, African American, and Australian readers, repeatedly expose the limitations of such vague terms. I continue to use them, however, inasmuch as they reflect translators’ priorities and appear in their correspondence. In the many unsolicited ‘pitches’ addressed to various publishers that I have read, proposers of new translations invariably claim that they will find favour with some nebulous class of average educated people. The writers of such letters focussed their efforts like rays of light towards a vanishing point called the ‘general reader’, beyond which emerged—on the other side of the reading process—a refracted spectrum of interpretations produced by multifaceted individuals like Corporal Palmer. 16 Anthony Grafton, ‘Is the History of Reading a Marginal Enterprise? Guillaume Budé and his Books’, Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, XCI/2 (1997), 141. Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com xxviii Prologue The practice of such readers may be thought of in the terms used by Virginia Woolf in 1925: ‘guided by an instinct to create for himself, out of whatever odds and ends he can come by, some kind of whole . . . Hasty, inaccurate, and superficial, snatching now this poem, now that scrap of old furniture, without caring where he finds it or of what nature it may be so long as it serves his purpose and rounds his structure.’17 The archetypal solitary autodidact that Woolf seems to have in mind was a generalization: many readers arrived at Kabir or Omar Khayyam not through a deliberate programme of study, but through happenstance. Many others did not read alone, but were introduced to Asian authors by friends, teachers, and clubs. But the wish or ‘instinct’ for coherence—the wish to minimize the random element in one’s browsing and maximize meaningful return—is something Palmer shares with many distinct individuals. My goal has been to explain both how these popular editions were made, and also how they were read. Indeed, I aim to give a picture of the whole cycle, from the conception and execution of translations, through the process of production and publication in either book form or periodical, dissemination to libraries and bookshops, and ultimately their consumption by readers and recirculation among other readers (not forgetting that many laypeople read older or more difficult translations in addition to, and in some cases in preference to, the new popular editions). In pursuit of this goal, a project that began in speculation bulged exponentially as new findings and potential approaches came to light—including a huge cast of largely forgotten translators. Of necessity it became a study of translation, of book and reading history, and of poetry, prose, and drama originally written in Hindi, Persian, Arabic, Sanskrit, Chinese, and Japanese. The obstacles to such an enquiry were clear: I had knowledge only of the first two languages, and that far from expert. I would have to borrow the instruments of my methodology from several disciplines, and write a book that could never adequately repay all its intellectual creditors. That it raises issues which it has not the scope to conclusively resolve, and plumbs depths which it cannot fully survey, I freely admit. Nevertheless I have presented my research in the form in which I judge it will be of most use to scholarship. I decided that only by aiming at comprehensiveness (and inevitably falling short), could I give an impression of the plenitude and diversity that characterizes the Victorian consumption of ‘oriental literature’. Moreover, the very occurrence of that vague, problematic designation so frequently in contemporary sources made me realize that to understand both translators and readers of the nineteenth century, I would in some ways have to emulate them. While some delved deep into one literary tradition, the bent of others—restless, eccentric, prejudiced, ­misinformed, imaginative, or comparative—carried them widely if superficially across a range of languages. Such practices were authorized by the existence of 17 Virginia Woolf, The Common Reader (London: Hogarth Press, 1925), pp. 11–12. Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com We Don’t reply in this website, you need to contact by email for all chapters Instant download. Just send email and get all chapters download. Get all Chapters For E-books Instant Download by email at etutorsource@gmail.com You can also order by WhatsApp https://api.whatsapp.com/send/?phone=%2B447507735190&text&type=ph one_number&app_absent=0 Send email or WhatsApp with complete Book title, Edition Number and Author Name. Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com Prologue xxix monolithic notions such as ‘the East’, which I had been well taught—and now teach my own students—to deconstruct. But nonetheless I, too, would have to read Confucius in the morning and Rumi in the afternoon, so to speak, if I was to perceive the various skewed frameworks that individuals or groups might piece together in order to connect such incongruous authors. Having observed the impulse to order Asian texts manifesting itself throughout the literate public, I would be better placed to articulate one of this book’s central arguments: that an effort was underway in the nineteenth century to assemble an Oriental Canon as a supplement to the Greco-Roman classics. That effort is described fully in the book’s central chapter, Chapter 4, which integrates the findings of the first three chapters and lays the groundwork for the final three. The reader will notice that each of my chapters is named for a different part of the process whereby a text crosses from one culture to another—‘Translating’, ‘Publishing’, ‘Circulating’, ‘Taking an Interest’, ‘Reading’, ‘Canonizing’—and yet may be puzzled as to why I have not arranged them in ‘chronological’ order. This is in part because the order in which these stages arise is not the same for every text. Sometimes a publisher decides to issue a text before its translation has been undertaken. Sometimes (often, in fact) the business of sorting and sifting texts into a canon does not come until after the translators have done their work— rather, the translators engage with and attempt to influence canon-makers before and during the act of translation. Moreover, it was necessary first to map out the social, cultural, and political background, as well as the institutional structures at work in the period under consideration, so that when I came to describe the production and reception of individual translations I could more effectively situate them within their context. Thus Chapters 1 to 3 serve the purpose of naming the many source-texts under discussion, showing how each entered the English language and was diffused through English literature. They examine the difference between academic and popular translations, explain how readers accessed translations (as well as original texts), and point to the various motive forces driving interest in Asian literature—an interest that spread and increased steadily in the course of the century. The second half of the book focusses more closely on the production and consumption of translations, with Chapter 5 investigating and comparing the methods and motivations of individual translators. Chapter 6 turns to the publishing world and its internal processes—proposal, editing, printing, illustration, marketing, pricing—by which the texts assumed their material form, while Chapter 7 examines their reception and usage by a variety of readers (though reader responses are cited and referred to throughout the book). In all chapters, discussion will range widely across the breadth of the Victorian oriental ‘canon’, but to reduce the risk of disorienting my own readers, most chapters are linked with a key text that illustrates the issues at stake in that chapter. In Chapter 2, the focal text is the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam; Chapter 4 dwells on the teachings of Confucius; an extended comparison of different translations of the Ramayana Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com xxx Prologue is the centrepiece of Chapter 5; while in Chapter 7, Sadi’s Gulistan offers a common touchstone for a host of Victorian readers. In their aim to recover and locate the presence of texts like these within the wider reading culture of the time, the first three chapters build on the sustained labour of many scholars to shift our outlook away from national contexts towards global patterns of circulation, and to understand the act of writing or reading as an event that often takes place at the juncture of multiple international networks. Such an approach, Caroline Levine writes, ‘allows us to reconceive what is proper to Victorian literature: Tolstoy and Whitman, The Arabian Nights and Euripides, Fénelon and Gilgamesh, The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle and the Bhagavad Gita.’18 The second half of the book, meanwhile, could not have been written without the intensive research over the past fifteen years into ‘ordinary’ readers of the nineteenth century, and the electronic tools (better catalogues, digital texts, the Reading Experience Database) that scholars in this area have created or promoted. Translation theorists, notably Lawrence Venuti, and contributors to the ongoing debate on world literature have informed my methodology throughout the book, but my most important interlocutor has been Annmarie Drury. Her Translation as Transformation in Victorian Poetry (2015) considers texts such as Fitzgerald’s Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam in the light of nineteenth-century translation theory (a subject fervently debated in contemporary periodicals) and she makes poetry central to her enquiry, since most of the aforementioned theorists held prosody to have ‘an intrinsic relationship to cultural and national identities’. Thus, poetry was the literary form in which the characteristics, temperament, and spirit of foreign nations was most apparent—a view held by many of the trans­ lators and readers mentioned in this book. Furthermore, Drury explains how the rapid expansion of the field of translated literature, to include many works bearing no relationship to the anglophone literary tradition, ‘tests and transforms’ English poetry.19 Victorian writers display a remarkable openness to foreign literature, a phenomenon observed long ago by Lionel Stevenson.20 But only more recently have we begun to understand their willingness to confront their readers with foreign word and script—as Robert Browning’s Ferishtah’s Fancies (1884) bombards its readers with chunks of Hebrew—and to bend English verse to admit foreign forms—as does Browning, again, with the Arabic tāwil octameter in ‘Muléykeh’ (1880), a poem which Drury suggests could possibly have inspired the ‘culturally expansive range of speakers and subjects’ in Tennyson’s late works, among them ‘Akbar’s Dream’.21 In this, poets were stimulated by translators 18 Caroline Levine, ‘From Nation to Network’, Victorian Studies, LV/4 (Summer 2013), 664. 19 Drury, Translation as Transformation, p. 3. 20 Of the Pre-Raphaelites, Stevenson writes, ‘their preoccupation with foreign literatures put an end to the parochialism that was stultifying English authorship.’ Lionel Stevenson, The Pre-Raphaelite Poets (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1972), p. 26. 21 Drury, Translation as Transformation, p. 146. Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com Prologue xxxi seeking to bring unfamiliar texts before an untrained public, and in turn they furnished translators with new stylistic strategies for doing so. Setting Some Limits I have confined my enquiry approximately to the years between 1845 and 1915, partly for practical reasons but also because I believe this period to be note­worthy. The following, first chapter will give an overview of oriental translation from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth centuries, and will touch straight away upon the great interest generated by Persian literature in the Romantic period—the same phenomenon Raymond Schwab, somewhat too grandly, termed the ‘Oriental Renaissance’.22 Schwab argued for his specialist period as one surpassingly open to foreign thought and writing of all kinds, before its legacy was ­forsaken by the Victorians. Though I am wary of making the same sort of generalization, my dissenting view is that while the cosmopolitan appetite Schwab ­cele­brates did fall away somewhat in the 1830s and 1840s, it rallied from the midcentury onwards.23 The data gathered by Peter France and Kenneth Haynes based on the Nineteenth-Century Short Title Catalogue would seem to bear this out: they found ‘Eastern’ texts to make up 11.6 per cent of all English translations published in 1810. In 1850, that figure was down to 7 per cent, climbing to 9.9 per cent in 1870 and 16.8 per cent by 1900.24 My explanation for this is the increasing availability of translation, after 1845, in various popular forms. Of course, if we go only by these percentages, the public in 1900 was not significantly more interested in oriental literature than at the beginning of the century. But looking at it another way, the total number of translations (in all languages) published annually had more than doubled in that period, and while in 1810 a relatively select and priv­il­ eged class of ‘general’ reader had access to the work of the pioneer orientalists, in the fin de siècle a much larger public drawn from all sectors of society was en­gaging with their successors. The period 1845 to 1915 is one wherein classic literature drawn from Asian languages became widespread and diffused throughout the reading culture of the United States, Britain, and its empire. It might well be asked why I did not push my argument further, and try to ­ determine whether the Victorian bookshelf was not truly a global one, 22 Schwab, Oriental Renaissance, p. xxiii. 23 Louise Curran, ‘Reviews of Foreign Literature: Some Special Problems’, Victorian Periodicals Newsletter, XX/2 (1973), 1. 24 Peter France and Kenneth Haynes, ‘The Publication of Literary Translation: An Overview’, in France and Haynes (eds), The Oxford History of Literary Translation in English, Volume 4: 1790–1900 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 149. Moreover, where a text was translated through an intermediary language, France and Haynes assigned it to the intermediary’s column. Thus their figures likely underrepresent late Victorian popular oriental translations, which were often made from French or German rather than from the original. Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com xxxii Prologue accommodating literature from across the European languages, Africa, and beyond. Again, there were practical objections to such a vast enquiry, but more significantly, the popularization of Asian texts and the emergence of a popular audience for them raises some particular issues and challenges. In comparison with their counterparts working in French, German, or Italian, the community of oriental trans­lators in English was characterized by a much sharper contrast between highly trained experts and novices with the barest understanding of the source languages. Furthermore, unlike the Divine Comedy or Don Quixote, many Asian texts were being studied for the first time, and in such a situation trans­ lators typ­ic­al­ly enjoy considerable liberty in their handling of the text. Thirdly, the ever-present possibility of misinterpretation or misrepresentation reminds us that up to the 1880s virtually all oriental translators were not native speakers. Though they often relied heavily on ‘native’ informants, they were scarcely answerable to any native public, and in most cases their activities were to some degree involved in the complex power relations of imperial rule. All these issues make the popular consumption of Asian texts an important area of enquiry, especially as with one or two exceptions (notably Omar Khayyam), the phenomenon has been very little studied. France and Haynes comment that through the period of their survey, Asian translations intended for the ‘general public’ are outnumbered by those ‘designed for specialists and students’.25 They make no conjecture, however, as to the size of those two classes of reader, and this very much begs the question Drury asks in the closing paragraphs of Translation as Transformation: how might our understanding of this history change if we concentrated our attention on the translations that ‘most Victorians’ actually read?26 Finally, a caveat—and a cautionary tale. Beyond a few much-admired texts, like the Arabian Nights, serious readers of Asian literature were a relatively small group. Not tiny by any means, but small in comparison with the much vaster public for travelogues and fictions about the mysterious East. In 2017, I spent an afternoon at the Leeds Library, a private subscription library that is unusual in having preserved its borrowing registers from the early twentieth century. They also hold an old copy of Herbert Giles’s History of Chinese Literature, a cheap and accessible guidebook of 1901, once well-represented in lending collections on both sides of the Atlantic. But approval by a library committee does not guarantee interest among patrons. Between 1910 and 1912, only one reader borrowed it from the shelves of the Leeds Library, ‘Miss Baines’, while in that same period Robert Hichens’s 1904 novel The Garden of Allah, which features a decadent Algerian poet and abundant local colour, was loaned thirty-one times.27 Small wonder that towards the end of his career Giles wrote to a Chinese academic 25 Ibid., p. 140. 26 Drury, Translation as Transformation, p. 225. 27 Leeds Library: Borrowing Ledgers GI 1908–1957 and GA 1910–1970, and Share Book 259. Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com Prologue xxxiii based in Switzerland, telling him how ‘l’apathie anglaise pour tout ce qui se r­ apporte à la Chine’ had been one of the greatest ‘chagrins’ of his life. Indeed, it was quite common for orientalists to criticize the perceived indifference of the British to their activities, and to Asian culture generally. ‘I believe that linguists are undervalued instinctively’, complained Richard Francis Burton in 1874, ‘because they are popularly supposed to be too clever by half.’28 Furthermore, how did Miss Baines react when she opened the History of Chinese Literature— with interest and wonder, or bafflement? At present we are apt to celebrate any intercultural encounter that might set an example for tolerance and understanding in our divided world, but as Nan Z. Da has recently challenged, do incidents like this have any ‘mappable’ consequences beyond their immediate circumstance?29 Even prolonged study did not necessarily foster the earnest and convivial exchange that idealists may have hoped of face-to-face encounters with actual Asians. I have often reminded myself of what took place when Moncure Conway met the exiled Egyptian nationalist Orabi Pasha, in Ceylon. A lifelong enthusiast of Persian poetry, the American writer thought to engage Arabi in a discussion of Hafez and Omar Khayyam, only to discover his companion was a soldier and Wahhabist with scant regard for such poets. Conway’s overture was reduced to an awkward and quizzical gesture, his nonplussed companion bluntly changing the topic to British policy in the Sudan, and the American Civil War.30 Bearing all this in mind, I have tried not to overstate my case. But I will show nonetheless that not all intercultural dialogues were as abortive as this one. Conway would find other, sympathetic listeners, and inspire hundreds of his readers to take up the study of Asian religions. Miss Baines may not have enjoyed Giles’s History, but if so it did not deter her from developing her oriental interests, for later she borrowed Okakura’s Ideals of the East. Their experiences form just single incidents of weather within a larger climactic change that suffused the literary atmosphere generally, and was triggered when the orientalist archive that had been steadily accumulating through the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries began to lift off and float away from the stacks. 28 UCLA: Collection 1506 (Herbert Allen Giles Papers, 1877–1929), H.A. Giles to Hain-jou-kia, 11 Nov. 1927; Morgan: MA Unassigned (Richard Francis Burton to anon., 2 Apr. 1874). 29 Nan Z. Da, Intransitive Encounter: Sino-U.S. Literatures and the Limits of Exchange (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018), p. 10. 30 Moncure Daniel Conway, My Pilgrimage to the Wise Men of the East (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1906), p. 166. Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com We Don’t reply in this website, you need to contact by email for all chapters Instant download. Just send email and get all chapters download. Get all Chapters For E-books Instant Download by email at etutorsource@gmail.com You can also order by WhatsApp https://api.whatsapp.com/send/?phone=%2B447507735190&text&type=ph one_number&app_absent=0 Send email or WhatsApp with complete Book title, Edition Number and Author Name. Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com 1 A Century of Translation On 13 June 1857 it was reported in London that the 3rd Bengal Cavalry had mu­tin­ied at Meerut, and that a conspiracy was afoot to organize a general rising throughout the army.1 The Great Rebellion had begun. Six weeks later, seventytwo-year-old Leigh Hunt wrote to a friend in Calcutta, but the war—which would so brutally disfigure any prospects for mutual respect and sympathy between the people of India and their arrogant rulers—was little on his mind, it seems. Pray tell me how literature stands in the East, both Eastern and English, and whether there is yet such a thing as a selection of all the best stories (in English) from the Persian and Hindoo poets and others. There ought to be and it ought to be called the Eastern Story Teller, and sell famously.2 Poet, critic, and political gadfly, friend of Keats and Hazlitt, Hunt was a Romantic who had stood on the beach at Shelley’s funeral and yet survived into the third decade of Victoria’s reign. He would certainly have experienced the tremor of interest in non-Western literature that passed through British letters in his youth, and which gave rise to Byron’s Giaour (1813), Southey’s Curse of Kehama (1810), Moore’s Lalla Rookh (1817) and Landor’s Poems from the Arabic and Persian (1800). Most literary-minded people of that generation had some knowledge of Sir William Jones, who had founded the Asiatic Society in 1784—the year of Hunt’s birth—and had been the chief progenitor of the dictionaries and grammars in Persian, Sanskrit, Arabic, and the modern Indian vernaculars that tumbled out of Calcutta in the years following, along with a representative selection of literary translations to serve as aids in learning these tongues. Persian, which remained the official medium of administrative and judicial proceedings in the East India Company’s territories up to 1832, was the priority: it accounts for the bulk of translations emerging in this period, and its literature was the first to attain general recognition and admiration in the West. One of Jones’s followers, Joseph Champion, gave English readers a first, much abridged, version of the Shahnameh in 1788, rendering Firdausi’s epic of the legendary kings of Iran in the heroic couplets of Pope’s Iliad. Among several versions of 1 ‘Foreign and Colonial News’, Illustrated London News, XXX/863 (1857), 560. 2 Thornton Leigh Hunt (ed.), The Correspondence of Leigh Hunt (2 vols, London: Smith, Elder, 1862), II, 286: James Henry Leigh Hunt to David Lester Richardson, 26 June–28 July 1857. Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com 2 Asian Classics on the Victorian Bookshelf Sadi’s thirteenth-century Gulistan (Rose Garden), an influential collection of didactic stories, it was Francis Gladwin’s 1806 volume that found favour in the 1840s with Ralph Waldo Emerson and the Transcendentalists, who disseminated it among American readers.3 Another text which attracted their attention was the Sanskrit Bhagavad Gita, in the 1785 prose of Charles Wilkins—like Jones, a founding member of the Asiatic Society. Jones’s own activity was polyglot and prolific. He brought for the first time to English notice Kalidasa’s drama Sakuntala (from the Sanskrit), the Muallaqat (seven Arabic odes that were supposedly hung on the Kaaba in pre-Islamic times), and the great Persian lyricist Hafez. The last was received principally in the form of his famous couplet on the Shirazi Turk, whom Jones tactfully transformed (in six lines) from a comely boy into a grammatically feasible, but historically improbable girl. Sweet maid, if thou would’st charm my sight, And bid these arms thy neck infold; That rosy cheek, that lily hand, Would give thy poet more delight Than all Bocara’s vaunted gold, Than all the gems of Samarcand.4 While bearing in mind these landmarks of English translation, it is also vital not to lose sight of French, Italian, and especially German scholarship, which was often far in advance of its British and American counterparts. With a copy of Joseph von Hammer’s translation at his side, Goethe was much better-placed to write his lyrical tribute to Hafez, the West-östlicher Divan (1819), than English con­tem­por­ ar­ies who—had they no German—knew the poet only in extracts. Thus, largely through the agency of the East India Company, a variety of major Persian writers became at least partially accessible in English between 1770 and 1820, along with a number of important Sanskrit and Arabic works (a Quran had already been published in 1734, courtesy of the London solicitor George Sale).5 More familiar to Hunt than any of these texts, though, will have been the Arabian Nights, which entered English literature from the French of Antoine Galland in the first decade of the eighteenth century. Numerous unauthorized ‘Grub Street’ translations of Galland ensured the Nights a special status in English reading 3 John D. Yohannan, Persian Poetry in England and America: A 200 Year History (Delmar, NY: Caravan Books, 1977), pp. 24, 113. 4 Lord Teignmouth (ed.), The Works of Sir William Jones (13 vols, London: John Stockdale, 1807), X, 251. 5 Sale’s was the first translation founded at least in part on the original Arabic (though Maracci’s Latin edition was no doubt constantly at his elbow). An earlier English version based on du Ryer’s French text had appeared at London in Charles I’s time, ‘for the fatisfaction of all that defire to look into the Turkifh vanities’. See The Alcoran of Mahomet (London, 1649). Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com A Century of Translation 3 culture long before the first Arabic-to-English version appeared in 1838,6 by which point the tales formed part of the furniture of every affluent (and many working-class) English child’s imagination. They were enjoyed as fervently by Tennyson and Walter Bagehot as by the dyer’s son and future Chartist, Thomas Cooper, who in the late 1810s borrowed the ‘enchanting’ collection from the circulating library run by Mrs Trevor, a stationer at Gainsborough in Lincolnshire.7 Even non-readers may have absorbed the stories through advertising or the the­ atre. Aladdin or, The Wonderful Lamp had appeared at Covent Garden as early as 1788, and by 1831, when it was staged at Bury St Edmunds, it was becoming known as a pantomime throughout the country. Other tales followed suit. In 1861, Her Majesty’s Theatre in London advertised ‘Flying Women of the Loadstone Island . . . the Most Startling Romance of the Age’, while at the end of the century the Kiralfy brothers would stage a series of spectacular Nights productions at Olympia.8 The popularity of the Nights encouraged publishers to support a range of analo­ gous ventures, and at this point Hunt’s remarks become rather puzzling—because the anthology he envisages had already been anticipated by more than one publisher. The editor of Tales of the East, brought out by Ballantyne of Edinburgh in 1812, ransacked the work of out-of-copyright European orientalists to fill his three volumes. Anything answering to the description ‘popular romance’ was admissible, including Alexander Dow’s version of a Persian textbook used by the Mughal nobility, the Bahar-i-Danish—one story from which gave Thomas Moore the scenario for Lalla Rookh.9 In a period when taxation and paper costs kept the price of new works of literature relatively high, oriental rechauffés made economic sense whether in book form, or in sixpenny number publications like The Library of Romance and The Story-Teller, which carried not only Nights-style tales but also caizi jiaren (Scholar and Beauty) stories popular in Ming and Qing China.10 Among these was the Haoqiu Zhuan, translated by a Canton merchant in the 1760s and again in 1829 by the future governor of Hong Kong, John Francis Davis (who titled his version The Fortunate Union).11 Leigh Hunt himself enjoyed a similar work, the Yu Jiao Li (Two Fair Cousins)—referring to it as ‘my beloved 6 Paulo Lemos Horta, Marvellous Thieves: Secret Authors of the Arabian Nights (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press: 2017), p. 91. 7 Roger Ebbatson, ‘Knowing the Orient: The Young Tennyson’, Nineteenth-Century Contexts, XXXVI/2 (2014), 125; Walter Bagehot, ‘The People of the Arabian Nights’, National Review, IX/17 (1859), 44–70; Thomas Cooper, Life of Thomas Cooper (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1872), p. 34. 8 Marina Warner, Stranger Magic: Charmed States & the Arabian Nights (2011; repr. London: Vintage, 2012), pp. 354–63. 9 Robert Irwin, The Arabian Nights: A Companion (London: Tauris Parke, 2005), p. 264. 10 See the May 1843 issue of The Story-Teller; or, Table Book of Popular Literature: a Collection of Romances, Short Standard Tales, Traditions, and Poetical Legends of All Nations, in which is reprinted a caizi jiaren story, ‘The Shadow in the Water’, that was originally translated by John Francis Davis in his Chinese Novels (London: John Murray, 1822). 11 Peter J. Kitson, Forging Romantic China: Sino-British Cultural Exchange, 1760–1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 32–3. Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com 4 Asian Classics on the Victorian Bookshelf Chinese novel’ and passing his 1827 copy onto Thomas Carlyle.12 Publications like The Story-Teller, which mingled Chinese with Middle Eastern stories, helped create a fabular notion of Asia as a realm of marvellous tales, and brought them to a sixpenny audience long before non-narrative, more ‘serious’ genres found a non-elite public. How to make sense, then, of Hunt’s eager query in 1857? Was his want of an ‘Eastern Story Teller’ merely the forgetfulness of an elderly man, or was he dissatisfied with what London booksellers and periodicals could presently offer him? Though Hunt asks for ‘the best stories’, he also specifies that they be by ‘poets’, and the Yu Jiao Li was not poetry. Nor would educated Chinese have classed it among their ‘best’ literature. Written in the late seventeenth or early eighteenth century, it long postdates the canon of poetic masterpieces, and though its nearcontemporary The Dream of the Red Chamber has now achieved the status of a classic novel, in Hunt’s time it would have been regarded as light reading.13 The Story-Teller’s editor, Robert Bell, admitted as much when he suggested to his readers that ‘a sample of the short popular fictions of that stately empire may help to prepare the way for the profounder speculations of enterprising publishers.’14 Even Davis’s forbiddingly titled Poeseos Sinensis Commentarii (1830) mostly ­contains the tea-picking ballads and other popular verse upon which English ­students of Chinese would have cut their teeth in 1820s Hong Kong.15 The ­situation for ‘Persian and Hindoo poets’ was of course better, though even then English ­readers of Hafez had to rely on such guides as Richardson’s Specimen of Persian Poetry (1774) and Hindley’s Persian Lyrics (1800)—both of which feature a mere handful of odes, annotated with parallel text for the benefit of the language learner. The issue of what is canonical (in both Eastern and Western eyes) shall be treated fully in Chapter 4, but other considerations which are relevant here—and which may have troubled Hunt—are what is genuine, and what is representative? Generally speaking, discerning Victorian readers desired authentic cultural artefacts, and authenticity for them was measured by antiquity. But the older a text, the harder it is to verify its genuine provenance and unadulterated content, and even if it is genuine, whether it adequately represents, say, the Persian literary trad­ition is quite another question. Again, the prevailing view (with some notable exceptions) was that classic texts epitomized Persian taste and sentiment, and were a better guide to the essential qualities of that nation and its people than modern vernacular literature. But how were the East India Company’s translators to delineate the canon of Persian literature when they were accessing it through a 12 Hunt (ed.), Correspondence of Leigh Hunt, II, 161 (Leigh Hunt to Southwood Smith, 23 Mar. n.y.). 13 Chloë F. Starr, Red-Light Novels of the Late Qing (Leiden: Brill, 2007), p. xxi. 14 The Story-Teller (May 1843), p. 110. 15 Eva Hung, ‘Chinese Poetry’, in Peter France (ed.), The Oxford Guide to Literature in English Translation (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 224. Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com A Century of Translation 5 third, intermediary culture—that of Mughal India? And how were their counterparts at Canton and Malacca, far from China’s literary centres and reliant on possibly reticent or conservative informants, to understand the difference between the ancient texts formally denoted ‘jing’ (classic), and those that were merely very old and universally admired? Considerable uncertainty on these matters in the early part of the century was an encouragement to firms like Ballantyne with their Tales of the East—a compendious publication but, as I have already hinted, a ragbag. It editor used the Bahar-i-Danish (Spring of Knowledge) to supplement the Arabian Nights of which it is partly derivative, but this text originated in Mughal Lahore and is of much lower importance in the global history of letters. The socalled ‘Persian Tales’ in the second volume are in reality the mysterious Mille et Un Jours pieced together—and perhaps largely invented—by the French traveller François Pétis de la Croix in the 1710s, while the accompanying ‘Tales of the Genii’ are altogether ersatz productions from the pen of the army chaplain James Ridley. Hunt may well have felt, then, that he wasn’t quite getting the real thing. His fellow Romantics, in spite of their infatuation with the Orient, had in fact done very little actual translation or paraphrase—Landor’s Poems from the Arabic and Persian are not even paraphrase, but out-and-out pastiche with a derisory intent.16 Among the poets of that generation only Moore truly studied, his books (now held by the Royal Irish Academy) testifying both to his efforts and to the limitations imposed on the private enthusiast in the early nineteenth century. Moore knew French but not German, which enabled him to read Sadi’s Gulistan in an old Paris edition that may have been more congenial than the English versions of Gladwin or James Ross, whose preface makes it perfectly clear that his only an­tici­ pated public is the East India Company cadet (‘the Persian tyro of Bengal’).17 For Hafez, however, he was thrown back on Richardson and Hindley. The other Persian texts in his collection reflect Company translation priorities (and, to some degree, Mughal tastes), being generally works used to inculcate good prose and wise conduct. Thus we find the Tutinama (Tales of a Parrot), a series of cautionary tales about adultery, but of Firdausi, Nizami, and the other major Persian writers not a trace. Moore may also have found himself priced out: though prolific and successful in his lifetime, he was never a wealthy poet, and the books he possessed must have represented a considerable investment. Perhaps this is why he owned only the first instalment of Terrick Hamilton’s four-volume Antar (1819), an Arabic saga attributed to the eighth-century poet Al-Asma‘i (and this was supplied gratis 16 Yohannan, Persian Poetry, p. 34. For a much fuller discussion of Romantic engagements with Persian literature, see Hasan Javadi, Persian Literary Influence on English Literature (1987; repr. Costa Mesa, CA: Mazda, 2005), pp. 72–107. 17 James Ross, The Gulistan: or Flower-garden, of Shaikh Sadī of Shiraz (London: J.M. Richardson, 1823), p. 25. Thomas Moore’s library at the Royal Irish Academy is classed under the shelfmark ML. For Moore’s ignorance of German, see Wilfred S. Dowden (ed.), The Journal of Thomas Moore (6 vols, Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1983–1991), V, v, 1867. Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com We Don’t reply in this website, you need to contact by email for all chapters Instant download. Just send email and get all chapters download. Get all Chapters For E-books Instant Download by email at etutorsource@gmail.com You can also order by WhatsApp https://api.whatsapp.com/send/?phone=%2B447507735190&text&type=ph one_number&app_absent=0 Send email or WhatsApp with complete Book title, Edition Number and Author Name. Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com 6 Asian Classics on the Victorian Bookshelf by the publisher). Alternatively, he may merely have found the translation im­pene­trable. Of the two dozen works of oriental research in his collection, only the slim Specimens of Arabian Poetry (1796) by the Cambridge divine J.D. Carlyle, makes any acknowledgement of the needs or interests of the non-expert reader. Carlyle’s is typical of the specimen-book genre that prospered in the early nineteenth century, an unsystematic sample of short excerpts chosen for their ‘­elegance’ or ‘novelty’, and translated intermittently, ‘to fill up an idle hour’ between diocesan engagements. Yet, in spite of his diffidence, Carlyle’s fond hope that the volume might offer ‘a sort of history (slight indeed and imperfect, yet to an English reader perhaps not uninstructive) of Arabian poetry and literature’ foreshadows the more methodical and purposeful anthologies that were to come.18 Costello and The Rose Garden, 1845 Though it is hard to quantify, a demand for a more accommodating style of ­edit­or­ship akin to J.D. Carlyle’s can be detected among the rising generation of the 1830s and 1840s—a demand that remained unsatisfied, for the time being. In October 1843, the elderly Moore made an irritable diary entry about strangers writing him speculative letters in the hope of getting his autograph: ‘Sir, though personally unknown to you, I venture to ask you a question which your familiarity with the Persian Poets will enable you to answer. Do you think a new translation of Hafiz would at the present moment be well received etc etc.’19 Nothing appears to have come of this enquiry. Meanwhile, in County Kildare, the future reformer and suffragist Frances Power Cobbe (1822–1904) was using her parents’ books and Marsh’s Library in Dublin to compensate for the formal education denied to her as a young woman. Having digested most of the Greek and Latin authors, her interests ‘centred more and more on the answers which have been made through the ages by philosophers and prophets to the great questions of the human soul. I read such translations as were accessible in those pre-Müller days, of Eastern Sacred books; Anquetil-Duperron’s Zend Avesta (twice); and Sir William Jones’s Institutes of Menu.’20 Cobbe refers to Friedrich Max Müller, the Oxford Sanskritist who from the 1860s onwards would lecture on philology and theology to packed houses of 18 J.D. Carlyle, Specimens of Arabian Poetry, from the earliest time to the extinction of the Khaliphat, with some account of the authors (Cambridge: John Burges, 1796), pp. i–ii. For a discussion of the ‘Specimen’-style anthology in the Romantic period, see Colleen Glenney Boggs, ‘Specimens of Translation in Walt Whitman’s Poetry’, Arizona Quarterly, LVIII/3 (2002), 36. 19 Dowden (ed.), Journal of Thomas Moore, vi, 2354. The correspondent was one George Abingdon of Brighton. 20 Frances Power Cobbe, Life of Frances Power Cobbe, as told by herself (2 vols, London: Richard Bentley, 1894), I, 71. Kate Flint highlights Cobbe’s autodidact efforts to catch up with her formally educated brothers in The Woman Reader, 1837–1914 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), p. 224. Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com A Century of Translation 7 non-experts (among them J.S. Mill and Gerard Manley Hopkins).21 No such resource existed in her youth, though general-interest periodicals like Fraser’s and the New Monthly occasionally carried instructive articles and reviews. In 1822, for ex­ample, ‘P.W.R’ addressed ‘the English reader who is acquainted with the translations of Sir William Jones’, soliciting his agreement that Hafez and Sadi ‘will scarcely yield in competition’ with Britain’s poets.22 Dedicated linguists and antiquarians would send for the Proceedings of the Asiatic Society from Calcutta, while the Company-sponsored Asiatic Journal was printed at London and provided Indian commercial and political intelligence with a smattering of literary matter. And in 1820 the house of Longman, it would seem, attempted to tap the latter’s market with a new journal, the Annals of Oriental Literature, tilting the content in favour of cultural researches. Priced at a daunting six shillings, it folded almost immediately, but its inaugural page of contents hints at the sort of reader the publisher may have envisaged: one who would be diverted by ‘An Essay on the Life and Genius of Firdausi, the great Epic Poet of the Persians’, but who also took a practical interest in Asian and African affairs encompassing the geographic (‘Account of a Mission to Ashantee’) and military (‘Origin and Increase of the Chinese Tartarian Army’).23 One reader of the short-lived Annals was a young protégée and admirer of Moore’s, Louisa Stuart Costello, who had just had her short adaptation (from a French translation) of an episode in the Ramayana rejected by the publisher William Fearman. She at once sent it off to the editors, who printed it in their third and final issue.24 Costello (1799–1870) was the daughter of an Irish infantry officer who, after her father’s premature death, was obliged to support herself and her ailing mother by her pen. In the 1840s she was turning out two or three books every year, including novels, travelogues, biographies, and translations, with no fixed sphere of activity and no special interest in Asia (at the time of her rejection by Fearman, she was actually studying Italian to further expand her range of literary activity).25 It was thus very much a short-term commercial venture, based on an empty niche she perceived in the book market, when in 1845 she inaugurated 21 Cary H. Plotkin, The Tenth Muse: Victorian Philology and the Genesis of the Poetic Language of Gerard Manley Hopkins (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1989), pp. 20, 55. 22 ‘Persian and Arabic Literature’, New Monthly Magazine and Literary Journal, IV/13 (Jan. 1922), 263. France and Haynes count four Persian, two Arabic, and two Chinese translations featuring in Fraser’s in the 1830s (‘Publication of Literary Translation: An Overview’, p. 144). 23 Annals of Oriental Literature, I/1 (June 1820), 9. 24 Bodleian: MS.Don.c.203, f.108 (Louisa Stuart Costello to William Lisle Bowles, 18 July 1819). The episode was the accidental killing of Yajnadatta by King Dasaratha. 25 Costello did also translate some of the pseudo-oriental tales written by the Frenchman ThomasSimon Gueulette in the early eighteenth century: The Thousand and One Quarters of an Hour, and The Adventures of the Mandarin Fun-hoam. For a full discussion of her life and work, see Clare Broome Saunders, Louisa Stuart Costello: A Nineteenth-Century Writing Life (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com 8 Asian Classics on the Victorian Bookshelf an unacknowledged epoch by publishing a little-known book called The Rose Garden of Persia. The Rose Garden is a digest of five articles Costello published in Fraser’s Magazine between 1838 and 1840,26 and presents an anthology of Persian poetry culled from the works of Jones, Gladwin, von Hammer, Garcin de Tassy, Quatremère, and other orientalists, who are helpfully listed in an appendix. To this professional community she is strategically apologetic. As the book went to press she wrote to the East India Company’s librarian, H.H. Wilson, to check the orthography of the couplet from Hafez that appears on her title page. The book, she explained to him, ‘gives biographies and specimens of Persian poets, merely for the English reader, but I think a great Oriental scholar like yourself will not disdain the attempt to do honour to his favourites, even though the unskilful should presume to do so.’27 The couplet in question, which Costello plucked from Jones’s Persian Grammar (where it is used to exemplify ‘the third person of the preterite’28), is given without attribution, citation, or translation. To the layman the foreign script serves no purpose other than the ornamental, but to the Persianist it is a tacit acknowledgement of his expertise, offered just before the start of a preface that unambiguously addresses the non-specialist: The softest and richest language in the world is the Persian: it is so peculiarly adapted to the purposes of poetry, that it is acknowledged there have been more poets produced in Persia than in all the other nations of Europe together: yet, except Sadi and Hafiz, and, it may be, Ferdusi, there are few whose names even are known to the general English reader; and the too common impression is, that there exists a great monotony in their verse, both as to sound and sense.29 In this striking opening sentence, Costello vindicates Persian as a major literary language, identifies it with the common inheritance of ‘the other nations of Europe’, and ascribes ignorant preconceptions to her putative reader. These are instantly excused, however, on the basis that the general public has been inhibited from exploring Persian literature by ‘the idea that it belonged exclusively’ to orien­tal­ists. Costello thus invites the uninitiated to enter territory hitherto ‘untrodden by all but learned feet’—a metaphor that puns, perhaps, on another meaning of feet. For as her preamble also makes clear, her anthology is to be concerned exclusively with poetry: poetry which has so far been rendered mainly 26 ‘Specimens of Persian Poetry’, Fraser’s Magazine, XVIII/100 (Apr. 1838), 447–66; XVIII/105 (Sept. 1838), 348–60; XIX/112 (Apr. 1839), 486–500; XX/116 (Aug. 1839), 127–38; and XXI/124 (Apr. 1840), 414–25. 