Asian classics on the victorian bookshelf: flights of translation alexander bubb All Chapters Instan
Asian Classics on the Victorian Bookshelf: Flights of Translation Alexander Bubb
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Science Fiction in Translation: Perspectives on the Global Theory and Practice of Translation 1st Edition
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Preface
I am quite ready to take the oriental learning at the valuation of the orientalists themselves. I have never found one among them who could deny that a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia.
—Thomas Babington Macaulay, Minute on Indian Education (1835)1
. . . the names of Firdusi, Sa’di, Omar Khayyám, Jami, and Háfiz, have a place in our own temples of fame. They have won their way into the book-stalls and stand upon our shelves, side by side with the other books which mould our life and shape our character.
—Introduction to The World’s Great Classics: Oriental Literature (1899)2
During the last two centuries, those enthusiasts who have heralded the imminent merging of national literary traditions into a new, joint configuration—world literature—have often given shape to their vision by imagining a universal library. The idea of a single institution, housing everything of value written in any language, has made such a development seem not only desirable but inevitable. This observation is not mine but was made recently by Aamir Mufti, citing among other exponents Goethe (who coined the term Weltliteratur in 1827 after reading a Chinese novel) and Macaulay, whose infamous remarks eight years later buttressed his recommendation that English-language schools should be established in India to foster an educated class sympathetic to British rule. The universal library is and continues to be an enticing notion, Mufti admits, provided one overlooks certain inconvenient questions. Who assembles this library, and to what end? By what principles do they decide which books to admit and which to exclude? How are books categorized, and in what language is the catalogue written? Most importantly, perhaps, who may enter and borrow from this library? For Mufti, these objections give the lie to any blithe assumption that globalization enables texts and ideas to travel unmolested around the world, any more than it permits a free and equal trade in commodities. On the contrary, he remarks,
1 T.B. Macaulay, Speeches: with his Minute on Indian Education (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1935), p. 349.
2 Epiphanius Wilson (ed.), The World’s Great Classics: Oriental Literature (4 vols, New York: Colonial Press, 1899), I, iii. Wilson correctly uses an apostrophe to register the glottal stop in Sadi, and acute accents for the long ‘a’ in Khayyam and Hafiz (though he has overlooked Jami). Nineteenthcentury orientalists used a wide variety of diacritics and to prevent confusion I have avoided them in my own transliteration.
‘world literature has functioned from the very beginning as a border regime’, in which some texts or languages are privileged over others.3
That a ‘border regime’ is in operation within the world library becomes obvious if we extrapolate Macaulay’s dictum. So pure is the metal of European thought, his image suggests, that when brought up for assay and set on the scales, even a small and random assortment of nuggets will prevail over a whole wagonful of ore from the mines of Asia. Better fifty tomes of Europe than an archive of Cathay, apparently, to paraphrase Tennyson’s Locksley Hall (written in the same year as Macaulay’s Minute). Now let us extend the ratio: isn’t Macaulay inviting us to suppose that the latter might with facility be reduced to the dimensions of the former? Would not we (i.e. Europeans) be well served if efficient translators would compress the cumbrous oriental archive into fifty convenient volumes? Such a curatorial enterprise would require that a circumscribed canon of texts, or extracts, be admitted to the library and much else turned away, and in Mufti’s account (which draws ultimately on the work of Edward W. Said), such was the task upon which British orientalists were already well advanced by 1835. He convincingly argues for the fundamental continuity between world literature and orientalism, by showing how the former came into being only when the extraordinarily diverse range of writing practices and traditions observable in ‘the East’ had been ‘absorbed, recalibrated, rearranged, revaluated, reclassified, reconstellated . . . and, in short, fundamentally transformed ’ by the work of European translators, mainly active in the nineteenth century.4 I have no intention of disputing Mufti’s thesis. But I do wish to ask one question. How might our understanding of this process change if, instead of considering the universal library only as a concept, we attempted to discover it in historical actuality? That is, what if we focussed on real books, on real bookshelves, belonging to real people?
Lord Macaulay wrote most of The History of England in his study at Wallington Hall in Northumberland, but that is not the library to which I am referring. In fact I am not alluding to any specific location, but rather to the overall biblioscape that Richard Gottheil seems to be describing, when he claims that the Persian poets Firdausi, Sadi, Omar Khayyam, Jami, and Hafez have come to populate the bookstalls and bookcases of the West. Made in a critical introduction to an anthology of their poetry—the first of four ‘oriental’ volumes published in the World’s Great Classics series at the turn of the century—Gottheil’s remarks suggest that the Persians stand on an equal footing (‘side by side’) with the European classics. Furthermore, they seem to have attained that position, mysteriously, by their own exertions (‘they have won their way’) rather than through any intermediary. From streetside stalls (he does not say shops) they accost the casual browser, but
3 Aamir R. Mufti, Forget English!: Orientalisms and World Literatures (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2016), pp. 1, 5, 9.
