Elsewhere. Women Translators and Travellers in Europe and the Mediterranean Basin in the Age of Enlightenment

Abstract

Travel as sentimental education, travel as cultural transfer and translation of texts, ideas, and emotions. Travel literature is an amalgam and hybridisation that can be analysed from different disciplinary perspective. Between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, this area became a sphere of expression not only for women philosophers, scientists and religious figures, but also for translators. Translation was mostly considered a non- creative activity, subordinate to the primacy of the author and hence devoid of the risk that the translator could independently promote ideas or foster controversies. However, there were women translators who consciously used translation and descriptive narrative as a tool for spreading new and sometimes provocative ideas. This chapter focuses on the analogy between two worlds, both involving strategies of cultural mediation and mutual diachronic and geographical bonds: the world of translation that interprets works to offer them to new contexts of reception, and the world of travelling, of journeys lived, narrated, and translated, that make distant and unknown places intelligible. I will concentrate on the figures of women travellers, translators, and writers, especially in the Levant and the Mediterranean, with a particular emphasis on the cases of Anne-Marie Fiquet du Boccage and Lady Mary Wortley Montagu.

Ain’t I a Woman? Sojourner Truth.

Women’s Convention at Akron, Ohio, 1851

In art and literature … woman has something specific to contribute. George Eliot [Mary Ann Evans]

Essays of George Eliot, London, 1963

Introduction. Travel, Translate, Transfer

During the seventeenth century, accounts of real travel—and often of imagined journeys—were an important source of reflection for women, firstly as readers of travel books but also, with increasing frequency, as translators and travellers in their own right. Travel functioned as sentimental education, as cultural transfer, and as the translation of texts, ideas, and emotions. Between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, this area became a sphere of expression for important women—not only for philosophers and scientists, prophetesses, and religious figures, but also for translators. Among these women were Elizabeth Wolff (1738–1804), who translated Robert Blair’s The Grave (1764) into Dutch and Benjamin-Sigismond Frossard’s work on slavery (La Cause des esclaves nègres, 1789) into Dutch (De zaak der Negerslaaven, 1790), and who travelled through France at the time of the Revolution, as well as writers, translators, and travellers such as Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (1689–1762); poet and travel writer Lady Anna Riggs Miller (1741–1781); and Henrietta Liston (1751–1828), who accompanied her husband (like Lady Montagu before her) to Constantinople while he served as British Ambassador to the Sublime Porte. Women travellers played a myriad of roles as wives, mothers, lovers, adventuresses, slave traders, writers, philosophers, and scientists. Regina Salomea Pilsztynowa (1718–after 1763) was an eighteenth-century Polish medical practitioner skilled in treating cataracts, who travelled in the Ottoman Empire and Eastern Europe. The well-known Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–1797), a philosopher and advocate of women’s rights, also wrote the popular travel narrative Letters Written in Sweden, Norway, and Denmark (1796). Women were moreover involved in other, significant forms of translation and transposition—some carried out through the eyes, as in the case of artists such as Louise-Élisabeth Vigée-Lebrun (1755–1842), who left us her fascinating travel journals; or as we find in the twenty plates in A Description of Latium (London 1805), which reproduced the places visited and described by Ellis Cornelia Knight (1757–1837), who also translated a collection of hymns and poems of a religious character titled Translations from the German in Prose and Verse (1812).

The new century—and to an even greater extent the Enlightenment period—brought significant changes both to the actual physical conditions of travelling and to the perception of its importance, the meshing of different spheres of knowledge that this entailed, and the emergence of female figures in the entwined fields of translation, cultural transfer, and travel.

This raises a number of questions. What original features did travelling acquire in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that distinguished it from the mediaeval iter studiorum and the Grand Tour of the Renaissance and Baroque periods? How did the translation of different types of text—of classical and philosophical texts, and of travel narratives—affect the sensitivity, knowledge, and experience of travelling and, in general, the narrative art of the women travellers of the time? What is the significance, not only of the translation of texts that these travellers encountered and acquired during their journeys, but more importantly of the perception, knowledge, and interpretation of reciprocal alterity they also encountered and came to know? And, as a leitmotif pervading and linking these questions, what was the distinctive contribution and the preeminent role of the woman travellers and translators in terms of their experience and vision of this otherness?

