To a far greater degree than many of us have yet realized, late-nineteenth-century women's poetry may be a poetry of alien homelands: of cultural spaces, that is, in which the domestic proves alien, even as technically alien territory comes to represent some form of home. And partly for this reasosn, to explore poetry in English may require moving not only beyond Britain, but also beyond English itself. Think, for example, of Christina Rossetti, who composed poems in Italian; of Mathilde Blind, with her German accent and translation of the French edition of the Journal of Marie Bashkirtseff; of Agnes Mary Frances Robinson Darmesteter Duclaux, whose poetry preceded a long, successful career of writing in great part in and for the French; of Louisa S. Bevington Guggenberger, with her German home and husband; or, for that matter, of nineteenth-century India's first influential English-speaking woman poet, Toru Dutt. As generations of Indian critics have stressed, as early anthologizer E. C. Stedman made clear, and as certain editors of recent nineteenth-century poetry collections have also acknowledged, Dutt's writing played a suggestive role within late-century understandings of “British literature.”¹

Indeed, even now, growing attention to her work is helping extend our conception of the geographical origins of “Victorian” poetry from Britain to Bengal. Still, if we are to develop a full exploration of Dutt's cultural presence, we may need to move further as well, connecting Indo-Anglian literature to that of France.

In one of my favorite moments of Dutt's novel Bianca. Or the Spanish Maiden, the young Bianca's father becomes so incensed during an argument with her British suitor that he drops both his own native language and that of his opponent. “Garcia spoke French,” the narrator explains, “whenever he was excited” (283).²

Coming from a Dutt, and particularly from this Dutt, the casual comment is telling. For though, as Meenakshi Mukherjee has taught us, Dutt's locutions and locations both render her an emphatically Bengali writer,³ in a Dutt family context, to be Bengali was also to be what one of Toru Dutt's biographers terms “a child of the international world.”⁴ Dutt's grandfather Rasamoy Dutt, for example, was “an enthusiastic pupil of English literature,” possessed of what has been described as a “‘splendid collection of English books’” (Gupta 17–18); her poet-father, Govin Chunder Dutt, published The Dutt Family Album, the first anthology of English poetry written by Bengalis;⁵ and her mother, Kshetramoni Mitter, confirmed a hard-fought conversion to Christianity by publishing her own Bengali translation of a book entitled The Blood of Jesus with the Tract and Book Society of Calcutta (Gupta 17–19; Das, Life 7).

Transnationalism and translation, then, were part of Dutt's familial heritage; and they played an even more dramatic role in her particular upbringing and career. Sheltered, constricted, yet in many ways deeply cosmopolitan, Dutt's already unusual education took a dramatic leap in 1869, when, four years after the death of her fourteen-year-old brother Abju, Govin Chunder Dutt took his remaining children, Toru and her sister Aru, to Europe. For Bengali women, such a trip was unprecedented; and it seems to have been thoroughly joyous (Das, Life 19). In the Spring of 1870, after a period during which Toru and Aru studied French at a pensionnat in Nice, the Dutts moved to England, where they spent time in London and then, between 1871 and 1873, settled in Cambridge. Here, as Toru and Aru continued their French studies, they also engaged more directly with British intellectual life, attending the “Higher Lectures for Women” and meeting with English feminists including Anne Jemima Clough.⁶

This period was clearly transformative. Indeed, by the time the Dutts returned to Calcutta in 1873, Toru and Aru had already embarked upon what would become a project ambitious enough to draw on all their recent learning (Das, Life 289): a series of translations of French poetry, primarily contemporary, for an English-speaking public. As those familiar with Dutt's biography may recall, however, the relative critical success of the result, A Sheaf Gleaned in French Fields (1876), proved an occasion for sorrow as well as celebration. For though the volume was well received, garnering praise from a number of critics including Edmund Gosse,⁷ Aru Dutt, who was already ill with tuberculosis by the time the Dutts returned to Calcutta, had lived to translate only a few poems before dying in 1874 (Gupta 20). Toru herself was already suffering from the same disease. By 1877, she, too, would be dead, at the age of twenty-one, leaving behind an impressive, idiosyncratic publication record whose extent we may not even yet fully realize. Only through her posthumous Ancient Ballads and Legend of Hindustan (1882) would Dutt make her name as a poet in her own right; and indeed, most of her fame still rests upon this volume, with its series of nine original narrative poems based on the Ramayana and the Mahabharata, and the Vishnu Purana⁸ and seven original compositions.⁹