27 BL: Mss Eur E301/9 (Louisa Stuart Costello to Horace Hayman Wilson, 23 Feb. 1845). 28 Teignmouth (ed.), Works, V, 227. 29 Louisa Stuart Costello, The Rose Garden of Persia (London: Longman, Brown, Green, & Longmans, 1845), pp. i–ii. Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com A Century of Translation 9 in English, French, or German prose, an emasculating process which has robbed the original of its ‘forcible expressions’, ‘bold metaphors’, and ‘sentiments of fire’, and left behind a bald record of tropes and similes. The ironic gendering at play here (a restoration of heroic qualities by a female translator, amending the work of an entirely male body of scholars) is brought home by the myth Costello subsequently relates about the origin of rhythmical composition. The world’s first line of poetry was, according to legend, uttered spontaneously by the Sassanid king Bahram Gor as he grappled with a wild tiger.30 The Rose Garden differs from William Ouseley’s Persian Miscellanies (1795) or Samuel Rousseau’s Flowers of Persian Literature (1801), and indeed from the Specimens of Arabian Poetry that Moore kept on his cottage shelves, in that it is not a sample of miscellaneous extracts, but attempts to provide a structured overview of the Persian canon. Flowers of the East (1833), a Persian anthology created by Ebenezer Pocock of Bristol, also adheres to the former pattern. Though its author aspires to ‘supply a desideratum in general literature’, the Flowers are really a mixed bouquet of poetry and prose not yet apprehended by established trans­ lators, artfully strung together (so it is claimed) after the fashion in which Persian poets are said to thread on a metrical necklace their individual pearls of verse.31 Costello’s goal instead is reflected in her choice of title: not a display of cut ­flowers, but a complete and self-contained garden. In horticultural terms, we might say her preference was for perennials rather than the blooms of a season. She orders her extracts chronologically by author, subdividing these thematically (‘On True Worth’, ‘In Praise of Wine’), adds light-touch historical context and explanatory notes, and thus arranges a cohort of sixteen major figures—including Firdausi, Sadi, Hafez, Nizami, Jami, Rumi, and Attar—who provide a superficial but ef­fect­ ive crash-course in Persian poetry. In these respects, her work is more com­par­ able to the Greek and Latin collections that appeared in the same generation, such as George Burges’s Public School Selections (1852), and The Golden Treasury of Ancient Greek Poetry (1867). Joseph Phelan sees Costello’s priorities as illustrative of the two orientalisms Edward Said spoke of in his landmark study: a Romantic Orientalism, based on a free-floating ‘collection of dreams, images, and vocabularies’ that can be adopted and manipulated by both Asian and European agents for a variety of purposes, and the ‘systematic and scientific’ orientalism that is committed to the collation and application of knowledge about Eastern cultures.32 The latter, which is the 30 Ibid., pp. ii–v. ‘Forcible expressions’, ‘bold metaphors’, etc. are phrases lifted from Jones. 31 Ebenezer Pocock, Flowers of the East, with an Introductory Sketch of Oriental Poetry and Music (London: Hamilton, Adams, & Co., 1833), p. v. My thanks to Fatima Burney for bringing this anthology to my attention. 32 Joseph Phelan, ‘Empire and Orientalisms’, in Matthew Bevis (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), p. 802; Edward W. Said, Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient (1978; repr. London: Penguin, 2006), p. 73. Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com 10 Asian Classics on the Victorian Bookshelf helpmeet of colonial rule, comes to supplant the former in the course of the nineteenth century, and its ordering impulse might be detected in Costello’s project. Like the Cambridge orientalist Edward Byles Cowell, who gave her book an approving if condescending review in 1847, she is preoccupied by the notion of Persian literature being representative of Persian nationality and identity. As Phelan points out, this Victorian bias leads to a magnification of Firdausi as the Homer or Chaucer of his language. The Shahnameh had attracted relatively little attention from William Jones, but it takes up almost 20 per cent of Costello’s text.33 Phelan exaggerates, however, the gap between the practice of Victorian Persianists and that of their precursors in the early part of the century. Firdausi does indeed come to assume a central position, a realignment mirrored by the increasing focus on epic poetry in other languages like Sanskrit. But he never eclipses Hafez on the literary horizon—least of all that horizon as it was perceived by the general public. Phelan quotes Costello’s rendition (‘in the accents of Pope or Johnson’) of Firdausi’s satire on his fickle patron Mahmud of Ghazni, but this specimen is not representative of the volume as a whole. Costello’s dominant concern is with lyric poetry, the bulk of her selections comprising philosophic odes, allegorical descriptions of nature, and poetry on the great lovers of Persian le­gend, such as Layla and Majnun, or Khusro and Shirin. Even her selections from the Shahnameh are governed by this bias, with much the largest extract being related to the courtship of Jamshid. Stressing that her version is based only very loosely on James Atkinson’s prose translation, Costello dwells particularly on the inner thoughts of the young princess who, a soothsayer has foretold, will marry the famous hero. King Gureng’s lovely daughter lies Beside a fountain gently playing; She marks not though the waves be bright, Nor in the roses takes delight: And though her maids new games devise, Invent fresh stories to surprise She heeds not what each fair is saying . . .34 Costello’s unusual rhyme scheme here, quite alien to the measured verse of Pope or Johnson, may have been taken from Shelley’s ‘The Cold Earth Slept Below’. But the poet she sought chiefly to emulate—as she had in her earlier 33 ‘Persian literature is national’, Cowell remarks (his italics), ‘and without this all literatures are worthless.’ E.B. Cowell, ‘The Rose Garden of Persia’, Westminster Review, XLVII/2 (July 1847), 274. 34 Costello, Rose Garden, p. 34; her source is James Atkinson, The Sháh Námeh of the Persian Poet, Firdausí (London: Oriental Translation Fund, 1832), p. 17. Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com We Don’t reply in this website, you need to contact by email for all chapters Instant download. Just send email and get all chapters download. Get all Chapters For E-books Instant Download by email at etutorsource@gmail.com You can also order by WhatsApp https://api.whatsapp.com/send/?phone=%2B447507735190&text&type=ph one_number&app_absent=0 Send email or WhatsApp with complete Book title, Edition Number and Author Name. Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com A Century of Translation 11 anthology of medieval French troubadours and minstrels35—was Thomas Moore. Her approach to the French is analogous to her method with the Persians. Unlike Browning and other poets later in the century, she is not especially interested in imitating foreign prosody (with one possible exception),36 but she does draw on the abundance of metres and stanza forms in Moore’s Irish Melodies to impart a songful, vital, and perhaps ‘national’ quality to her renditions. Lacking Moore’s facility, her words seldom lift off the page, but she applies her method with some success to the versification of existing prose translations. Here is a passage in Silvestre de Sacy’s edition of the Pandnama (a book of proverbial counsel at that time attributed to Attar), describing the mixed fortunes visited on men by the inscrutable deity, and Costello’s condensed reworking (with original for reference). آن یکی راݣـنج ونعمت می دهد وان دݣر را رنج وزحـمت می دهد آن یکی را زر دو صد همیان دهد دیݣـری در حرست نان جان دهد آن یکی بر تخت باصد عـز و ناز وان دݣر کرده دهان ازفآقه باز آن یکی پوشیده سنجاب و سمور دیݣری خفیه برهنه در تنور آن یکی بر پستی کمخا ونخ 37وان دݣربر خاك خواری بسته يخ Il donne à l’un les richesses et les plaisirs; l’autre a en partage les chagrins et l’affliction: celui-ci reçoit de lui deux cents bourses remplies d’or; celui-là expire, faute de pain: celui-ci est placé sur le trône, au milieu des grandeurs et des délices; celui-là n’a pas même de quoi apaiser la faim qui le dévore: l’un est vêtu d’hermine et de martre; l’autre est étendu tout nu dans un four: l’un repose sur des tapis de soie d’étoffes précieuses; l’autre est ignomineusement couché sur la terre, exposé à toute la rigueur du froid et de la gelée.38 One lies on Persian silk reclined, One naked in a frozen wind; One scarce can count his heaps of ore, One faints with hunger at the door.39 35 Louisa Stuart Costello, Specimens of the Early Poetry of France (London: William Pickering, 1835). 36 The exception is ‘The Caravan’, a short piece attributed to the Mughal poet Faizi, although I have found no source for it. Allowing for the fact that English feet are accentual and Persian quantitative, Costello’s pacey hendecasyllabics here precisely accord with the metre in which the Shahnameh was composed and, significantly, recited. 37 Silvestre de Sacy, Pend-namèh, ou le livre des conseils (Paris: Imprimerie Royale, 1819), p. 453. Spelling as in de Sacy’s text. 38 Ibid., p. 3. 39 Costello, Rose Garden, p. 103. Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com 12 Asian Classics on the Victorian Bookshelf In this example, Costello has taken Attar in prose and restored him to his coup­ lets, but such conformity is rare. It is much more common for her to deliberately ignore the original poetic forms, in spite of her major source, Von Hammer, taking care to reproduce them in German. From him she would have known that Omar Khayyam wrote in quatrains rhyming AABA, and that Rudaki’s lament for Bokhara or ‘Ju-yi Muliyan’ consists of ten lines structured around one recurring end-phrase or radif. Nonetheless, she put the former into the seven-syllable lines used by ‘Anacreon’ Moore for translations of his favourite Greek lyricist (a poet with whom Hafez had already been much compared), while Rudaki was realized in an ABABCC stanza containing iambic lines of varying lengths. Not a vestige of the original prosody remains, though the lingering quality of the final couplet in Costello’s Rudaki-stanzas (longer by two syllables than their preceding lines), hints at the way the tenth-century poet turns over his memories of the beautiful city he was forced to abandon, using the radif ‘aayad hami’ (is always coming).40 But a ‘faithful’ interpretation was never Costello’s intention. Indeed, her writing is at its most lively when most unscrupulous. Her objective rather was to seek out analogous forms that would strike a chord with English readers and illuminate the poet’s meaning for them; and in the cataleptic trochaic tetrameter that she borrows from Moore, Costello arguably gives a more accurate impression of the mingled scepticism and humility of Omar Khayyam than many of his subsequent translators. All that nature could unfold, Have I in her page unrolled; All of glorious and grand I have sought to understand. ’Twas in youth my early thought, Riper years no wisdom brought, Life is ebbing, sure though slow, And I feel I nothing know.41 While by no means wildly off the mark, the canon of poetry Costello frames is uninformed by Persian commentators, and distorted by the priorities of East India Company translators. Her editorial interventions are also hardly without faux pas and clumsy generalization. ‘Most of the Asiatic poets are Sufis’, she avows, quoting Hafez’s ode on ‘Earthly and Heavenly Love’—a translation which Parvin Loloi has shown not be Hafez at all, but a passage from the Bustan of Sadi.42 40 Joseph Von Hammer, Geschichte der schönen redekünste Persiens (Vienna: Heubner und Volke, 1818), pp. 39–40; Thomas Moore, The Complete Poetical Works of Thomas Moore (London: Longmans, Green, Reader, and Dyer, 1869), pp. 1–40; Costello, Rose Garden, p. 43. 41 Ibid., p. 70. 42 Ibid., pp. 1, 4. Parvin Loloi, Hafiz, Master of Persian Poetry: A Critical Bibliography (London: I.B. Tauris, 2004), p. 331. Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com A Century of Translation 13 Her spelling of Pandnama as Peridnama, perhaps thinking of the peris or winged sprites who feature in Lalla Rookh as well as Beckford’s Vathek, is another blunder which was sharply criticized in Cowell’s review.43 Her worst mistake, but one that Cowell is either too kind or too cautious to contradict, is her inclusion of Elmocadessi (Al-Maqdisi), an author who wrote not in Persian at all but Arabic. For all these defects, however, there is an appealing strain of enthusiasm and reverence running through Costello which, especially when contrasted with Cowell’s tone, further complicates our understanding of her as a practitioner of ‘scientific’ orientalism. Cowell fully approves of her effort at an ordered, chronological, national canon—so much so, in fact, that he hijacks it for his own ends. Punctuated by sparse references to Costello, his review replicates her sequence of poets and assesses each in turn, effectively overwriting her views with his own and rendering her work redundant. He subtly advertises his intellectual mastery over the field of Persian literature, always tempering his praise with criticisms that serve to subordinate it to Western standards of judgement. If Iran has produced more poets than any other country, then ‘even more than the usual proportion’, he reminds his readers, were ‘worthless’. Moreover, that proportion has risen sharply: Cowell’s narrative culminates in the decline of Persian poetry after the fifteenth century into mannerism and triviality, a trajectory of decadence entirely absent in Costello. He breaks off his sequence sharply at Hatefi (d. 1521), whereas the Rose Garden continues into a chapter on Faizi, and Costello’s original articles in Fraser’s include a number of more modern poets such as Urfi, Hilali, and Kashefi. While he greets Costello’s volume with courtesy, therefore, Cowell can be seen sim­ul­tan­ eous­ly moving to reassert academic sovereignty over his territory. Unsurprisingly he deprecates the ‘mad partiality’ of Sir William Jones, so frequently quoted in the Rose Garden, ‘to whom Eastern literature was an El-Dorado of all that is beautiful’.44 Costello’s affection for the orientophile polyglot and the passionate, Romantic tone of his criticism is revealing of how, in its effort to instruct lay ­readers, her work gestures not just forward but also backward in time, and partakes of both Said’s categories.45 Her mixed strategy, and divided affinities, would be echoed by many subsequent translators who sought to engage a lay audience, while keeping on the right side of academic gatekeepers. The Rose Garden of Persia was issued by the large mainstream press of Longman— the same publisher, in fact, to whom Costello had sent a submission twenty-five years earlier for their abortive Annals of Oriental Literature. That was in Thomas Longman III’s time, however, and his son may well have greeted Costello’s second offering with scepticism, if we are to judge by the helpful prods delivered by her 43 Cowell, ‘The Rose Garden of Persia’, 293. 