It is not possible to analyse, in detail, a vast production of an estimated fourteen hundred travelogues from this period written by men, as opposed to around forty by women. A valuable and eloquent bibliography of these printed travel books from the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries, written in European languages (but mainly French and English), is provided by the collection and catalogue assembled by the twentieth-century traveller and collector Fiammetta Olschki (Olschki 1990). An initial comparison of the male and female travel narratives listed there can only stress the fact that the inequality of literary production resulted from a set of diverse conditions affecting quantity, type, and style (Morris and O’Connor 1994; Birkett 2004; Pickford and Martin 2013; Aldrich 2019; Brilli and Neri 2020; Page-Jones). Carl Thompson has exhaustively argued how “cultural constraints exercised a powerful shaping influence on women’s accounts, generating a degree of the facto difference from male-authored narratives” (Thompson 2017). My contribution aims rather at underscoring the particular significance of the conceptual connection between forms of representation and translation of alterity in notebooks, letters, and travel journals—especially in the Levant and the Mediterranean—of women writers, translators, and artists and of “diplomatic wives” over the long eighteenth century. I will focus on the analogy between two worlds that both acted as channels: the world of translation that interprets works in order to offer them to new contexts of reception; and the world of travelling, of journeys lived, narrated, and translated, that make distant and unknown places intelligible. Both spheres involve strategies of mediation and mutual diachronic and geographical connections. For Butor, Powers, and Lisker, travellers “travel in order to write, they travel while writing, because, for them, travel is writing” (Butor et al. 1974, 14; Cronin 2000), to which we could add: writing is translating, travel is translating. Additionally, and more specifically, being women translators and women travellers are two intersecting experiences between which we can trace analogies, as both imply an element of cultural transmission and of liberation from anonymity and subjective concealment.

My focus thus shifts from questions that have already been amply analysed in the field of translation studies, such as the limitations of women’s education; the choice of texts and subjects deemed appropriate for female translation; the lack of recognition or marginalisation of women translators; or even the attribution of their work to an alleged male translator of the time, with women obliged to conceal their gender and adopt male pseudonyms in order to get their translations published, as we find in the case of Theresa Huber (1764–1820), who used her husband’s name. Translation was generally considered a non-creative activity, subordinate to the primacy of the author and hence devoid of the risk that the translator might independently promote ideas or foster controversies. In spite of this, there were women translators who consciously used translation and descriptive narrative as a tool for spreading new and sometimes provocative ideas.

A consolidated literature with different approaches and outcomes has addressed women travellers, spanning a chronology from antiquity onwards and exploring the different reasons behind female travelling: the mediaeval pilgrimages of pious women and religious trips undertaken for espionage, as in the case of those made by Aphra Ben through Belgium and the Netherlands, or enforced migration to avoid religious persecution or restrictive social and moral conventions (see, for instance, Thompson 2017, 131–50, which contains an exhaustive bibliography; Delisle 2002; van Deinsen and Vanacker 2019, 60–80). Eighteenth- and nineteenth-century women travel writers have also been extensively studied and documented in recent years, from the pioneering anthologies of the 1980s to editorial collections on the topic, illustrating a solid tradition within a literary genre that has long been considered to be male-dominated.¹ Just as translations provide a new text for new contexts, so—across the continent of Europe and the Mediterranean—the women travellers of the Enlightenment transmitted their travelling experiences by translating them for their compatriots and other European readers of the time.

During the Enlightenment, and especially over the long modern age between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, travel increasingly became an opportunity for knowledge and education for women too. Moreover, it also had a specific meaning as an opportunity for acquiring knowledge that also signified a greater social and intellectual independence, freed from the bonds of marriage or family or of social status. There has also been a lengthy debate on the question of whether or not there was a female version of the Grand Tour, and about the existence of women Grand Tourists paralleling the travels of male scientists and humanists since mediaeval times (Birkett 2004; Brilli and Neri 2020; Morris and O’Connor 1994).

A Grand Tour—from early modern times and, especially, from the Baroque period—became a customary and almost essential stage in the education of gentlemen and diplomats. At the end of the seventeenth century, in aristocratic families, it was still the prerogative of the sons to embark on the Grand Tour, an educational journey that—as the very name indicates—took the form of a circular route through Europe, and more specifically France, Italy, and perhaps Greece, returning home enriched by experience and having acquired knowledge crucial for the citizen. It was not the custom for the ladies of the lineage to do likewise, except possibly to accompany the gentleman traveller as daughter or wife in some parts of the trip. Cultured women, often familiar with several languages and translators, not only described but interpreted and re-interpreted the surrounding world through this activity of mediation. One way this happened was when they were actually able to undertake a journey, albeit accompanied by acquaintances and family members. However, the majority of these women writers imagined narrating, describing, and painting territories they would have liked to visit. These were other and better worlds, elsewhere, and this compensatory aspect of travel literature emerged in different dimensions, both for those who were simply readers and for those who actually undertook the journey. Hence while some women were able to travel in the course of the eighteenth century within the context of their family, accompanying gentlemen, diplomats, and upper-class men and women who settled abroad for reasons related to their position or to medical treatment or health, it was not until the following century that women began to travel in much greater numbers and often deliberately alone.

