This paper explores the mobility of revolutionary language—not only what it says but how it travelled, where it went and what it became. It draws on research undertaken by the team of the UK-based AHRC-funded project ‘Radical Translations: The Transfer of Revolutionary Culture between Britain, France and Italy (1789-1815)’. This project has identified nearly 1000 revolutionary-era translations and constructed a prosopography of some 500 translators in order to map the circulation of radical ideas in the revolutionary period. Many of these translations were highly performative, undertaken by translators who were actively seeking to insert themselves into a transnational narrative of revolution that was still unfolding and that they ardently wanted to shape. Through the act of translating, they sought to build networks of solidarity across borders and engage in a transnational debate that also included elements of disagreement and even outright competition. In addition to serving as a major—and heretofore largely overlooked—record of how a radical language of freedom and equality was extended into new contexts, this corpus of translations also registers the social and political networks of the translators themselves.
Recovering the role of the translator as a historical actor is not without its challenges, however. The invisibility of the translator has become proverbial in translation studies. But the world of radical translators has remained obscure for additional reasons. Some translators, such as Thomas Jefferson, were highly visible public figures whose translation work has often been overshadowed by their more prominent publications. Others of equally high profile, such as Mirabeau, used translation as a cloak of invisibility or a means of hiding in plain sight. But legions of others wrote anonymously or under pseudonyms, either for fear of repercussions or because they were so universally known they did not need naming.
A key challenge of this project, therefore, was to identify the large number of anonymous or pseudonymous translations that circulated in the revolutionary period. To do so we supplemented bibliographical research on translations with prosopographical research on translators and their networks. Although it bears some relation to network theory, prosopography also differs from it. It can be defined as the investigation of the common characteristics of a group of people whose individual biographies may be largely untraceable or only indirectly known. As I explain in this contribution, it is particularly useful for registering the complexity of a ‘pluralist movement’ (such as that of revolution), in which the challenge is to capture both a committed core of known agents and a penumbra of less obvious people who were sporadically involved and/or could be considered adherents in certain contexts.
The variable duration, not to mention ephemerality, of some of these social networks (and their textual productions), itself poses problems of translation. After all, an English radical is not the same as a French Jacobin or an Italian patriot. Especially as the revolution wore on, this dilemma of ‘indigenous’ versus ‘imported’ political identities was keenly felt by the revolutionaries themselves and became a key subject addressed in many of their translations. To better grasp how these distinct, but interrelated, movements interacted with one another and how they became changed through this interaction, it is necessary to track how different individuals and groups entered and exited the process of revolution at different times, contributing jointly to the construction of a shared, if differentiated, narrative of revolution.
Translation is a powerful resource for such a study. Moving away from notions of ‘influence’, recent scholarship has stressed how translation activates multiple reception horizons as it travels across space and time, thereby revealing the importance of aporias and resistances for understanding how cultural influence works in practice. But revolutions have their own temporalities that also need to be considered. In our own project, we have addressed this challenge by mapping our corpus of translation onto five different chronologies (reflecting the political contexts of Britain, Ireland, America, France, and Italy). These chronologies were not taken ‘off the shelf’ but were constructed by us to reflect a typography of events relevant for both translation activity and revolutionary history (examples of such events include regime change, censorship, and military action). By correlating people and their texts to events that challenged them, we can make inferences about what might trigger a renewed interest in translation, whether as a mode of overt communication or as a covert activity through which a translator may ‘hide’ behind another text or author.
This brings me to my final point: revolutions are often associated with the construction of ‘master narratives’. But, as I hope to demonstrate, it is more accurate to refer to activist translations as ‘metastatements’ or ‘metanarratives’ that always combine two or more chronologies. Understanding the role of these metanarratives is key to understanding the dual role of translation as both a catalyst for rupture with the past and a source of authority for the future.
The full article of this synopsis can be found here.