4 Ibid., p. 48 (Mufti’s italics).
when housed on a domestic bookshelf (he does not say library), they take on a more decided, indeed a quasi-religious significance. To Gottheil, a secular Jew, the bookcase constitutes a sort of shrine, standing in relation to the greater canon of literature in the same way perhaps that a Roman’s household gods stood in relation to the city temple. Such grandiose rhetoric deserves scrutiny, and so I have set about testing the truth of Gottheil’s assertions. Could Persian poetry really have contributed to shaping the individual ‘character’—and thus to moulding the collective ‘life’—of British and American readers at the fin de siècle, and if this was so then what were the specific poems that accomplished this? Did those readers’ bookshelves hold one Asian book to fifty European, or did they choose a more balanced ratio for their universal libraries-in-miniature? My findings will become apparent in the following chapters—findings, on reflection, that I could scarcely have imagined when I began my research eight years ago on a snowy day in Syracuse, New York. But even though at that stage my destination remained obscure, I had at least discerned three dark spots in our existing knowledge which I thought I might throw some light on.
The first of these lacunae was connected with what Raymond Schwab termed, forty years ago, the Oriental Renaissance. Schwab’s historical focus was on the 1780s and 1790s, when Sir William Jones and his associates carried out groundbreaking research in Calcutta. Despite the profound impact their translations would make in the short term on Romantic literary culture, Schwab’s argument is that in the course of the following century Jones’s cosmopolitan attitude was negated by a wilful ignorance of Asian culture based on the conviction of white racial superiority. Though it continued to flourish in France and Germany, in Britain orientalism failed to recapture the attention it had drawn in its heyday and grew steadily ‘ephemeral’ to public life.5 In spite of Schwab’s tendency to overgeneralize, this narrative has proved remarkably persistent. In her Imperial Babel (2014), Padma Rangarajan points out Schwab’s shortcomings while broadly acquiescing in his thesis, overlooking the obvious fact that orientalism did not lose steam after Jones’s untimely death in 1794, but rather gathered speed relentlessly.6 By 1894, the volume of literature from Asia available in English was vastly greater and more comprehensive than the fragmented corpus of Jones’s lifetime. More importantly, a number of texts now existed in multiple translations—allowing readers to differentiate—and most importantly, editions had been made catering explicitly for the non-expert reader. Some up-to-date studies (e.g. Reza TaherKermani’s 2020 The Persian Presence in Victorian Poetry) have begun to pay heed to the burgeoning world of popularization, but academic interest remains weighted towards translations made for the benefit of oriental scholars, colonial
5 Raymond Schwab, The Oriental Renaissance: Europe’s Rediscovery of India and the East, 1680–1880 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), p. 43.
6 Padma Rangarajan, Imperial Babel: Translation, Exoticism, and the Long Nineteenth Century (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014), p. 111.
officials, missionaries and other specialist readerships.7 Cheap and popular works were sometimes made by people with a highly imperfect knowledge of the source language, and yet sold more copies than authors with the proper credentials. There has been a failure to take such works seriously—Rangarajan refers to Matthew Arnold’s Sohrab and Rustum, a basically accurate retelling of a well-known episode in Firdausi’s Shahnameh, as ‘merely costume’. We might make amends, however, if we are willing to take up a challenge issued recently by Annmarie Drury: ‘what would happen to our understanding of “world literature” if we read the poetic translations that most Victorians read?’8
Inattention to popularizers (a fuller explanation of this term will follow in Chapter 1) has been a problem in the study of European languages too, but that is starting to dissipate. David Damrosch has described the effect of Charles Jervis’s 1742 ‘popular translation’ of Don Quixote in eighteenth-century Britain, while Chantal Wright has partly vindicated Dostoyevsky’s first English translator, Constance Garnett. For decades critics only saw it as their task to pick apart the latter’s flawed Russian, rather than to try and understand the ‘formative’ influence her verbal choices had exerted on a generation of English readers.9 In the area of Asian literature, however, the disparity remains pronounced. This has a bearing on the other two lacunae I propose to address. Firstly, there has been a tendency to treat the mediation of colonial cultures and contexts to the British public as two distinct areas of activity: the highbrow (anthropology, comparative religion, art, and collecting) and the popular (travel writing, fiction by Kipling and Henty, stage melodrama, imperial exhibitions, and the spectacles of the Kiralfy brothers).10 Historians have certainly allowed for the permeation of one sphere by the other, but, with some exceptions, translation has been treated as though it could only have been consumed by the wealthy and educated, when in reality it was communicated in different forms to different audiences.11
Lastly, when researchers have specifically examined translation, focus has usually rested exclusively on the translators, their intentions and methods (often with reference to their prefaces and explanatory notes, and sometimes to their manuscript drafts or correspondence). The intended audience and how it responded (favourably or unfavourably) to the translation, still less the unintended
7 See also several of the essays in Pouneh Shaban and Michelle Quay (eds), The Routledge Handbook of Persian Literary Translation (Abingdon: Routledge, 2022).
8 Rangarajan, Imperial Babel, p. 121; Annmarie Drury, Translation as Transformation in Victorian Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), p. 225.
9 David Damrosch, ‘Translation and National Literature’, in Sandra Bermann and Catherine Porter (eds), A Companion to Translation Studies (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2014), p. 351; Chantal Wright, Literary Translation (London: Routledge, 2016), p. 99.
10 For a detailed study of the latter sphere of activity, see Neil Hultgren, Melodramatic Imperial Writing: From the Sepoy Rebellion to Cecil Rhodes (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2014).