This chapter will deal, first, with the intersection of travel and translation from early modern times to the eighteenth century, and more specifically in the case of women; second, with the issue of women’s (relative) invisibility, taking as an example Anne-Marie Fiquet du Boccage and her Lettres sur l’Angleterre, la Hollande, et l’Italie; and finally, with travelling women in the Mediterranean, focusing on Lady Mary Wortley Montagu’s Letters of the Right Honourable Lady M-y W-y M-e: Written during her Travels in Europe, Asia and Africa, to Persons of Distinction, Men of Letters.

“Outward Bound” Into New Worlds and Cultures

One aspect of particular interest is the meshing and intersection of experience in women who were travellers, writers, and sometimes translators too. Investigation of such figures is complicated by the fact that the journeys (some actually made and others only imagined) were not always recorded in writing (stories, letters, or journals), and that they implicate the dual leap of interpretation and translation. Women who were at once travellers, writers, and translators made for figures who were a complex combination. These early modern femmes savantes—despite sometimes being obliged to conceal their gender—overcame the silence and rhetoric of female modesty, and they criticised in their paratexts and commentaries the cliché of an elegant yet unfaithful translation as a comparison rooted in an unfair reference to the world of women. They thus played a crucial role in the coeval debate on the nature, utility, and role of translation, and they contributed to the double process recognising women’s cultural contributions and those of translators.

Women translators during the Renaissance (like their male counterparts) mostly translated classical texts: works written in Greek and Latin or by mediaeval poets and historians, as well as texts by Boccaccio and Petrarch. They moreover made an often invisible but particularly significant contribution to the circulation of religious texts, which were equally popular as Greek and Roman literature. Increasingly in-depth research is bringing to light a panorama of women who, from the fourteenth century on, devoted themselves to translating into the vernacular sacred and evangelical texts and psalms, books of the Bible, sermons, and other works by holy writers as well as religious literature in the broader sense. Diligent and moved by faith, these women became conscious intermediaries for their communities (Tylus 2019). They were ardent spirits who opened up, for the illiterate, the path to prayer and devotion, and they were themselves personally committed to this quest. The Renaissance saw numerous women engaged in translating religious, moral, and literary works—both Catholic (Margaret Roper, Mary Basset, Suzanne Du Vegerre, and Elizabeth Cary) and Calvinist (the Cooke sisters, Anne Locke of Geneva, Katherine Parr, and Elizabeth I)—who performed this subtle labour of subverting traditional rhetoric through the use of linguistic and cognitive devices (Calvani 2012, 90, 98). Young women writers often placed their work under the protection of noblewomen with whom they felt a particular affinity, or who professed the same faith. These translators made their voices heard, sometimes in the text itself but most of all in its paratextual elements: the preface, the dedication, the address to the reader, the translator’s note, and the epilogue (Hosington and Fournier 2007, 369).² Even though they were often famous, these women had difficulty asserting the role of translator and having their names be placed on the title pages of the works that they had translated.

Here, too, as in the case of setting out on a journey for an eighteenth-century woman, we can discern the persistence of a rhetorical, historical-hermeneutic, evocative, and traditional model of translation as a painstaking task that was suited to the female mindset and that, up to the nineteenth century, consigned the women translators to roles of cultural inferiority and invisibility. Translating is a matter of comparing languages, but also cultural contexts and visions of the world: it is not merely transparent, but a window onto different languages, cultures, societies, and periods. Translating also means copying, transposing, and physically transporting. Women writers and translators were aware that their work went well beyond the mere exercise of language, embodying a journey towards knowledge and playing a social role of cultural mediation. These women often challenged bigoted contemporary moralism, as in the case of the writer and author of numerous translations Elizabeth Helme (1743–1814), who translated into English the just-published account of the travels of the French explorer and ornithologist François le Vaillant³:

I have done this the more willingly, from an assurance that nothing has been expunged that could be either an aid to Science, inform the Naturalist, or even gratify a laudible curiosity. I have likewise softened (if I may be allowed the expression) a few passages that possibly might be accounted mere effusions of fancy and vivacity in a French author, but which would ill accord with the delicacy of a female translator, or indeed with the temper and genius of English readers, with whom Mons. Vaillant, notwithstanding, bids fair to become a great favorite, as he unites a daring spirit of enterprize with another truly British Characteristic, namely Humanity.⁴

When Vaillant’s work appeared in 1790, it immediately triggered a scandal on account of the illustrations depicting naked the “Hottentot” women described in the text, and the attacks published in the English literary journals of the time did not spare the translator either (Fig. 8.1).

