Prismatic Jane Eyre E-Book

Andrés Claro

• Herausgeber: Open Book Publishers
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023

Beschreibung

Jane Eyre, written by Charlotte Brontë and first published in 1847, has been translated more than six hundred times into over sixty languages. Prismatic Jane Eyre argues that we should see these many re-writings, not as simple replications of the novel, but as a release of its multiple interpretative possibilities: in other words, as a prism.


Prismatic Jane Eyre develops the theoretical ramifications of this idea, and reads Brontë’s novel in the light of them: together, the English text and the many translations form one vast entity, a multilingual world-work, spanning many times and places, from Cuba in 1850 to 21st-century China; from Calcutta to Bologna, Argentina to Iran. Co-written by many scholars, Prismatic Jane Eyre traces the receptions of the novel across cultures, showing why, when and where it has been translated (and no less significantly, not translated – as in Swahili), and exploring its global publishing history with digital maps and carousels of cover images. Above all, the co-authors read the translations and the English text closely, and together, showing in detail how the novel’s feminist power, its political complexities and its romantic appeal play out differently in different contexts and in the varied styles and idioms of individual translators. Tracking key words such as ‘passion’ and ‘plain’ across many languages via interactive visualisations and comparative analysis, Prismatic Jane Eyre opens a wholly new perspective on Brontë’s novel, and provides a model for the collaborative close-reading of world literature.


Prismatic Jane Eyre is a major intervention in translation and reception studies and world and comparative literature. It will also interest scholars of English literature, and readers of the Brontës.

Leseprobe

Prismatic Jane Eyre

Prismatic Jane Eyre

Close-Reading a World Novel Across Languages

Matthew Reynolds

with Andrés Claro, Annmarie Drury, Mary Frank, Paola Gaudio, Rebecca Ruth Gould, Jernej Habjan, Yunte Huang, Abhishek Jain, Eugenia Kelbert, Ulrich Timme Kragh, Ida Klitgård, Madli Kütt, Ana Teresa Marques dos Santos, Cláudia Pazos-Alonso, Eleni Philippou, Yousif M. Qasmiyeh, Léa Rychen, Céline Sabiron, Kayvan Tahmasebian, and

Giovanni Pietro Vitali

https://www.openbookpublishers.com

© 2023 Matthew Reynolds with Andrés Claro, Annmarie Drury, Mary Frank, Paola Gaudio, Rebecca Ruth Gould, Jernej Habjan, Yunte Huang, Eugenia Kelbert, Ulrich Timme Kragh, Abhishek Jain, Ida Klitgård, Madli Kütt, Ana Teresa Marques dos Santos, Cláudia Pazos-Alonso, Eleni Philippou, Yousif M. Qasmiyeh, Léa Rychen, Céline Sabiron, Kayvan Tahmasebian and Giovanni Pietro Vitali. Copyright of individual essays and chapters is maintained by the author of each essay and chapter.

This work is licensed under an Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0). This license allows you to share, copy, distribute and transmit the text; to adapt the text for non-commercial purposes of the text providing attribution is made to the authors (but not in any way that suggests that they endorse you or your use of the work). Attribution should include the following information:

Matthew Reynolds et al., Prismatic Jane Eyre: Close-Reading a World Novel Across Languages. Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers, 2023, https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0319

Copyright and permissions for the reuse of many of the images included in this publication differ from the above. This information is provided in the captions and in the list of illustrations.

Every effort has been made to identify and contact copyright holders and any omission or error will be corrected if notification is made to the publisher.

All external links were active at the time of publication unless otherwise stated and have been archived via the Internet Archive Wayback Machine at https://archive.org/web

Digital material and resources associated with this volume are available at https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0319#resources

ISBN Paperback: 978–1-80064–842–5

ISBN Hardback: 978–1-80064–843–2

ISBN Digital (PDF): 978–1-80064–844–9

ISBN Digital ebook (EPUB): 978–1-80064–845–6

ISBN XML: 978–1-80064–847–0

ISBN HTML: 978–1-80064–848–7

DOI: 10.11647/OBP.0319

Cover image: © OpenStreetMap contributors created by Giovanni Pietro Vitali

Cover design by Katy Saunders

Contents

Acknowledgements 1

Prefatory Note 5

Illustrations 7

Introduction 11

Matthew Reynolds

I. Prismatic Translation and Jane Eyre as a World Work 21

Matthew Reynolds

II. The World Work in Language(s) 63

Matthew Reynolds

1. Jane, Come with Me to India: The Narrative Transformation of Janeeyreness in the Indian Reception of Jane Eyre 93

Ulrich Timme Kragh and Abhishek Jain

2. Who Cares What Shape the Red Room is? Or, On the Perfectibility of the Source Text 185

Paola Gaudio

3. Jane Eyre’s Prismatic Bodies in Arabic 209

Yousif M. Qasmiyeh

4. Translating the French in the French Translations of Jane Eyre 245

Céline Sabiron

III. Locating the Translations 269

Matthew Reynolds

5. Representation, Gender, Empire: Jane Eyre in Spanish 297

Andrés Claro

6. Commissioning Political Sympathies: The British Council’s Translation of Jane Eyre in Greece 369

Eleni Philippou

7. Searching for Swahili Jane 399

Annmarie Drury

8. The Translatability of Love: The Romance Genre and the Prismatic Reception of Jane Eyre in Twentieth-Century Iran 421

Kayvan Tahmasebian and Rebecca Ruth Gould

IV Close-Reading the Multiplicitous Text Through Language(s) 457

Matthew Reynolds

V. ‘Passion’ through Language(s) 479

Matthew Reynolds

9. A Mind of her Own: Translating the ‘volcanic vehemence’ of Jane Eyre into Portuguese 503

Ana Teresa Marques dos Santos and Cláudia Pazos-Alonso

10. The Movements of Passion in the Danish Jane Eyre 525

Ida Klitgård

11. Emotional Fingerprints: Nouns Expressing Emotions in Jane Eyre and its Italian Translations 547

Paola Gaudio

VI. ‘Plain’ through Language(s) 593

Matthew Reynolds

12. Proper Nouns and Not So Proper Nouns: The Poetic Destiny of Jane Eyre in Chinese 619

Yunte Huang

13. Formality of Address and its Representation of Relationships in Three German Translations of Jane Eyre 637

Mary Frank

14. Biblical Intertextuality in the French Jane Eyre 655

Léa Rychen

VII. ‘Walk’ and ‘Wander’ through Language(s); Prismatic Scenes; and Littoral Reading 679

Matthew Reynolds

15. Free Indirect Jane Eyre: Brontë’s Peculiar Use of Free Indirect Speech, and German and Slovenian Attempts to Resolve It 703

Jernej Habjan

16. ‘Beside myself; or rather out of myself’: First Person Presence in the Estonian Translation of Jane Eyre 723

Madli Kütt

17. Appearing Jane, in Russian 751

Eugenia Kelbert

VIII. Conclusions 777

Matthew Reynolds

Lives of Some Translators 781

List of Translations 799

Data and Code 859

Notes on the Co-Authors 867

Index 873

Acknowledgements

As you can see from the title page, this book is a collaborative publication, the fruit of a populous and intensely conversational project. It was funded from 2016 to 2020 by the AHRC as part of the Open World Research Initiative programme in Creative Multilingualism (led by Katrin Kohl), and hosted by the Oxford Comparative Criticism and Translation Research Centre (OCCT), which is itself sustained by The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities (TORCH) and St Anne’s College, and by a generous benefaction from Jane and Peter Aitken. I am very grateful for all this support.

