Emotions in Translation: Helen Maria Williams and "Beauties Peculiar to the English Language" (Critical Essay‪)‬

JEAN-JACQUES ROUSSEAU'S JULIE, OU LA NOUVELLE HELOISE: LETTRES DE Deux Amants Habitants d'Une Petite Ville au Pied des Alpes (1760) caused a sensation, not only in French-speaking Europe but among British readers too. Just months after its publication in French, William Kenrick produced an English translation entitled Eloisa, or a Series of Original Letters (1761), which went through more than fifteen editions before 1810. Claiming in his Preface to this work that translations "that appear like a thin gauze spread over the original [reflect] want of attention, or want of ability in the translator," Kenrick made substantial changes to Rousseau's novel, aspiring "to improve and adorn [it] with beauties peculiar to the English language." He "could never," he insists, "copy the failings of [the] author, be his reputation ever so great." (2) The translator, he contends, has a license and a responsibility to amend the errors of the original. Faithfulness must be sacrificed to integrity so that the translation emulates, rather than simply reproduces, the foreign text it showcases. The most overt of Kenrick's modifications is his revision of the title and the name of the central protagonist from Julie to Eloisa, on the basis that this is the name by which Rousseau's novel had become known to the British public. (3) His alteration consolidates a parallel between the novel's heroine and the legendary twelfth-century nun that remains implicit in the original (gestured towards through the French novel's sub-title and mentioned in passing just once in the text itself). By accentuating Rousseau's comparatively unobtrusive metaphor, Kenrick fosters for British readers an unspoken affinity between the French novel and Alexander Pope's widely-read poem, "Eloisa to Abelard" (1717), also affectionately known among eighteenth-century readers as "Eloisa." (4) Through this intertextual allusion, Kenrick grounds his translation of the (already notorious) French novel in a familiar British tradition figure-headed by Pope, whose reputation as one of the preeminent moral poets of the century safeguards the territory. His alteration indicates that British and French readers differ in the fastidiousness of their moral standards, implying that the moral standards of British readers are more stringent than those of their French counterparts. For Kenrick, then, conscientious translation of a novel from French to English involves strengthening the work's moral framework to ensure that it meets the more rigorous demands of its British readership. (5)