Abstract
This chapter looks at female participation in transnational spaces and the many translations published by Irish women in the nineteenth century. By examining patterns of production and reception of translations by Irish female translators, this chapter considers the context within which these women worked. An analysis of how reviews assessed translations by women highlights the gendered norms of the period and the societal context of their transnational work. Various examples are used, from women translating for the national press to nuns translating devotional material. The research reveals active and engaged networks of female translators working in a positive environment which offered new opportunities for literary, political and societal outlets through translation.
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
Mary Anne Browne was originally from Berkshire and settled in Ireland following her marriage. She contributed to the DUM from 1839.
- 3.
Cusack’s translations include: Conferences for Ecclesiastical Students and Religious; Cloister Songs and Hymns for Children; The Will of God; A Hymn of Divine Love; Miraculous Cure at Assisi and The Child’s Month of Mary.
- 4.
For more details on these translators and their publications, see the database of translators at www.translationhistory.ie
- 5.
A death notice for this Mary Martin appeared in The Nation of 12 May 1855: ‘MARTIN—In her 80th year, Mary, wife of Robert Martin, of Ross, Co. Galway, Esq.’. Therefore, she must have been born in 1765 or 1766. One of the reasons that this person has been considered to be M.E.M. is the proximity between her death and the disappearance of M.E.M. from the pages of the DUM.
- 6.
Marian Bushe (née Martin, married Arthur Bushe on 23 September 1853 in St Nicholas’s, Galway; died on 26 January 1892).
- 7.
Leinster Express, 3 December 1853; Leinster Express, 9 December 1854; the reviewer seems quite sure Mr Florence MacCarthy is the translator. In contrast, the Freeman’s Journal of 7 July 1856 says: ‘MEM reappears in “The Plants of Superstitions”—a graceful essay on a subject with which she is learnedly familiar’ (emphasis added).
- 8.
I would like to acknowledge the investigative skills of José Shane Brownrigg Gleeson Martinez in trying to ascertain the identity of M.E.M.
- 9.
Across Europe, there were differing degrees of participation of women in translation in this period. France, Germany and the Netherlands appear to have had many prominent female translators in the nineteenth century, see, for example, Dow (2007). Female translators were more active in Ireland than in other societies such as Finland where in the nineteenth century, published translations by women were few and far between until the end of the century. The statistics for the participation of Finnish women in translation in the nineteenth century can be found in Lilius (2007) and Ruotanen (2000). I am grateful to Outi Paloposki for supplying me with this information and comparative opportunity.
- 10.
- 11.
Original titles: Wilhelm Meinhold, Sidonia von Bork, die Klosterhexe (1847); Alphonse de Lamartine, Histoire des Girondins (1847); Alexandre Dumas, Impressions de voyage: Suisse (1834). More information on Speranza’s translations can be found at www.translationhistory.ie
- 12.
‘The translation has been executed with great fidelity by an anonymous hand’ (The Critic, 15 August 1849). Some editions seem, however, to have been attributed to Speranza. The book was published as part of Simms and McIntyre Parlour Library, a publishing venture which aimed to supply cheap and popular reading for the British and Irish public.
- 13.
The First Temptation was a translation of Wilhelmine Friederike Gottliebe Canz, Eritis sicut deus. Ein anonymer Roman (1854–5).
- 14.
Elegance in translation, for example, must not be considered a merely female attribute: male translations were also praised in these terms, see, for example, DUM, April 1851, 220, 37.
- 15.
The Athenaeum wryly commented: ‘This work is extremely well translated, but few readers will have the patience to wade through three thick volumes of German philosophy, and its practical application to the different characters. […] All the characters go more or less mad, and the reader will find himself inclined to follow their example, and close the book in haste’ (The Athenaeum, 20 June 1863, no. 1860, 810). ‘Mrs. Wilde’s translation of this German novel has the merit, not very common in translations of being pleasantly readable. It is only at long intervals that a phrase or a sentence reminds us by its structure that we are not reading an original work. The vigour and life which pervade it prove that the task of translation has been done con amore. […] Whether it was desirable to translate this ‘philosophical romance’ at all may, we think, be questioned. […] “The First Temptation” is not likely to be an attractive book to English readers. It is too intensely German for them to relish: German in its excess of sentimentality, and German in its obtrusive jargon of formal metaphysics’ (The London Review, 23 May 1863).
- 16.
See also reviews in The Speaker (16 January 1892) and The Academy (28 March 1885). The original texts were Jules Claretie, Camille Desmoulins, Lucile Desmoulins (1874) and Charles d’Héricault, Les Aventures de Deux Parisiennes pendant la Terreur (1881).
- 17.
For example, Chambers’s Journal’s review of Camille Desmoulins and His Wife said that ‘it will be admitted that much pains must have been taken with the translation’ (12 January 1877, 20).
- 18.
Mémoires du comte Miot de Mélito (1858).
- 19.
Margaret Hutton, the anonymous Irish translator of Kugler’s Handbook of Painting, received little acknowledgement for her work with most attention focused instead on the male editor of the work Charles Eastlake whose name was prominent in the published text. The editor was appointed by the publisher John Murray for Hutton’s translated text. I would like to thank Philip McEvansoneya for sharing his current research on Hutton and for supplying this information.
- 20.
- 21.
Kugler’s Handbook was also reviewed in The Nation and it was reported that it was translated from the German by ‘the gifted wife of one of our own most respected fellow-citizens’ (The Nation, 13 August 1853).
- 22.
Very little is known of Ely McCarthy (c.1828–48); she was the sister of Justin McCarthy (1830–1912), and daughter of Michael F. McCarthy, the editor of the Poems of J. J. Callanan (1847). In his Irish Recollections, Justin McCarthy says of his sister: ‘She was from her very childhood a great lover of books, and had acquired a thorough knowledge of French and Italian’ (McCarthy 1912, 93). He added that ‘She wrote many poems and made many translations, and began to acquire for herself a reputation, among those in Cork, and they formed a very considerable proportion of the population who gave to books their habitual study. To one of the magazines in Cork she contributed a translation of a novel by George Sand […] Ely made many translations, from French and Italian poets, which found editors who gave them publication’ (1912, 97).
- 23.
- 24.
There was an added spice to this discussion as Seward claimed a minimal knowledge of Latin and that her translations from Horace were paraphrases.
- 25.
DUM, August 1856, 284 (48).
- 26.
Freeman’s Journal, 29 January 1828.
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O’Connor, A. (2017). The Female Pen: Translation Activity and Reception. In: Translation and Language in Nineteenth-Century Ireland. Palgrave Studies in Translating and Interpreting. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-59852-3_7
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