11 One study that has considered the multiple audiences for a translated work, and their development over time, is Dorothy Maria Figueira, Translating the Orient: the Reception of Śākuntala in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1991).
audiences who more often than not made unbidden use of a translator’s work, have not been much thought of in these investigations. This is an important omission, because the major forces we can perceive with hindsight to have shaped literary culture over time—what we might call the macro-history of literature—often look different when viewed from the vantage point of an individual reader in the past. Book reviews, trade periodicals, and booksellers’ adverts are among the sources that have helped me trace the contours of the period’s literary topography, and the fact that such sources have yielded various references to the ‘oriental classics’, rhetorical contrasts of the ‘old world’ of the East with the ‘new world’ of the West, and figurations of the universal library, very much supports Mufti’s narrative. But what actually happens at the microlevel, when world literature is compressed into someone’s household shelf, is thoroughly unpredictable and may even resist the dominant values pressing in on that person from their surrounding context. A single text may trigger a ‘flight’ from those values, propelling the reader with the same momentum by which it initially escaped the orientalist archive, and flew, chaotically, to an untold number of individual bookcases. I am not referring merely to cases of orientophilia, since infatuation with ‘the East’ proceeds from the same entrenched habits of thought as the denigration of it. But I do mean alternative ways of reading, more sensitive and more generous modes of conduct, and forgotten etiquettes of intercultural encounter. To excuse, or do any special pleading, for the translators and orientalists mentioned here is far from my intention, but I would like to suggest that the principles, or modalities, at work in the production of the Victorian oriental canon may be undermined by the practice.
As evidence of the latter, the physical book has been central to my approach. In 2016, I bought a secondhand copy of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam that had been enriched with extensive marginalia by its former owner, a Canadian schoolteacher named Winnifred Carruthers. This purchase, motivated by curiosity, proved a turning-point. I began to seek out more translations from Persian containing inscriptions, bookplates, annotations, underlining, booksellers’ stickers, and other signs of use. Later I broadened my remit to all Asian languages, and amassed a collection of more than one hundred books that I now call AVaTAR— the Archive of Victorian Translations from Asia and their Readerships. A collector of Yiddish schoolbooks, Miriam Borden, gave an interview in 2021 in which she explained what she looks for on the antiquarian market: ‘I’m interested in books that have a voice’, she said.12 In developing AVaTAR, I too have sought out books that have a story to tell, books that may initially give off just a murmur of past usage, but which begin to speak audibly once their former owners have been identified. With the help of online public records (birth and death registers,
12 Borden was interviewed by Nigel Beale on The Biblio File podcast: https://thebibliofile.ca/ book-collector-miriam-borden-on-rescuing-the-yiddish-language (accessed 8 Oct. 2021).
burial lists, the census, local newspapers, and so on) this is an activity that has proved time-consuming but eminently doable. And so while some books in AVaTAR did belong to well-documented individuals (like the Radical MP John Bright, or the Indian dancer Ram Gopal), most sat originally on the shelves of ‘ordinary’ Victorians and Edwardians, whom it has been my privilege to grow acquainted with. For the sake of brevity, I have not generally explained the full process whereby I determined that the ‘E.J.C.’ who presented Winnifred Carruthers with her copy of Omar Khayyam, and left his initials on the flyleaf, was Ernest John Chave of Woodstock, Ontario; or that James Gemmell Knight was a Liverpool printer; or that Willoughby Connor was a Hobart Freemason; or that the strange dedicatory verses written inside Herbert Ormerod’s copy of the Hitopadesha were alluding to the recent death of his wife. Moreover, within the space of this monograph I was only able to mention a small selection of the books. However, a descriptive catalogue of the full collection, with provenance notes, biographical sources, and photographs, is available at https://avatar-books.com/. For the time being AVaTAR remains in my own hands, and I warmly welcome enquiries and requests to view items.
Given the centrality of AVaTAR to my enquiry, it is fitting that first thanks should go to the many booksellers who helped me form the collection, by patiently responding to my emails or by allowing themselves to be drawn into long, distracting conversations on the shopfloor. I am especially grateful to Ted at Mythos Center Books in Frontenac, Minnesota, who made a lonely trip to his warehouse during the Covid-19 lockdown to inspect a copy of the Bhagavad Gita for me, and John Randall from Books of Asia who has been of assistance on several occasions. Also Stephen Foster of Foster Books, West London, without whose fascinating stock of miniatures I would not have discovered my 9cm × 6cm pocket edition of Confucian maxims. Librarians and archivists, too, have generously given their time to follow up my queries related to such tantalizing catalogue descriptors as ‘ownership marks’ or ‘pencilled annotations’. In the digital age it was a privilege to see Elaine Webster, the National Trust’s curator at Mompesson House in Salisbury, turn to handwritten accession registers to help me trace the provenance of their fascinating annotated Ramayana. The staff of the Wilson Library at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill were so kind as to send me some scans of J.M. Dent & Co documents gratis, after I missed a crucial folder during my visit in 2020. Emily DeVore, Amanda Wahlmeier, Andrew Gustafson, and Darryl Jerome of the Johnson County Genealogical Society helped me track down obituaries and other information on Stewart Bruce Terry, the former owner of one of my AVaTAR books. A useful morning spent with the Mark Samuels Lasner Collection at the University of Delaware was only made possible by the collector himself graciously coming down to open the reading room for me outside of normal library working hours. And a special mention must go to Louise
Anson of Kilmacrew House, County Down, who let me occupy her sitting room all afternoon, and brought me endless cups of tea while I consulted some family papers related to the Chinese translator Helen Waddell.