Sowon S. Park, as co-investigator, helped define the project from its inception, as well as researching material relating to Korean. Alessandro Grilli, Yorimitsu Hashimoto, Adriana X. Jacobs, Magda Szpindler and Kasia Szymanska participated in the workshops, contributing ideas, as well as information on (respectively) Italian, Japanese, Hebrew, Mongolian and Polish. Emrah Serdan provided data on the Turkish translations; Hongtao Wang, and a team of students at Beijing Foreign Studies University, on the Chinese translations; Karolina Gurevich on the vast numbers of re-editions of translations in Russian; Sasha Mile Rudan on translations in Serbian and Croatian; Eunjin Choi on aspects of the reception of Jane Eyre in Korea; Vincent Thiery on aspects of the reception in France. The project has also benefited from the intellectual generosity of people not directly connected to it: Patricia González Bermúdez and Marta Ortega Sáez, who shared their expertise in the Spanish translations, Tom Cheesman, who contributed knowledge of the early German translations, Simone Landucci, who brought crucial know-how to the construction of the digital Time Map, and the rare-book expert Jay Dillon, who alerted us to several, otherwise-unknown early editions. I explored the Italian translations with a group of postdocs and postgraduate students in Pisa: Caterina Cappelli, Anna Ferrari, Martina Pastorini, Valeria Ferrà, Benedetta Dini, Chiara Andreoni, Maria Scarmato, Chiara Polimeni, Federica Marsili, Fabio Bassani, Marilena Martucci; I am grateful to them for their enthusiastic participation, and to Alessandro Grilli and the Università di Pisa for hosting me. I am also grateful to my lovely colleagues in the Creative Multilingualism programme for generating a heartening context in which to discuss the progress of the research.

Giovanni Pietro Vitali (the co-author of this volume who created the interactive digital maps) also had a crucial broader role, building the website through which our work was disseminated as it progressed: I am intensely recognizant of his verve and expertise.

The project, and this volume, have benefitted from much able research assistance. Rachel Dryden, postdoctoral research assistant in 2016–17, began the large task of assembling the list of Jane Eyre translations; Eleni Philippou (also a co-author of this volume) then stepped into the role and extended the research. Chelsea Haith, Valeria Taddei and Paul Raueiser helped clean publication data and digital texts; Erin Reynolds reconfigured the data for the digital Covers Maps; Michael Reynolds provided some key assistance with coding. Joseph Hankinson did more work on the list of translations, and gave careful editorial attention to the manuscript of this volume. Open Book Publishers called in no less than 19 peer reviewers, and the book has benefitted significantly from their attention, as also from that of Tania Demetriou who read parts of it at a yet later stage. I am enormously grateful to Alessandra Tosi for supporting the idea of this volume from its first glimmer onwards, and to everyone at Open Book for their work on its realisation, especially Jeremy Bowman, who dealt expertly with the many challenges posed by the typesettng.

Some pieces of writing associated with the project have been published elsewhere: Matthew Reynolds, ‘Jane Eyre Translated: 57 languages show how different cultures interpret Charlotte Brontë’s classic novel’, The Conversation, 27 September, 2019; Matthew Reynolds, ‘Through a Prism’, The Linguist, 59. 3 (June/July 2020), 18–19; Matthew Reynolds and Giovanni Pietro Vitali, ‘Mapping and Reading a World of Translations’, Digital Modern Languages Open, 1 (2021), http://doi.org/10.3828/mlo.v0i0.375; Eugenia Kelbert, ‘Appearances: Character Description as a Network of Signification in Russian Translations of Jane Eyre’, Target: International Journal of Translation Studies, 34.2 (2021), 219–250, https://doi.org/10.1075/target.20079.kel; Kasia Szymanska, ‘My Pale Rusalka, a True Heathen: Reading Polish Jane Eyre across Centuries’, in Retracing the History of Literary Translation in Poland: People, Politics, Poetics, ed. by Magda Heydel and Zofia Ziemann (London: Routledge, 2021), https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429325366. See also the blogposts and other media listed at https://www.creativeml.ox.ac.uk/research/prismatic-translation/.

Above all, I wish to acknowledge the generous and generative energies of collaboration. Authorship is a fuzzy category: all the co-authors of this book have contributed beyond the essays that bear their names, while everyone mentioned above has authored thoughts or information that have helped the volume into being. Of course, these contributions are recorded as far as possible in the text; but there is also a more diffuse shared perceptiveness and energy. I have done my best to honour and channel it in my chapters.

M. R.

Prefatory Note

Our copy-text for quotations from Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre is the Project Gutenberg e-book which is based on the edition published by Service & Paton in London in 1897, available at: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/1260/1260-h/1260-h.htm. Since this is an electronic text, in which the quotations can easily be located by searching, we do not give page numbers for the quotations; but we do give the chapter to help you locate them in a different edition if you prefer.

The Gutenberg text contains errors of transcription from the 1897 edition, and the 1897 edition itself includes slight variants from any of the editions published during Brontë’s lifetime (which also vary slightly among themselves). Quotations have been checked against the authorially sanctioned editions as represented in Jane Eyre, ed. by Jane Jack and Margaret Smith (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2016 [1969]) and any significant divergence has been noted.

Obviously the Gutenberg edition is not a reliable or authoritative text in the terms of traditional scholarship. Why then take it as our copy-text? For two reasons. First, it is readily available to you as a reader: if you wish to plunge in and read around any of the passages we discuss, it is easy for you to do so. And secondly, because the Gutenberg edition is a good representative of the textual condition from which translations arise. In the history of translation — and still today — translators rarely work from what literary scholarship would consider to be an authoritative text. Indeed, as Paola Gaudio shows in her investigation of this issue in Essay 2, the Gutenberg edition is itself increasingly being used as the source text for new translations. A ‘source’, then, is not a fixed point of origin to which translations orient themselves and from which they diverge. Rather, the source is itself a multiplicitous and shifting entity, which the translational imagination enters and re-makes. All the translations that we have been able to identify, including of course those from which we quote, are given in the List of Translations at the end of the volume. Our general principle for referencing translations has been that it would be repetitious to list them in the Works Cited at the end of each chapter and essay since they are easily locatable in the List of Translations. However, in the case of some essays, which focus on a distinctive subset of translations, it has seemed more helpful to give that subset also in the Works Cited.

