Article published In:
TargetVol. 21:2 (2009) ► pp.308–332
Translating for a Good Cause
Joseph Lavallée’s antislavery novel Le Nègre comme il y a peu de Blancs (1789) and its two English translations (1790)
In Joseph Lavallée’s Le Nègre comme il y a peu de Blancs (1789) novelistic means are openly used to serve the abolitionist cause. The author announces in the preface that his aim is to “make his readers love Black people”. The novel was quite well received in France and it was translated into English twice the following year, first by Joseph Trapp and then by an anonymous translator. My article is based on a comparative analysis of some key passages containing abolitionist discourse in the source text and in the two target texts. I argue that the second English translator systematically made the novel more suitable for the abolitionist cause, by omitting or by modifying contradictory material found in the source text. Interestingly, it was this manipulated version of Lavallée’s novel that became popular among English-speaking readers.
Article outline
- 1.Introduction
- 2.
Le Nègre comme il y a peu de Blancs and its two English versions
- 3.Analysis
- 3.1Structure and style in Le Nègre comme il y a peu de Blancs
- 3.2Lavallée’s novel and Oroonoko
- 3.3Abolitionist discourse in the source text and the translations
- 4.To conclude: The revealing last words
- Acknowledgements
- Notes
-
Corpus texts
-
References
References (52)
Corpus texts
Anonymous
1790 The Negro Equalled by few Europeans. Translated from the French. London: printed for G.G.J. and J. Robinson.
Lavallée, Joseph
1789 Le Nègre comme il y a peu de Blancs. Madras/Paris: Buisson.
Lavallée, Joseph
1791 Le Nègre comme il y a peu de Blancs. Seconde édition. Madras/Paris: Buisson. Consulted via ECCO (accessed August–October 2008).
Trapp, J. A.M
1790 The Negro as there are Few White Men. Translated from the French. London: Printed for the author, and sold by Messrs. White and Son, Fleet Street; Elliot and Kay, opposite Sommerset House; Richardson, Royal Exchange; Parsons, Pater-noster Row; Steel, Towerhill; Flexney, Deighton, Holborn; Cattermoul, Oxford Street; Ridgeway, York Street, St. James’s Square; Brown, Otridge, Strahan, M’Queen, Strand; Fowler, Piazza, Covent Garden; Murray, Princes Street; Parsley, Surry Road; and J. Barker, Russell Court, Drury Lane.
Behn, Aphra
1997 Oroonoko ed. by
Joanna Lipkin. New York & London: W.W. Norton & Company.
Behn, Aphra
2008 Oronoko, l’esclave royal ed. by
Bernard Dhuicq. Paris: Éditions La Bibliothèque.
Bongie, Chris
2005 “
Victor Hugo and ‘The Cause of Humanity’. Translating Bug-Jargal (1826) into The Slave-King (1833)”.
The Translator 11:1. 1–24.
Boulukos, George
2008 The Grateful Slave: The emergence of race in eighteenth-century British and American culture. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Brantlinger, Patrick
1985 “
Victorians and Africans: The Genealogy of the Myth of the Dark Continent”.
Gates 1985
. 185–222.
Carey, Brycchan
2005/2007 British Abolitionism and the Rhetoric of Sensibility: Writing, Sentiment, and Slavery, 1760–1807. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Carretta, Vincent
1997 Review article “
Mind-Forg’d Manacles: Slavery and the English Romantic Poets & Translating Slavery: Gender and Race in French Women’s Writing, 1783–1823”.
Eighteenth-Century Studies 30:4. 455–456.
CR = The Critical Review, or Annals of Literature 69 & 70
1790 London: A. Hamilton. Consulted
via
[URL] (accessed 11 August 2008).
Duprat, Catherine
1993 Le temps des philanthropes : La philanthropie parisienne des Lumières à la Monarchie de Juillet. Vol. I1. Paris: Éditions du C.T.H.S.
Dhuicq, Bernard
2008 “
Préface”.
Behn 2008
. 9–21.
ECCO = Eighteenth Century Collections On-Line
[URL] (accessed August-October 2008).
Ehrard, Jean
2008 Lumières et Esclavage : L’Esclavage colonial et l’opinion publique en France au XVIIIe siècle. Bruxelles: André Versaille éditeur.
ER = The English Review; or, an abstract of English Foreign literature
11 (1788), 13 (1789), 17 (1791) London: J. Murray. Consulted
via
[URL] (accessed 17 October 2008).
Even-Zohar, Itamar
1990 “
Polysystem Studies”.
Poetics Today 11: 1.
France, Peter
2000 The Oxford Guide to Literature in English Translation. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Friedman, David M.
2001 A Mind of Its Own: A Cultural History of the Penis. New York: The Free Press.
Garside, Peter James Raven&Rainer Schöerling
(
2000)
The English Novel 1770–1829: A Bibliographical Survey of Prose Fiction Published in the British Isles, vol. I1: 1770–1799. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Gates, Henry Louis Jr.
1985 “Race,” Writing, and Difference. Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press.