The typescript of this book benefited tremendously from the kind attention and input of my Roehampton colleagues Mary Shannon and Susan Greenberg, of my mentors Elleke Boehmer and Javed Majeed (both of whom championed this project in its early stages, when it was known as ‘Persia in Pocket Edition’), of my friends Sebastian Lecourt and John McBratney, and above all of Annmarie Drury who read almost the whole manuscript. In addition, I received much help and encouragement over the years from Dominic Brookshaw, Sinéad Moriarty, Clare Broome Saunders, Mary Ellis Gibson, Jan Montefiore, Chris Murray, Rajeswari Sunder Rajan, Jonathan Rose, Edmund G.C. King, Shafquat Towheed, Nicola Kirkby, Shengyu Wang, Santanu Das, Ankhi Mukherjee, Brian Murray, Julia Hartley, Paul Babinski, Mishka Sinha, Angus Nicholls, Maddalena Italia, Claire Chambers, and Sukanya Banerjee. Thank you to all the seminar and workshop participants who commented on my ongoing research, in particular Saronik Bosu of New York University, who pointed out that the physical bookshelf could be used as both a ‘metric’ and as a ‘metonym’ for nineteenth-century ecumenical reading cultures. Thank you to my funders: without the financial support of the Leverhulme Trust, Marie-Skłodowska Curie Actions, and the Trinity Long Room Hub at Trinity College Dublin, none of this would have been possible.13 Thank you to my family for their help in proofreading, with a special thanks to my grandmother Diana Bubb, who gave me a copy of Arthur Waley’s One Hundred and Seventy Chinese Poems that she had annotated as a schoolgirl in the 1940s, and who made a habit of asking me, somewhat pointedly, whenever the opportunity arose: ‘is your book finished yet?’ And thank you finally Tarun, the friend who entered my life like a fragrance, or like the sound of Urdu (as my dedication page could be translated into English), who has held me above water, preserved me from mishap and dismay, encouraged all my whims, demanded clarity in thought and expression, and taught me when to stop.
13 Co-funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 programme under Marie Skłodowska-Curie Grant Agreement No. 713730.
List of Illustrations
0.1 Corporal Palmer’s Rubaiyat (with permission of the Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales) xxv
1.1 Frontispiece to The Rose Garden of Persia (author photograph) 14
2.1 West Norwood Cemetery, London (author photograph) 51
3.2 Los Angeles Central Library, detail of ‘Phosphor’ (author photograph) 79
4.1 Stewart Bruce Terry’s commentary on Mencius (author collection) 106
4.2 Confucian Analects with tram ticket (with permission of WM College) 113
5.1 Patten Wilson, ‘Sohrab Taking Leave of His Mother’ (courtesy of Yellow Nineties 2.0) 146
5.2 James Legge, The Chinese Classics, with a Translation, Critical and Exegetical Notes, Prolegomena, and Copious Indexes: Volume 4, Part 1, p. 53 (author photograph) 149
5.3 Helen Waddell, Lyrics from the Chinese, p. 1 (author photograph, copyright permission granted by Louise Anson) 150
6.1 Ernest Griset’s cover design for Vikram and the Vampire (1870) (courtesy of Hathitrust) 177
7.1 Way of the Buddha (1906) annotated by Duncan Lorimer Tovey (author photograph) 219
List of Abbreviations
AVaTAR Archive of Victorian Translations from Asia and their Readerships (author’s personal collection)
Beinecke Beinecke Library, Yale University
Berg Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection at the New York Public Library
BL British Library
Bodleian Bodleian Library, University of Oxford
Bristol Special Collections, University of Bristol Library
Brotherton Brotherton Library, Leeds University
Columbia Butler Library, Columbia University
CUL Cambridge University Library Special Collections
FSL Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington DC
Houghton Houghton Library, Harvard University
Huntington Huntington Library, San Marino, California
HRC Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin
JMA John Murray Archive, National Library of Scotland
LMA London Metropolitan Archives
LRO Liverpool Record Office
Morgan Morgan Library, New York
NLI National Library of Ireland
NLS National Library of Scotland
NSW State Library of New South Wales, Sydney
NYPL Manuscripts & Archives Division, New York Public Library
Pforzheimer Carl H. Pforzheimer Collection of Shelley and his Circle, New York Public Library
Reading Archive of British Printing and Publishing, Special Collections, University of Reading
SLV State Library of Victoria, Melbourne
SOAS Special Collections, School of Oriental and African Studies, London
Syracuse Special Collections Research Center, Bird Library, Syracuse University
TCD1 Department of Manuscripts & Archives, Trinity College Dublin
TCD2 Department of Early Printed Books & Special Collections, Trinity College Dublin
UCLA Young Research Library, University of California Los Angeles
UNC Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
Virginia Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library, University of Virginia
WSRO West Sussex Record Office, Chichester
Prologue
A Soldier’s Rubaiyat