44 Ibid., 308, 273. 45 For an example of Jones’s ardent language, see his description of an unnamed allegorical poem about the love of Ferhad for Shirin: ‘a blaze of religious and poetical fire’. Teignmouth (ed.), Works, III, 247. Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com 14 Asian Classics on the Victorian Bookshelf Figure 1.1 Frontispiece to The Rose Garden of Persia (author photograph) patron Moore (‘I shall take care to urge your suit to them and try and soften their booksellers-hearts’).46 It was an expensive volume to produce, with well over half the production costs associated with the beautiful arabesque borders designed for each page by the author’s brother Dudley, based on tracings made of manuscripts 46 Pforzheimer: Misc Ms. 2135 (Thomas Moore to Louisa Stuart Costello, 13 June 1842). Moore does not mention a title, but given that Costello’s usual publisher was Bentley, it is likely his appeal to Longman’s was on behalf of the Rose Garden. Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com A Century of Translation 15 in the library of the Asiatic Society in London (Figure 1.1). These expenses are likely to have contributed to the book’s high price and meagre advertising budget, and in turn reduced its sales. One thousand copies of the Rose Garden were printed, of which 517 copies were sold in its first year at twelve shillings and ninepence. But by 1848 Longman must have concluded that at that price its public had been exhausted, and the remaining stock was disposed of cheaply to the bookseller-turned-publisher Henry G. Bohn.47 The Rose Garden covered its costs and netted Costello about £40 (on the half-profits system), but there was no second edition. It would not be widely distributed until its multiple reprintings by George Bell (in 1887), Gibbings (1899 and 1911) and T.N. Foulis of Edinburgh (1907, 1913, and 1924). If her readers were few, they could be loyal. The Persophile publisher Thomas Fisher Unwin, of whom more in Chapter 6, and his wife Jane Cobden bought Bell’s reprint and kept it on their shelves long after it was superseded by other books. Large parts of the Rose Garden were reproduced in other works (not always credited), such as the fascinating hodgepodge of knowledge compiled by John Henry Freese, an English merchant-turned-educator domiciled in Brazil, and titled Everybody’s Book (1860).48 Costello’s muddling of Sadi for Hafez was an error perpetuated by plagiarists like the Irish barrister E.V. Kenealy, who relied on her in his 1864 Poems and Translations. It must also be remembered that many who were unable to access copies of Costello in her lifetime will have obtained a thorough (albeit distorted) summary courtesy of Cowell in the Westminster Review. The young Walt Whitman was one such, a deep interest in Sufism emer­ ging many years later in his poem ‘A Persian Lesson’.49 All this makes it difficult to gauge Costello’s direct influence, but as an underqualified anthologist, using crisp presentation and attractive illustration to appeal exclusively to a lay audience, her book set a number of precedents, scouting trails that would be more confidently explored by publications in the second half of the century. The Rise of the Popularizer, 1850–1915 In a recent article on Sanskrit erotic poetry, Maddalena Italia describes a ‘pivotal moment’ at the beginning of the twentieth century that witnessed the ‘percolation’ of the texts she studies, in English translation, ‘from the scholarly sphere to that of 47 Reading: MS 1393 (Records of the Longman Group), 1/A5, Divide Ledger D4, p. 46. Longman spent £5 12s. 1d. on publicity in the first year. By contrast, more than £27 was bestowed the following year on a title with an identical print run, Coley’s Practical Treatise on the Diseases of Children, which sold little more than one hundred copies and made a spectacular loss. 48 John Henry Freese, Everybody’s Book: or Gleanings Serious and Entertaining, in Prose and Verse, from the Scrap-book of a Septuagenarian (London: Longman, Green, Longman, and Roberts, 1860), pp. 371–95. 49 Loloi, Hafiz, p. 331; Roshan Lal Sharma, ‘Walt Whitman and Sufism’, Spring Magazine on English Literature, II/2 (2016), 40. Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com We Don’t reply in this website, you need to contact by email for all chapters Instant download. Just send email and get all chapters download. Get all Chapters For E-books Instant Download by email at etutorsource@gmail.com You can also order by WhatsApp https://api.whatsapp.com/send/?phone=%2B447507735190&text&type=ph one_number&app_absent=0 Send email or WhatsApp with complete Book title, Edition Number and Author Name. Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com 16 Asian Classics on the Victorian Bookshelf non-specialist literature’.50 That moment was triggered by the highly successful publications of Edward Powys Mathers, who like Costello did not translate at all directly from his source-texts, but through the intermediate language of French. For me, the Rose Garden does not represent such a singular turning-point. Rather, it betokens a gradual sea-change that took place over the coming decades, first in the reception of Persian poetry and later of other classic texts from different Asian traditions. Throughout the second half of the nineteenth century, professional translation activity continued apace. Antiquated or incomplete translations were updated—new versions of the Quran, for example, came out in 1861 and 1880— while other works, from East Asia especially, appeared in English for the first time. We have already seen how caizi jiaren stories found their way from China to English readers well in advance of the Confucian classics. The translation of the latter began, just as with Persian and Indian texts, under Company rule in Bengal (in 1809). But the instrumental figure in sinology would be the missionary James Legge, who laboured at Hong Kong through the middle decades of the century on his versions of the Analects, Shijing, Shujing, and other texts. Japan, barred to prying Westerners for so long, remained a closed book until the Japanese Odes of F.V. Dickins appeared in 1866, followed by A.B. Freeman-Mitford’s Tales of Old Japan (1871). It is crucial to appreciate, however, the bifurcated perspective that restricted European understanding of East Asian literature at this time. On the one hand, career-scholars like Legge were heavily committed to antiquity; on the other, a small amount of Qing Dynasty fiction and Mitford’s Tales—their plots based largely on bunraku (puppet plays) and kabuki he saw performed in the theatres of Asakusa—offered insights into the China and Japan of recent times.51 The years between, for all but a few experts, must have appeared a blank. The Tang Dynasty poets like Li Po (b. 701) and Du Fu (b. 712), now familiar names in the West, only began to enter the general frame of reference at the turn of the century, while most of the classic novels (such as the Tale of Genji from medieval Japan, and the sixteenth-century Journey to the West from China,) would not be properly appreciated until the advent of Arthur Waley’s much-loved versions between 1925 and 1942. As in the first half of the century, most of these pioneer translations were never intended seriously as commercial propositions, except as textbooks. Many were subsidized by the Oriental Translation Fund, set up in London in 1828, while Legge’s Chinese Classics were underwritten by the tea and opium merchants Jardine Matheson. But developing in parallel with these academic ventures was a fastgrowing corpus of popular, commercial books, some of which were paraphrases dug opportunistically from the ready quarry of existing literature, while others were 50 Maddalena Italia, ‘Eastern Poetry by Western Poets: Powys Mathers’ “Translations” of Sanskrit Erotic Lyrics’, Comparative Critical Studies, XVII/2 (2020), 206. 51 Hung, ‘Chinese Poetry’, pp. 224–5. Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com A Century of Translation 17 fresh translations contributing to—and potentially competing with—professional knowledge. This was particularly the case in Japanese studies, with Dickins’s Japanese Odes being expressly intended ‘for the benefit of students of Japanese’ while the Tales began as a series of articles in the Cornhill Magazine, Mitford complementing his stories with personal observations on Japanese history, manners, politics, and religion, and illustrating them (going one better than Costello) with woodblock prints commissioned from local artists.52 The same pattern of knowledge diffusing at different levels simultaneously can also be seen in other languages, with the condensers of epic poetry and other long works often managing to bring out their abridgements in advance of the longawaited full translations. Thus Frederika Richardson’s Iliad of the East was issued by Macmillan in 1870, the same year that Ralph T.H. Griffith unveiled the first of his five-volume met­ric­al translation of the Ramayana. The fifth would not appear until 1874. Sir Edwin Arnold stole a march on K.M. Ganguli in exactly the same manner, bringing out Indian Idylls in 1883 just at the outset of the latter’s thirteen-year project of publishing the Mahabharata in its entirety. The curate Arthur George Warner died before publishing his metrical Shahnameh, the magnum opus being finally completed by his brother in 1925, more than forty years after Helen Zimmern’s effective prose summary, The Epic of Kings, and ninety years after James Atkinson’s much more partial rendition. The want of such an edition, moreover, had been felt for some time, as we can see in this humorous verse of 1858: Firdausi; you’ll not master in the Persian, If unassisted by an English version, His sixty thousand couplets in a trice; Let Atkinson’s abridgment then suffice.53 Why did productions for the general reader begin to multiply now, rather than in the early decades of the century when Byron, encouraging Moore to press ahead with the composition of Lalla Rookh, had famously told his friend ‘the public is orientalizing’?54 Basing her argument on the number of articles on Indian subjects (her specific interest is Sanskrit) appearing year-by-year in journals like the Edinburgh Review, Mishka Sinha has proposed that the spike in interest apparent in Byron’s generation was in fact followed by a lull of some twenty years. She attributes this decline to the predominance of utilitarian ideals, noting moreover 52 Frederick Victor Dickins, Hyak Nin Is’shiu, or Stanzas by a Century of Poets, being Japanese Lyrical Odes (London: Smith, Elder, 1866), p. vi. 53 Quoted in Reza Taher-Kermani, The Persian Presence in Victorian Poetry (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020), p. 97. 54 Leslie A. Marchand, Byron’s Letters and Journals (12 vols; London: John Murray, 1973–96), III, 101 (Byron to Thomas Moore, 28 Aug. 1813). Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com 18 Asian Classics on the Victorian Bookshelf that Britain is the exception—in continental Europe and the USA, intellectual and cultural interest in India rose throughout the course of the nineteenth ­cen­tury.55 That is one possible explanation. Another is that readers may have become surfeited with overfamiliar tropes and subjects, particularly in respect to Persian literature. Jones, Moore, and Isaac D’Israeli (who had published Mejnoun and Leila, a prose version of the great Persian love story, in 1797) had certainly helped school the British public in the commonplaces of Persian belles lettres, and it was this crust of cliché that Edward Fitzgerald seems to have vaguely imagined breaking through in 1846. That year he wrote to his friend E.B. Cowell of how ‘it would be a good work to give us some of the good things of Hafiz and the Persian poets; of bulbuls [nightingales] and ghouls [i.e. guls = roses] we have had enough.’56 Cowell himself adopted nearly the same wording in his review of Costello’s Rose Garden the following summer: ‘enough has been said of guls and bulbuls, and it is high time to select those things that can really throw light on man and his development.’57 A dozen years later the fruit of Fitzgerald’s ambition would ripen, diffidently enough, in the 250 copies of his privately printed Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám (1859), most of which were relegated to the penny box outside Bernard Quaritch’s bookshop near Leicester Square. Once rescued by the Irish orientalist Whitley Stokes, and distributed among a small group of friends who included Dante Gabriel Rossetti, the verses stunned readers who were entirely unprepared for the trenchant force of their wit and scepticism.58 Fitzgerald’s intervention, like Costello’s, should not be seen as a pivotal moment but rather as the beginning of a slow pivot. Thirty years later, he was arguably better known for his version of Aeschylus’s Agamemnon than of Omar Khayyam. In 1888, a passionate admirer of the former, the politician Lord Selborne, was having dinner with a friend who had been one of the early aficionados of the ­latter. When he compared Fitzgerald’s work with that of expert linguists, like the Oxford classicist E.D.A. Morshead, Selborne was led to think that ‘a translator might be too good a scholar’.59 ‘Perfect translations’, he reasoned, were impossible, something that was true of prose and even more so of poetry, and therefore the pursuit of an exact understanding might actually lead the translator away from a desirable outcome, not towards it. Presumably Selborne would allow the need for a reasonable knowledge of the source-language; but beyond a certain point, 55 Mishka Sinha, ‘Corrigibility, Allegory, Universality: A History of the Gita’s Transnational Reception, 1785–1945’, Modern Intellectual History, VII/2 (Aug. 2010), 301. 56 Quoted in Yohannan, Persian Poetry, p. 97. For D’Israeli’s story, see Romances (London: Cadell and Davies, 1799). It is notable, as Drury highlights in Translation as Transformation (p. 162), that Fitzgerald had versified a passage from D’Israeli’s Mejnoun and Leila at some point in the early 1840s. 57 Cowell, ‘The Rose Garden of Persia’, 274. 58 John Drew, ‘Whitley Stokes and the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám’, in Elizabeth Boyle and Paul Russell (eds), The Tripartite Life of Whitley Stokes: 1830–1909 (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2011), p. 115. 59 Sir Mountstuart E. Grant Duff, Notes from a Diary, 1886–1888 (2 vols, London: John Murray, 1900), II, 184. Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com A Century of Translation 19 he seems to suggest, expertise yields diminishing returns. The politician and his friend had astutely realized that the power of Fitzgerald as a translator derived, paradoxically, from his intuitive approach and his altogether dilettante attitude. Fitzgerald had studied Persian, under Cowell’s tuition, as a hobby, and it was Cowell who first supplied him with manuscripts of Khayyam’s quatrains. But the choice to publish was not prompted by academic trends, and not at all by his detection of a gap in the market (even though the only English renditions of Khayyam then extant were Costello’s small selection). Fitzgerald’s mini-masterpiece came about through the unusual degree of personal sympathy he felt maturing between him and the medieval astronomer, whose poetry he so daringly ­transcreated—retaining Khayyam’s stanza-form and rhyme-scheme, but freely editing and amalgamating, and above all stringing the quatrains together into a lyrical sequence that runs from dawn (‘Awake! for Morning in the Bowl of Night’) to dusk and death. It was the ordering of discrete quatrains into a continuous poem—indeed, a psychological progression—that enabled the work’s tremendous success and encouraged so many translators to jump on the bandwagon, among them E.H. Whinfield (1882), Justin Huntly McCarthy (1889), Richard Le Gallienne (1897), and Edward Heron-Allen (1899). Even so, this craze for Khayyam, which Chapter 2 will treat in greater depth, could not really commence in earnest until after Fitzgerald died in 1883 and ceased to control the issue of his poem. Ironically, popular acclaim had been far from the mind of the Suffolk recluse, who published all four editions of his Rubáiyát anonymously. Having established a timeline, then, for the literary developments that concern us, how might we actually define a popular translation, or a popular translator, as against what I refer to variously in this book as scholarly, academic, or professional translations? We could refer to the famous dichotomy drawn by Schleiermacher in his 1813 essay ‘On the Different Methods of Translating’. Either the translator leaves the author ‘in peace’, as Schleiermacher puts it, and ‘moves the reader toward him’; or he does the opposite, leaving his reader in peace ‘as much as possible’ while endeavouring to move the foreign author towards his position.60 Popular translators might be thought of as favouring the second approach, pri­ori­ tiz­ing the needs and/or tastes of their English-speaking audience potentially to the detriment of accurate comprehension. Alternatively, we could define popular translators as those who identify texts that have already been translated for one or more specialist audiences, and who produce accessible editions for the general public (usually working primarily from the existing translation, or from an equivalent in French, German, or another European language). Taking another look at Fitzgerald, however, we can see how hard it is to make such tidy distinctions. Like his friend Cowell, he translated from the original, not an intermediary 60 Friedrich Schleiermacher, ‘On the Different Methods of Translating’, trans. Susan Bernofsky, in Lawrence Venuti (ed.), The Translation Studies Reader (3rd edn, Abingdon: Routledge, 2012), p. 49. Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com 20 Asian Classics on the Victorian Bookshelf language (although it may be relevant that he first essayed a translation not into English, but into Latin). Moreover, after considering some other poets who had already been treated by Persianists, and who might therefore have been con­ sidered ready for wider dissemination, he chose instead one who was more or less new to English letters. On the other hand, he was clearly attentive to the needs of the domestic lay reader, taking pains to set the quatrains to ‘tolerable English music’, as he modestly put it. For this he was rewarded with tremendous acclaim, and yet he shunned a celebrity he had never sought. Far from keeping an eye on shifts in public taste, he lived a secluded life, paying no heed to trends and fashions, writing long letters with capital letters in the middle of his sentences after the manner of the eighteenth century. Then again, in other respects he was uncannily in tune with the zeitgeist. ‘His bent was for reduction, for concentration, for distillation’, remarks Daniel Karlin, who found those same letters ‘filled with projects for furbishing up old classics, making them palatable to a modern audience’ (one road not taken was a revamp of Richardson’s Clarissa). Fitzgerald even customized the books in his library, cutting down their pages by half and then rebinding them.61 The issue is further vexed by the variety of terms that the translators I have examined use to denote themselves and their work. Costello describes herself as ‘collecting’ major poets together in a spirit of ‘bonne volonté’. The book represents ‘my endeavour to make them popular’, though she confesses that Persian poetry is too vast a field to be adequately represented by any single presentation of ‘specimens’.62 The title pages of later anthologies credit their creators with ‘gathering’, ‘arranging’, ‘compiling’, or ‘editing’. Evading, perhaps, the obligations or ex­pect­ations attendant on a ‘translator’, various writers have instead ‘rendered’, sometimes ‘versified’ the text in their native language; or they have preferred the neologisms ‘Englished’ or ‘Done into English’. Others have been more forthcoming about their lack of linguistic proficiency, claiming merely to have ‘paraphrased’, ‘adapted’, or ‘epitomized’ the source or even, more boldly, to have ‘retold’ it. Among the more eccentric subtitles I have come across are ‘some echoes of Arabian poetry’ and ‘reconstructed from the Anvari-Soheīli’.63 These terms reflect diverse mentalities and methodologies on the part of translators, and since it seems impossible to come to a satisfactory definition based either on translational practice, or on the kinds of text that are selected for translation, I would like to propose a loose, simple, but I think accurate distinction, based on audience. A specialist translator knows with considerable certainty who his or her readers will be, within the foreseeable future; a popular translator, however, may only speculate. The former were often writing for students, or for an audience connected with some 61 Daniel Karlin, ‘Introduction’, in Edward Fitzgerald, Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, ed. Karlin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. xxxix. 62 Costello, Rose Garden, pp. x–xii. 63 Owing to this confusion of terms, and to avoid reinforcing the hierarchy between ‘real’ trans­ lators and ‘mere’ paraphrasers, none of the writers of the Victorian translations cited in this book are described in the footnotes using ‘(trans.)’, ‘(ed.)’, or any other qualifier. Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com We Don’t reply in this website, you need to contact by email for all chapters Instant download. Just send email and get all chapters download. Get all Chapters For E-books Instant Download by email at etutorsource@gmail.com You can also order by WhatsApp https://api.whatsapp.com/send/?phone=%2B447507735190&text&type=ph one_number&app_absent=0 Send email or WhatsApp with complete Book title, Edition Number and Author Name. Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com A Century of Translation 21 i­nstitution—whether that be the India Office, the Hindu College in Calcutta, or the London Missionary Society—which had undertaken to purchase or could be expected to purchase a large portion of the copies. The latter may have targeted certain audiences—people interested in folklore, Theosophists, tourists visiting Japan, schoolchildren—but not being able to say for sure if that constituency would prove amenable to the book, or buy sufficient copies to make it a success, they had to appeal to a spectrum of potential readers. Popular translators may have been unable to agree on a standard nomenclature, but this did not belie any vagueness of purpose. On the contrary, the prefaces fronting their translations often state definite objectives, and this is particularly pronounced when one further verb begins to proliferate: ‘popularize’. As mentioned, Helen Zimmern’s The Epic of Kings was an abridgement of the Shahnameh that appeared long before a complete edition of that foundational work of Persian literature was available in English. Her preface briskly ac­know­ledges a prior translator, the East India Company officer James Atkinson, before expressing regret that his even more abbreviated version of 1835 was too fragmentary to form a satisfactory narrative. ‘This version, which is half in prose, half in verse, alternately ambitious and monotonous,’ she remarks, ‘possesses few attractions for the general reader’. In deference to Atkinson, Zimmern did not know Persian, but since her goal was ‘a paraphrase and not a translation’, this was no obstacle. ‘All I needed’, she explains, ‘was at hand in the form of Professor Jules Mohl’s French version.’ Like Costello, then, Zimmern operated through an intermediary language, and it is appropriate (and perhaps not coincidental) that her statement of intent is strongly reminiscent of her predecessor’s. ‘My endeavour to make them popular’, which is tucked apologetically into the final paragraph of Costello’s preface, becomes the very first sentence of Zimmern’s: ‘It has been my endeavour in this book to popularize the tales told by the Persian poet Firdusi in his immortal epic.’64 Her text enjoyed greater success than The Rose Garden, going rapidly into a second, cheaper edition, and this was undoubtedly helped by a supportive publisher (Thomas Fisher Unwin), and by Zimmern’s canny stratagem of ­persuading much more famous, male cultural figures to lend their prestige to the volume. Edmund Gosse contributed a long prefatory poem, ‘Firdausi in Exile’, while his brother-in-law, the painter Lawrence Alma-Tadema, produced two striking illustrations. Zimmern also prolonged the text’s lifespan by bringing out a (minimally) revised version for children four years later, titled Heroic Tales, Retold from Firdusi the Persian, with a corresponding reduction in price. The custom of redacting the erotic content of the Arabian Nights for family consumption is well-known, and goes back at least as far as 1812,65 but we have largely forgotten how the Persian epic (or more specifically its episode of Sohrab and Rustam, which had inspired 64 Helen Zimmern, The Epic of Kings: Stories Retold from Firdusi (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1882), p. v. 65 The Beinecke Library holds a manuscript dated to 1812 that appears to be a set of notes for a book, to be titled ‘Tales of the East, being a Collection of the Celebrated Eastern Histories & Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com 22 Asian Classics on the Victorian Bookshelf Matthew Arnold’s eponymous poem in 1853) once seemed destined to become a nursery standard. At least six other English children’s versions followed in Zimmern’s train between 1886 and 1930, some evidently intended for the use of schools or dramatic societies, before fashion carried it quietly out of favour.66 Making no apology for her ‘ignorance of Persian’ (an admission made in the second sentence of her preface), Zimmern evidently saw her activities as fulfilling a legitimate role within the literary economy: the role of popularizer. Whereas the independently wealthy Fitzgerald undertook his study of Persian in the true spirit of amateurism, Zimmern conducted her research efficiently from a desk in the British Museum reading room. Here she met chief librarian Richard Garnett, who introduced her to the Shahnameh and may have suggested it as a subject, and she completed her project in time for the autumn book-buying season of 1882. For her, writing for the general public was not a hobby but a livelihood and profession. She produced no further works of Persian translation, but moved on instead to Icelandic folklore, an explication of Schopenhauer’s philosophy, an anthology of extracts from modern European novelists, and the first English edition of Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil. Her entire career, in fact, was shaped by the concept of popularization—the presentation of a technical or specialized subject in a generally intelligible or entertaining form—and the growing recognition of it as a valuable, if not essential, form of writing. The OED records the first such usage as occurring in 1799.67 Seventy years later, the vocation was far enough advanced for Matthew Arnold to set forth a kind of manifesto for it in Culture and Anarchy: The great men of culture are those . . . who have laboured to divest knowledge of all that was harsh, uncouth, difficult, abstract, professional, exclusive; to humanize it, to make it efficient outside the clique of the cultivated and learned, yet still remaining the best knowledge and thought of the time, and a true source, therefore, of sweetness and light.68 Arnold’s ‘humanizers’ were active in all fields of research: theology and biblical exegesis, archaeology, classical music, political economy, agriculture and, above all, science and medicine.69 This was the natural outcome of a situation in which Adventures known as the Arabian Nights Entertainments, etc, etc, the whole Rearranged & Illustrated for Family Readings’. Beinecke: Osborn d348. 66 These included Kate M. Rabb, National Epics (Chicago, IL: A.C. McClurg, 1896); Ella Sykes, The Story Book of the Shah (London: Macqueen, 1901); and Elizabeth D. Renninger, The Story of Rustem (New York: Scribner, 1909)—like Zimmern, all female authors. See Yohannan, Persian Poetry, pp. 228, 293. 67 See http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/147914?redirectedFrom=popularize#eid (accessed 2 Aug. 2018). 68 Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy: An Essay in Political and Social Criticism (London: Smith, Elder, 1869), p. 49. 69 See Bernard Lightman, Victorian Popularizers of Science: Designing Nature for New Audiences (Chicago, IL and London: University of Chicago Press, 2009). Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com A Century of Translation 23 research was beginning to be publicly funded, and in which new discoveries impacted on the lives (and convulsed the settled beliefs) of a population that was increasingly literate, and yet simultaneously baffled by advanced concepts and abstruse terminology. ‘It is inevitable’, reflected the Arabic professor A.J. Arberry in 1938, that as a scientific discipline grows ever more specialized, the researcher ‘tends to divorce himself more and more from those principles of a universal and fundamental character which alone avail to keep him in sympathy with the general public and the general public in sympathy with him.’ Late Victorian scholars could not expect to emulate Sir William Jones, who in his day had stood in ‘the vanguard of linguistic research’, yet who still managed to share some of his early breakthroughs—along with interdisciplinary observations on law and religion— with ‘the ordinary reader’.70 Notwithstanding the impossibility of straddling the parallel paths of scientific accuracy and humane letters, Arberry’s British Orientalists praises a number of his undaunted predecessors who tried nevertheless to draw on the essential ‘human appeal which lies at the root of all oriental studies’—among them Edward Denison Ross, who ‘mirrored learning to the public’, and the Turkish prodigy E.J.W. Gibb who expressed a wish to satisfy ‘the non-orientalist reader’.71 There was often a practical side to their idealism. Institutions like the School of Oriental and African Studies, which Ross founded in 1916, needed funding, as did largescale research projects like the Linguistic Survey of India (1894–1928). Others championed their respective sub-fields, like that most famous of Victorian orien­ tal­ists Sir Richard Burton, who gave his vociferous backing to Arabic studies. Ever the Islamophile, he criticized the Government of India’s preference for Sanskrit and Indian vernaculars, and considered it his duty to awaken the British Empire to a consciousness of its role as the world’s largest Muslim polity.72 Ever impecunious, too, Burton constantly essayed money-spinning publication projects, his wife Isabel pitching one of many non-starters to Chatto & Windus in 1884: It has long struck him that in these days of revivals & abstracts & popularizations something might be done for the old romances of chivalry. For instance Amadis de Gaul is a name known to most people but who has ever seen the book: Do you not think that it might take the public taste if carefully boiled down to a single handy volume.73 Others sought to enlist public sympathy for countries in which they had studied and travelled, and in which the maintenance or overturning of the status quo 70 A.J. Arberry, British Orientalists (London: William Collins, 1943), p. 38. 71 Ibid., p. 25; E.J.W. Gibb, Ottoman Poems (London: Trübner, 1882), p. 7. 72 Richard F. Burton, ‘The Book of Sindibād’, Academy 646 (20 Sept. 1884), 175. 73 BL: Add MS 88877 (Isabel Burton to Andrew Chatto, 1 June 1884). Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com 24 Asian Classics on the Victorian Bookshelf might benefit their friends and informants. Bringing out his Ottoman Poems in the wake of the ‘Bulgarian Horrors’ in 1876, Gibb was keen to persuade his ­readers that Turks were not ‘illiterate barbarians’. At the turn of the century Sir Edwin Arnold acted as willing apologist for Japanese imperialism in Korea and Taiwan, while Edward Granville Browne campaigned for the Persian constitutionalists in their struggle for democratic reforms.74 British Orientalists offers a useful reminder that academics, explorers, colonial officers, and other recognized specialists also successfully engaged in popularization. But naturally it deals only with that class of writers and their exploits, and not at all with the unaffiliated enthusiasts who also made signal contributions, or with the full-time scribblers for whom popularization was not a secondary activity but their métier. This is unsurprising, as there is a well-established pattern of intellectuals overlooking or deliberately sidelining neophytes. In the standard histories they have been dismissed as traducers and counterfeiters (a view reinforced, for different reasons, by post-Saidian scholarship) or at best given only a condescending appreciation. The thoroughgoing, standard histories of individual Asian literature and their reception in English that have appeared in the last fifty years, such as John D. Yohannan’s Persian Poetry in England and America, follow much the same course. Although he admits that the Rose Garden was the ‘first genuine anthology of Persian verse’, Yohannan credits its author with little by way of independent judgement or influence: ‘Miss Costello’ was attracted to manuscripts in the Bodleian, we are told, ‘having an artistic bent’, and her anthology ‘rendered a valuable service’.75 For Helen Zimmern and her Epic of Kings, meanwhile, his 400-page monograph reserves no mention at all. This is a particularly unfortunate omission when we consider that the people mentioned in the previous paragraph were (1) entirely male; (2) all connected in some way with the business of empire. By contrast, many popular translators were women, and some approached the established domain of British orientalism from quite marginal positions. Zimmern, in fact, was both a linguistic outsider and an outsider to Britain altogether, with no prior investment in its imperial project. Born in Hamburg, daughter of a Jewish lace merchant, she arrived in Nottingham as a child and naturalized as British the year before publishing The Epic of Kings. But by the end of the 1880s she had emigrated again, to Italy, and spent the rest of her life in Florence.76 Though certainly not an anti-imperialist, allegations of Italian atrocities in Libya prompted her to point out that Britain, ‘with her own record of the Indian Mutiny and of the Soudan’, was of all nations the least fit to criticize.77 74 Gibb, Ottoman Poems, p. 7; for Arnold’s correspondence with the Japanese envoy Kato Takaaki, see the Edwin Arnold Papers at Duke University, Rubinstein Library. 75 Yohannan, Persian Poetry, p. 68. 76 National Archives: HO 334/10/3427 (Naturalization Certificate: Helen Zimmern). 77 ‘In India the British had short shrift for the rebels, who certainly had a patrie to fight for.’ Charles Lapworth and Helen Zimmern, Tripoli and Young Italy (London: Stephen Swift, 1912), p. 27. Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com A Century of Translation 25 It would be naïve to suppose that all popularizers were performing a disinterested public service. Several of the writers I will mention resemble less Arnold’s ‘great men of culture’ than they do the purveyors of ‘superficial knowledge’ J.S. Mill reproved in The Spirit of the Age (1831). ‘The grand achievement of the present age is the diffusion of superficial knowledge’, complained Mill, arguing that the ‘moral or social truths’ that needed to be held up for public contemplation, in a world undergoing rapid change, were instead being submerged below a tide of abstracted information.78 Yet if we don’t look for the real vectors of transmission, whereby certain stories, characters, images, and metaphors detached from their native traditions and produced an impact in English literature, then our ideas of cultural exchange will be fundamentally flawed. In 1895, the artist Patten Wilson produced a series of celebrated illustrations of episodes in the Shahnameh which he published in the Decadent periodical, The Yellow Book. There is little that could be called decadent about them: they depict martial scenes of chivalry, inspired by a text that even in the most prejudicial European accounts of Persian literature constitutes the undisputed ‘golden age’ of poetry before its efflorescence and decay. The choice of subject may well have reflected an editorial decision to change the tone of the magazine, however, since its scandalous art editor Aubrey Beardsley— an orientalist himself of sorts, in his enthusiasm for Japanese shunga erotica—had just been fired. I am only speculating at this point, but if we are one day to uncover the genesis of these artworks, we will need to put away the long-established and constantly repeated assumption that Wilson derived his imagery from Sohrab and Rustum. On the contrary, a contemporary source tells us categorically that the drawings were ‘inspired, not by the poem in which Matthew Arnold tells how Rustum killed his own son unwittingly in single combat, but by reading a prose translation of Firdausi Tusi.’ The availability of translations at the time, as well as the close correlation between Wilson’s choice of subjects and the emphasis of Zimmern’s narrative, makes it highly likely that The Epic of Kings was the book in question.79 Popular Commodities: Scarcity and Surplus in the Literary Marketplace In an essay of 1956, Harold Rosenberg wrote about the unenviable position of the ‘middlemen’ who make it their business to communicate the difficult and erudite to the masses. To the artists or originators, popularizers are people who steal and 78 F.E.L. Priestley and J.M. Robson (eds), The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill (33 vols, Toronto: University of Toronto Press), XXII, 232. 79 Walter Shaw Sparrow, ‘Some Drawings by Patten Wilson’, The Studio, 23 (Aug. 1901), 193. Wilson’s first drawing was of an archer—the same subject chosen by Alma-Tadema for his frontispiece to Zimmern’s book—and there are further similarities which are discussed in Chapter 5. Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com We Don’t reply in this website, you need to contact by email for all chapters Instant download. Just send email and get all chapters download. Get all Chapters For E-books Instant Download by email at etutorsource@gmail.com You can also order by WhatsApp https://api.whatsapp.com/send/?phone=%2B447507735190&text&type=ph one_number&app_absent=0 Send email or WhatsApp with complete Book title, Edition Number and Author Name. Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com 26 Asian Classics on the Victorian Bookshelf falsify their intellectual property, discounting their scarce goods by flooding the market with cheap imitations.80 Their feelings are akin to the contempt of a couturier for the knockoff retailers who copy his patterns and profit by his ingenuity. Translation is an interesting field in which to study this dynamic, because what is popularized is already an imperfect reproduction. Every article of merchandise stands in a subsidiary position, at once ancillary to and deviant from its original. This may be why debates in this period about translation practices, even though they are phrased in the dichotomies of true/false, faithful/unfaithful, and authentic/ spurious are often, one feels, really arguments about the value accorded to literary labour—in terms of money or prestige—and how that is affected by the scarcity or availability of certain texts. If we think about translations as existing in a marketplace, in which some goods are inaccessible to those with less spending power, less leisure time, or less cultural capital (in the form of prior knowledge), then condensed or abstracted texts have an important role to play. In the case of a narrative, this might take the form of an abridgement or synopsis; in the case of scripture and philosophical works, arrangements of extracts with explanatory notes; from the oeuvre of a major poet, edited selections might be offered, or a range of poets grouped historically or thematically. E.D. Root, who described himself as ‘an American Buddhist’, published in 1880 what is really an original poem on the life of Buddha (‘a versified, annotated narrative’ as he calls it), but accompanied by quotations from the Dhammapada, and other citations—for the purpose of comparison— from Lao Tse and Confucius. With thrifty candour, Root explains that English translations of Eastern philosophical works ‘are expensive, and beyond the reach of the mass of readers’. Therefore he set about procuring the relevant volumes (‘with great difficulty, and considerable expense’) and, having digested them, has in his work ‘epitomized, and brought within the scope of the masses . . . all that is needed to form a correct biographical narrative of the keenest-minded of all religious, Heaven-sent Ariels [i.e. Gautama Buddha]’. Root’s book could be had for $1.81 As William St Clair has remarked, ‘anthologies, abridgements, and adaptations’ have often mitigated the gap between those who could afford to buy new literature and scientific writing at the time of publication, and poorer readers who had to wait until those books had been discarded and entered the second-hand market. They were the means by which ideas ‘trickle[d] down’, a role they continued to fulfil long into the era of the slow-to-develop public libraries. ‘They help to 80 Harold Rosenberg, ‘Everyman a Professional’, in The Tradition of the New (New York: Horizon, 1959), pp. 71–3. 81 The price in Britain was five shillings. E.D. Root, Sakya Buddha: a Versified, Annotated Narrative of his Life and Teachings; with an Excursus, Containing Citations from the Dhammapada, or Buddhist Canon (New York: Charles P. Somerby, 1880), pp. vi, 12. Thanks to Sebastian Lecourt for drawing my attention to this work. Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com A Century of Translation 27 bind a society together, uniting the reading experiences of one generation with that of others.’82 Following Costello’s early blueprint, late Victorian anthologies like W.A. Clouston’s Arabian Poetry for English Readers (1881) and Samuel Robinson’s Persian Poetry for English Readers (1883) encapsulate in their titles the project to make accessible to educated people a representative sample of a foreign canon of writing. Not all anthologies aimed at the quintessence of a single literary tradition. From the mid-1850s, a different variety began to emerge: the ecu­men­ic­al digest that juxtaposed texts from various languages to demonstrate the unity of religious traditions. Rather like Leigh Hunt and his ‘Eastern Story Teller’, Oxford classicist Benjamin Jowett remarked speculatively to James Legge that he would appreciate a ‘book containing all the best things in the great religions of the World. Such a book would be a stay to the minds of many persons.’83 The prototypes for this work were conceived not in Britain but in America, by a trio of Unitarian ministers: William Rounseville Alger, who published Poetry of the East in 1856, Moncure Conway and his Sacred Anthology of 1874, and Pebbles, Pearls and Gems of the Orient by Charles D.B. Mills (1882). Much the most popular, the genesis of Conway’s selection lay in his years at the Harvard Divinity School in the early 1850s, and the friendship of the Transcendentalists. Supposedly, Thoreau asked him one day what texts featured in his curriculum, and when Conway told him ‘the Scriptures’, Thoreau startled him by replying ‘Which?’ Emerson lent him the Bhagavad Gita in Wilkins’s translation, and the Dasatir: ‘these were revelations, like peaks and lakes of regions unknown to my spiritual geography.’ Like Francis Power Cobbe in the previous decade, Conway struggled with editions unsuitable for the lay reader (‘through vulgar superscriptions of literalism illuminations of the palimpsest shone out’), an experience that must have influenced his editorial approach.84 Crucial to its development was his correspondence with Max Müller who, humorously alluding to Francis Palgrave’s much-loved compilation of English verse, once referred to the Sacred Anthology as ‘your Golden Treasury from the Sacred Books of the World’.85 A collection of letters now at the University of Oregon reveals the extent to which Müller acted as consultant on Conway’s project, correcting 82 William St Clair, ‘The Political Economy of Reading’, the John Coffin Lecture in the History of the Book, School of Advanced Study, London, 2005, p. 11: http://oldemc.english.ucsb.edu/emccourses/novel-mediation-s2011/novel-mediation/Articles/stclair.pdf (accessed 4 Aug. 2018). 83 SOAS: CWM/LMS/China/Personal/James Legge Papers/Box 10 (Benjamin Jowett to James Legge, 24 Mar. n.y.). It is likely this undated letter was sent after 1875, when Legge was appointed Professor of Chinese at Oxford. 