In many contexts, it has proved tempting to read Dutt's final volume as a form of homecoming. After all, Dutt's revisions of Hindu narratives seem to draw both on the beloved vernacular stories of her mother and on the classical Sanskrit studies she undertook with her father. Moreover, the “Miscellaneous Poems” poems that close Ancient Ballads and Legends seem even more strongly autobiographical. From “Near Hastings,” with its evocation of the gift of English roses “large as lotus flowers” (26); to “Sonnet. – Baugmaree” and “Our Casuarina Tree,” with their explicit celebration of the lush gardens of the Dutt family home near Calcutta; to the haunting “Tree of Life,” which Govin Chunder Dutt linked to an incident in his daughter's life (Das, Life 339), these seem to be explicitly personal – and thoroughly contemporary – reflections. That so intimate a volume should have been written in English may seem surprising; still, as Mukherjee's recent work underscores, Dutt's linguistic choice links her to many of her contemporaries.¹⁰

In defining “the ‘vernaculars’” as “the repository of interiority and imagination, and English as a rational tool for polemics and persuasion,” Mukherjee suggests, many critics of early English-educated Indian writers may have failed “to take into account how English seeped into the intimate and personal domains” of writers “of the elite classes – the class from which writers in all the languages emerged.”¹¹ In Toru Dutt's India, where English itself was already, as Malashri Lal puts it, “neither indigenous nor alien” (4), determining the language of intimacy – of “home” or of “getting excited” – may have been as difficult for a female writer as for some of the male novelists whose work Mukherjee addresses.

Perhaps, then, the poet did indeed partly come “home” in her final book: home, that is, to a multiply translated realm within which popular Bengali, Sanskrit, and English traditions claimed intimate place. If so, however, she also came “home” to France. For two of the alleged “ancient ballads and legends of Hindustan” are, in fact, French patriotic poems; and at least one, “France. 1870,” seems clearly linked to its author's passionate response to the immediate upheavals of the Franco-Prussian war. “Not dead, – oh, no, – she cannot die!” this poem begins, conjuring up a fallen national figure who seems close to drowning in her own blood (1, 8). France swoons here, as “Levite England passes her by,”¹²

and in the process, “Thought, Freedom, Truth” seem nearly “quenched” (3, 13). For France is, Dutt insists, “Head of the human column”: without her, “whence then shall Hope arise for us”? (11, 14). With the entire “human column” at stake, one can hardly be surprised to find the poem turning to celebration as Dutt's heroine finally stirs, “fire in her glance” (16). Dare “Attila's own exultant horde” jeer her now? (20). “Strong once more for the battle-fray,” France ultimately stands, as from her brow “gleams bright the star” that “lightens the world” (21–24). “Bow, nations, bow,” the poem concludes: “Let” France “again lead on the way!” (24–25). So much for reading Dutt's work as merely a negotiation between British imperial centers and peripheries.

Indeed, with a slight shift in perspective, even the opening “miscellaneous poem” of Ancient Ballads and Legends, “Near Hastings,” seems bent on triangulating national and imperial identities. Here, in a spontaneous act of kindness toward two Indian strangers, “one, in pain,” a woman gently offers red roses to the speaker and her sister – after, that is, asking whether they are “from France” (19–20). In yet another poem, Dutt moves further, beyond allusion to France, or even discussion of French politics, into the French language itself. More explicitly invoking the powerful Revolutionary figure of Marianne, which surely stands behind that in “France. 1870,” this poem, “On the Fly-Leaf of Erckmann-Chatrian's Novel Entitled ‘Madame Thérèse,’” opens by recounting how the novel's courageous Revolutionary heroine and her small brother lead the Republican forces in storming a Prussian-held bridge.¹³

Quickly, then, Dutt shifts focus, to call up a scene of reading whose claims are at once more personal and more abstract: “I read the story and my heart beats fast!” (17). No wonder: for as Dutt's emphasis on Madame Thérèse's Prussian opponents underscores, such a reading links past, current, and future liberation struggles. “Well might all Europe quail before thee, France,/Battling against oppression!” the speaker asserts: “Years have past,/Yet of that time men speak with moistened glance. /Va-nu-pieds!” (18–21). With this move into French, the Revolution emerges – and, then, in a sudden and telling turn, is quickly undercut – as a world model: “When rose high your Marseillaise,/Man knew his rights to earth's remotest bound,/And tyrants trembled. Yours alone the praise!/Ah, had a Washington but then been found!” (21–24). The speaker's heart beats fast; but the poet, who has read her revolutionary history, refrains from casting even her own chosen leader of nations as a clear home of liberty.