In the State Library of New South Wales is a very small book, 5cm × 8cm, bound in worn green leather, with a chalky-white stain swirling along its reverse side. At some point, water, probably rain, has soaked through its pages, tinging them pink at the corners with the red ink of the pastedown. Its spine is only long enough to admit a stencilled name—‘Omar Khayyam’—and to that, turning inside, the title page adds just two further, scrupulously accented words: Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. There is no mention of the translator, nor indeed that the book’s contents were originally written in Persian—though if we turn to the back, a short biographical afterword gives us the few known facts about the eleventh-century astronomer to whom the collection of ruba‘i or quatrains are attributed. It also reveals this English version to be the first of four made by the Victorian poet and recluse Edward Fitzgerald. His 1859 translation ‘attracted very little attention at the time of its publication, but of recent years it has had an immense vogue, and has been read and appreciated by thousands.’ That is all, more or less, that the book carries by way of editorial baggage. Whereas in 1859 Fitzgerald himself had offered his reader ten pages of preface, by 1907 the Edinburgh firm of Nimmo, Hay & Mitchell seem to have felt that Omar Khayyam needed little introduction— or at least no more than did Thoughts from Emerson, Winnowings from Wordsworth, A Tennyson Treasury, and the five other literary works we find advertised in the rear endpapers as forming entries in their Miniature Series.1
This then was a cheap, one-shilling edition of an English classic author. Sized for the pocket, it was intended for a reader who was already familiar at least with the poem’s title, and who desired perhaps a portable copy that could be referred to at spare moments. The pocket in which this copy was carried was a soldier’s, Corporal Thomas Ambrose Palmer, a farmer from Mangain, New South Wales, who enlisted in 1915 at the age of thirty-six and was sent first to Egypt, then France.2 He returned safely from the Western Front, and the Rubaiyat is bundled with a collection of his war letters and diaries. He may have acquired the book before, during, or even after the war; but the way it has been archived, and the evident rain damage, would suggest that Palmer bore this book on his person across the battlefields of Europe. In this he was not alone. As we will see later, the
2 For Palmer’s war record, see National Archives of Australia: B2455, Palmer, Thomas Ambrose.
Rubaiyat was one of the poems most commonly read by First World War combatants (and not only English speakers). Indeed, Nimmo, Hay & Mitchell reissued their miniature Omar in 1914, possibly with a view to this vast and mobile readership, though the little book in Sydney is from the original 1907 print run.3
Palmer has crammed every available space in the tiny book with annotations, saving only those pages on which are printed the actual quatrains of the poem, which it appears he wanted to preserve clean. Shafquat Towheed and Edmund King describe how books were passed and swapped between soldiers in the trenches as part of a communal reading culture.4 Not so with this item. The annotations would be hard to read even without the water stains, and could not have been intended for another reader—unless it were a hypothetical future reader, such as a son or daughter. No, these quotations (for the notes consist entirely in extracts from other poems) were designed as supplementary material to Palmer’s own reading and re-reading of the Rubaiyat. Grouped together principally in the front endpapers, they signal the points of reference and ‘frame of mind’ with which he felt the text should be approached.5 This was what it originally meant to ‘illustrate’ a book, to cite Thomas Dibdin’s definition from 1809: ‘bringing together, from different works, (including newspapers and magazines, and by means of the scissars [sic], or otherwise by transcription) every page or paragraph which has any connexion with the character or subject under discussion.’6 As we lever open its crinkled pages, the book thus discloses a vista of its owner’s remarkable reading habits, and evokes too the bookshelf—actual or mental—on which it once assumed its place, the global bookshelf of Thomas Palmer. Appropriately, we find also that the principal subject this soldier wished to illustrate was ‘connexion’ itself—or rather, the resonances and sympathies he detected between poems drawn from distant parts of West, South, and East Asia.
Of course, Palmer could hardly carry a library in his knapsack, and he may have decided to use his Rubaiyat as a commonplace book to preserve the chance fruits of his browsing in YMCA huts and hospital day-rooms. But there is clearly a more deliberate selection and ordering at work. The miniature Omar does serve as a substitute for weightier pages, because the excerpts all bear some analogous relationship to the longer text in whose wings they shelter. Moreover, several of them appear to have been transcribed from memory. On the front pastedown can be recognized the preamble to Tennyson’s late poem ‘Akbar’s Dream’ (1892), given
3 The copy bears no date of publication, but may be dated from its characteristics, as described in A.G. Potter, A Bibliography of the Rubāiyāt of Omar Khayyām (1929; repr. Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag, 1994), p. 15.
4 Shafquat Towheed and Edmund G.C. King, ‘Introduction’, in Towheed and King (eds), Reading and the First World War: Readers, Texts, Archives (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), p. 12.
5 H.J. Jackson, Marginalia: Readers Writing in Books (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001), p. 25.
6 Thomas Frognall Dibdin, Bibliomania; or Book Madness: a Bibliographical Romance, in Six Parts (London: privately printed, 1809), p. 669.
here verbatim on the left, with the original for comparison (the book’s cramped dimensions obliged Palmer to split each line in two).
