Women, Nation And Modernity

By Author: Amaryllis Nerita Frank
Total Articles: 2
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Gosse thus recast the presumed audience for English translations, his grandiloquent first-person plural addressing leisured fellow-travellers rather than 'city clerks' and 'shop girls'. While it seems likely that a large section of his readership could only have aspired to the topographical familiarity which he so casually presumed, patrons of the International Library could still rest assured: to read translations of modern European fiction was quite noble, and Heinemann was no trash-monger pandering to the taste for putrid literature. Yet the use of a travel-guide metaphor to dignify the business of publishing and purchasing two-shilling paper-covered translations by no means defended the ability of 'the common market' to appreciate literary value. If the analogy's implication was that the monoglot reader who holidayed abroad could be trusted to buy affordable English editions of European novels for Replica Tag Heuer their artistic merit, rather than for their presumed pornographic content, all Gosse had done was to exchange the class connotations ...
... of linguistic ignorance for those associated with spending power.

The sense in which Heinemann's International Library tried to construct literary value out of relative economic wealth was, of course, metaphorical; when the Lutetian Society (so called because of the Roman name for Paris) tried to do the same thing, it was for real. In 1894, six emerging writers collaborated under its auspices to publish genuinely unabridged English translations of L'Assommoir (1877), La Curee (1872), Germinal (1885), Nana, Pot-Bouille (1882) and La Tenel1 Since three of these novels were specifically indicted in the 1888 trial of Vizetelly, where an expurgated version of La Terre had revolted the jury, one can see why the project has been characterised as a 'protest' against the legal rulings. Indeed, two of Tag Heuer Replica Watches the translators, Havelock Ellis and Arthur Symons, were like Gosse and Hardy among the signatories of Ernest Vizetelly's petition to release his father from jail. Moreover, given that Ellis and Symons had qualms about Zola's worth visiting Paris in 1890, they apparently had no interest in meeting the 'faded' author, being 'concerned only with... leaders... of the young generation' such as the symboliste Mallarme; and Symons believed that 'there [was] no doubt [he] writes very badly, worse than any other writer of eminence' their participation in the Lutetian Society initiative might seem to demonstrate an admirable dedication to the fight against 'censorship' which Ernest Vizetelly had urged. Their mission statement appeared to corroborate such commitment:

The Lutetian Society proposes to issue... translations of such representative masterpieces [sic] of fiction by Continental authors as are unprocurable in England in an unmutilated rendering. These translations will be the work of scholars... It should be added that this series is the only complete, unexpurgated, and absolutely literal edition of M. Zola's novels as yet printed in the English tongue, and that it is issued by the special permission and under the direct auspices of M. Zola. 'Like Vizetelly, but unlike Heinemann, the Society promised not to abridge; like Heinemann, but unlike Vizetelly, it attempted to invest its translations with superior literary value.