Criteria for Inclusion
The ‘Radical Translations’ digital resource does not reproduce a pre-existing analogue archive or catalogue, but constitutes a new, handpicked corpus of texts that we have collected in response to a specific set of research questions [link]. Because we have, in a sense, created our own object of study, it is important that we highlight the procedures used to model the data, so as to open the resource to other researchers. Needless to say, in setting the linguistic and geographical scope of the project as well as its chronological range, we had to strike a balance between practical limitations and the need to establish a meaningful sample. In future, we hope to expand our corpus either by including more translations in different languages from the same time period (eg. German, Spanish, Polish, Greek) and/or by building a larger corpus of revolutionary writings to contextualise translation within the more general transmission and circulation of revolutionary ideas.
1. What is a radical translation?
Our starting point was basic. We defined as radical any translation that sought to extend revolutionary rights, freedoms and notions of democratic participation into new contexts in order to reach new publics. These new contexts could be linguistic and geographical as well as political or social (such as the case of translations that sought to cross boundaries of class, gender or race). We opted for a loose formulation in the spirit of Anthony Pym’s “working definitions” which he argues should be “as blind as possible, incorporating an element of conscious heresy or irrationality into their carefully verbalized form” (Pym 1998: 65). The relative bluntness of our initial definition has, we hope, prevented us from pre-determining our own results and made constructing the database an open-ended, heuristic process.
Although our working definition was kept deliberately loose, it was not arbitrary. Our initial criteria of selection was based either on our knowledge of the translators themselves (their social identities and their political networks) or on well-known source-texts associated either with the radical Enlightenment (eg. d'Holbach, Rousseau) or the revolution (Thomas Paine, various writings on the French Declaration of Rights, Constitutions etc).
Moreover, this knowledge of the social identity of translators constitutes new research (see Networks below). Although the social identities and networks of people prominent in revolutionary movements across Europe are well known, there is no comparable analysis of translators, whose lives and activities remain obscure. Recent scholarship has focused attention on translators as important cultural go-betweens, but mainly in relation to established institutions or states. To our knowledge, no one has attempted to determine the more informal networks of translators involved in extending radical ideas across inter as well as intra-linguistic borders of all kinds.
But if recognisably “activist” translations constitute the “core” of our corpus, it is also the case that the corpus includes a number of borderline cases, for example novels whose content at first glance may not appear to be overtly radical but is radicalised in translation. Or the case of women translators, whose social position may not allow them to overtly express adhesion to democratic ideas but whose translations may be interpreted as “radical” within a specific context. Although our project begins with a core group of well-known radicals, it seeks to illuminate these lesser known figures and texts by reconstructing the channels through which translations move. Therefore, an important point for us when choosing who and what to include in the database has been to consider to what extent such borderline cases illuminate the transmission, adaptation and range through which radical ideas came to be expressed.
2. Countries
At this stage, the Radical Translations project concentrates primarily on three countries or geographical areas, namely Britain, France and Italy, and maps translations to and from English, French and Italian. Ireland and the United States have been included as vital centres for the circulation of both key source texts and translations, as well as being central to the biographies of some of the radical authors and translators present in our database.
Our aim was to uncover Europe’s shared radical heritage, often obscured by the national paradigm of traditional historiography, by following the transfer of radical ideas across linguistic, geographical and political borders as well as across different 'national' or 'regional' chronologies of political events.
France is generally still seen as the originator of modern revolutionary culture, which it then “exported” through cultural influence and war. Yet, the French revolutionaries were profoundly influenced by political traditions coming from abroad, including the English Commonwealth, the medieval Italian communes and classical republicanism.
We chose Britain and Italy because they provide contrastive examples: it is often assumed that Britain remained aloof from the revolutionary turmoil that engulfed the continent. Conversely, Italian radicals and their political exploits are routinely dismissed as traitorous collaborations with the occupying French army or, at best, misguided attempts at imitating a foreign revolution. By revealing the varied intensities and modalities of translation activity across the three language areas, our research helps reconsider such assumptions around insularity and originality (or lack thereof).
Italy did not exist as a unified nation state in the period covered by the project, but our use of the term is justified by political geography and by the burgeoning national consciousness of many radical patriots. After all, the Napoleonic campaign of 1796 is customarily adopted as the beginning of the Italian Risorgimento and path to nationhood (Banti 2004).
3. Timeframe
The need to control the proliferation of material in three languages and from five geographical areas, led us to follow standard practice in framing the revolutionary period between 1789 and 1815.
However, in a few cases the database timeline extends beyond our core period to account for source texts and first translations published before 1789 as well as new editions produced after 1815, which are linked to translations or retranslations that appeared in the period covered by the project.