20 The Linguist Vol/59 No/3 2020
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FEATURES
read the translations, because the meaning of a
work can flower differently in different languages, times
and cultures.
Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre has been translated nearly
600 times into more than 50 languages. With a fantastic
group of 30 collaborators,
2
I have been exploring how
we can make sense of the multilingual existence of this
work, re-written so many times and re-made in so many
different forms of words.
3
The first thing we did was simply
to try to identify all the translations. This was no easy task,
since many do not appear in online catalogues. Then our
digital consultant, Giovanni-Pietro Vitali, turned the data
into maps. A look at even the simplest kind of map (see
above) changes your sense of the novel: it is no longer
only an English classic, anchored in Yorkshire, but a global
text that has taken on life in many different places.
On our website (prismaticjaneeyre.org), a variety of
maps present the global travels of the novel in other
ways, including through time. You can see the quick
spread of translations into Germany, Belgium, Russia,
France, Denmark and Cuba in the first few years after
the book was published in English, and the intense life-
through-translation that it developed in Iran and East
Asia in the second half of the 20th century.
The main ambition of the project is to trace how the
meanings and imaginative suggestiveness of the book
morph as it is remade in different languages. We are
doing this in various ways, for instance tracing shifts in
patterns of metaphor and in the distribution of key
words. Perhaps my favourite focus is on pronouns. In
Brontë's English, Jane and Rochester have only one form
of pronoun with which to address each other in everyday
conversation: 'you'. ('Thee' and 'thou' did have a residual
existence, but only in religious or dialectal contexts). Other
languages, of course, have more complex pronominal
systems – and even languages close to English, such as
French and German, can make a distinction between
formal (vous/Sie) and informal (tu/du), which the
language the novel was first written in could not.
This means that in several languages there is a crucial
possible event in the book that does not exist in English:
do Jane and Rochester ever call each other tu? The
beautiful discovery you make when you look at the
translations is that this moment can convincingly occur at
several different points in the narrative. There is no right
or wrong here. Instead, the imaginative core of the book
expands prismatically through the media of different
languages and the varying imaginations of translators.
Notes
1 Salama-Carr, M (2011) 'Interpreters in Conflict – The View
from Within: An interview with Louise Askew'. In Translation
Studies, 4.1, 103-8
2 See prismaticjaneeyre.org/people for details
3 The Prismatic Translation project is funded by the Arts and
Humanities Research Council (AHRC) as part of the Open
World Research Initiative (OWRI) in Creative Multilingualism
(www.creativeml.ox.ac.uk), and hosted by the Oxford
Comparative Criticism and Translation Research Centre
(www.occt.ox.ac.uk)
POSTHUMOUS
IMPACT
A map showing the
global distribution of
translations of Jane
Eyre, from the first one
in 1848 to the present
day (main image).
There have been many
modern-day versions,
including the 1997
TV series starring
Samantha Morton
(above) and Zhang
Tianyu's 2019 Chinese
adaptation (top)