84 Moncure Daniel Conway, “Books that Have Helped Me”: reprinted from the “The Forum” (New York: D. Appleton, 1888), pp. 94–5. A Zoroastrian text, the Dasatir is purportedly ancient but now generally believed to have been written in the sixteenth or seventeenth century under the influence of Suhrawardy’s Illuminationism (an Islamic philosophy akin to Neoplatonism). The first English translation was published at Bombay in 1818. 85 Columbia: MS#0277 (Moncure Daniel Conway Papers), Box 16, Max Müller to Conway, 13 Aug. n.y. Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com 28 Asian Classics on the Victorian Bookshelf various rudimentary errors (‘the Bhagavad Gita is an episode of the Mahābhārata, not the Rāmāyana’), and granting permission to reprint extracts from his version of the Dhammapada. The professor even offered advice as to the typeface, and urged ‘altogether a more elegant dress’ for the fledgling volume.86 Conway and Müller’s cooperation demonstrates that the interaction between scholar and popularizer need not be fraught with suspicion and resentment. It also throws an interesting light on the coterminous activities of Müller, who in the early 1870s was readying the ground for what would prove the era’s most ambitious and prestigious orientalist undertaking, Oxford University Press’s fiftyvolume Sacred Books of the East. Müller’s general preface to the series tactfully praises the pioneering ‘dilettanti’, ‘enthusiastic sciolist[s]’, and ‘devoted lovers’, who had pressed forward and published maps to new regions of thought, while the true savants laboured yet over their magna opera. But he also regrets the harm they have done in persuading the public that the Vedas, Zend Avesta, the various Tripitakas, Quran, and other holy works are full of ‘primeval wisdom’ and ‘sound and simple moral teaching’. Disappointment awaits anyone who picks up the Sacred Books of the East, Müller warns, expecting ‘to find in these volumes nothing but gems’.87 Müller was not directly snubbing Mills’s Pebbles, Pearls and Gems of the Orient—indeed, his remarks antedate its publication. Rather he was exploiting a lapidary discourse that, as Annmarie Drury points out, glittered throughout the corpus of Victorian translation, in such volumes as Lady John Manners’s Gems of German Poetry (1865) and Herbert Giles’s Gems of Chinese Literature (1884).88 Such language may have been particularly prevalent in Asian researches, however, given the genuine sense of discovering new texts, supported by stereotypical associations of the Orient with the exquisite or gaudy, and with fabulous wealth. Costello offered her readers ‘precious poetical gems’, for instance, while William Jones (according to the facetious Cowell) found in Bengal his ‘El-Dorado’.89 The metaphor plays host to various meanings. There is the implication that the treasures of oriental literature are waiting to be plucked whole from the ground— an unskilled labour of love, that perhaps anyone might perform.90 Gemstones, of course, must also be cut and polished, and this would suggest further employment for the abridgers and popularizers. Profit was certainly a motive for some among 86 University of Oregon: A-085 (Friedrich Max Mueller letters to Moncure Conway), Müller to Conway, 14 Dec. 1873 and 5 Feb. 1874. 87 Max Müller, ‘Preface to the Sacred Books of the East’, in The Upanishads: Part I (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1879), pp. ix–xii, xxi. 88 Drury, Translation as Transformation, p. 226. 89 Costello, Rose Garden, p. ii. 90 The Hungarian orientalist Ármin Vámbéry compared Turkish folklore to ‘precious stones lying neglected in the byways of philology for want of gleaners to gather them in’. This remark was translated by R. Nisbet Bain, in Turkish Fairy Tales and Folk Tales (London: Lawrence and Bullen, 1896), p. 5. Bain’s was an English edition of Turkish tales originally published in Hungarian by Ignác Kúnos (1860–1945). Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com A Century of Translation 29 this crew, and analogies might easily be drawn between foreign exploiters of India’s material wealth and looters of her literature. Emily Mace highlights this monetary aspect of the metaphor, as well as the sense in which Müller himself uses it in his preface: deep down in the mine there is indeed some ‘sound and simple moral teaching’, but to get at it you will have to first toil through layers of useless rubble, and even ‘noxious vapours’. Or as Conway put it, truths of universal value can only be extracted from the world’s Bibles by discarding the ‘local and temporary’ matter which encases them.91 To add a final inflection, one also senses sometimes hovering in the background of these discussions the old adage about throwing jewels of wisdom to those without the taste or learning to appreciate them—an image Richard Burton resorted to when one of his translations ran afoul of the reviewers: Perpend what curious fate be mine, How queer be Fortune’s rigs, That set my sweets before the swine, My pearls before the pigs!92 Müller was making an important point. Scriptures are not self-help tracts or works of belles lettres, brimming with sweetness and light, but complex historical documents that need to be understood in their proper context. The purpose of the Sacred Books series was to supply that context—were it ever so ‘commonplace’ and ‘tedious’—in an exhaustive manner. ‘Extracts will no longer suffice’, asserts Müller as he surveys the field in 1879.93 But suffice for what? Did modern scientific standards, or imperial prerogatives, demand comprehensiveness? And when everything is translated, is everything consequently domesticated and absorbed into English literary culture—or will some things always resist transplantation outside their native soil? Surely that is the popularizer’s role. But if Müller’s remarks are taken to their logical conclusion, their offices will be made redundant by the modern standard edition. Today, a search on Amazon will soon make plain that the Penguin Classics and Oxford World’s Classics, employing professional translators, have indeed gained the upper hand over gifted amateurs. But throughout the fin de siècle and into the Edwardian period, the ‘dilettanti’ would continue to flourish, and the intriguing interplay between their activities and recognized scholars’ would persist (sometimes in a collaborative spirit, in other cases ter­ri­ tor­ial and acrimonious). Sir Edwin Arnold stands out as the most successful author in this period: a genuine scholar in Sanskrit and Persian, somewhat of an 91 Emily Mace, ‘Comparative Religion and the Practice of Eclecticism: Intersections in NineteenthCentury Liberal Religious Congregations’, Journal of Religion, XCIV/1 (Jan. 2014), 85–6. 92 Trinity College, Cambridge: Houghton 4/213 (‘The Reviewer Reviewed’, a pamphlet issued in 1881 to defend Burton’s version of The Lusiads against its many critics). 93 Müller, ‘Preface to the Sacred Books of the East’, p. xii. Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com 30 Asian Classics on the Victorian Bookshelf impostor in Arabic and Japanese, he published a wide variety of translation and original poetry between the 1860s and the end of the century, including a collection of Islamic ‘gems’, Pearls of the Faith (1883).94 His English version of the Bhagavad Gita, The Song Celestial (1885), achieved huge commercial success, bested only by his blank verse epic based on the life of Buddha, The Light of Asia (1879). Richard Burton, too, would finally make his fortune with The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night (1885–8), although this ribald and erotic retelling of the familiar Arabian tales represented, I will argue, an elitist reaction against the popularizing trend. In a move which circumvented indecency laws but also sharpened the exclusivity of his publication, each of the sixteen volumes was sold to subscribers only, at a guinea apiece—a price which increased still further when the volumes were subsequently traded on the collectors’ market.95 This marked the upper extreme on a pricing spectrum which underwent, at its opposite end, a similarly dramatic dip, as falling paper and printing costs (and the expiration of copyrights) brought translations from Asian languages into the reach of the clerk or even workman. By the First World War, many of the texts that will feature in the following chapters were available either in standard cheap series, like Everyman’s Library, or in John Murray’s one- or two-shilling Wisdom of the East books, fifty-one of which were issued between 1905 and 1916 (the series resumed after the War and carried on till the 1960s). The price of Costello’s Rose Garden, too, came down with each reprinting, from the original price of twelve shillings and ninepence in 1845 to seven shillings and sixpence in 1887. By 1899 it could be had for a crown, by 1911 for one shilling and sixpence. Meanwhile, brand-new anthologies, like Holden’s Flowers from Persian Gardens (1902) or May Byron’s Light in the East (1912), were launched directly into this bracket. At such a price, forethought was not required in the acquisition of foreign literature—texts could be picked up on a whim, and discarded just as haphazardly, perhaps to be found by another reader. Chance acquisitions could open up undreamt-of vistas. Ultimately, the key development in the course of the period this chapter has surveyed was the evolution of an open market in translation, with most major texts served by a variety of English versions appealing to different interest groups and price brackets. By the first decade of the twentieth century, there were at least eight English translations of Hafez in print, and at least six more circulating secondhand. Three versions of Sadi’s Gulistan could be had for less than three 94 In Pearls of the Faith (London: Trübner, 1883), each chapter is named for one of the ninety-nine attributes of God. The Arabic text for each attribute is given, and then an English transcription. Arnold mistranscribes ‘Al-Malik’ on page 9 (giving it a long ‘a’) and ‘Al-muṣawwir’ on page 42 (rendering the letter sād as ‘z’). Both are errors characteristic of someone who learned the alphabet in India while studying Hindi/Urdu or Persian, rather than Arabic. 95 Mary S. Lovell, A Rage to Live: A Biography of Richard and Isabel Burton (1998; repr. London: Abacus, 1999), p. 689. Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com A Century of Translation 31 shillings and sixpence, with others available at higher prices. Five translations of the Ramayana had been produced (and one prose synopsis), and three of Sakuntala (with another to follow in 1912). In some cases this development was belated in its arrival, but swift in its progress. For well over a century the only English Quran available was Sale’s, a text derived to a greater or lesser extent from the Latin of Maracci.96 When a wholly primary translation finally appeared in 1861, it issued from the pen of a High Church clergyman, J.M. Rodwell, who wasted no opportunity to discredit the holy revelation.97 A fascinating document is Richard Burton’s much-used copy of this book, the marginalia of which show the great intellectual renegade, whose sympathies were professedly with Islam over conventional Christianity, constantly chafing with disgust and frustration. On page xxii, where Rodwell avers that Mohammed was an epileptic (‘of a highly nervous and excitable mother’), and thus susceptible to the delusion that he was appointed God’s final and definitive Prophet, Burton has inserted the blunt contra­dic­tion, ‘So he was’. Where Rodwell criticizes Islam for condoning slavery and polygamy, Burton points out that Christian scripture is not free of these blemishes, while the suggestion that the charismatic Mohammed willfully deceived his followers is dismissed by Burton as the narrow thinking of a ‘man who cannot understand what genius means’.98 Not long afterwards, however, E.H. Palmer completed his sympathetic Quran translation in a spirit of cultural relativism, and after decades of scarcity the public now had the luxury, and the predicament, of choice. An 1881 article in the Edinburgh Review compared the three Qurans for the benefit of the newcomer, weighing the literalness of Sale against the ‘poetic inspiration’ of Rodwell and the ‘freshness and buoyancy’ of Palmer, who attempted to reproduce the effect of vernacular Arabic by using modern English slang. Should one read the Quran as Muslims do, with the surahs in the conventional sequence, or should one—as the Review recommended—prefer the ‘scientific’ editorship of Rodwell who attempted to organize them in chronological sequence?99 Three years later one of the nineteenth century’s most adventurous readers, Lafcadio Hearn, informed a friend of these and other factors to be considered in making one’s purchase: There are two English translations besides Sale’s—one in Trȕbner’s Oriental Series, and one in Max Muller’s “Sacred Books of the East” (Macmillan’s beautiful Edition). Sale’s is chiefly objectionable because the Suras are not versified: the chapters not having been so divided in early times by figures. But it is horribly 96 Some selected passages from the Quran, though, were published by E.W. Lane (1843). 97 For an autobiographical fragment that reveals something of the roots of Rodwell’s interest, see LMA: P69/ETH/A/002/MS04238 (Parish Register of St Ethelburga). 98 Huntington: 634991, J.M. Rodwell, El-Kor’ân; or, The Korân: translated from the Arabic (London: Quaritch, 1876), pp. xxii–xxiii, 251. 99 ‘The Korān’, Edinburgh Review, CLIV/316 (Oct. 1881), 356–61. Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com 32 Asian Classics on the Victorian Bookshelf hard to find anything in it. The French have two superb versions: Kazimirski and La Beaume. Kazimirski is popular and cheap (3fr 50); the other is an analytical Koran of 800 4to pp, with concordance, and designed for the use of the Government bureaux in Algeria . . . I have a great plan in view: to popularize the Legends of Islam and other strange faiths in a series of books.100 In addition, a rumour was abroad that Edwin Arnold—a personal idol of Hearn’s—was preparing his own popular translation, though this never came to pass. Hearn’s reading habits were exceptionally focussed on the non-Christian. But what of his correspondent, civil servant W.D. O’Connor, or any other reader who could only spare a limited amount of time to such literature—or who perhaps encountered and absorbed it involuntarily, as it circulated in their daily diet of text and image? The next chapter will begin to suggest the motives for general readers in turning to these translations, before Chapter 3 explains their practical opportunities for obtaining them, and surveys the widespread background presence of Asian literature and points of cultural reference in the wider Victorian scene. 100 Berg: ALS from Lafcadio Hearn to W.D. O’Connor, 29 June 1884. Hearn was mistaken about the Sacred Books of the East—the series was published by Oxford University Press, not Macmillan. Download Complete Ebook By email at etutorsource@gmail.com We Don’t reply in this website, you need to contact by email for all chapters Instant download. Just send email and get all chapters download. Get all Chapters For E-books Instant Download by email at etutorsource@gmail.com You can also order by WhatsApp https://api.whatsapp.com/send/?phone=%2B447507735190&text&type=ph one_number&app_absent=0 Send email or WhatsApp with complete Book title, Edition Number and Author Name.
