Covid-19 has disrupted everything, including academic conferences, workshops and seminars. In the light of the necessary postponement of this year’s Translating Cultures workshop in Wolfenbüttel, Germany, I have chosen to suspend my series on Myths Concerning Republican Government for one month more in order to offer a brief account of the paper I would have given at that workshop, which reflects the new project that I am currently in the process of developing.
Scholarship on translation inevitably focuses on words. How are specific terms translated? How accurately does a translation convey the meaning and sentiment of a work? But what about the form in which those words are presented: what role does the genre that is used or the physical appearance of a text play in conveying meaning, indicating audience, and determining purpose; and what happens when a translation appears in a different form from the original? These are questions I had begun to ponder during previous Wolfenbüttel workshops.
Algernon Sidney, after Justus van Egmont, based on a work of 1663. National Portrait Gallery NPG 568. Reproduced thanks to a Creative Commons license.
For my contribution to our postponed third workshop I plan to explore these issues using Algernon Sidney's Discourses Concerning Government as a case study. Though an important seventeenth-century work with a long afterlife in England and abroad, the original 'text' was simply a collection of manuscript sheets found on Sidney's desk when he was arrested, in May 1683, for his alleged involvement in the Rye House Plot. In its journey from Sidney's desk to the French Revolution, where it generated particular interest, Discourses Concerning Government was transformed multiple times through the interventions of various collaborators.
The first stage of this was its publication as a physical book in 1698 by the editor John Toland and printer John Darby. In 1762, Thomas Hollis published a new edition in his 'Library of Liberty' and, a further thirty years on, Daniel Eaton followed suit with his own edition. Over the same period The Discourses established a French presence. Toland's edition was reviewed in the Huguenot periodical Nouvelles de la République des Lettres in 1699. Soon after, a French translation was produced by a Huguenot refugee Pierre-August Samson. It too was reviewed in Huguenot periodicals as well as being reprinted in 1755 and 1794. In 1789 Sidney's ideas were drawn to the attention of a wider French audience via Lettre de félicitation de milord Sidney aux Parisiens et à la nation françoise. Exploring the different stages of this text's journey, and changes in its form that occurred in the process, reveals interesting evidence about the relationship between the form and content of texts and translations.
The frontispiece to Toland and Darby’s 1698 edition of Sidney’s text. I am grateful to Gaby Mahlberg for providing me with this image.
First, the physical form of a text - its size, the quality of the paper, the sophistication of the frontispiece - offers indications as to its audience, purpose, and significance. Here there is a marked contrast between the different versions of The Discourses. The Toland and Hollis editions are large lavish volumes intended for the private libraries of the rich (Toland) or major university and public libraries (Hollis). Hollis went so far as to bind the works in his Library of Liberty in red leather and to emboss them with symbols of liberty such as the bonnet rouge. By contrast Daniel Eaton's edition was more modest, being part of a scheme by the London Corresponding Society to make available cheap versions of key political texts. In fact, Eaton not only published Sidney's text in full, but also included excerpts in his weekly periodical Politics for the People. The French translations too were generally smaller than Toland's original, perhaps reflecting the humble and transient lifestyle of Huguenots at the time.
Secondly, it is interesting to observe the connections these editors and translators saw between texts. Toland was largely responsible for the creation of a canon of English republican works and he deliberately associated Sidney's Discourses (written in the 1680s) with works produced during the English Revolution, emphasising their common themes. His 1704 reprint of the Discourses explicitly alerted readers to the fact that John Milton's, Edmund Ludlow's and James Harrington's works could also be found in Derby's shop. Similarly, Hollis's Library of Liberty set Sidney's text alongside works by Milton, Ludlow, Andrew Marvell and Marchamont Nedham; and the common binding used physical resemblance to reinforce the ideological connection. In sending collections of works to particular institutions Hollis was also able, as Mark Somos demonstrated to us last year, to use marginalia to create a trail of republican writings and to influence how they were read.
Pierre-August Samson’s 1702 French translation of Sidney’s Discourses. With thanks to Gaby Mahlberg for providing the image.
Thirdly there is the question of genre. Knowledge of Sidney in France came initially via the reviews in periodicals. Here, then, The Discourses was associated with Huguenot concerns - in particular Protestantism and resistance to absolute monarchy. How did this affect French readings of Sidney's text? And what about Lettre de félicitation de milord Sidney. This was not a translation, but a short work pretending that Sidney had returned from the dead to counsel the French. Presenting Sidney's ideas in the form of a letter addressed to the revolutionaries allowed those ideas to be targeted at their concerns. Content and form, then, are inextricably bound together. To fully understand the one - we must also pay close attention to the other.