- What is this project about? Why look at Translations?
The Gothic is a genre that revolves around gendered, cultural, and sexual transformation. It is often used as space to critique Catholicism and women’s virtue.
The Monk by Matthew G. Lewis is set in 16th century Spain. The center of the novel is the fictitious and corrupt monastery of the Capuchins of Madrid. The novel unravels as the monk, Ambrosio, is led into temptation and begins to break his monastic vows. We follow him through 350 pages of incest, decaying corpse, Wandering Jews, bleeding ghost nuns, seductive demons, and besmirched virtue.
My project is a comparison between the 1794 English gothic novel The Monk, a French translation of the novel produced immediately after the English publication, and two other French translations produced in 1840 and 1931. My project does not try to evaluate the fidelity of the translations, but traces their dynamic relationship by asking:
What is each translation trying to accomplish?
What is problematic about each translation?
How did the desires of a national readership help shape the specific stylistic choices the translators made, and how was the readership in turn shaped by those same choices?
As my research narrowed down, my primary questions became more specific: how are feminine bodies and spaces represented differently in each of the French translations?
- One of the challenges with this project was establishing the connection between the gothic and translation.
Castle of Otranto (1756) by Horace Walpole is arguably the origin point of the gothic. Since Walpole guised his novel as a translation of a medieval Italian text when he first published it, he both distanced his readers from the novel’s events and liberated them from having to judge the novel’s moral compass, as they would with a novel set in 18th-century English society. Presenting his book in this way invited readers to take pleasure in the novel by freeing them from these ethical bounds.
In addition to the point I make about Walpole, English and French had a long standing relationship with gothic literature and one way that this was spread was through translation.