Fig. 8.1

“Narina, A young Gonaquais”. Schomburg Center Research in Black Culture, Manuscripts, Archives, and Rare Books Division, The New York Public Library. The New York Public Library Digital Collections. 1796. https://digitalcollections.nypl.org/items/510d47da-6f43-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99

Elizabeth Helme faithfully translated the work, complete with the images of the women, including that of “Narina, A Young Gonaquais”.⁵ She was also responsible for the English translations of the travel books for children by the famous German educator Joachim Heinrich Campe (1799a, 1799b, 1811).

“En Philosophe, en Poète, en Femme Aimable et en Bel-esprit”

The quotation is from Anne-Marie du Boccage in Garms-Cornides (1999, 181).

During the eighteenth century, some women did become famous as translators, such as Elizabeth Carter, Marie-Anne Paulze-Lavoisier, Giuseppa Eleanora Barbapiccola (translator into Italian of René Descartes’ Principia Philosophicae, titled I principi della filosofia), Barbara Sanguszko (a poet, translator, and moralist during the Enlightenment in Poland), Catharina Ahlgren (a well-known Swedish translator of both poetry and novels from English, French, and German), and Claudine Picardet (a French chemist and translator into French of extensive scientific literature from Swedish, English, German, and Italian). Other lesser-known figures include Mademoiselle De La Chaux, to whom Diderot attributed the translation of Hume’s works (Bongie 1989). Anne-Marie Fiquet du Boccage (1710–1802), a friend of Algarotti, was anything but unknown in her own time; she wrote poems, comedies, and tragedies and was made a member of the academy in her homeland of France (Académie française and the French Academy of Sciences) and in Italy. Admired throughout Europe, she translated Pope’s The Rape of the Lock into French (1749) and Milton’s Paradise Lost, which she imitated in her own poem Le Paradis terrestre (1748) (Tournu 2017); she also composed an epic poem, La Colombiade (1756), and the tragedy Les Amazones (1749), and she collected for publication the letters sent to her sister during her travels. Madame du Boccage’s Lettres sur l’Angleterre, la Hollande et l’Italie (1762) is doubly transgressive for the evocative form in which it describes ideas about whether women might abandon a static, domestic condition and enter into the arena of public discourse. These are questions widely debated by scholarship on eighteenth-century women travel writers.⁶

The epistolary form used by Mme du Boccage became one of the favourite narrative genres for communicating experiences that could interest continental readers. This form of communication, which had been very important in the seventeenth-century République des Lettres, conserved certain distinctive traits. It was addressed to one person, or a small circle, while at the same time being a vehicle for news and ideas of interest to a larger community. Further, because of their confidential nature, letters were relatively less subject to explicit and implicit constraints, while at the same time they could exploit all the rhetorical devices of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century epistolary literature, often conceived with view to publication. For this reason, letters were open to the transmission of unusual and novel concepts and experience that were frequently at odds with the prejudices and convictions of the time. Anne-Marie du Boccage wrote to her sister (Fig. 8.2):

Know then, that a terrible apprehension of finding the time hang heavy on our hands at Calais, made us quit it when the weather was doubtful. It soon ceased to be so; the winds and the rain redoubled: Though the storm we underwent well deserves a poetical description, I shall not vainly attempt to give one; what could I do after our great poets? The truth from my pen would not be equal to their fictions. Let me then simply declare, that the infernal noise of the waves, the tackle and the sailors, and the constant oppression at my heart, prevented me from expressing my fears: My griefs were succeeded by the most excruciating ideas. What, said I to myself, shall I no more see my Sister, nor my Friends, whom I forsook? Shall I not even see England, to visit which was the intention of my voyage? My friends will blame my indiscreet curiosity and will soon forget me. Du Boccage (1770, I, 1–3)

Fig. 8.2

Portrait de Madame Du Bocage, engraving. Tardieu (le fils), engraver; Loir (M.lle) model painter. Bibliothèque nationale de France, département Estampes et photographie, Gallica http://catalogue.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/cb41090027h

The journey was an adventure beyond known places and often into foreign lands. Nevertheless, between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries travelling women continued to be confined within a milieu that reflected their social status, which was generally middle- or upper-class. The letters to family and friends also helped to offset a sense of disorientation and to cultivate a cultural and emotional bond with the social milieu from which they came, and to which they would very likely return.