Dutt's relationship to French literature and culture was not simple; but in certain contexts, it does seem to have been central. Indeed, what may be most striking about her entire career, beyond its range of achievement, is Dutt's consistent, complex positioning of Bengal as a key site for the reading, appropriation, and transformation of French as well as British literary traditions. Indeed, A Sheaf Gleaned in French Fields, which will be my primary focus here, is merely the beginning of a rich range of work. After Sheaf appeared, Dutt continued to translate French poetry into English,¹⁴

publishing these compositions, like her first translations and her criticism of the Creole poet Leconte de Lisle and the early Indo-Anglian poet Henry Louis Vivian Derozio, in the Bengal Magazine.¹⁵ She translated French legislative debates, including one focused in great part on a speech by Victor Hugo, for the same periodical;¹⁶ and though, at the time she died, Bianca. Or the Young Spanish Maiden was not yet complete, another novel, in French, was. Clarisse Bader, a French Orientalist with whom Dutt had developed an epistolary friendship, published that work, Le Journal de Mademoiselle d'Arvers, in Paris in 1879, apparently to good reviews; Penguin India has just released a new English translation.¹⁷

“This child of Bengal,…Hindu by race and by tradition; English by education; French at heart”: thus one distinguished Orientalist characterized Dutt in 1883, pronouncing, tellingly, that she had the “right to a line in the history of our literature,” as well as, “above all,” a right “to our remembrance as a fragile and sweet image of that which the Hindu genius would have been able to produce under the wing of France.” “Isn't it strange,” he continues, “that the only poet's soul to blossom in India since the British conquest should have turned, with such an invincible instinct, toward the sun of France?” The author of these words is James Darmesteter (292; my translation. See Das, Life 314). If the name seems familiar, it should: Darmesteter, after all, was the first husband of British poet A. Mary F. Robinson (Darmesteter Duclaux).

That we tend to overlook Robinson's writing in French is already odd; but given how effectively scholars including Mukherjee and Susie Tharu have linked Dutt to what Mukherjee calls “questions about literary models and cultural identity, individual voice and the allegorical exigencies of nationhood” (Mukherjee 90; see Tharu), the relative absence of recent critical concern with Dutt's French writing seems a particularly striking omission. This is, after all, a writer who once famously described herself in her diary as an “indomitable and steadfast French woman” (Gupta 27) – and a writer, moreover, whose transnational affinities claimed public attention during her own time. In 1879, only two years after Dutt's death, for example, a Statesman poem in her honor staged a quarrel between India, England, and France over claims to Dutt's literary glory. Eventually, divine authority resolves the dispute: a smiling “Reaper” rises with a “rush of…wings,” lifting the disputed “song-bird” through a “trail of light” to her true “home,” which is to say, Heaven.¹⁸

Why, then, have English-speaking critics paid relatively little attention to this aspect of Dutt's career? Perhaps, Tharu and K. Lalita's two-volume Women Writing in India anthology suggests, partly because, just as Dutt's own Mr. Garcia speaks French when he is excited, so may Dutt herself have spoken French when she was most passionately engaged with the politics of nation states. Within their own lifetimes, Tharu and Lalita stress, even Indian schools presented Dutt “as a brilliant, but protected upper-class child-poet, who died early of consumption. Rarely did students learn that, like her uncle Romesh Chunder Dutt, she was a nationalist and a passionate republican; that she was widely read in the history and literature of the French Revolution; or that she had translated speeches made in the French Chamber of Deputies around the time of the Revolution for Indian nationalist journals.”¹⁹

Tharu and Lalita's privatized schoolroom Dutt seems to be, at least in part, a heroine conceived through influential strains within the early legend-making of Indian nationalism. As Partha Chatterjee's influential essay on the “nationalist resolution of the women's question” underscores, by the end of the nineteenth century, cultivation of “a superior national culture,” based on the “inner spirituality of indigenous social life,” was becoming an essential task of Indian nationalist femininity (245, 243). Whether as a potential or an actual nation, India might have seemed to have greater need of an accomplished female poet, even an Anglicized poet, who still wept over her mother's Bengali stories, than of a poet intent on the traumas of France in 1870, much less a translator intimately engaged with the grisly satire of a Heine or the fiery speechmaking of a Victor Hugo. If so, the results of such privatization may have been ironic. For in the end, the move to underplay the resonance of Dutt's writing in French and on French literature, even including her non-political writing, may impede full consideration of her positioning as a Bengali writer. Le Journal de Mademoiselle d'Arvers, for example, seems to be a predominantly apolitical work, closer to some of the writings of Fanny Burney, say, than to anything by George Sand.²⁰

Still, as published, that novel helped confirm Dutt's place within a transnational community beyond the immediate reach of British colonialism. For when the Journal first appeared in Paris in 1879, Bader prefaced it with an essay that vividly documented Dutt's loyalty to France during the crisis of 1870, even as it praised the critical achievement of Sheaf.²¹ The Journal is no postcolonial text. Nonetheless, as Darmesteter proudly and regretfully attests, in its very mimicry, such writing remains strangely resistant to being fully tucked under any particular colonial “wing.”

