1. Word after Word

“Style” (1888) sheds light on the cultural politics of Pater's approach to translation. Here Pater famously argued that the literary artist must be “of necessity a scholar” whose task is to study and observe the rules of language in the most correct way possible.Footnote ¹³ Pater's ideal example of the scholar/writer was Flaubert, whose notorious quest for le mot juste—“the unique word, phrase, sentence . . . absolutely proper to the single mental presentation or vision within” (29)—made him the “martyr of literary style” (27), an image that captures the decadent sensibility that gently pervades this essay in which literature is described as “a sort of cloistral refuge, from a certain vulgarity in the actual world” (18). Pater's cosmopolitan orientation, evinced by his choice of a French author as the model for a denationalized idea of what counts as good writing, brings him to conceive of languages as hybrid ecosystems that struggle to be contained within the political borders of nations, being the product of “a myriad various minds and contending tongues” (12). As such, they are always open to foreign influences and contamination. Pater cites as an example the assimilation into English of “the phraseology of the great German metaphysical movement” that had taken place over the last fifty years (15). In a crucial passage, he uses translation as providing a perhaps surprising illustration of what he understands as the freedom of the writer, arguing that the literary artist

Far from being merely a utilitarian task aimed at conveying meaning across the linguistic divide, a good translation practice for Pater shines light on the art of literary composition.Footnote ¹⁴ Pater chastises translators who concentrate too much on idiom, advocating instead a word-after-word technique focused on capturing the “elementary particles” of literature. In “The Task of the Translator,” Benjamin too would maintain that the search for “pure language” through translation is aided by a literal rendering that bypasses the constraints of syntax and focuses instead on the word: “For if the sentence is the wall before the language of the original, literariness [Wörtlichkeit] is the arcade” (79). This is why both Benjamin and Pater defend models of translation that respect the foreignness of the original by interfering with its structure as little as possible.

Pater's claim that Plato can be rendered by following the word structure of his sentences is highly disputable from a practical point of view, but what it reveals is Pater's belief that translation should let the otherness of the foreign text shine through, imprinting the receiving culture with its distinctive stamp, and therefore revealing cultural differences rather than trying to hide them behind the false screen of the idiomatic. To bring home the point about the close relationship between translation and literary style, Pater describes Flaubert's finding of the mot juste as an act of “inspired translation,” building an implicit parallel with the translator's preoccupation with the individual word, and adding that “all language involves translation from inward to outward” (34). However painfully achieved (the image of Flaubert's stylistic martyrdom weighs heavily on the essay), translation for Pater is not an ancillary and imitative mode of writing beset by failure but rather an act of creative freedom that represents, as Bénédicte Coste has argued, “a defining feature of individuality.”Footnote ¹⁵ Or, more provocatively still, translation is a mode of writing that unmasks the fiction of individuality, which plays such an important role in the determining hierarchies of literary value.

In this respect, the argument in “Style” anticipates Pater's suggestion in Plato and Platonism (1893) that the thought and “language” of Plato, individual and foundational though they may seem to us looking back on the history of philosophy, are in fact adapted from earlier, anonymous sources: “It is hardly an exaggeration to say that in Plato, in spite of his wonderful savour of literary freshness, there is nothing absolutely new: or rather, as in many other very original products of human genius, the seemingly new is old also, a palimpsest, a tapestry of which the actual threads have served before, or like the animal frame itself, every particle of which has already lived and died many times over.”Footnote ¹⁶ Rendering Plato word after word into a foreign language, Pater's imagined translator adds to this palimpsest, in which acts of creating and copying, invention and repetition, blur into one another. By taking care of the transmission of the “particles” of language—an image that is significantly repeated across the two texts—translation becomes a necessary part of the chain through which the polyphonic and collaborative text that crystallizes in Plato in the fourth century bce travels across time and space.