Madame du Boccage addressed herself to a readership of both ladies and gentlemen, to all those “who have not seen the objects of which I speak [and who] will be able, in my feeble sketches, to take the desire to look for more striking portraits of them, in the best Travellers, and those who know them for themselves will perhaps not be displeased to recall them with me”.⁷ She shared this conviction with Anna Riggs Miller, who travelled with her husband in France and Italy and published her own Letters from Italy (London 1777). Around the turn of the seventeenth century, a similar opinion was expressed in the pages of the diary kept by Celia Fiennes during her travels on horseback through England and Scotland, accompanied only by two servants. Her diary remained within the confines of her family until it was published in the early nineteenth century, although it circulated widely in the form of printed passages and in manuscript (Plebani 2019, 169). Conceived as a reading book in epistolary form, Celia Fiennes’ work includes an adaptation of the original diary kept by Sophie Schwarz in 1784 and 1785 while Schwarz was travelling with Elise von der Recke, in Becker and Karo 1905 (see also Lynch Piozzi 1789). Sophie von La Roche was an important figure of the late German Enlightenment, a famous writer who travelled through Switzerland, France, Holland, and England after being widowed and then published the diaries of these travels in the 1780s (Stuart Costello 1840; Strutt 1842).

In Lettres sur l’Angleterre, la Hollande et l’Italie du Boccage does not only give detailed descriptions of places, architectural features, and the particular social customs and habits of these countries’ inhabitants; she also strengthens her description through poetic narration to underscore affinities and the emotional encounter between the French-speaking world she was familiar with and the foreign worlds she visited.⁸ Even more significant and unusual is the fact that she translates and transcribes passages, poems, and rhetorical inscriptions, which served to emotionally and visually foreground historical memories. An example is the inscription in Italian verse, almost a poem, found on the rear of a temple, meant as a remembrance of illustrious men for all travellers from beyond the Alps.⁹ She also gives precise accounts of the encounters made on her travels, the readings she shared with Count Algarotti, and the memory of a famous lady traveller who had recently passed away, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu:

We read the Poem together every evening. He has also shewn me some pretty Italian sonnets, and a fine English ode upon Death, written by Lady Worthley Montague, with whom we had the pleasure of conserving at Venice, which is her settled place of residence. You have, doubtless, been informed, that upon her return from her embassy to Constantinople, she had the resolution to have her only son inoculated: her example was universally followed by the English. M. de la Condamine [Charles Marie de La Condamine], famous for his learning, his travels, and his zeal for the public welfare, advises us to avail ourselves of the talents of this celebrated Lady. Du Boccage (1770, vol. I, 162–63).

This was a significant recognition for a writer whose main work came to be appreciated late, thanks to the devoted attention of Mary Astell. Astell had earlier lamented the fate of invisibility she felt weighing upon Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, in the preface to Montagu’s Letters that she intended to publish in 1724: “But, alas! The most ingenious author has condemned it to obscurity during her life”.¹⁰ Indeed, despite being well known today, Mary Montagu has to be included among the figures who were doubly invisible during their lifetimes, both as a traveller, and as the author of the famous Turkish Embassy Letters—published posthumously only in 1763—and as a translator. In 1710 she translated the Enchiridion of the Greek philosopher Epictetus from Latin, which she then sent to the Anglican bishop Gilbert Burnet, accompanied by a letter in which she championed women’s right to a cultured education. Among the numerous women authors of travelogues, journals, and tales of travel from the eighteenth century on, Anna Riggs Miller highlights Montagu for the aspect of invisibility and concealment characterising her person and work, either chosen or enforced, and for the analogy between women’s translating and travelling that she embodies. In Miller’s Preface to her Letters from Italy, we read of Montagu: “The Author’s declining to give her name to so circumstantial a narrative, as renders it singularly improbable it should long remain concealed, seems to call for some apology”.¹¹