O God in every temple I see O god in every temple I see people that see thee, people that see Thee and in every language I hear spoken, people praise thee. feel Polytheism and Islam feel after thee after Thee each religion says Thou
Each religion says, ‘Thou art one, without equal.’ art one—without equal if it be a mosque people
If it be a mosque people murmur the holy prayer, murmur the holy prayer has people ring the bell and if it be a Christian Church, people ring the bell from from love of Thee love to Thee. sometimes I frequent
Sometimes I frequent the Christian cloister, and the Christian church sometimes the mosque. & sometimes the mosque But it is Thou whom But it is thou whom I search from temple to temple. I seek from temple to temple Thy elect have no dealings Thy elect have no dealings with either heresy or either with heresy or orthodoxy orthodoxy; for neither of them stands behind the screen for neither of them stands of thy truth. behind the screen of your truth
Heresy to the heretic
Heresy to the heretic, and religion to the orthodox, and Religion to the But the dust of the rose-petal belongs to the heart of orthodox the perfume seller.7
‘Akbar’s Dream’ is a dramatic monologue spoken by the Mughal emperor (1542–1605), a Muslim ruler celebrated for the pluralist approach he adopted in governing his multi-faith Indian empire. Tennyson read about Akbar’s Sufiinfluenced beliefs and his attempt to synthesize a unitary religion in the Ain-iAkbari, an account of his reign translated into English in 1873 by the orientalist Heinrich Blochmann.8 Corporal Palmer has not transcribed Tennyson’s own poem, however, but rather the preamble or epigraph that he extracted from Blochmann’s introductory essay. This was a Persian composition produced by the emperor’s vizier Abu’l-Fazl (Palmer renders the name ‘Abdul Fazi’), which he apparently meant to be inscribed on a Hindu temple as a deterrent to would-be Muslim iconoclasts. In preference to the English poem with its oriental colouring, then, Palmer has chosen as his first insert a primary text from the same linguistic
7 Christopher Ricks (ed.), The Poems of Tennyson (London: Longman, 1969), p. 1441. Tennyson abridged Blochmann’s text, and so must have been Palmer’s source. For the original, see H. Blochmann and H.S. Jarrett, The Ain i Akbari, by Abul Fazi ’Allami, translated from the original Persian (3 vols, Calcutta: Asiatic Society, 1873–94), I, xxxii.
8 For Tennyson’s sources for ‘Akbar’s Dream’ and his wider interests in non-Christian literature, see Kirstie Blair, Form and Faith in Victorian Poetry and Religion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 189–96.
tradition as the Rubaiyat. Indeed, he has not quoted Tennyson’s verses at all, but only ‘An inscription by Abdul Fazi on a temple in Kashmir’. And if he mistook the name of the Persian vizier in English, his attempt two pages later to transcribe it in the Perso-Arabic script was a little nearer the mark.9
As we delve deeper into Palmer’s notes, let us think about the rationale for his choice of ‘illustrations’. Omar Khayyam’s nineteenth-century translators, and to a degree his readers, can be divided into two parties: those who honoured him as a sceptical hedonist, preferring the company of cupbearers to that of the clergy; versus those who insisted that he was a Sufi, and his wine and taverns mystic symbols of a higher spiritual reality. They represent two Victorian responses to the erosion of Christian doctrine, the first rejecting religion outright, the second adopting non-Christian faiths or pursuing (like the Theosophical Society, founded in 1875) a monist or pantheist solution. Palmer evidently fell into the latter camp and, mirroring the comparative practices of the Theosophists, seeks to illustrate or ratify Omar’s beliefs by citing a number of writers past and present. His second quotation, following Abu’l-Fazl, reflects the same tradition of Indian religious syncretism, as expounded by the medieval Hindi poet Kabir.
My brother kneels—so says Kabir To stone & brass in heathenwise
But in my brothers voice I hear Mine own unanswered agonies
His God is as his fate assigns His prayer is all the world’s—& mine.
It is possible that Palmer had come across the One Hundred Poems of Kabir translated in 1914 by Rabindranath Tagore. But these lines are not Tagore’s—in fact they are not a translation at all, but rather an imitation of Kabir written by Rudyard Kipling, and used as a chapter heading in his novel Kim (1901).10 Nevertheless, they do faithfully recreate one of the poet’s distinctive mannerisms,11 and Palmer, who may have considered them genuine, must have intended them to complement Abu’l-Fazl. They also find their pendant at the other end of the book, in a contemporary quotation from the American dialect poet Joaquin Miller: ‘In men whom men condemn as ill / I find so much of goodness still, / I[n]
9 I am conjecturing here, as the writing is so awkward as to be almost unintelligible. ‘Fazl’ has been spelt using the medial fā’ instead of its initial, followed by sīn instead of zā. Whoever wrote these characters knew his limitations, however, and used pencil (Palmer’s notes are otherwise in pen).
10 Rudyard Kipling, Kim (London: Macmillan, 1902), p. 358. As with ‘Akbar’s Dream’, Palmer has slightly misquoted—Kipling’s text has ‘saith Kabir’, ‘My own’ and ‘as his fates assign’.
11 Nearly all of Kabir’s vanis conclude with ‘kahat Kabir’ or ‘kahe Kabir’ (Kabir says).
men whom men pronounce divine / I find so much of sin & blot— / I hesitate to draw a line / Between the two, where God has not.’ Though Miller refuses to draw a line between sinner and saved, these tolerant lines draw a line under the Rubaiyat itself, for Palmer has written them out directly below the Persian slogan with which Fitzgerald chose to conclude his translation: TAMÁM SHUD (‘it is all’).
