2016/04/23 by Matthew Reynolds
Arts and Humanities · #Translation Studies and Practices
paper · doi:10.1093/res/hgw027
During the 1930s, a long Swahili poem, Sayyid Abdallah A. Nasir’s Al-Inkishafi , was translated by the English linguist William Hichens. In verse-form, diction and mood, the translation is markedly Victorian (Hichens titled it The Soul’s Awakening ). Why should this be? The question launches Annmarie Drurie into a nuanced, scholarly exploration of the modes of Victorian verse translation, their interplay with other kinds of writing, and the reasons for their strange persistence into the mid-twentieth century. Drury begins by emphasizing ‘the massive role of Victorian periodicals in publishing translations and pieces about translation’ (p. 17). She gives close attention to essays by John Wilson in Blackwood ’s in 1845 and Thomas Herbert Warren in the Quarterly Review 50 years later. She shows that writing about translation in these contexts is ‘characterized by a constant and constantly frustrated grappling towards theory’ (p. 14): Dryden is less a master than we have perhaps tended to think, and more a prompt to partial disagreement and fresh ideas. Translation emerges as a locus of literary experiment, with verse form a key consideration: ‘ The Academy prints Müller’s scansions and Fraser’s publishes Newman’s arcane metrical mathematics out of acquiescence in an idea that what is thus debated and discovered has meaning for British Culture more broadly’ (p. 50). One especially compelling example is a debate in the letters pages of the Academy in 1886 about the translation of the National Anthem into Panjabi. Should it preserve the English metre and rhymes, so that all the subjects of the Empire could hear the same rhythm and form? Or should it be adapted to Indian verse traditions, so that some of those imperial subjects might actually be tempted to sing it?