If one feels compelled, as Mukherjee puts it, to write at least in part “in the language of the rulers” (Perishable Empire 89), there may be real advantages to playing with (and playing off) one literary/imperial power against another. Certainly downplaying Dutt's connection to France may serve a form of double Anglicization, short-circuiting a cultural triangulation whose third pole is Indian nationalism. Consider, for example, what is surely the most resonant of all English elaborations of the Toru Dutt legend: that is, the criticism of Edmund Gosse. Packaged as an “Introductory Memoir” to the first printing of Ancient Ballads and Legends itself, Gosse's account of Dutt's career became a part of that work – and has passed, with it, into legend.²²

Legend-formation distorts critics' as well as poets' works; and it seems fair to note that within the entirety of Gosse's memoir, Dutt appears both as an Indian poet and as a “better French than English scholar.” “She loved France best,” Gosse writes, unequivocally: “she knew its literature best, she wrote its language with more perfect elegance” (“Toru Dutt” xii). Still, the most consistent, and so far the most culturally resonant strain within Gosse's narrative emphasizes another story: that of a born writer whose “marvelous faculties” “slumbered” before she left India; who fell to “despairing of an audience in her own language”; and who turned to English as “a medium for her own thought” (xii–xiii).

Such sentimentalized, Anglicized homecoming emerges most powerfully, perhaps, within Gosse's praise of certain traditional narratives of Ancient Ballads. Here, at last, he writes,

Like the most improbably artless of imaginary Poetesses, this figure seems to be “chanting” only “to herself” – in English, no less. Moreover, she does not even chant her own “songs.” Rather, crucially, she gives voice to the “songs of her mother's race.” Generic, genetic, these songs of race seem to spring from deeper sources than Kshetramoni Mitter's idiosyncratic storytelling or Govin Chunder Dutt's absorption in Sanskrit. In the face of the “songs” of a “mother's race,” the claims of an idiosyncratic, personal past seem to recede; and so, too, does any likelihood that Dutt's retellings of still-vital classical and religious texts might represent calculated interventions, attempts to shape a particular cultural future.²³ Part doomed sapphic poetess, part safely archaized, Anglicized bard, Gosse's Dutt embodies a carefully Christianized “Vedic solemnity and simplicity of temper.” Quarantined from the literary life of “modern India,” she remains nonetheless not quite a British writer either. For even in her best work, Gosse suggests, at points “the text reads like a translation from some stirring ballad, and we feel that it gives but a faint and discordant echo of the music welling in Toru's brain” (xxv). “Mellow sweetness,” the memoir to Ancient Ballads and Legends summarizes, in lines that would be repeated for generations, “was all that Toru lacked to perfect her as an English poet, and of no other Oriental who has ever lived can the same be said. When the history of the literature of our country comes to be written, there is sure to be a page in it dedicated to this fragile exotic blossom of song.”²⁴

If this is homecoming, then “home” seems to be little more than the repository of a British imperial souvenir. At the same time, it would be misleading to suggest that Gosse's reading of Dutt, even in these few lines, succeeds at some sort of unequivocal project of colonialist appropriation. For to be cast as a purveyor of “ancient ballads and legends” is to be positioned, in Romantic terms, as a bard; and however limited or constrained it may be, bardic nationalism remains a form of nationalism (See Trumpener and, for example, Nair 78).

