Past event
Guest Lecture: Dr Emilio Irigoyen From Hawthorne's French to Melville's Spanish: Pseudotranslations, mirrorings, and the quest for a multilingual reading community
Nathaniel Hawthorne originally presented “Rappaccini's Daughter,” one of his most famous short stories, as the English translation of a text by a fictive French writer. In translation theory, the creation of a text written to be perceived as a translation is called pseudotranslation. In Hawthorne's fiction, the writer's last name is Aubépine, French for hawthorn, and the titles of the works he is said to have written are French equivalents of Hawthorne's own—a projected or mirrored French alter ego that Hawthorne also explores in “Monsieur du Miroir.” These experiments would inspire Herman Melville, a fervent admirer of Hawthorne. In Melville's “Benito Cereno,” the much-discussed phrase that serves as a leitmotif is presented as a translation from Spanish: “Seguid vuestro jefe (follow your leader).” Like Hawthorne's French titles, Melville's supposed original is an invention, but while Hawthorne expects readers to recognize the artifice easily, Melville's mirroring of Spanish and English is a deception, designed to induce in readers a false sense of transparency about the other language—as well as about the people who speak it. Hawthorne famously claimed that his texts would be better understood from “somewhere else,” but he ultimately offered U.S. readers a comfortable sense of cosmopolitanism. Melville, by contrast, aimed for a genuinely transnational, multilingual reading community, stressing both the opportunities and the limits of engaging with otherness—linguistic and otherwise.