Within the volume, the parts written by Matthew Reynolds are referred to as ‘chapters’ and numbered with Roman numerals. They lay the theoretical foundations, and develop an overarching argument about the close reading of Jane Eyre as a world work, articulating the perspective of the project as a whole. The parts written by the other co-authors are referred to as ‘essays’ and numbered with Arabic numerals. They focus on particular language-contexts and issues, exhibiting a variety of approaches in the arguments they pursue. Unless otherwise noted, English translations of quotations are by the author of the chapter or essay in which they appear.

M. R.

Illustrations

1.

A spare chamber. Images of the manuscript (London, British Library, MS 43474–6, vols. I–III), the 1850 edition (London: Smith, Elder & Co.) and the 1897 edition (London: Service & Paton) are courtesy of the © British Library Board. The 1850 edition was digitised by the Google Books project

p. 187

2.

Dusky pictures. Images of the manuscript (London, British Library, MS 43474–6, vols. I–III), the 1850 edition (London: Smith, Elder & Co.) and the 1897 edition (London: Service & Paton) are courtesy of the © British Library Board. The 1850 edition was digitised by the Google Books project

p. 195

3.

A wild man. Images of the manuscript (London, British Library, MS 43474–6, vols. I–III) and the 1850 edition (London: Smith, Elder & Co.) are courtesy of the © British Library Board. The 1850 edition was digitised by the Google Books project

p. 196

4.

Wild and mild. London, British Library, MS 43474–6, vols. I–III, courtesy of the © British Library Board

p. 198

5.

Enchaining stories. London, British Library, MS 43474–6, vols. I–III, courtesy of the © British Library Board

p. 199

6.

Blent, lips and head. London, British Library, MS 43474–6, vols. I–III, courtesy of the © British Library Board

p. 203

7.

The General Map, zoomed out to provide a snapshot of the global distribution of Jane Eyre translations. Created by Giovanni Pietro Vitali; © OpenStreetMap contributors

p. 271

8.

The ‘World Map’ zoomed in to show the distribution of Jane Eyre translations in Turkey, Greece, Albania, North Macedonia and Bulgaria. Created by Giovanni Pietro Vitali; maps © Thunderforest, data © OpenStreetMap contributors

p. 275

9.

The ‘World Map’, zoomed in to show the 1992 publication of Stanevich’s Russian translation in Krasnoyarsk, Siberia. Created by Giovanni Pietro Vitali; maps © Thunderforest, data © OpenStreetMap contributors

p. 277

10.

Time Map: translations 1848–53. Created by Giovanni Pietro Vitali and Simone Landucci; © OpenStreetMap contributors, © Mapbox

p. 281

11.

The Time Map, zoomed in to show intense Jane Eyre translation activity in China, South Korea, Taiwan and Nepal, 1992–97. Created by Giovanni Pietro Vitali and Simone Landucci; © OpenStreetMap contributors, © Mapbox

p. 284

12.

Time Map: translations 1945–50. Created by Giovanni Pietro Vitali and Simone Landucci; © OpenStreetMap contributors, © Mapbox

p. 285

13.

Cover image of Jeyn 'Eyr, trans. by Masʿud Barzin (Tehran: Maʿrefat, 1950)

p. 430

14.

Grouped emotions

p. 559

15.

Frequency of ‘emotion’ and its near-synonyms

p. 561

16.

Difference in frequency of emotion-nouns in English and Italian

p. 570

17.

Emotional fingerprint (i)

p. 574

18.

Emotional fingerprints (ii)

p. 575

19.

Emotional fingerprint (iii)

p. 576

20.

Emotional fingerprint of Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre

p. 581

21.

Translations of ‘plain’ and its derivatives in 13 Italian translations, researched and created by Caterina Cappelli

p. 594

22.

A prismatic visualization of the data presented in Figure 17, researched and created by Caterina Cappelli

p. 595

23.

Reprints and re-editions of the Gurova and Stanevich translations, researched and created by Karolina Gurevich

p. 773

The General Map https://digitalkoine.github.io/je_prismatic_generalmap/
Created by Giovanni Pietro Vitali; © OpenStreetMap contributors

The Time Map https://digitalkoine.github.io/translations_timemap/
Created by Giovanni Pietro Vitali and Simone Landucci;© OpenStreetMap contributors, © Mapbox

Introduction

© 2023 Matthew Reynolds, CC BY-NC 4.0 https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0319.01

Matthew Reynolds

Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre is not only a novel in English. It is a world work, co-existing in at least 618 translations, by at least as many translators, and spreading over an ever-extending period of years — currently 176 — into at least 68 languages. How can we grasp this vast phenomenon? What questions should we ask of it? With what tactics and tools? What kind of understanding can we hope to achieve? The large and multimodal text that lies before you presents some answers.

In doing so, it aims to contribute to several fields. To world literary studies, by showcasing the complexities inherent in the transnational circulation of a text through language difference, and uncovering the generativity of that process, which involves the imaginative energies of many people, and meshes with their historical moments and political commitments. To English literary studies, by revealing how extremely the reach of a text such as Jane Eyre, and therefore the contexts relevant to its interpretation, exceed the boundaries typically drawn around English literature and the English language: both kinds of ‘English’ are porous, continually tangling and merging with other literature(s) and language(s). To translation studies, by presenting, not only a massively detailed instance, but a corresponding theorisation of translation’s inevitably pluralising force, of its role in co-creating the work that is often thought of as simply ‘being translated’, and of why translation is best seen as happening, not between separate languages, but through a continuum of language difference.

Prismatic Jane Eyre presents some innovations in the methodology of literary history and criticism. It makes use of digital techniques, but braids them into longer-standing practices of literary-critical reading and literary-historical scholarship. Facing the start of this Introduction, you will see links to interactive maps of the kind associated with ‘distant reading’, as pioneered by Franco Moretti;1 and they will recur, in varying configurations, throughout the pages that follow. In the second half of the book, from Chapter IV onwards, you will also find interactive media of an almost opposite character: trans-lingual textual animations inspired by the digital media art of John Cayley.2 These elements both frame and connect the various literary-critical readings, each anchored in a different location, that are presented by the volume’s many co-authors. This intensely co-operative structure is our work’s main methodological step forward. The world is made of language difference, and any consideration of a text in world-literary contexts needs to address this fact. Reading collaboratively is a good way to do it, and we hope that the practice we present in this volume may serve as a model for the collaborative close reading of other texts in the world.

So large and varied a book, with so many co-authors, of course builds on many precedents: they are noted and engaged with throughout the chapters and essays that follow. But let me here, as a first orientation, indicate some of our main points of reference. Our overall approach learns from Édouard Glissant in seeing both literature and scholarship as participating in a ‘poétique de la relation’ [poetics of relatedness]. Our research is therefore not shaped by metaphors of conquest or discovery, but rather by the example of ‘l’errant’ [the wanderer] who ‘cherche à connaître la totalité du monde et sait déjà qu’il ne l’accomplira jamais’ [seeks to understand the totality of the world, all the while knowing that he will never manage it].3 Though we present a large amount of knowledge and discussion of Jane Eyre in world-literary contexts, there is a great deal more material that we have not been able to address, and which indeed could never be grasped in full. Selection is basic to our enterprise, and everything we provide here has a metonymic relationship, and therefore a partial one, to the larger phenomenon that is Jane Eyre as a world work. No doubt the study of any book, in any context, is always in some sense incomplete; but incompleteness is a pervasive and unignorable feature of the study of literature in world contexts.