In Gosse as elsewhere, then, both in Dutt's legend and beyond, deployments of Romanticism mark a key point of intellectual slippage, at once confirming and destabilizing the boundaries of Indian nationalism and British colonialism. “Being native, having a native place, being ‘home,’ mapping one's land”: in late nineteenth-century India, such projects, Inderpal Grewal makes clear, mark the emergence – and, crucially, the gendering – of colonial modernity (134). Caught up in highly charged, shifting relations to “what is not-home,” “home” takes form here in part through interplays among nationalism, anti-colonialism, and “pre-nationalist or extranationalist forms of identity in India, especially gendered ones”; and these interplays work, in part, through complex negotiations with Romanticism.²⁵

The creation of “a poetry of landscape of ‘home’ and the past that presents a heritage of freedom” might echo and accede to colonialist glorifications of England as the local habitation of liberty; but as Grewal notes, this same project might also undermine such glorifications by relocating the home of liberty on the outskirts of Calcutta.²⁶ By casting Dutt as a Romantic poetess-bard, then, Gosse's introductory memoir helps open up an ambiguity at the heart of the very phrase “our country.” Revealingly, even as the short passage quoted above celebrates the songs of Dutt's “mother's race,” it slips between glorifying the honors of “our” imperial literary history and the claims of Dutt's own “race and country.”

Not surprisingly, then, as long as we focus on India and Britain, we may read Dutt's career in terms of a colonial mimicry, tracing an undergirding ambivalence that “produces simultaneous and incommensurable effects, destabilizing English and Indian identities as part of the same operation.”²⁷

To address Dutt's complex relationship to French culture, however, may be to attempt something slightly different; and here, Parama Roy's attempt to “reconstellate and extend” current “debates on originality, repetition, and negotiation” may offer an invaluable precedent (3). For as we have seen, Gosse's legendary glorification of Ancient Ballads and Legends is, in effect, a redemption narrative. Explicitly, it invites us to celebrate that volume as the fruit of Dutt's (self-)deliverance from inauthenticity, whether as embodied in her own earlier attempt, “vainly, though heroically, to compete with European literature on its own ground” or as threatened by her proximity to the presumably contagious “littleness and frivolity” of “modern India.” Implicitly, Gosse elevates the dubious authenticity of Ancient Ballads and Legends over the mimicry of Sheaf – and in so doing, remembers to forget, at least to some degree, Gosse's own heralding of Dutt's early achievement. From a slightly odd angle, then, Sheaf underscores the importance of Roy's project of opening up “the field of identity formation and nation formation to a more heterogeneous model than that of anglicization” (3). For if there has ever been a volume that embodied the “multivalence” of mimicry, it is surely Sheaf (5).

In thus implicitly dismissing the “vain” attempt of Sheaf, Gosse had a great deal to forget. For in his first review of that work, in the August 26, 1876 issue of the Examiner, he had described himself as both “struck by the ambition” of the volume and surprised at finding “Miss Toru Dutt translating, in every case, into the measure of the original, no less than 166 poems, some of them no less intricate in form than perplexing in matter!” (Gosse, “A Book of Verse” 967). “This amazing feat,” he had gone on to say, “she has performed with a truly brilliant success.” Indeed, Sheaf “recalls the French more vividly than any similar volume we are acquainted with.” To be sure, such praise was followed by a strange, intriguingly aggressive fantasy: “If modern French literature were entirely lost,” Gosse suggests, “it might not be found impossible to reconstruct a large number of poems from this Indian version.”²⁸

Still, even if cataclysmic endangerment of European literature is the subtext here, Dutt appears as a potential literary rescuer. And indeed, after praising the volume's “considerable learning combined with some odd omissions,” Gosse's review closes by asserting that Sheaf, “taking for granted that it is what it seems to profess to be, a genuine Hindu product, is an important landmark in the history of the progress of culture” (967).

“Is not this high praise?” asked Dutt herself (Das, Life 223). She did not live to read the succeeding account of Sheaf in Gosse's introductory memoir to Ancient Ballads and Legends; but in many ways, it, too, would surely have pleased her. Dutt's selection of poems, Gosse now writes, follows “a principle of her own that slowly dawn[s] on the careful reader.” Her notes reveal a “startling” knowledge; and if that knowledge has limits, these were “inevitable to her isolation, and hardly worth recording, except to show how laborious her mind was, and how quick to make the best of small resources” (xvi–xvii). Sheaf remains here “a wonderful mixture of strength and weakness, of genius overcoming great obstacles and of talent succumbing to ignorance and inexperience. That it should have been performed at all is so extraordinary that we forget to be surprised at its inequality” (xv). Obstacles, not incapacities, seem to be the problem here. Still, in moments of emerging unease, Dutt's notes now appear as “curious” and, “to a stranger, bewildering”; her translations, as irretrievably alien. At points, Gosse writes, “it is obvious that the Hindu poetess was chanting to herself a music that is discord in an English ear” (xv–xvi). “The attainment” of Sheaf may be “simply astounding,” then (xvii); but once cast as a foil for the racialized, archaized celebration of Ancient Ballads and Legends, such achievement is ultimately reduced to that of a vain though heroic work of competitive mimicry.²⁹

