| My dissertation identifies a major shift in the public perception of translation work and the emergent aesthetics of the Romantic in the late 1700s. Even as recent critics have examined translation's potential for challenging traditional accounts of authorship, original production, and Romantic genius; the question remains: where do our contemporary conceptions of translation practice originate? What is its history, its genealogy? By the late eighteenth century, it became commonplace to view translation as "drudgery," to look back with nostalgia to the days of Pope when translator and poet were non-differentiated species. Locating translation's increased association with women's writing and manual labor in the mid-eighteenth century, I argue that translation, while relegated to a second-class form of writing, paradoxically afforded this new demographic of translators access to the public. It is precisely when translation becomes feminized, moreover, that writers like Wordsworth cordon off poetry from "frantic novels, and sickly and stupid German tragedies," genres intimately linked in public discourse to the practice of translation. Using tropes of feminine modesty and manual labor, the "translatress" strategically moved through forms of mimicry---foreign-language acquisition, tutoring and published translations---as apprenticeships towards generating original writing. Figures such as Frances Brooke, Dorothea Veit-Schlegel, Charlotte Bronte, and Margaret Fuller labored under what Charlotte Lennox called "slavery to the Booksellers," before venturing "out of their sphere" in order to publish original works. Furthermore, the project explains how translation became a Romantic vehicle for challenging late-eighteenth-century aesthetic assumptions. Continental writers such as Germaine de Stael and Novalis theorized translation as a necessary introduction of foreign material into the linguistic body of the nation in order to promote "transcendental health." British practitioners of the Gothic modeled their writings on the very business of translation, yet figured this admission of the Other as a nightmarish invasion. |
