Overview

The interest among Victorian readers in classical literature from Asia has been greatly underestimated. The popularity of the Arabian Nights and The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam is well documented. Yet this was also an era in which freethinkers consulted the Quran, in which schoolchildren were given abridgements of the Ramayana to read, in which names like 'Kalidasa' and 'Firdusi' were carved on the façades of public libraries, and in which women's book clubs discussed Japanese poetry. But for the most part, such readers were not consulting the specialist publications of scholarly orientalists. What then were the translations that catalysed these intercultural encounters? Based on a unique methodology marrying translation theory with empirical techniques developed by historians of reading, this book shines light for the first time on the numerous amateur translators or 'popularizers', who were responsible for making these texts accessible and disseminating them to the Victorian general readership. Asian Classics on the Victorian Bookshelf explains the process whereby popular translations were written, published, distributed to bookshops and libraries, and ultimately consumed by readers. It uses the working papers and correspondence of popularizers to demonstrate their techniques and motivations, while the responses of contemporary readers are traced through the pencil marginalia they left behind in dozens of original copies. In spite of their typically limited knowledge of source-languages, Asian Classics argues that popularizers produced versions more respectful of the complexity, cultural difference, and fundamental untranslatability of Asian texts than the professional orientalists whose work they were often adapting. The responses of their readers, likewise, frequently deviated from interpretive norms, and it is proposed that this combination of eccentric translators and unorthodox readers triggered 'flights of translation', whereby historical individuals can be seen to escape the hegemony of orientalist forms of knowledge.

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9780198866275

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This wonderful and insightful book is an important contribution to the history of translation in Victorian Britain and how it underpinned its literary culture. Through painstaking and fascinating archival work, Bubb focuses not only on translators but also on their readers, and how they responded to Asian texts which became 'Classics' in translation. In doing so, he gives us fresh perspectives on the cosmopolitan breadth of Victorian Britain's reading culture, showing how its 'biblioscapes' bear little resemblance to the phobic attitudes of 21st century Britain today. This is a major work on the intellectual and literary history of Victorian Britain, and on the history of translation in the 19th and early 20th century Anglophone world. * Javed Majeed, Professor of English & Comparative Literature, King's College London * What I most admire about this extraordinary book is the visionary quality of the knowledge that Alexander Bubb generates through meticulous attention to the material records and physical traces of Victorian readers. Insightfully, and with empathy for all manner of readerly circumstances, Bubb illuminates a Victorian encounter with literatures of the world in a way never before accomplished. * Annmarie Drury, Associate Professor of English at Queens College, City University of New York * In researching the frequency with which Asian classics appeared on Victorian bookshelves, Bubb provides readers with an engaging book history project that usefully counters the truism that Britons were generally uninterested in the empire they had acquired. The author's scrupulous archival research into the circulation history of orientalist translations reveals something far more interesting and nuanced. * Padma Rangarajan, Associate Professor of English at the University of California, Riverside *

"This wonderful and insightful book is an important contribution to the history of translation in Victorian Britain and how it underpinned its literary culture. Through painstaking and fascinating archival work, Bubb focuses not only on translators but also on their readers, and how they responded to Asian texts which became 'Classics' in translation. In doing so, he gives us fresh perspectives on the cosmopolitan breadth of Victorian Britain's reading culture, showing how its 'biblioscapes' bear little resemblance to the phobic attitudes of 21st century Britain today. This is a major work on the intellectual and literary history of Victorian Britain, and on the history of translation in the 19th and early 20th century Anglophone world. * Javed Majeed, Professor of English & Comparative Literature, King's College London * What I most admire about this extraordinary book is the visionary quality of the knowledge that Alexander Bubb generates through meticulous attention to the material records and physical traces of Victorian readers. Insightfully, and with empathy for all manner of readerly circumstances, Bubb illuminates a Victorian encounter with literatures of the world in a way never before accomplished. * Annmarie Drury, Associate Professor of English at Queens College, City University of New York * In researching the frequency with which Asian ""classics"" appeared on Victorian bookshelves, Bubb provides readers with an engaging book history project that usefully counters the truism that Britons were generally uninterested in the empire they had acquired. The author's scrupulous archival research into the circulation history of orientalist translations reveals something far more interesting and nuanced. * Padma Rangarajan, Associate Professor of English at the University of California, Riverside * Asian Classics on the Victorian Bookshelf, Bubb explores other, more established archives as well, looking particularly at commonplace books to determine how widely people read and how they responded to these translations. * TLS * It is a remarkable achievement in terms of its configuration of a daunting number of texts from six cultures,...The book also reminds us of the pervasive presence of Eastern thought in nineteenth-century culture. * Kathy Rees *"

Author Information

Alexander Bubb is a Senior Lecturer in English at Roehampton University. He is the author of Meeting Without Knowing It: Kipling and Yeats at the Fin de Siècle (OUP, 2016), which won the University English Book Prize (2017), and was nominated for the European Society for the Study of English Book Awards in the early-career category (2018). His research concerns translation, migration, multilingualism, and cosmopolitanism in the Victorian world, and how these phenomena were shaped by Britain's relationship with India.

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