Certainly to turn to Sheaf itself is to find oneself a long way from the chanted and channeled authenticity of the “songs” of anyone's “mother's race.”³⁰

Overtly concerned with questions of cultural circulation, Dutt's volume repeatedly dramatizes her fascination with the historical vagaries as well as the technical challenges of poetic translation. Elaboration, invention, multiplicity: these values shape the collection's contents. Suggestively foreshadowing the later reception of her own poetry, for example,³¹ Dutt seeks out works that have been translated out of and then back into their languages of composition: to her own versions of Xavier de Maistre's “The Butterfly” and Charles Millevoye's “The Fall of the Leaves,” she adds notes explaining that both French poems, having been translated into Russian, were retranslated into French by admirers ignorant of their origins (1880, 10–12; 24–25; 338, 339–40). She rates French translations of Shakespeare (365–66); she offers an English verse translation of a Swedish poem, “Flytfaglarne,” as translated into French prose (176–78; 355); and yes, she does engage in competitiveness. In addition to her own translation of A. V. Arnault's “The Leaf,” she offers another version for comparison: marvelously, by no less an Anglicist than Macaulay himself (13; 338). (That her own version is the weaker, seems far from clear.)

Even beyond the prosodic ambitiousness that so surprised Gosse, and in defiance of his praise of their “absolute and unaffected exactness” (“A Book of Verse” 967), Dutt's translations effect active creative transformations of their original sources. Indeed, if we are to believe Darmesteter, a knowing French reader might find Sheaf translating recent French poetry not merely into English, but into an English rich with Indian literary undertones (278–79). Certainly, even to a less sophisticated eye, Dutt's claims to creative freedom seem unmistakable. Consider one of the most dramatic examples: her English rendition of Victor Hugo's bitter “Chanson,” from the 1853 Les Châtiments. Hugo did not call Louis Napoleon “Tom Thumb”; but after renaming the poem “Napoléon le Petit,” Dutt does.³²

The insult is rendered doubly effective by its Transatlantic reference, since Charles Sherwood Stratton, who played the role of “Tom Thumb” under P. T. Barnum's direction, built his sensationally successful career partly on parodic military performances as “General Tom Thumb.” Dutt's Napoleon the Little is not even a “real” Tom Thumb: what that figure performs in play, Napoleon renders vicious.

More scathingly satiric than Hugo's, Dutt's version also transforms the original's deployment of sexual menace. In Hugo, rape merely takes its place among other acts of brutality: “Voici de l'or, vien, pille et vole/Petit, petit” (15–16). Dutt's translation, “There's gold for thee, regale thy soul,/Tom Thumb, Tom Thumb” (1880, 15–16), might seem to sanitize the line; and indeed, where Hugo explicitly renders Berlin and Vienna as the first of Napoleon's forced “mistresses,” their fortresses snatched “by the corset,” Dutt writes, instead, that those cities “before him bent.” In the end, though, the English version does not erase the original poem's references to violence against women; rather, it renders them more oblique and subtle, allowing the implications of the bent-over cities to emerge with the stanza's final, contrasting offer to Napoleon the Little: “for thee, lo, here are girls,/Tom Thumb, Tom Thumb.”³³

An analogous process may well be at work with the poem's final evocation of Napoleon I as a fallen archangel. Hugo's Napoleon is explicitly, emphatically masculine: he wields thunder (27); and when he lets the world loose, the immense sea opens a bitter abyss to accept his plunge (33–40). Dutt's Napoleon, in contrast, bears only palm and reins; the ocean that accepts him is neither immense nor bitter. What is at work here? Domestication? Feminization? Perhaps.³⁴ What is not at work, clearly, is any direct transmission of a certain strain of masculine (and / or, perhaps, Western) glamorization of individual masculine power. At once more risible and less glamorous than Hugo's, the Louis Napoleon of Dutt's translation claims his place within an explicitly revisionist project.³⁵