When “Style” came out in the Fortnightly Review in December 1888, the essay entered the discursive space of Victorian periodical publishing at the height of the Vizetelly trials. At the instigation of the National Vigilance Association, in the autumn of 1888 the publisher of Zola's English translations had been charged and fined for obscene libel; the following year—when Pater's essay was republished in book form in Appreciations—Vizetelly was put on trial again and sentenced to three months’ imprisonment.Footnote ¹⁷ Flaubert was a very different writer from Zola—the latter was often criticized for a slapdash exuberance of style that was almost the opposite of Flaubert's meticulous linguistic research. However, as a British critic remarked in 1889, “Flaubert is still by many regarded as one of the high priests of Zolaism”;Footnote ¹⁸ meanwhile, the suppression of English translations of Zola that followed the Vizetelly trials deepened a sense of confusion about the admittedly fraught relationship between naturalism and decadence as literatures that deliberately set out to offend public morals. At this moment of crisis, therefore, the topic of translation, especially in relation to modern French fiction, was highly politically charged. In this context, Pater's suggestion that translations should respect the otherness of foreign literature, stretching the aesthetic and moral boundaries of the culture in which they are received, could be seen to nod approvingly toward Vizetelly's transgressive use of translation, while nodding back disapprovingly, in a characteristically oblique way, to Matthew Arnold's advocacy of strategies of domestication and standardization in his public controversy with Francis Newman, in the early 1860s, over translations of Homer.Footnote ¹⁹

To gain a deeper insight into the cultural politics of Pater's English model of foreignizing translation, we just need to go back to the article about the enduring “bad name” of translation mentioned earlier. In this same article, in which George H. Ely provided an interesting overview of recent French translations of modern English writers (Pater, Thomas Carlyle, John Ruskin, H. G. Wells), he rejected Pater's theory of “word after word” translation formulated in “Style,” defining it as a “dubious, almost fatal, doctrine” and as potentially resulting in “a monstrosity” (258, 263). Ely spoke with some authority, as his own translation of Les Femmes de la Renaissance (1898), by the French historian René de Maulde la Clavière, had just been published that year. In the article, Ely defended the principle of forceful domestication that he adopted in his own work as translator. Building on Dryden, Ely's definition of a successful translator was one who was able to “produce upon his reader's mind the same aesthetic effect as the original would produce on the mind of a person reading it in his native tongue” (262). This illusion of transparency described here, by means of which the translated text ought to capture the style and intent of its author while reading completely fluently in a foreign language, is, as Lawrence Venuti has argued, a recurrent feature in the production, marketing, and reception of translations in English-speaking countries.Footnote ²⁰ According to Venuti, transparency and its corollary, the attempt to reduce the translator to an ideal condition of invisibility—both crucial to theories of translation based on principles of domestication—are symptomatic of an attitude of “complacency” in relations with cultural others that refuses to understand and respect foreignness (13). In extreme cases, this attitude amounts to a form of cultural violence that can be enlisted in propagating ethnocentric values, with potentially troubling political consequences (16 and passim).Footnote ²¹

In his attack on Pater, Ely exemplifies the conservative ideology described by Venuti, which co-opts ideas of transparency and invisibility in order to uphold what Ely believes to be “the essential differences between the Latin and the Anglo-Saxon races,—differences in blood and genius, in physical environment and dominant occupations, in modes of thought and literary expression” (263). According to the dominant nineteenth-century ideology of cultural nationalism that Ely espouses, literature was at once the natural expression of the “essential differences” between nations and an a posteriori proof that those differences were just and needed to be defended. This is why the task of the translator as Ely understood it was to remove the foreign accent of the original as literature migrated across linguistic and national boundaries; while the task of the critic of translation, which Ely fulfills extremely diligently, was to point out linguistic mistakes and inaccuracies arising from the ignorance of English customs that demonstrated that those “essential differences” were an actual, ineluctable fact. Ely objected to Pater's foreignizing theory because, as he rightly intuited, it led to the potential disruption of cultural codes in the translating language: hence his image of the alleged “monstrosity” of the cultural hybrid that comes from word-for-word translation.Footnote ²² Ely's own technique of domestication, by contrast, kept borders more tidily in place just as it overtly enabled the flow of ideas from one country to another.