All Victorian readers of the Rubaiyat, whether sceptic or Sufi, recognized the poem’s message that one must savour the wine of life, and die gladly upon hearing the fatal beat of Azrael’s wings: ‘While the Rose blows along the River Brink, / With old Khayyám the Ruby Vintage drink: / And when the Angel with his darker Draught / Draws up to Thee—take that, and do not shrink.’12 This simple credo seems to have consoled more than one soldier of the Great War, and Palmer’s response is to choose perhaps the most prominent space in the volume—the blank verso facing the poem’s opening page—for the third of his oriental pendants (Figure 0.1). This quotation is drawn not from the Perso-Indian tradition, however, but from the Japanese:
Figure 0.1 Corporal Palmer’s Rubaiyat (with permission of the Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales)
12 Edward Fitzgerald, Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, the Astronomer-Poet of Persia (London: Bernard Quaritch, 1859), p. 10.
Fire of the Autumn turns to Red & Gold the greeness [sic] of the leaves before their grave receive them but for ever pure & cold the white foam blossoms on the tossing wave Yasuhide
The verses are by the ninth-century poet and official Fun’ya no Yasuhide, and an English reader of the 1910s enjoyed multiple routes of access to them. They were available in a standard scholarly text edited by Professor Basil Hall Chamberlain, as well as in a slim number of John Murray’s cheap ‘Wisdom of the East’ series, Clara Walsh’s Master-Singers of Japan (though her decorous Georgian style is markedly different from the proto-Imagism of the lines above).13 Palmer may even have read an article by the brilliant young poet-critic Yone Noguchi, printed in the Melbourne Herald six months before the outbreak of war, which mocks Yasuhide and his overblown style. But his actual source was an Anglo-Japanese collaborative translation, Sword and Blossom Poems, printed on crêpe paper at Tokyo by the ingenious Hasegawa Takejiro, a publisher who specialized in packaging Japanese literature for European audiences.14 Whether or not Palmer drew any formal connection between the five-line tanka and four-line ruba‘i, he chose it as an autumnal pendant to the Persian, and as a touchstone perhaps for the growing melancholy he expressed in letters home to his fiancée Nell:
Trust you are O.K. & not worrying unduly. It’s a sad old world this and the best anyone gets is a few years together with those they love & if I get through this business all right I’ll have reason to be grateful, remembering all the boys who have gone under . . . 15
The Textual Horizon
Out of this tiny volume opens a vast horizon of possible intertexts, and from artefacts like it we may achieve a global outlook on cultural production and
13 Basil Hall Chamberlain, The Classical Poetry of the Japanese (London: Trübner, 1880), p. 121; Clara Walsh, The Master-Singers of Japan (London: John Murray, 1910), p. 87. For the possible influence of Sword and Blossom Poems on the Imagists, see Yoshiko Kita, ‘Imagism Reconsidered, with Special Reference to the Early Poetry of H.D.’, PhD thesis, Durham University (1995), p. 38.
14 Yone Noguchi, ‘Japanese Essays: Poetical Vulgarity’, Herald (Melbourne), 31 Jan. 1914, p. 4 (reprinted from the Westminster Gazette); Shotaro Kimura and Charlotte M.A. Peake, Sword and Blossom Poems, from the Japanese (3 vols, Tokyo: Hasegawa, 1907–10), II, 18. Yasuhide’s lyric is also quoted by a reviewer in the Bookman, XXXV/205 (Oct. 1908), 61.
15 NSW: MLMSS 9831, T.A. Palmer to Ellen Honora Wilson, 21 Apr. 1918.
consumption in the nineteenth century. Palmer’s reference points are not exclusively Asian (the rear endpapers also bear some words of Ruskin on the power of education), but the bulk of the annotation, grouped prominently at the front of the book, testifies to his evident interest in non-Western literature. His curiosity may have predated the war, or it may have been inspired by his three months’ gunnery training in the Middle East. But of greater significance is the likelihood that he cultivated this interest privately, without formal instruction, using the literature at his disposal in the 1910s.
This book takes its impetus from readers like Corporal Palmer, who invested their time and money in studying what Victorians conceived as the ‘classic’ literature of the major Asian languages, and who were motivated to do so not because of any professional commitment (academic, mercantile, missionary, or otherwise), but by spiritual yearning, imperial enthusiasm, speculative philosophy, or eccentric theories, a search for alternative sexual and gender norms, travel, friendship, escapism, and various other forms of personal curiosity. This is what I mean by a ‘general reader’—not a category defined by class or intellect, but by a relationship of amateurism to the source-languages. Such readers were often obliged to resort to dense and technical books which were never intended for use by non-experts. But when possible, they consumed the accessible, affordable, popular translations that began to appear in the 1840s and multiplied rapidly during Palmer’s lifetime. Traditionally denigrated by specialists, these popular editions enabled an important and remarkable transition whereby, in the course of a few decades, many texts that had been hitherto the preserve solely of orientalists and antiquaries spread their boards and executed a dramatic flight from the scholar’s desk to the domestic bookcase.
It is generally accepted now that the ‘common’ or ‘general’ reader has been a label of convenience which obscures the ‘obstinate, irreducible individualism’ of every historical person, and the particular conditions shaping their response.16 The individuals who populate these pages, and include country gentry, urban bourgeoisie, working men and women, children and adolescents, British, Irish, American, African American, and Australian readers, repeatedly expose the limitations of such vague terms. I continue to use them, however, inasmuch as they reflect translators’ priorities and appear in their correspondence. In the many unsolicited ‘pitches’ addressed to various publishers that I have read, proposers of new translations invariably claim that they will find favour with some nebulous class of average educated people. The writers of such letters focussed their efforts like rays of light towards a vanishing point called the ‘general reader’, beyond which emerged—on the other side of the reading process—a refracted spectrum of interpretations produced by multifaceted individuals like Corporal Palmer.