The transformation of “Chanson” into “Napoléon le Petit” is particularly striking; but in many respects, it is no exception to the rule. When Dutt deletes the closing first person from the furious “À Ceux qui Dorment” (Hugo 157–58; Dutt 88–89) or the final “he” from “Au Peuple” (Hugo 162–63; Dutt 95–96), for example, she moves collective subjectivity subtly to the fore. Beyond such relatively delicate reshapings, moreover, she takes other liberties – not least, by adding an epigraph from Tennyson's “Locksley Hall” to Hugo's “Lux” (Hugo 216–17; Dutt 91). Moreover, she positions individual translations within a larger project whose outlines she tends to define with equal freedom. She includes Heine's “The Slaver,” for example – a move only made possible, in the first place, by virtue of an insistence on reading “Henri Heine” as “neither a German nor a Frenchman” (347). Here, Dutt herself suggests that in formal terms, her translation fails. “It would have been far better,” she writes in the notes, “to have kept the measure of the original in this piece, but we found it impossible to do so. There is a scathing bitterness of sarcasm in some of Heine's pieces, this, among the rest, that appals and verges on the sublime” (348). And indeed, if “Le Négrier,” the French translation on which Dutt drew, already loses the terrifyingly jaunty economy of the original “Das Sklavenschiff,” Dutt's attempts to underscore Heine's “scathing bitterness” dilute the poem's intensity still further.³⁶

Perhaps, in this case, content dictated inclusion. If so, the surprising presence of a harrowing account of the Middle Passage may arise, in part, from its power to lend a disturbing, politicized resonance to the volume's portrayal of primarily contemporary French poetry.

In any case, among both her contemporaries and certain later readers, some of Dutt's translations seem to have succeeded. “One of the pieces in the Sheaf, ‘My Vocation,’ by Béranger, has been inserted in the ‘Course of English Reading’ for the use of candidates for the Entrance Examination in Calcutta,” Dutt proudly reported to a friend in 1876 (Das, Life 189). As late as 1909, when the New York Athenaeum Society published its two-volume collection of the poems of Victor Hugo, many of the translations they chose were by Toru Dutt.³⁷

Moreover, as early critics recognized, Sheaf was something more than the first book of an ambitious translator: it was also a study guide and a work of scholarship. Suggestively, as Dutt herself first presented it, Sheaf offered none of the traditional panoply of modest feminine self-display. The first edition contained no preface, introduction, biographical snippet, or frontispiece portrait.³⁸ On offer instead was an ambitious, strongly defined constellation of poems, heavily Romantic in character, and accompanied by a lengthy series of notes. The tone of these latter fairly well embodies the word “panache.” In fact, a full reading of Sheaf suggests that if Dutt was indeed competing with European writers, she may have had her eyes on critics of poetry as much as on poets or translators. If so, she made her point. Many French critics, Darmesteter was to assert, might be put to shame by Dutt's profound knowledge of French poetry. As for English critics: he knew no one who demonstrated “at once such exactitude of detailed information and a critical sentiment so delicate and so sure” (278–79; my translation).

“Shades of Sainte-Beauve, Taine, Arnold, Saintsbury, Gosse!” wrote Byram K. Talookdar in an underread 1936 pamphlet. “How you must have trembled for the safety of your laurels!” (10–11). Laurels, perhaps – or home ground. For as Gosse himself seems to have realized in his more generous (or realistic) moments, with Sheaf, Dutt did more than enter European critics' home terrain; she shifted it. Often erudite and always vivid, idiosyncratic, and opinionated, her notes to Sheaf seek to establish their author's claims as both an expert interpreter of French poetry and an arbiter of taste for English-speaking audiences;³⁹

and as they do so, they insist upon Dutt's own cultural location in undertaking such work.

Dutt advises; she jokes; and, in the process, she assumes, as a matter of course, that India can and should form a key reference point in reading French and British literature. Read Lamartine's life and travels, she suggests, for example; you'll thank me. Then, playfully, she notes that “Lectures pour tous” contains “not a line over which the most delicate maiden or most innocent child need blush,” adding that “it is delightful reading, only – for the truth must always be told – a little dull here and there.” “Lamartine,” she immediately follows, “married an English lady, a grand-daughter of Governor Holwell, who was incarcerated in the Black Hole by Surajah Dowlah, in the early days of British rule in India” (342). At moments, she underscores her position through teasing: of a M. Hyppolite Babou, for example, she jokes that “we may almost hail” him “as a countryman, for is he not a Baboo?” (352). At other points, she enacts her relative detachment from British culture in more serious terms. Of Jules Lefèvre-Deumier, a poet inspired by Scott and Byron, she writes, “Not until…'Les Confiances' in 1833, did he shake off his English yoke” (353). In yet other passages, she can be close to insulting. Of a poem by Louis Bouilhet, she writes, “The last stanza is not in the original, but has been added by the translator to suit the taste of the English reader, to whom a satire, however keen may be the irony, on an age long gone by, without a modern application or a latent significance, would appear unmeaning and unnecessary” (369). Above all, perhaps, through her notes' citations of the Bengal Magazine (363, 366); their frequent, casual references to Indian history, and to classical Indian texts⁴⁰

; their quotation of an untranslated passage from the Ramayana, in Sanskrit⁴¹ Dutt signals a calculated shifting of critical ground.