During the eighteenth century, despite the difficulties of travelling independently, the yearning for this form of freedom opened horizons for early modern female travellers, reinforcing their desire for knowledge and refining the sensitivity of their gaze. Their stories are more nuanced compared to those of their male contemporaries, experiences, and representations of travel shaped by multiple, intersectional factors, and reflecting cultural ambitions that they would not have been able to cultivate or express in any other way, or that would have been satirised as appearing to overstep the norms of contemporary femininity. They have no qualms about expressing their feelings. Significantly, at the end of her Grand Tour as she was preparing to return to Paris, Madame du Boccage wrote: “There I heard of a wonder of nature, too little known to us, though very near us, and which notwithstanding deserves our attention and should excite our surprise. My mind loses itself in admiring these wonders”.¹² Finally, taking her to leave of her readers, she again recalled what she had written in the Avis au Lecteur:

I have sent you the long descriptions which you required of me by the surest conveynance I could find: I see you have received almost all of them; I have consulted men of learning and books; but I should not be accountable for their errors to which, I fear, I have added some of my own. I only point out to you the objects of which you must consult other authors for a fuller account. How greatly must I love you to have found time to write so many letters to you in the midst of the dissipation of pleasures and the fatigue of travelling! Du Boccage (1770, II, 212)

The Letters exemplify various particular aspects of the perception, reading, and representation by eighteenth-century women travellers of the surrounding world and its naturalistic, architectural, and historic features. Through the experience of du Boccage, they also illustrate the role played by the translation of inscriptions and of sonnets and poems by local poets or by the author herself, conceived to highlight figurative details of the travel account and the emotions conveyed to the reader. These put the final touch on a work that circulated well beyond du Boccage’s family circle in being proposed as a public composition and a brave and curious literary foray into the knowledge of new lands.

En Route to the Levant

From the very start, the travel literature dealing with the Mediterranean and the Levant was characterised by a descriptive intention—at times imaginary—characterised by the fear of an incumbent Islam as a ferocious conqueror of Europe that would destroy the Christian religion. From the sixteenth to early seventeenth century, travellers, diplomats, and merchants told tales of Turks as the religious and moral enemy of Europe bent on conquest. They recounted the difficulties and dangers of travelling and of crossing countries and frontiers, and they described the political and military systems so as to provide useful information for defeating the Ottoman enemy (Western Travellers in the Islamic World Online 2006).

A major contribution to a linguistic, historical, and critical study of the Islamic world began to take shape from the end of the sixteenth century as Arabic and Turkish texts were translated into Latin and the vernacular, and as printing presses were established in Italy and Holland with movable type for Arabic and Middle-Eastern characters. Over the course of the century, attention became focused on a more accurate and realistic description of the Levant. Travel literature became increasingly marked by faithful description, albeit from a European and Western perspective and not yet completely free from the mediaeval religious and bellicose phantoms. This literature was extensive, ranging from An Itinerary Written by Fynes Moryson Gent (London, 1617) to the Viaggio di Levante del Signor di Loir, translated into Italian by Abbondio Menafoglio (Venice, 1671), and the better-known works of travellers such as Jean de Thévenot, Paul Rycaut, and Charles Thompson.

Reflecting on the phenomenon of travels in the Orient and providing a useful synthesis of their social and cultural complexity, Stéphane Yerasimos has clarified these journeys as a confrontation between the self and the elsewhere. In the ancient world, and still in the classical Arabic period, the world was described as starting from its centre (ourselves) and proceeding towards the periphery. The disintegration of this centre and the aspirations to reconstruct it gave rise, he argues, to travel writing (Yerasimos 1991, 2–3; see also Ballaster 2005). It was left to the female travellers and writers of the Enlightenment to look beyond the diplomatic and mercantile accounts, beyond the religious prejudices, and beyond a description of Islamic women aimed solely at evoking a voluptuous female life within the confines of the harem. This was an epistolary literature spoken aloud, even though it conserved the features of familiarity and intimacy.

In the preface to the Letters of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, Astell underscores its status as an epistolary work devoid of English prejudices that could offer “a more true and accurate account of customs and manners of the several nations, with whom this lady conversed”.¹³ Montagu had described the fear of the plague, and of natural events and fires, on a journey towards the Levant punctuated by constant perils:

I flatter myself, dear sister, that I shall give you some pleasure in letting you know that I have safely passed the sea, though we had the ill fortune of a storm. … For my part, I have been so lucky, neither to suffer from fear nor seasickness; though, I confess, I was so impatient to see myself once more upon dry land.¹⁴

In her letters Montagu further recounts her fear of encountering Turkish society. Yet in an evocative crescendo, she also describes the villages and the natural beauty “that seems to me artificial, but, I am assured, is the pure work of nature—within view of the Black Sea, from whence we perpetually enjoy the refreshment of cool breezes, that make us insensible of the heat of the summer”, as well as female elegance and lifestyle: “The beauty and dress of the women exactly resemble the ideas of the ancient nymphs, as they are given us by the representations of the poets and painters”¹⁵ (Fig. 8.3).