The arguments of Francis B. Nyamnjoh have helped us to embrace this condition of our research. He notes that, in Africa, ‘popular ideas of what constitutes reality … are rich with ontologies of incompleteness’, and proposes that ‘such conceptions of incompleteness could enrich the practice of social science and the humanities in Africa and globally’. He advocates a ‘convivial scholarship’ which challenges labels that ‘oversimplify the social realities of the people, places and spaces it seeks to understand and explain’, which recognises ‘the importance of interconnections and nuanced complexities’, and which ‘sees the local in the global and the global in the local by bringing them into informed conversations, conscious of the hierarchies and power relations at play’.4 In focusing on (only) about 20 of the 68 or more languages spoken by the world Jane Eyre, and, for each of them, zooming in on only a few especially interesting or indicative translations, we have made the incompleteness of our project obvious. In this way, we assert the importance of recognising that the world Jane Eyre can never be fully known. It is possible to enter into, explore and sample the phenomenon, but not to possess it. It is true that I (Matthew Reynolds) have had what might be called a controlling interest in the project; I initiated and led it; I have edited the essays by my co-authors, and I have written the sequence of chapters that offer a grounding and summation of the research. Some sort of unifying propulsion was necessary for the work to have any coherence. But, at each stage, I have tried to open that propulsion to re-definition and re-direction by my co-authors (hence their being co-authors rather than contributors). I proposed a selection of passages, linguistic features and key words that we might look at together across languages in our practice of collaborative close reading, but that selection changed following input from the group. So also did the structure of this volume. The maps, constructed by Giovanni Pietro Vitali, present data that has been contributed by all the co-authors (and indeed many other participants in and friends of the project, as described in the Acknowledgements). Likewise, the translingual close-readings that I perform in Chapters IV–VII build on observations made by many of the co-authors, and others; as do the arguments about location that I make in Chapter III, and the conceptualization of translation that I offer in Chapters I and II. In writing these chapters, I have tried to honour and perform this plural authorship, shifting between the ‘we’ of the project and the ‘I’ of my own point of view, and opening up a dialogue with my co-authors. That conversation continues on a larger scale across the volume as a whole, in the interplay between the chapters and the essays, and between the written analyses and the visualisations. This dialogic structure embodies our conviction that the heterolingual and multiplicitous phenomenon of the world Jane Eyre cannot be addressed by translating it into a monolithic explanatory framework and homolingual critical language. While they meet in the comparative unity of this volume, and the shared medium of academic English, the readings, with their different styles, emphases, rhetorics and points of reference open onto a convivial understanding of differences, interconnections and complexities — they aim to generate Nyamnjoh’s ‘informed conversations’. Correspondingly, we have very much tried to avoid the imposition of pre-formatted labels onto our material. In the convivial progress of our research, the author of each essay was free to pursue whatever line seemed most interesting to them in their context, while our understanding of all the categories that organise our work, from ‘a translation’ (see Chapters I and II) to ‘an act of translation’ (see Chapter III) to ‘language(s)’ (see Chapter II) developed in response to the texts and situations we encountered.

Our work is also, of course, in dialogue with prominent recent voices in the anglophone and European literary academy. With Pascale Casanova, we rebut ‘le préjugé de l’insularité constitutive du texte’ [the assumption of the constitutive insularity of a text] and set out to consider the larger, transnational configurations through which it moves5 — though recognising, more fully than she does, that such configurations can never be known in their entirety, and that circulation can happen in intricate and unpredictable ways. We follow Wai Chee Dimock in realising that, not only ‘“American” literature’, but any literature is ‘a crisscrossing set of pathways, open-ended and ever multiplying, weaving in and out of other geographies, other languages and cultures’;6 and we agree with Dipesh Chakrabarty in paying ‘critical and unrelenting attention to the very process of translation’.7 Our conception of translation builds on research that has been published in Prismatic Translation (2019), which in turn is indebted to the work of many translation scholars — debts which are noted both there and here, throughout the pages that lie ahead. Prismatic Jane Eyre as a whole enacts in practice an idea of prismatic translation (briefly put, that translation inevitably generates multiple texts which ask to be looked at together), but what that means in theory can be conceived in different ways. Of what is to come, Chapter I develops the prismatic approach in dialogue with the essays in this volume, and with theorists writing in English, Italian and French; Essay 1, by Ulrich Timme Kragh and Abhishek Jain, offers a somewhat different conception, drawing on Indian knowledge traditions and theories of narrative and translation in Sanskrit and Hindi; Essay 8, by Kayvan Tahmasebian and Rebecca Ruth Gould, articulates its argument through Persian conceptions of genre; while Andrés Claro, in Essay 5, takes as his starting point what he calls ‘a critical conception of the different possible behaviours of language as a formal condition of possibility of representation and experience’. This plurality of points of view is a crucial element in our practice of convivial criticism. What Prismatic Jane Eyre offers is, not a variety of material channelled into a single explanatory structure, but rather a variety of material explored in a range of ways from different theoretical perspectives. It is in this respect that the work we present most differs from that of the figure in the European and North American academy who has most energised this project: Franco Moretti. We have learned from Moretti’s ambition to invent techniques for criticism with a wide transnational scope, and in particular from his use of cartography; but we differ decisively from his conviction that world literature can be mapped according to a single explanatory schema, a ‘world system’ with an inescapable ‘centre’ and ‘periphery’. Most of all, we depart from his view that close reading can have no place in the study of world literature, and that ‘literary history will … become “second-hand”: a patchwork of other people’s research, without a single direct textual reading’.8 This volume rebuts that assertion. To read closely means to attend to particularities: of individual style; of linguistic repertoire; of ideological commitments; of historical and geographical location. As I explain further in Chapter IV, and as will be evident throughout this volume, attending to particularities means doing something that is fundamental to world literary study: recognising and responding to difference.