Indeed, much as Gosse assessed and interpreted Dutt's work for English readers (and thus, given the critical and publishing politics of the time, perhaps for many Indian readers as well), so, too, did Dutt herself lay claim to the authority required to interpret French poetry for English-speaking readers. Forget peripheries and centers: Dutt needed neither the British Empire nor the English language in order to claim her place in an increasingly global culture. If anything, Sheaf seems to suggest, English-speaking audiences needed her, the Indian woman critic, scholar, and translator, in order to keep abreast with French poetic developments. With Sheaf, Dutt may in fact have inaugurated the publication of serious comparative poetry criticism by Indian women.

To suggest that we read the volume in this way – that we take it seriously as a many-layered critical and creative exploration of cultural mimicries – is not to suggest that the Dutt who practices (and collects, and rules over) poetic mimicry in Sheaf is somehow more significant or sophisticated than the later poet of transfigured Wordsworthian authenticity.⁴²

Nor is it to pretend that Sheaf somehow transcends the ideological power of colonialism, be it British or French.⁴³ Indeed, critiques of what Mukherjee terms the book's “double ventriloquism” retain their point (Perishable Empire 96). If Sheaf serves in some sense as an act of cultural deference and a form of intellectual service work, however, it's worth remembering that in certain contexts, both intellectual service work and ventriloquism may be acts of daring. No one who has read Dutt's poetry could wish she had limited herself to scholarship, translation, and criticism, surely; but neither need one set the poet of Ancient Ballads and Legends at odds with the audacious translator/scholar/critic of Sheaf. After all, even as she moved into composing original poetry, Dutt herself continued her earlier work. The year before she died, she was still hoping, she wrote, “to bring out another ‘Sheaf’, not gleaned in French but in ‘Sanskrit Fields’!” (Das, Life 203).

Dutt's critical scholarship speaks from Calcutta: it seeks to interpellate, by assuming, an audience whose conversance with Indian writing is as much a matter of course as is its familiarity with British, American, and French poetry and poetic criticism. By investigating (which includes challenging) the possibility of such an audience, those of us who focus on poetry in English may find newly rich readings of Dutt's work – work produced, at its best, as Alpana Sharma Knippling writes, “not from the site of a monolithic ‘truth’ and ‘native’ authenticity, but from the infinitely more fascinating site…of reinvention and improvisation” (217).

In this context, it is worth returning one last time to Gosse's archaizing celebration of those “songs of her mother's race to which she always turned with tears of pleasure.” For Dutt's own direct reference to such tears first appeared in a letter to Clarisse Bader, thanking Bader for her 1867 La Femme dans l'Inde Antique, expressing pride at being able to say that the heroines of classical Indian literature were worthy of “all honor and all love,” and requesting permission to translate Bader's work into English.⁴⁴

The point seems crucial: for in terms of both poetry and gender, Bader's book explicitly aims toward a future in which Europeans will derive inspiration from the classical literature of India.⁴⁵ It seems suitable, then, that one of Dutt's final projects should have been the preparation of an English-speaking Indian edition of Bader's study, which was itself drawn not only from French sources, but from Sanskrit and from the writings of “English, German,” and “Italian Orientalists.”⁴⁶ This work, too, might have been a form of homecoming.

In closing, let me suggest that specialists in late-century women's poetry might learn a great deal by seeing what happened if we set Toru Dutt at the center of our reading. What might it mean, we might come to ask, for example, that even as Dutt began her literary career by translating Heinrich Heine and Victor Hugo into English verse, a brilliant Jewish teenager in New York, named Emma Lazarus, turned to similar projects? What personal and intellectual investments might have driven these aspiring poets to begin their careers by translating the passionate, often satiric, and political writings of these particular exiled male Romantics? Moreover, how might such affinities connect both Dutt and Lazarus to A. Mary F. Robinson Darmesteter Duclaux, whose ongoing concern with Hugo stretches well into the twentieth century?⁴⁷

To engage fully with Dutt – and with her, in Lazarus or Robinson – might we need to read more of Heine or Hugo? At this point, we can only speculate. What we can be sure of, however, is that specialists in a British literary period that speaks of itself in French are the perfect readers to begin asking the question.