Paul and Virginia. Translated from the French of Bernardin Saint-Pierre by Helen Maria Williams
Authors of source text
Jacques-Henri Bernardin de Saint-Pierre
Contributions
- Helen Maria Williams
- translator
- G.G. and J. Robinson (George Robinson)
- publisher
- Anonymous (L'Imprimerie de la rue de Vaugirard (English Press))
- publisher
Related resources
- is translation of
- Paul et Virginie has translation
- has paratext
- Paul and Virginia. Translated from the French of Bernardin Saint-Pierre by Helen Maria Williams paratext
Notes
Url to the original Paris version with six plates. While no publisher is indicated, it is almost certainly from Williams' partner, John Hurford Stone's English Press, who also printed for Robinson, the London publisher.
This is an important novel for the abolitionist movement, and Williams is thus an apt translator, given her literary associations with abolitionism in Britain -- in, for example, the long poem Peru (1784).
Williams' translation is heavily abridged, and in her preface, she describes how parts of it -- as well as some of the cycle of sonnets she integrated -- were confiscated as suspect documents by the Jacobin authorities in 1793. Indeed, Williams presents elsewhere (see Barker) an anecdote where she was taking tea with her friend, Bernardin Saint-Pierre, at the moment her arrest was announced. The novel was translated before this brief arrest between October and November 1793, and after her return from exile in Switzerland in 1794.
While her translation was one of many – with at least three identified translators – it went through nine editions by 1814 and at least 20 by 1850, becoming the standard translation in English. It is also worth nothing that many of the subsequent editions that claim to be newly translated are actually reworkings of Williams' version, either starting from the next page or restoring the missing passages with ones lifted from the Hunter version. Most of them omit the interpolated sonnets.
There is another edition of the same year with no imprint but almost certainly issued by the radical publisher John Hurford Stone, with whom Williams was involved, illustrated with six plates.
For more on the history of this translation, see Philip Robinson, 'Traduction ou trahison de "Paul et Virginie"? l'exemple de Helen Maria Williams' (Revue d'Histoire littéraire de la France, 1989, no.5).
See Anna Barker, 'Helen Maria Williams' 'Paul and Virginia' and the experience of mediated alterity', in Luise von Flotow, ed., Translating Women (University of Ottawa Press, 2011).
See Louisa Calè, 'Sympathy in Translation: Paul et Virginie on the London Stage', in Romanticism on the Net, no.46 (May 2007).