Prismatic Jane Eyre is open to being explored in various ways. This ‘Introduction’ is really only the first section of a serial discussion which continues through Chapters I–VIII, in which I offer an account of Jane Eyre as a world work, addressing successively the theory of translation, conception of language(s) and idea of location that arise from it (Chapters I–III) before presenting a manifesto for multilingual close reading, with examples (Chapters IV–VII), and finally offering some conclusions (Chapter VIII). These chapters are in dialogue with the essays by which they are surrounded, which focus on particular contexts and issues. Each chapter serves as an introduction to the essays that follow it, and the sequence of the essays represents an evolution of theme. Those following Chapters I and II speak most immediately to the conceptualisation of language(s), translation and text. Ulrich Timme Kragh and Abhishek Jain, in ‘Jane, Come with Me to India: The Narrative Transformation of Janeeyreness in the Indian Reception of Jane Eyre’ offer a redefinition of the prismatic approach, drawing on knowledge traditions in Sanskrit and Hindi, before presenting an account of the interplay between translations and adaptations of Jane Eyre in many Indian languages. Paola Gaudio, in ‘Who Cares What Shape the Red Room is? Or, On the Perfectibility of the Source Text’, traces variants between successive English editions of Jane Eyre, and discovers how they have played out in Italian translations, showing that ‘the source text’ in fact consists of texts in the plural. In ‘Jane Eyre’s Prismatic Bodies in Arabic’, Yousif M. Qasmiyeh takes an Arabic radio version as the starting point for his argument that Jane Eyre is crucially an oral as well as a written work, and that this feature becomes especially charged in Arabic translations; while, in ‘Translating the French in the French Translations of Jane Eyre’, Céline Sabiron shows how French translators have been puzzled by the French that was already present in the language Brontë wrote.

The essays following Chapter III have most to do with location. In ‘Representation, Gender, Empire: Jane Eyre in Spanish’, Andrés Claro finds radical differences between the translations done in Spain and in hispanophone South America; while, in ‘Commissioning Political Sympathies: The British Council’s Translation of Jane Eyre in Greece’, Eleni Philippou showcases one particularly charged translation context from the Cold War. In ‘Searching for Swahili Jane’, Annmarie Drury investigates why Jane Eyre has not been translated into Swahili (and hardly at all into any African language); and, in ‘The Translatability of Love: The Romance Genre and the Prismatic Reception of Jane Eyre in Twentieth-Century Iran’, Kayvan Tahmasebian and Rebecca Ruth Gould demonstrate how a combination of place and political moment impart a distinctive generic identity to translations in late twentieth-century Iran.

The essays following Chapters IV and V, and interspersed by Chapters VI and VII, offer the most tightly focused close readings. After Chapter V’s discussion of ‘passion’ in many languages, you will find Ana Teresa Marques dos Santos and Cláudia Pazos-Alonso’s essay on ‘A Mind of her Own: Translating the “volcanic vehemence” of Jane Eyre into Portuguese’, Ida Klitgård’s on ‘The Movements of Passion in the Danish Jane Eyre’, and Paola Gaudio’s on ‘Emotional Fingerprints: Nouns Expressing Emotions in Jane Eyre and its Italian Translations’. After Chapter VI’s investigation of the many meanings of ‘plain’ come Yunte Huang’s essay on ‘Proper Nouns and Not So Proper Nouns: The Poetic Destiny of Jane Eyre in Chinese’, Mary Frank’s on ‘Formality of Address and its Representation of Relationships in Three German Translations of Jane Eyre’, and Léa Rychen’s on ‘Biblical Intertextuality in the French Jane Eyre’. Chapter VII, with its investigation of the distinction between ‘walk’ and ‘wander’ and of what becomes of it in different tongues, its presentation of two ‘prismatic scenes’, and its account of ‘littoral reading’, then opens onto three essays that attend to grammar and perception: Jernej Habjan’s ‘Free Indirect Jane Eyre: Brontë’s Peculiar Use of Free Indirect Speech, and German and Slovenian Attempts to Resolve It’, Madli Kütt’s ‘“Beside myself; or rather out of myself”: First Person Presence in the Estonian Translation of Jane Eyre’, and Eugenia Kelbert’s ‘Appearing Jane, in Russian’. After which, you will find some conclusions (Chapter VIII), information about the lives of some of the translators discussed, a list of the corpus of translations that we have worked from, and a link to the code that underlies the interactive maps and JavaScript animations.

Structured as it is by this sequencing of the chapters and essays, the volume has not been formally divided into sections, whether by theme or (for instance) by region, because to do that would be to impose exactly the kind of artificial neatness denounced by Nyamnjoh: close reading can be found in all the essays, as can attention to place and to the conceptualisation of the processes in play. The chapters are, in a sense, written by ‘me’ (Matthew Reynolds); but in writing them I am endeavouring to speak on behalf of the whole collaborative project, so the narrative voice shifts between more plural and more individual modes. The essays embody more consistently the distinctive styles and approaches of their authors.

Prismatic Jane Eyre is also represented by a website. Depending on when you are reading these words, the website may still be live at https://prismaticjaneeyre.org/, or it may be archived at https://web.archive.org/web/20231026144145/https://prismaticjaneeyre.org/. In either form, the website offers a quick way of sampling the project as a whole. What follows in this volume is obviously very much fuller, and perhaps it may seem a lot to read through from beginning to end. We invite you to follow the sequence of chapters and essays if you wish; but we invite you equally to hop, skip and wander as you will. Prismatic Jane Eyre offers, not the encapsulation of a phenomenon, but an opening onto it; and we hope that you, as a reader, may relish entering this incomplete exploration of Jane Eyre as a world work, just as we, as readers, and as writers of readings, have done.

Works Cited

Casanova, Pascale, La République mondiale des lettres, new edition (Paris: Seuil, 2008).

Cayley, John, Programmatology, https://programmatology.shadoof.net/index.php

Chakrabarty, Dipesh, Provincializing Europe Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference, new edition (Princeton, NJ.: Princeton University Press, 2008), https://doi.org/10.1515/9781400828654

Glissant, Edouard, Poétique de la relation (Paris: Gallimard, 1990).

Moretti, Franco, Distant Reading (London: Verso, 2013).

Nyamnjoh, Francis B., Drinking from the Cosmic Gourd: How Amos Tutuola can Change our Minds (Mankon, Bamenda, North West North West Region, Cameroon: Langaa Research & Publishing CIG, 2017), https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctvh9vw76

1Franco Moretti, Distant Reading (London: Verso, 2013).

2 John Cayley, Programmatology, https://programmatology.shadoof.net/index.php

3 Edouard Glissant, Poétique de la relation (Paris: Gallimard, 1990), p. 33.

4 Francis B. Nyamnjoh, Drinking from the Cosmic Gourd: How Amos Tutuola can Change our Minds (Mankon, Bamenda, North West Region, Cameroon: Langaa Research & Publishing CIG, 2017), pp. 2, 5.

5 Pascale Casanova, La République mondiale des lettres, new edition (Paris: Seuil, 2008), p. 19.

6 Wai Chee Dimock, Through Other Continents: American Literature across Deep Time (Princeton, NJ.: Princeton University Press, 2006), p. 3.

7 Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference, new edition (Princeton, NJ.: Princeton University Press, 2008), p. 17.

8Moretti, Distant Reading, pp. 48–49.