It is significant that, of the various works under review, the French translation of Pater was precisely the one that Ely found most unsatisfactory—indeed, it is impossible not to suspect that his irritation with this particular work was the original trigger for the article. Ely saw Georges Khnopff's recent, allegedly faulty translation (1899) of the Imaginary Portraits (1887) as illustrating the dangers of the word-after-word method advocated in “Style,” and, in order to demonstrate his argument, he cited multiple examples of incorrect translation: “Sebastian von Storck, Mr. Pater tells us, ‘made light of his distress,’ and M. Khnopff forthwith writes, ‘turned his distress into flame.’ The somnolent old Duke of Rosenmold used to ‘nod early’ at his council-board, and the translator is himself caught napping when he renders, ‘se contentait d'un signe de tête, bien vite’” (258), etc.

The Belgian Khnopff was not only a prolific author of translations (including Oscar Wilde's La Maison des grenades, 1902) but also a key mediator of foreign literatures in French-speaking symbolist circles and promoter of literary cosmopolitanism. His Portraits imaginaires (1899) was the first translation of Pater into French.Footnote ²³ Therefore, as Clément Dessy has argued, the excessive fidelity of which Ely accuses Khnopff here should in fact be seen as a deliberate refusal to “gallicize” Pater's text and as reflecting Khnopff's symbolist-inspired linguistic experimentalism and his ambiguous position as a French-speaking Belgian in the French literary field.Footnote ²⁴ Or, switching to Venuti's terms, we could say that Khnopff resisted being cast in the role of the invisible translator by placing his translation outside and across the allegedly essential national differences that literature, according to cultural nationalists like Ely, was supposed to uphold. Practiced in this way, translation reinforced the cosmopolitan and culturally transgressive mission of symbolism, in whose circles Khnopff moved (his translation of the Imaginary Portraits came out with the publishing house of the Mercure de France, which had close ties with the symbolist movement).

Back in Britain, it may seem logical that Ely should try to defend and, as it were, patriotically reclaim Pater from this misappropriation of his work, especially since Ely's article was published in the pages of Macmillan's Magazine—the very same venue where Pater's short stories had first appeared in periodical form. In actual fact, however, Ely claimed that “Mr. Pater must share the blame with M. Khnopff” for the latter's translation mistakes, and, in support of this claim, cited Arthur Symons's dictum that Pater's prose in the Imaginary Portraits “smacked of the French soil” (258). In other words, Ely insinuated that Khnopff might have failed as a translator because Pater's original was itself somehow corrupted—a cultural and even linguistic hybrid, only partially at home in a normative version of literary English: the foreignizing French translation thus perversely mirrored a translational quality that was already present in the source text, distorting it further.

The conservative cultural politics behind Ely's attack on foreignizing practices becomes even clearer if we read his article in Macmillan's Magazine in relation to his near-contemporaneous translation of La Clavière's Women of the Renaissance (1900). La Clavière's book investigated the social life and biographies of notable women in sixteenth-century France and Italy, suggesting that the flowering of Renaissance art and culture could be seen as the product of an intensification of the feminine influence. While la Clavière overtly approached his topic with the objective gaze of the historian, he in fact presented the intertwining of a cult of beauty and female emancipation as inevitably doomed to failure in the Renaissance and, one must infer, in the present: silently leaning on the contemporary idiom of degeneration, he described the feminine influence on Renaissance culture as “soft and enervating” and a “disease of sensibility,”Footnote ²⁵ in short, as causing a period of decadence that was later quashed by a masculine, skeptical, and anticosmopolitan reaction in seventeenth-century France. La Clavière established an open dialogue with nineteenth-century British culture by making multiple references to Ruskin and to the New Woman movement, whose radical handling of the woman question prompted, as he admitted in the introduction, his own historical investigation.Footnote ²⁶ In rendering the book into English, Ely brought out the Englishness and topicality of the source text by making a series of micro-interventions that boosted his strategy of domestication. For example, he substituted the original subtitle of the book, vers le bonheur! (literally “toward happiness”), with his own subtitle, A Study of Feminism, which, by the anachronistic use of the word “feminism,” emphasized its relevance to the modern age. Most pointedly, he dedicated his translation to the outspokenly antidecadent William Ernest Henley. Translated into English, Les Femmes de la Renaissance thus became an intervention into the domestic debate on decadence, which took sides against the progressive twinning of decadent aestheticism and the female emancipation cause. In the context of 1900 Britain, where the scar of the Wilde trials was still fresh, La Clavière's story of the rise and fall of a decadent, feminized Renaissance read like a warning against the effeminate culture of aestheticism, the more so since his theories were founded on an essential binarism between the supposed “masculinism of Anglo-Saxon countries” and “feminism of Latin countries,” which Ely helpfully glossed in synthetic form in his summary of contents, another domesticating intervention of the translator absent from the source text.Footnote ²⁷ Cultural effeminacy therefore appeared particularly perverse in Britain, rooted as that country supposedly was in an alleged natural dominance of the masculine spirit. Pater, the writer who had first established the strong connection between Renaissance art and aestheticism and decadence, was an unnamed but obvious target of this translation-as-critique.