16 Anthony Grafton, ‘Is the History of Reading a Marginal Enterprise? Guillaume Budé and his Books’, Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, XCI/2 (1997), 141.
The practice of such readers may be thought of in the terms used by Virginia Woolf in 1925: ‘guided by an instinct to create for himself, out of whatever odds and ends he can come by, some kind of whole . . . Hasty, inaccurate, and superficial, snatching now this poem, now that scrap of old furniture, without caring where he finds it or of what nature it may be so long as it serves his purpose and rounds his structure.’17 The archetypal solitary autodidact that Woolf seems to have in mind was a generalization: many readers arrived at Kabir or Omar Khayyam not through a deliberate programme of study, but through happenstance. Many others did not read alone, but were introduced to Asian authors by friends, teachers, and clubs. But the wish or ‘instinct’ for coherence—the wish to minimize the random element in one’s browsing and maximize meaningful return—is something Palmer shares with many distinct individuals.
My goal has been to explain both how these popular editions were made, and also how they were read. Indeed, I aim to give a picture of the whole cycle, from the conception and execution of translations, through the process of production and publication in either book form or periodical, dissemination to libraries and bookshops, and ultimately their consumption by readers and recirculation among other readers (not forgetting that many laypeople read older or more difficult translations in addition to, and in some cases in preference to, the new popular editions).
In pursuit of this goal, a project that began in speculation bulged exponentially as new findings and potential approaches came to light—including a huge cast of largely forgotten translators. Of necessity it became a study of translation, of book and reading history, and of poetry, prose, and drama originally written in Hindi, Persian, Arabic, Sanskrit, Chinese, and Japanese. The obstacles to such an enquiry were clear: I had knowledge only of the first two languages, and that far from expert. I would have to borrow the instruments of my methodology from several disciplines, and write a book that could never adequately repay all its intellectual creditors. That it raises issues which it has not the scope to conclusively resolve, and plumbs depths which it cannot fully survey, I freely admit. Nevertheless I have presented my research in the form in which I judge it will be of most use to scholarship. I decided that only by aiming at comprehensiveness (and inevitably falling short), could I give an impression of the plenitude and diversity that characterizes the Victorian consumption of ‘oriental literature’. Moreover, the very occurrence of that vague, problematic designation so frequently in contemporary sources made me realize that to understand both translators and readers of the nineteenth century, I would in some ways have to emulate them. While some delved deep into one literary tradition, the bent of others—restless, eccentric, prejudiced, misinformed, imaginative, or comparative—carried them widely if superficially across a range of languages. Such practices were authorized by the existence of
17 Virginia Woolf, The Common Reader (London: Hogarth Press, 1925), pp. 11–12.
monolithic notions such as ‘the East’, which I had been well taught—and now teach my own students—to deconstruct. But nonetheless I, too, would have to read Confucius in the morning and Rumi in the afternoon, so to speak, if I was to perceive the various skewed frameworks that individuals or groups might piece together in order to connect such incongruous authors. Having observed the impulse to order Asian texts manifesting itself throughout the literate public, I would be better placed to articulate one of this book’s central arguments: that an effort was underway in the nineteenth century to assemble an Oriental Canon as a supplement to the Greco-Roman classics.
That effort is described fully in the book’s central chapter, Chapter 4, which integrates the findings of the first three chapters and lays the groundwork for the final three. The reader will notice that each of my chapters is named for a different part of the process whereby a text crosses from one culture to another—‘Translating’, ‘Publishing’, ‘Circulating’, ‘Taking an Interest’, ‘Reading’, ‘Canonizing’—and yet may be puzzled as to why I have not arranged them in ‘chronological’ order. This is in part because the order in which these stages arise is not the same for every text. Sometimes a publisher decides to issue a text before its translation has been undertaken. Sometimes (often, in fact) the business of sorting and sifting texts into a canon does not come until after the translators have done their work— rather, the translators engage with and attempt to influence canon-makers before and during the act of translation. Moreover, it was necessary first to map out the social, cultural, and political background, as well as the institutional structures at work in the period under consideration, so that when I came to describe the production and reception of individual translations I could more effectively situate them within their context. Thus Chapters 1 to 3 serve the purpose of naming the many source-texts under discussion, showing how each entered the English language and was diffused through English literature. They examine the difference between academic and popular translations, explain how readers accessed translations (as well as original texts), and point to the various motive forces driving interest in Asian literature—an interest that spread and increased steadily in the course of the century. The second half of the book focusses more closely on the production and consumption of translations, with Chapter 5 investigating and comparing the methods and motivations of individual translators. Chapter 6 turns to the publishing world and its internal processes—proposal, editing, printing, illustration, marketing, pricing—by which the texts assumed their material form, while Chapter 7 examines their reception and usage by a variety of readers (though reader responses are cited and referred to throughout the book). In all chapters, discussion will range widely across the breadth of the Victorian oriental ‘canon’, but to reduce the risk of disorienting my own readers, most chapters are linked with a key text that illustrates the issues at stake in that chapter. In Chapter 2, the focal text is the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam; Chapter 4 dwells on the teachings of Confucius; an extended comparison of different translations of the Ramayana