The World Map https://digitalkoine.github.io/je_prismatic_map
Created by Giovanni Pietro Vitali; maps © Thunderforest, data © OpenStreetMap contributors

The Time Map https://digitalkoine.github.io/translations_timemap
Created by Giovanni Pietro Vitali and Simone Landucci;© OpenStreetMap contributors, © Mapbox

I. Prismatic Translation and Jane Eyre as a World Work

© 2023 Matthew Reynolds, CC BY-NC 4.0 https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0319.02

Matthew Reynolds

Translations Among Other Texts

The corpus of translations that we have (variably, selectively) explored is vast. Using blunt, quantitative terms which I will qualify in the pages that follow, we can speak of 618 ‘translations’ over 176 ‘years’ into 68 ‘languages’: in short — or rather in long, in very long — a textual multitude of something like 100,000,000 words. Yet this enormous body of material is only a subset of the even larger array of texts — both written and in other media — that have been generated by Jane Eyre in one way or another, including adaptations, responses and critical discussion (this publication takes its place among that multitude). There are at least fifty films going back to the earliest days of cinema, most of them in English but with versions also in Arabic, Czech, Dutch, German, Greek, Hindi, Hungarian, Italian, Kannaḍa, Mandarin, Mexican Spanish, Tamil and Telugu.1 There have been TV series and adaptations for radio, again in many moments, languages and locations.2 A series of powerful lithographs from the novel has been made by the Portuguese artist Paula Rego. Now there are fan fictions, blogs and at least one vlog, and erotic mash-ups which interleave Brontë’s text with throbbing scenes of passion.3 Back in the mid-nineteenth century — indeed, almost as soon as it was published — the novel was being re-made for the stage. The most influential dramatization was Charlotte Birch-Pfeiffer’s Die Waise aus Lowood [The Orphan of Lowood] of 1853: it neutered the scandalous heart of the book by changing Bertha from Mr Rochester’s own wife to that of his dead brother; she also becomes the mother of Adèle. Over the ensuing decades this play was much performed, in German and other languages, across Europe, the UK and the USA, lending its title also to many translations of the novel.4 In India, as Ulrich Timme Kragh and Abhishek Jain show in Essay 1 below, Jane Eyre was freely re-written first in Bengali and then in Kannada, as Sarlā [সরলা] by Nirmmalā Bālā Soma [নির্ম্মালা বালা সোম] and Bēdi Bandavaḷu [ಬೇಡಿ ಬಂದವಳು] by Nīla Dēvi [ನೀಳಾ ದೇವಿ] in 1914 and 1959 respectively, well before it was translated.5 And of course Jane Eyre has had a pervasive, energising influence on English-language literary writing, from Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Aurora Leigh (1856) to Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw (1898), from Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca (1938) to Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), together with a scattering of more recent fiction, such as Tsitsi Dangarembga’s Nervous Conditions (1988), Jamaica Kincaid’s Lucy (1990), Ali Smith’s Like (1997), Leila Aboulela’s The Translator (1999) and Aline Brosh McKenna and Ramón K. Pérez’s graphic novel Jane (2018).

Alongside these — and many more — proliferating imaginative responses, the novel has always generated vigorous critical discussion, from excited early reviews, through percipient comments by twentieth-century writers such as Virginia Woolf and Adrienne Rich, to the explosion of academic scholarship and criticism which has, since the 1970s, found in Jane Eyre a focus for Marxist, feminist and postcolonial literary theories, for research in literature and science and — more recently — for renewed formalist analysis and approaches rooted in environmental and disability studies.6 Perhaps the most decisive intervention in this critical afterlife was made by Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar in 1979, with their argument that Mr Rochester’s mentally ill and imprisoned first wife, Bertha, who inspired their book’s title, The Madwoman in the Attic, is Jane’s ‘double’: ‘she is the angry aspect of the orphan child, the ferocious secret self Jane has been trying to repress ever since her days at Gateshead’.7 This interpretation can seem a key to the novel, making sense of its mix of genres as a sign of internal conflict. Jane Eyre describes — in a realist vein — the social conditions that make it impossible for Jane fully to act upon or even to articulate her desires and ambitions in her own speaking voice as a character; but it also enables those same unruly energies to emerge through the gothic elements of the text that she is imagined as having written — her Autobiography (as the book’s subtitle announces it to be).

Another influential line of analysis was launched by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, who in 1985 offered a sharp critique of the role that Bertha, a ‘native subaltern female’, is made to fulfil. For Spivak, Bertha is ‘a figure produced by the axiomatics of imperialism’, a manifestation of the ‘abject … script’ of the colonial discourse that pervaded the linguistic and imaginative materials Brontë had to work with. Across the continuum of imagining between Jane Eyre and Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, this figure (re-named Antoinette in Rhys’s novel) serves as ‘an allegory of the general epistemic violence of imperialism, the construction of a self-immolating colonial subject for the glorification of the social mission of the colonizer’. Jane’s happiness, therefore, comes at the expense of colonial subjects: Spivak takes this to reveal a blindness in readings such as Gilbert and Gubar’s, and more generally in the discourses of Anglo-American feminist individualism.8

Like The Madwoman in the Attic, Spivak’s text generated a cascade of quotation and reprinting, as well as of critical contention which pointed to elements of the novel that it downplays. As Susan L. Meyer noted, Bertha, who is identified as a ‘Creole’ in Jane Eyre, is not a straightforwardly representative ‘native subaltern’ since she comes from a rich, white, slave-owning family.9Spivak’s response was that her argument still held since ‘the mad are subaltern of a special sort’; more interestingly, she suggested that the simplicities of her analysis, as first put forward, had contributed to its popularity among students and readers of the novel: ‘a simple invocation of race and gender’ was an easier interpretation to adopt than one that would do more justice to the complicated social identities of the participants.10 This observation indicates how critical analysis, readers’ reactions and indeed imaginative re-makings have intertwined in Jane Eyre’s afterlife, creating a vivid instance of a general phenomenon that has been described by Roland Barthes:

Le plaisir du texte s’accomplit … lorsque le texte ‘littéraire’ (le livre) transmigre dans notre vie, lorsqu’une autre écriture (l’écriture de l’autre) parvient à écrire des fragments de notre propre quotidienneté, bref quand il se produit une coexistence.[Textual pleasure occurs when the ‘literary’ text (the book) transmigrates into our life, when another writing (the writing of the other) goes so far as to write fragments of our own everyday lives, in short, when a coexistence comes into being.]11

Many readers have embraced Jane Eyre in this way, and it is evident that the pleasure of such imaginative coexistence comes, not only from agreement, but also from contestation — as for instance when Jean Rhys’s passionate involvement with the book led her to re-write it from Bertha’s point of view, an imaginative reaction that helped Spivak to frame her critical position. And that critical position has, in turn, both affected readers’ views and nourished new creative responses, such as Jamaica Kincaid’s novel Lucy (1990), in which the governess figure (a modern au pair) is herself from the West Indies. There is a similar chain of creativity prompting criticism prompting further creativity in the way Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), which echoes Jane Eyre’s Bertha in its imagining of a monstrous, hidden figure (Hyde), anticipates Gilbert and Gubar’s argument when it joins that figure with an apparently irreproachable public one (Jekyll) to form a single conflicted self. And, again, Gilbert and Gubar’s critical reading has fed into new creative work, such as Polly Teale’s play Jane Eyre (1998), where Bertha always accompanies Jane on stage,12