Fig. 8.3

Lady Mary Wortley Montagu in Turkish dress, engraving S. Hollyer after J.B. Wandesforde. Österreichischen Nationalbibliothek, Digital collections

Lady Montagu’s descriptions are full of curiosity, convinced as she was of the task she had set herself to translate and make accessible for English readers the experiences of her own sojourn in the Ottoman lands—her view of the everyday life of ordinary people and nobles, of religious customs, and of life in the markets and the aristocratic residences of Belgrade, Constantinople, and Pera. Her letters convey her particular capacity for a historically critical reading of a different and fascinating social and political reality, despite the limitations of the gender-specific constraints so often mentioned in women’s travel literature. They also reveal her awareness of being an element of symbolic representation of her own society and of performing a cultural translation of an “other world” so as to make it comprehensible and interesting to a diversified public of readers that included the British aristocracy, British and European cultural figures such as Alexander Pope and Antonio Conti, and the broader public of curious readers. In a letter of 1718, she wrote to an English noblewoman:

I am afraid you will doubt the truth of this account, which, I own, is very different from our common notions in England; but it is no less truth for all that. —— Your whole letter is full of mistakes, from one end to the other. I see you have taken your ideas of Turkey, from that worthy author Dumont, who has wrote with equal ignorance and confidence.’Tis a particular pleasure to me here, to read the voyages to the Levant, which are generally so far removed from truth, and so full of absurdities, I am very well diverted with them. They never fail giving you an account of the women, whom,’tis certain, they never saw, and talking very wisely of the genius of the men, into whose company they are never admitted; and very often describe mosques, which they dare not even peep into.¹⁶

Shortly afterwards, she underscored the authenticity of her own account:

I’ll assure you,’tis not for want of learning, that I forbear writing all these bright things. I could also, with very little trouble, turn over Knolles and Sir Paul Rycaut, to give you a list of Turkish emperors; but I will not tell you what you may find in every author that has writ of this country. I am more inclined, out of a true female spirit of contradiction, to tell you the falsehood of a great part of what you find in authors.¹⁷

Neither famous writers nor the traveller-writers in general were spared her irony for having provided erroneous descriptions of the life of aristocratic Muslim women whom she herself had been able to frequent—a life which was in fact leisured and quite free: “Tis also very pleasant to observe how tenderly he and all his brethren voyage-writers lament the miserable confinement of the Turkish ladies”.¹⁸ In May 1718, as she was about to depart from Constantinople, Lady Montagu wrote to Abbot Conti, distancing herself from the descriptive travel literature that was interested only in war and administrative aspects. Such narratives were not aimed at deciphering a different world, she remarks, but at fighting its religion and its military power:

I have not been yet a full year here, and am on the point of removing. Such is my rambling destiny. This will surprise you, and can surprise no body so much as myself. Perhaps you will accuse me of laziness, or dulness, or both together, that can leave this place, without giving you some account of the Turkish court. I can only tell you, that if you please to read Sir Paul Rycaut, you will there find a full and true account of the vizier’s, the beglerbys, the civil and spiritual government, the officers of the seraglio, &c. things that’tis very easy to procure lists of, and therefore may be depended on; though other stories, God knows —— I say no more —— every body is at liberty to write their own remarks; the manners of people may change; or some of them escape the observation of travellers.¹⁹

In her correspondence with Conti, who requested her observations, she describes the cultural and religious world of the cities in which she had stayed. She responded in an exemplary manner to the Abbot’s questions about the Muslim religion, about which she herself had questioned several religious representatives, while at the same time not holding back with criticism of zealous Catholic persecution:

He assured me, that if I understood Arabic, I should be very well pleased with reading the alcoran, which is so far from the nonsense we charge it with, that it is the purest morality, delivered in the very best language. I have since heard impartial Christians speak of it in the same manner; and I don’t doubt but that all our translations are from copies got from the Greek priests, who would not fail to falsify it with the extremity of malice. No body of men ever were more ignorant, or more corrupt; yet they differ so little from the Romish church, that, I confess, nothing gives me a greater abhorrence of the cruelty of your clergy, than the barbarous persecution of them.²⁰