Coming back to the article in Macmillan's Magazine, it is now easier to see why Ely pursued the attack on Pater's decadent legacy that he had first undertaken by translating La Clavière. Pater's theory of word-for-word translation was inextricably bound up with decadence in Ely's eyes. Indeed, analyzing a specific passage of Pater's critical prose in “Style,” Ely rhetorically asked: “Does not this repetition, this ‘damnable iteration’ of assonant syllables and cadences, suggest that the writer was too greatly preoccupied with single words to attend to the general construction and rhythm?” (258–59). Intentionally or not, this critique echoed Paul Bourget's famous definition of the decadent style in Essais de psychologie contemporaine (1883), translated into English by Havelock Ellis in 1898, as one in which “the unity of the book is decomposed to give place to the independence of the page, in which the page is decomposed to give place to the independence of the phrase, and the phrase to give place to the independence of the word.”Footnote ²⁸ Ely found that Pater's privileging of the word above syntax, whether in his theory of translation or in his critical prose, disrupted the organic integrity of language that made it the foundational element of a national literature and a national identity. Especially perverse in this sense was the way in which writing in the native language followed the same principles as a foreignizing style of translation. This is why there was more than just linguistic accuracy at stake in correcting the mistakes of Pater's word-after-word method in “Style”: Pater's translational style was a decadent style that needed to be exposed as such.

2. Born in Translation

We have seen that, in presenting a successful literary style as a form of “inspired translation,” Pater radically repositioned translation as a source of individuality in writing, within a broader theory of literary style that rejected the logic of cultural nationalism. Ever receptive to Pater's ideas, Oscar Wilde wrote to Henley, within days of the first publication of “Style,” that “to learn how to write English prose I have studied the prose of France. . . . Yes! Flaubert is my master, and when I get on with my translation of the Tentation I shall be Flaubert II, Roi par grâce de Dieu, and I hope something else beyond.”Footnote ²⁹ Wilde's preference for the Tentation de Saint Antoine displays a more openly—perhaps more affectedly—decadent taste than Pater's, for, in this highly wrought tale set in late antiquity, Flaubert described the psychological struggle of a tortured soul in the ornate style and static plot structure that would come to be seen as typical of decadent literature. In À Rebours (1884), a work that Wilde knew well, J.-K. Huysmans had canonized the Tentation as a classic of modern decadence: reviewing modern French literature through the prism of his perverse taste, the novel's hero, Des Esseintes, claimed that the Tentation showed Flaubert in “a state of mind analogous to his own”;Footnote ³⁰ and he associated the style of Flaubert's novel with the decomposition of the French language and “the decadence of French literature” that he triumphantly witnessed around him in the fin de siècle.Footnote ³¹

In the event, however, it was not Wilde who produced the first English version of Flaubert's Tentation but the barrister D. F. Hannigan who, in the year of Wilde's trials, framed his translation as a naturalistic exploration of human psychology “from the standpoint of modern science.”Footnote ³² Years later, the Tentation started to acquire a more distinctly decadent voice in English, first in a version by G. F. Monkshood (1910) published without paratextual guidance as part of the decadent-leaning Lotus Library, and then in a translation by René Francis based on an earlier manuscript, which openly domesticated Flaubert by deliberately suppressing the “baffling modernism of language” of the French text, opting instead for a “semi-Biblical phraseology” familiar to English readers.Footnote ³³ It is perhaps because of this stylistic choice that W. B. Yeats, on reading Francis's translation, was immediately struck by its resemblance to Wilde's Salomé and commented on the shaping influence of Flaubert's decadence on “what is most typical in our generation.” He added: “Flaubert has made enough fabulous beasts to make the wilderness of romance terrible for another hundred years.”Footnote ³⁴