A peculiarity of the critico-creative afterlife that I have just sketched is the overwhelming monolingualism of its range of attention. As Lynne Tatlock has noted in her recent study, Jane Eyre in German Lands, what has become of the novel in the ‘German-speaking realm remains terra incognita for most scholars working in English’,13 and the same is true of translations and responses in all other languages. Together with the (few) studies there have been of them,14 they tend to be treated as something separate from the real business of understanding and re-imagining the novel. It is writing in English (so the assumption goes) that has the power to determine what Jane Eyre means, and to give it ongoing life in culture: what happens in other tongues is taken to be necessarily secondary, a pale imitation that can safely be ignored. Yet Tatlock’s book is full of illumination, not only of German culture, but also of Jane Eyre. I hope the same is true of the pages that follow; that, as they trace the book’s metamorphoses through translation, and across time and place, they also offer a refreshed and expanded understanding of Jane Eyre — Jane Eyre ‘in itself’, I would say, were it not that, as we have begun to see with the book’s afterlife in English, it is impossible to hold a clear line between the book ‘in itself’, on the one hand, and what has been made of it by readers and interpreters on the other. Interventions like those by Rhys and Spivak change what Jane Eyre is; this is no less the case if they happen to be in other languages, and to have been made by translators. After all, translators are especially intimate interpreters and re-writers, who must pay attention to every word.

As we will discover, Jane Eyre has been read and responded to at least as often, and just as intensely, in languages other than English; and the way the novel has metamorphosed in translation has sharp relevance to the critical issues I have just sketched (and indeed many others, as we will see). When considering Jane Eyre’s feminism, it matters that it was translated by a Portuguese avant-garde feminist for serialization in an alternative Lisbon periodical in the late 1870s, and that it was connected to women’s liberation movements in Latin America in the mid-twentieth century (see Essay 9 below, by Ana Teresa Marques dos Santos and Cláudia Pazos-Alonso, and Essay 5 by Andrés Claro). When considering the representation of Bertha, what has been made of that representation by readers in the Global South, and how they have re-made it through translation, is clearly an issue of some pertinence (see again Essay 5, as well as Essay 1 by Ulrich Timme Kragh and Abhishek Jain, and Essay 3 by Yousif M. Qasmiyeh).

There are material reasons why these connections have not come into focus until now. It takes a particular conjunction of institutional support and technological development to sustain the degree of collaboration and breadth of reference that are presented in these pages. Yet the material conditions that have hampered work like this in the past have also embodied and sustained a particular ideological stance: a belief in the separateness and self-sufficiency of standard languages, especially English, and a corresponding misunderstanding and under-valuation of the interpretive, imaginative, dialogic power of translation. Some recent work in translation studies and comparative and world literary studies has pushed to reconfigure this regime of ‘homolingual address’, as Naoki Sakai has defined it, creating alternatives to what Suresh Canagarajah has called ‘monolingual orientation’ in literary criticism — that is, the assumption (despite all everyday experiential evidence to the contrary) that the default interpretive context, for any work under discussion, possesses ‘a common language with shared norms’.15Prismatic Jane Eyre, in redefining the novel as a multilingual, transtemporal and nomadic work, shares also in the endeavour to open up critical discussion to more diverse voices. I will return to the theory of language that permeates and emerges from this approach in Chapter II.

The proliferation of textuality generated by Jane Eyre that I have sketched — the carnival of critique, reading, re-making, reaction, response, and adaptation — matters to the translations of the novel, and they in their turn should be recognised as part of it. As André Lefevere has pointed out, people’s idea or ‘construct’ of a given book comes, not from that book in isolation, but from a plethora of sources:

That construct is often loosely based on some selected passages of the actual text of the book in question (the passages included in anthologies used in secondary or university education, for instance), supplemented by other texts that rewrite the actual text in one way or another, such as plot summaries in literary histories or reference works, reviews in newspapers, magazines, or journals, some critical articles, performances on stage or screen, and, last but not least, translations.16

Translations enter into this larger flow of re-writing and re-making, and they are also affected by it, as indeed all the different currents in the ongoing cultural life of the novel may affect one another. Such currents influence the interpretive choices translators make and the way the finished books are marketed and read. They can even bring translations into being: for instance, a successful film version will typically trigger new translations. Jane Eyre is therefore a paradigmatic instance of the argument I made in Prismatic Translation (2019) that translation should always be seen as happening, not to one text, but among many texts.17 The textuality that flows into any given act of translation may include the whole range of other kinds of re-creation; it may also encompass many other sources such as related books in the receiving culture, histories, dictionaries and so on.18

In these pages, we follow Lefevere in seeing any translation of Jane Eyre as happening among the larger penumbra of versions and responses: they will be referred to and discussed at many points in the chapters and essays that follow. Nevertheless, we draw more of a distinction than he does, albeit a porous and pragmatic one, between all this critical and creative ongoing life and the focus of our investigation, which is the co-existence of the novel in its many translations. For the purposes of our study, we adopt the following rules of thumb for deciding whether to count a given text as a Jane Eyre translation. It should be a work intended primarily for reading, whether on page or screen. So we draw a line between the translations that are our focus and the re-makings in other media — such as films, radio versions, and plays — that are less central to our enquiry. It should be a work of prose fiction, so we distinguish between translations on the one hand and reviews and critical discussions on the other. And it should be a work that is offered and/or taken as representing Jane Eyre — indeed, as beingJane Eyre — for its readers in the receiving culture. So the translations are separated out from responses like Wide Sargasso Sea, or versions like Jane Eyrotica or Lyndsay Faye’s Jane Steele (which shadows the plot of Jane Eyre, though the heroine is a murderer). Some of these Eyre-related books have been translated into other languages — erotic versions have had some success in Russia, for instance19 — but such translations are not translations of Jane Eyre, any more than the versions and responses themselves are. Readers of such texts know that what they are getting is something different from Jane Eyre — indeed, that is why they are reading them.

Another way of describing the (porous, pragmatic) line that we draw is that it distinguishes between translation without an article — the loose, variously fluid and figurative phenomenon — from translation with an article, ‘a translation’, that is, a whole work which stands in a particular relationship to another whole work. The entire penumbra of versions and responses can be said to involve translation-without-an-article: for instance, these texts might include translated snippets of dialogue or passages of description, or they might ‘translate’ (in a loose sense) elements of the source into different genres or locations. To adopt the Indian philosophical terms expounded by Ulrich Timme Kragh and Abhishek Jain in Essay 1 below, ‘the dravya (substance) Jane Eyre can be said to exist in different paryāy (modalities) of the source text, adaptations, and translations, which all are pariṇām (transformations) sharing a quality of janeeyreness’. But within this larger range, any text that offers itself as ‘a translation’ is subjected to a tighter discipline. It takes on the task of being the novel Jane Eyre for its readers.