The originality, independence, and narrative and epistolary style of Lady Mary Montagu acted as inspiration, as can be seen from the diaries of Henrietta Liston. Almost in the style of a novel, Liston recounts her travels to the Levant and her sojourn in Constantinople in the company of her ambassador husband in the early decades of the nineteenth century (Hart et al. 2020). This was the time of the Napoleonic wars and the early stages of the reign of Mahmud II, so that the diary and the other writings of Henrietta Liston offer a fascinating supplement and continuation of the Turkish Embassy Letters written by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu a hundred years earlier (Fig. 8.4).

Fig. 8.4

Excerpts from journals of Henrietta Liston, The Turkish Journal, 1812–1814, diary and description of Constantinople, “Further writings on Constantinople, 1814–1815”. Creative Commons: https://digital.nls.uk/120755366

Conclusion. Many Modes of Translation and Transposition: Women Travellers and Painters

Translation and transposition can also be performed through the eyes, in the case of artists such as Louise-Élisabeth Vigée-Lebrun, a great traveller and portraitist in the years around the turn of the eighteenth century and during the troubled years in Paris, who was a member of the Académie royale de peinture et de sculpture. Before fleeing from France in 1789, she painted an evocative and almost theatrical portrait of Mahomet Dervisch-Kam, one of the three ambassadors sent to the French court by Tipu Sahab, sovereign of the Kingdom of Mysore (Fig. 8.5).

Fig. 8.5

Mahomet Dervisch-Kam, portrait painting by Élisabeth Vigée-Le Brun, 1788 oil on canvas, https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q61041226

In flight from the revolutionary turmoil, choosing the gilded exile of the Grand Tour in Italy, she also left us her fascinating travel journals. Arriving in Naples, she wrote:

We reached Naples at about three or four o’clock. I cannot describe the impression I received upon entering the town. That burning sun, that stretch of sea, those islands seen in the distance, that Vesuvius with a great column of smoke ascending from it, and the very population so animated and so noisy, who differ so much from the Roman that one might suppose they were a thousand miles apart. I had engaged a house at Chiaja on the edge of the sea. Opposite me I had the island of Capri, and this situation delighted me.²¹

As a painter and storyteller, she is also emblematic in having been able to transform her extremely difficult situation as an exile forced to continually move from place to place into a journey across Europe in services of an education and artistic mission that she expressed in numerous portraits and landscapes.

Another artist and writer engaged in translation and transposition was Ellis Cornelia Knight (1757–1837). After the death of her father Admiral Knight, she set off with her mother for Italy, where they stayed in Florence, Rome, and Naples. In 1805 she published a book in London, the Description of Latium, or La Campagna di Romana, describing the Roman Campagna and the Agro Romano complete with twenty drawings of the places she had visited and described. There, she writes (Fig. 8.6):

It is impossible to visit this spot, without reflecting on the magnificence of the ancient port of Claudius, and comparing with it the melancholy and desolate state in which this part of the coast now appears. … All is now changed, and from this truly distressing scene the British traveller will naturally turn his thoughts with exultation to his native country.²²

Fig. 8.6

Ellis Cornelia Knight, A Description of Latium (London 1805), Porto of Ostia. https://archive.org/details/descriptionoflat00knigrich/page/n131/mode/2up

Travel literature is an amalgam and hybridisation. As the nineteenth century approached, there was a huge increase in the number of women who saw travel and cultural engagement not only as an educational “finishing” for the honnête femme but as a commitment to independent and public knowledge in which the customary anonymity of the translator became increasingly transparent. These women were writers, scientists, translators, and polymaths rolled into one (Bret, 2008, 2014), as well as being travellers. As we have seen, their stories call for a new contextualisation of women’s artistic, scientific, anthropological, translational, and experiential contributions to the cultural history of the modern age. Looking at them from the combined approaches and hermeneutics of historical, anthropological, geographical, and philosophical studies, literary criticism, translation, and post-colonial studies allows us not only to foreground the part they played in quantitative terms, but also to fully grasp and understand the contribution that they made to literature and philosophical reflection, as well as to knowledge as a whole (Carlyle 2011; Andréolle and Molinari 2011, xi–xxv; Stevens 2011; Di Giovanni and Zanotti 2018; Hayden 2011).