The Tentation certainly cast its decadent spell on Lafcadio Hearn, another Irish writer whose sustained dialogue with aestheticism and decadence is starting to receive attention from literary critics.Footnote ³⁵ Hearn is best known today for his Japanese writings, but he was also a prolific translator of French literature;Footnote ³⁶ his output included the first English version (1882) of Théophile Gautier's fantastic stories. In the early 1880s Hearn also composed a complete translation of the Tentation de Saint Antoine, which he failed to get published, however, and which only saw the light of day after his death in 1910. The translation was edited by Hearn's former friend Elizabeth Bisland, who also curated Hearn's posthumous reputation by publishing a biography and selected correspondence. In bringing out Hearn's translation, Bisland did more than add an alternative to the existing English versions: she reclaimed the visibility and agency of the decadent translator and, in this process, co-opted both Hearn and Flaubert as part of what Kristin Mahoney has called post-Victorian decadence.Footnote ³⁷ The delayed publication of Hearn's translation of Flaubert's novel, in other words, activated a decadent network in which Bisland also participated with her own work as essayist and novelist, for instance the collection At the Sign of the Hobby Horse (1910), which was also published that same year.

Bisland's introduction to Hearn's Tentation was simultaneously a subtle critique of Hearn's decadent identity and an eloquent defense of the autonomous form of decadent translation. She achieved this by taking the highly unusual step of drawing a double portrait of Flaubert and Hearn, which presents translation as a form of kinship between the two writers, exploding the fiction of the individuality of the literary text. Hearn was painfully aware that translators were penalized by a literary market that did not offer adequate financial rewards for their efforts.Footnote ³⁸ However, reconstructing his early career, Bisland decided to put aside material concerns in order to present translation as a creative outlet for what she described as Hearn's instinctive indifference to English literature of the Victorian period, with its “large, unacademic freedom of manner” and narrow domestic concerns.Footnote ³⁹ Bisland depicted the young Hearn working on his versions of Gautier and Flaubert at night, “with the flickering gas jet whistling overhead, and his myopic eyes bent close to the papers which he covered with beautiful, almost microscopic characters—escaping thus from the crass, raw world about him to delicately and painstakingly turn into English stories of Cleopatra's cruel, fantastic Egyptian Night's Entertainment.” Or, alternatively, taking his work into “strange lodgings in gaunt, old half-ruined Creole houses; at the tables of odd little French cafés, or among the queer dishes in obscure Spanish and Chinese restaurants.” Linked to secrecy, social transgression, and withdrawal into the self, translation was Hearn's schooling in decadent identity: it led the young author, both in mind and body, into a world at the fringes of American middle-class propriety, populated by foreign voices, where his intellectual work, far from appearing elitist, mingled naturally with the daily tasks of migrants and marginal subjects.

Crucially, Bisland wanted to convey the fact that translation was not a process of loss of self but a productive journey toward the attainment of an individual voice: “in his immersion in the works of these virtuosos of words, in his passionate search for equivalents of the subtle nuances of their phrases, [Hearn] developed his own style. A style full of intricate assonances, of a texture close woven and iridescent.” Hearn's decadent style—exemplified in his exotic and supernatural tales with which readers in 1910 would have been familiar—was therefore born in translation: the young Hearn discovered himself by following Flaubert into the “strange” and “queer” marginal locations of nineteenth-century New Orleans. It is particularly significant in this sense that Hearn's self-revelation should take place in translating the Tentation, which, as Michel Foucault has argued in “Fantasia of the Library” (“La Bibliothèque fantastique,” 1967), is itself a book made out of other books. For Foucault, the Tentation marked the historical moment in which “[t]he imaginary is not formed in opposition to reality as its denial or compensation; it grows among signs, from book to book, in the interstice of repetitions and commentaries; it is born and takes shape in the interval between books.”Footnote ⁴⁰ Foucault did not speak of decadence explicitly, but in his analysis we can recognize a number of tropes that are associated with decadent literature, such as the author's withdrawal from reality and the emphasis on modes of consumption rather than production: the Tentation is the book that consumes books, a decadent archive like Des Esseintes's library in À Rebours. In this space of decadent textuality, translation is not conceived of in terms of loss of authenticity or meaning but as a logical extension of the text that already contains within itself modes of reproducibility and transmission. More than that: paraphrasing Benjamin, we could say that, in Bisland's account, “translatability” is the meaning of the text that Hearn found in his close engagement with Flaubert.