Nevertheless, this distinction has to be pragmatic and porous because what it is for a text to ‘be the novel Jane Eyre for its readers’ is not something that can be determined objectively or uncontentiously, especially not when a wide range of different languages and cultures, with varying translational practices, are taken into account. For instance, an immediate and blatant exception to our rules of thumb is the Arabic radio version by Nūr al-Dimirdāsh, first broadcast in 1965. As Yousif M. Qasmiyeh explains in Essay 3 below, this translation reached a ‘wide and popular audience across the Arabic speaking region’, where access to books ‘was restricted by a range of socio-economic and educational barriers’. It also had a significant influence on later print translations. So, in this context, where radio is doing some of the same cultural work as might be done by print elsewhere, it seems best to count al-Dimirdāsh’s text as a translation. Even with texts that are indubitably printed, uncertainties of definition arise. Indeed, they flourish. Back in 2004, Umberto Eco proposed what looks like it might be an effective — if broad-brush — quantitative measure for distinguishing a text that is a translation from one that is not:

In terms of common sense I ask you to imagine you have given a translator a printed manuscript in Italian (to be translated, let us say, into English), format A4, font Times Roman 12 point, 200 pages. If the translator brings you back, as an English equivalent of the source text, 400 pages in the same format, you are entitled to smell some form of misdemeanour. I believe one would be entitled to fire the translator before opening his or her product.20

Yet, if we applied this principle to our corpus, the number of translations would be radically reduced, not because any of them are twice as long as Brontë’s English Jane Eyre but because many of them are twice as short, or even shorter. We count such abridged texts as translations by following our rules of thumb: they are intended primarily for reading; they are prose fiction; and they take on the work of being Jane Eyre for their readers. In this, we are adopting the classic approach of Descriptive Translation Studies, seeking not to impose on our material an idea of what translation ought to be, but rather to observe and understand what it has been and is: in the words of Gideon Toury, to view translations as ‘Facts of a “Target” Culture’, and to ‘account for actual translational behaviour and its results’.21

It follows that a kind of text that counts as a translation in one culture might not if it appeared in another. In France, there is nothing quite like the first Chinese translation, done by Shoujuan Zhou [周瘦鹃] in 1925, with the title 重光记 [Chong guang ji; Seeing Light Again]: it is only 9,000 characters in length, and cuts many episodes, as suggested by the titles of its four parts: ‘(1) Strange Laugh; (2) Budding Love; (3) Mad Woman; (4) Fruit of Love’.22 Perhaps the nearest French equivalent is that early French review which delighted Charlotte Brontë, written by Eugène Forcade for the Revue des deux mondes in 1848: it is 24 pages long, so about 10,000 words, and it includes a full summary of the novel together with close translation of selected passages. Brontë called this review ‘one of the most able — the most acceptable to the author of any that has yet appeared’, observing that ‘the specimens of the translation given are on the whole, good — now and then the meaning of the original has been misapprehended, but generally it is well rendered’.23 There is no doubt that both texts are involved in translation-without-an-article. And if we were to take them, the Chinese translation and the French review, abstract them as much as possible from their respective cultures and look at them side by side, we might well conclude that the review gives the fuller impression of what Brontë wrote.

But readers of the Revue des deux mondes did not think they were being offered a translation. They knew they were reading a review — not only because Forcade frames and permeates the summary and extracts with his own opinions of the novel and indeed of much else, including the 1848 French revolution, but also because, for mid-nineteenth-century French readers, reviews were established as a genre distinct from translations: though a review might well include passages of translation, it was not itself a translation. The 1925 Shanghai publication, on the other hand, was part of a ferment of translation of English and European texts in China in the early decades of the twentieth century, during which there was also much debate about different modes of translation and the language appropriate to it. A range of kinds of text were therefore received under the umbrella term yi譯 (translation), with重光记 [Chong guang ji; Seeing Light Again] among them.24 So, unlike the French review, the Chinese text is a piece of fictional writing that is offered and taken as being a translation, as bodying forth Jane Eyre for its readers; and in fact it was the only text in Chinese that did so until the publication of a fuller version ten years later: 孤女飘零记 [Gunv piaolingji; Record of a Wandering Orphan] by Wu Guanghua [伍光建]. So it seems to make best sense to count Chong guang ji as a translation, while not counting Forcade’s review.

Given all this variability and overlap, why seek to distinguish translations from other kinds of re-writing at all? One reason is that it enables us to count them, and to locate them in time and space, and therefore to create the interactive maps and other visualisations that I present in Chapter III. Even though the category that we have defined is fuzzy, there is still value in mapping it, and especially so when the synoptic picture provided by the maps is nuanced by the detailed local investigations conducted in the essays. A second reason has to do with the kind of close reading that translations embody and enable. Because translations stick so tightly to the source text, trying to mean the same, or do the same, with different linguistic materials in different times and places, they repay very close comparative attention. As Jean-Michel Adam has observed:

La traduction présente … l’immense intérêt d’être une porte d’accès à la boîte noire de la lecture individuelle et secrète qui fait que le même livre est non seulement différent pour chaque lecteur, mais qu’il change même à l’occasion de chaque relecture et retraduction.25[Translation has the enormous interest of giving us an entry into the black box of individual, secret reading which causes the same book, not to be only different for each reader, but to change with every re-reading and re-translation.]

Clive Scott has made a similar point: ‘translation is a mode of reading which gives textual substance to reader response’.26 Because this substantiated reader response, this metamorphic reading and re-reading, translation and re-translation, is done in different moments, cultures and languages, it also gives us a uniquely precise view of the gradations and entanglements of historical, cultural and linguistic difference. This will be amply illustrated in the chapters and essays to come.

The third reason, which follows closely from the second, is that it is only by distinguishing translations from the mass of other Eyre-related textuality that we can bring into focus the distinctive, paradoxical challenge that — like translations of any text—they pose to understanding and interpretation. A translation stakes a claim to identity with the source text: to beJane Eyre for the people who read it. And yet that claim is in many respects obviously false, most obviously of all, of course, in the fact that the translated Jane Eyre is in a different language. Pretty much every word, every grammatical construction, and every implied sound in a translation will be different from its counterpart in the source. What is strange is that it is in practice this blatant and unignorable difference which enables the claim to identity to be made. It is the perception of language difference that generates the need to be able to say or write something that counts as the same in a different language; and it is the reality of language difference that enables a translation to take the place of its source, since the source will be, for many readers in the receiving culture, difficult or impossible to understand. So, paradoxically, the claim to identity is made possible by the very same factor that announces it to be untrue. To quote again from Prismatic Translation, the book that provides much of the theoretical groundwork for Prismatic Jane Eyre, this is ‘the paradox of all translation’.27

From the 1850s onwards, that is, in the early years of Jane Eyre’s expanding life in translation, this paradox was confronted by European lawyers, who were trying to establish international copyright agreements that would include translations. As a scholar of the issue, Eva Hemmungs Wirtén, has put it:

The crux was that the international author-reader partnership also required the multiplication of authorship, and when the need for another author — a translator — was a prerequisite for reaching new readers, the work in question was in danger of alienation from the author. Something happened when a text moved from one language into another, but exactly what was it? Was it reproduction only, or creation of a new work, or rewriting?28

The debates culminated in the