The Poetics of Archaism: Victorian Translators of Old Norse and Persian Legends

Abstract

This dissertation develops an account of a poetics of archaism as encountered in the works of British translators who helped mediate Old Norse and Persian legends into English during the long nineteenth century. What these translations shared in common was the discovery of new antiquities in the North and the East rivalling Greco-Roman antiquity, but with greater geographical and linguistic distance. A sense of temporal and spatial distance was presented to nineteenth-century readers through various forms of poetic archaism and the practice of linguistic anachronism whereby translators deliberately invoked obsolete words in order to negotiate the perceived historical difference of their source texts. Through analysis of specific examples, the dissertation demonstrates a range of thinking about the affordances of archaism, the problem of translative equivalence, and perceptions and translations of historical alterity.

Moving beyond the paradigm of descriptive translation studies, the introductory chapter calls for reading nineteenth-century translations “otherwise.” The second chapter interrogates the conventional view of archaism as the quintessential modus of nineteenth-century translation practice and theory. Focusing on three mediations of the Shahnameh, the chapter finds in James Atkinson’s Soohrab (1814), Matthew Arnold’s Sohrab and Rustum (1853), and Helen Zimmern’s The Epic of Kings (1882) interrelated but distinct responses to the perceived remoteness of their Persian source text. The third chapter intervenes in standard accounts of William Morris’s practice as a translator of Old Norse literature by reconstructing a new context for his archaism; implicit in his preservationist activism is a distinct theory of historical translation committed, as demonstrated in an autograph manuscript of Harald the Hard-redy, to heterogeneous integrity and historical continuity. The fourth chapter compares how earlier translations of the Shahnameh and Old Norse sagas are recirculated as “translations of translations” in Edwardian books for children, for example in The Storybook of the Shah (1901) by Ella Constance Sykes, and in The Book of Rustem (1907) and Told by the Northmen (1908) by Ethel Mary Wilmot-Buxton. By reading the decorative covers alongside the literary content of their books, it is possible to see how such paratextual and intertextual elements variously erase or embrace the distance separating the triangulated source texts from Edwardian readers.

In thus compiling and reading an archive of Old Norse and Persian legends in translation, the dissertation investigates the practices of nineteenth-century translators and the diverse cultures of translation in which they participate, and it reveals old new ways of theorizing the task of the translator. It contributes to the study of Victorian poetry by illuminating the translative poetics of Matthew Arnold and William Morris, and it expands literary history by highlighting forgotten women of letters who played an integral role in popularizing Old Norse and Persian legends. The dissertation models a mode of self-reflective close reading that is attuned to the inventive textual, paratextual, and intertextual ways in which nineteenth-century archaizing translations recognize the otherness of their source texts and seek to make it visible.