Bisland demonstrated the attainment of literary individuality in translation by reducing the distance between Hearn and Flaubert, pointing out natural affinities or what she called spiritual “points of resemblance” that made their textual encounter almost inevitable, until the translator and author appeared as veritable alter egos despite being separated by the gulf of language, space, and time. She noted their shared indifference for useful things and a life of action, their antimaterialism, their curiosity about “poignant sensations, of the sad, the mysterious and the exotic.” But what bound Hearn and Flaubert most closely for Bisland was a “nostalgia for the strange, for the unaccustomed, that all born wanderers know”:

It is significant that the final quotation from the Tentation should have traveled to Bisland's introduction by way of À Rebours, where Des Esseintes engages a ventriloquist for a private nighttime performance of Flaubert's dialogue between the Chimera and the Sphinx culminating in this very line. Des Esseintes fancied that, in this grotesque form, the disembodied voice of Flaubert spoke directly to his own “unsatisfied longing for the ideal.”Footnote ⁴¹ Now Bisland uses the same quotation to subsume Flaubert and Hearn within the decadent affect encapsulated by Symons in his characterization of Mallarmé as “a seeker after something in the world, that is there in no satisfying measure, or not at all”—an affect on which Max Nordau had meanwhile put the indelible stamp of degeneration theory. Bisland reclaims the decadent “longing for the ideal” as a category of resistance. At the same time, the impossible translational intimacy between Hearn and Flaubert imagined by Bisland also conjured the foundational decadent encounter between Baudelaire and Edgar Allan Poe of half a century earlier. Speaking of that encounter, Hearn, in an article from his American period, described translation as creating a “reflection” between the two authors, who lived in such different social and cultural circumstances: “the same wild dreams, the same strange despair, the same madness of melancholy, the same idiosyncrasies of style marked the literary character of both writers.”Footnote ⁴² Indeed, Baudelaire remembered that, on first reading Poe, he had had an uncanny experience of seeing, “with horror and delight, not only topics I'd dreamed of, but sentences I'd thought of and he had written twenty years before.”Footnote ⁴³ Bisland switched to a similarly uncanny register (“the ghostly, the hidden, the unrealized”) in order to situate the productive encounter between translator and author on a special plane where the rules of chronology and traditional patterns of influence do not apply.

As we have seen with Pater, the translational is not only an aesthetic category and a form of radical subjectivity but a vantage point to probe the limits of a national culture. Therefore, like Baudelaire's Poe, for whom America was “a vast prison in which he ran about with the fevered restlessness of a creature born to breathe the air of a sweeter-scented world,”Footnote ⁴⁴ Bisland's Hearn was at once a critic and a victim of America's materialism and its hypocritical Puritan morality, which Bisland dubs a “state of provincial propriety.” Hearn was aware that his determination to preserve the integrity of the original put him at odds with the tastes and publishing conventions of his host country. He admitted to a correspondent that the work was “audacious in parts,” but he did not want anything suppressed: “That serpent-scene, the crucified lions, the breaking of the chair of gold, the hideous battles about Carthage,—these pages contain pictures that ought not to remain entombed in a foreign museum.”Footnote ⁴⁵ Hearn's refusal to domesticate Flaubert placed his translation outside the boundaries of the culturally acceptable, as his failure to find a publisher testifies. In bringing it out after his death, Bisland not only consecrated Hearn's translation of the Tentation as a decadent classic: like Pater, she also mounted a defense of the translational as a core feature of the aesthetic and political identity of decadent literature.