“Walter Pater the Translator: Feuillet’s La Veuve”
Résumé
My presentation explores one of the few manuscripts in which Pater sets about translating Octave Feuillet’s La Veuve (1883 or 1886). This 5-sheet manuscript displays his translation strategy, his hesitations, and his edits. Pater translates almost ‘à la vitre’ (Chateaubriand on translating Milton’s Paradise Lost), proves attuned to the nuances of the language, and masters the translation of the religious vocabulary of the source text. He tries to make his translation idiomatic while leaving a touch of foreignness that a revision might have partly erased. No doubt this exercise is part of his translator’s hygiene, but Pater lets readers into his translator’s workshop to uncover what he theorized in his Preface to Shadwell translation of Dante’s Purgatorio in 1892: a total, sensitive, even sensual translation: ‘enfold[ing] one, so to speak, in its own atmosphere, that one should feel able to breathe in it’.