Genette, Gérard
1982 Palimpsestes : La littérature au second degré. Paris: Éditions du Seuil.
Grieder, Josephine
1975 Translations of French Sentimental Prose Fiction in Late Eighteenth-Century England: The History of a Literary Vogue. Durham: Duke University Press.
Harrow, Sharon
2004 Adventures in Domesticity: Gender and Colonial Adulteration in Eighteenth-Century British Literature. New York: AMS Press.
Haskins Gonthier, Ursula
2008 “
‘La difference de couleur n’en fait point dans l’âme’: Behn’s Oroonoko and the French Antislavery Debate”.
Journal for Eighteenth-Century Studies 31: 2. 209–222.
Hermans, Theo
ed. 1985 The Manipulation of Literature. Studies in Literary Translation. London & Sydney: Croom Helm.
Hoffmann, Léon-François
1973 Le Nègre romantique : Personnage littéraire et obsession collective. Paris: Payot.
Isani, Mukhtar Ali
1979 “
Far from ‘Gambia’s Golden Shore’: The Black in the Late Eighteenth-Century American Imaginative Literature”.
The William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd Ser. 36: 3. 353–372.
Jennings, Lawrence C.
1992 “
The Interaction of French and British antislavery, 1789–1848”.
Proceedings of the Fifteenth Meeting of the French Colonial Historical Society. Martinique and Guadeloupe, May 1989 ed. by
Patricia Galloway&
Philip P. Boucher. New York & London: Lanham. 81–91.
Jennings, Lawrence C.
2000 French Anti-Slavery: The Movement for the Abolition of Slavery in France 1802–1848. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Kadish, Doris Y. & Françoise Massardier-Kenney
eds. 1994 Translating Slavery: Gender and Race in French Women’s Writing, 1783–1823. Kent/ London: Kent State University Press.
Lefevere, André
1992 Translation, Rewriting, and the Manipulation of Literary Fame. London & New York: Routledge.
Lefevere, André
1998 “
Translation Practice(s) and the Circulation of Cultural Capital. Some Aeneids in English”. ed. by
Susan Bassnett&
André Lefevere. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters Ltd. 41–56.
Lloyd, Heather
2000 “
Voltaire”.
Encyclopedia of Literary Translation into English ed. by
Olive Classe. London & Chicago: Fitzroy Dearborn Publishers. Vol. II1.
Locke, Mary S.
1901 Anti-Slavery in America, from the Introduction of African Slaves to the Prohibition of the Slave Trade (1619–1808). Boston: Ginn & Co.
Martin, Angus, Vivienne G. Mylne&Richard Frautschi
1977 Bibliographie du genre romanesque français 1751–1800. London : Mansell & Paris : France Expansion.
Mercier, Roger
1962 L’Afrique noire dans la literature française : Les premières images (XVIIe– XVIIIe siècles). Dakar: Université de Dakar.
MonAKO Glossary
in
[URL] (accessedAugust-October 2008).
Nussbaum, Felicity A.
2003 The Limits of the Human: Fictions of Anomaly, Race, and Gender in the Long Eighteenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Oxford English Dictionary on-line
[URL] (accessed August-October 2008).
Quérard, J.-M.
1830 La France littéraire, ou dictionnaire bibliographique des savants, historiens et gens de lettres de la France, ainsi que des littérateurs étrangers qui ont écrit en français, plus particulièrement pendant les XVIIIe et XIXe siècles. Paris: Firmin Didot. Vol. IV1.
Raven, James
2007 The Business of Books: Booksellers and the English Book Trade 1450–1850. New Haven & London: Yale University Press.
Robinson, Philip
1989 “
Traduction ou trahison de ‘Paul et Virginie’ ? L’exemple de Helen Maria Williams”.
Revue d’histoire littéraire de la France 89:5. 843–855.
Saillant, John
1995 “
The Black Body Erotic and the Republican Body Politic, 1790–1820”.
Journal of the History of Sexuality 5:3. 403–428.
Seeber, Edward Derbyshire
1936 “
Oroonoko in France in the XVIIIth Century”.
PMLA 51: 4. 953–959.
Seeber, Edward Derbyshire
1937 Anti-Slavery Opinion in France during the Second Half of the Eighteenth Century. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press.
Stetting, Karen
1989 “
Transediting—a New Term for Coping with a Grey Area between Editing and Translating”.
Proceedings from the Fourth Nordic Conference for English Studies ed. by
Graham Caie et al. Copenhagen: Department of English, University of Copenhagen. 371–382.
Streeter, Harold Wade
1936 The Eighteenth Century English Novel in French Translation: A Bibliographical Study. New York: The Institute of French Studies Inc.
Turley, David
1991 The Culture of English Antislavery, 1780–1860. London & New York: Routledge.
Cited by (2)
Cited by 2 other publications
Lockard, Joe
2021.
“The Unknown Painter,” Antislavery Fiction, and Zombies.
Studies in the American Short Story 2:1
► pp. 48 ff.
Tarkka, Laura
2021.
Political Corrections: The Revolutionary Context and English Retranslations of Johann Georg Zimmermann’s Vom Nationalstolze [On National Pride] (1768).
TTR 34:1
► pp. 181 ff.
This list is based on CrossRef data as of 10 july 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers.
Any errors therein should be reported to them.