The World Map https://digitalkoine.github.io/je_prismatic_map Created by Giovanni Pietro Vitali; maps © Thunderforest, data © OpenStreetMap contributors
The Danish Covers Map https://digitalkoine.github.io/danish_storymap/ Researched by Ida Klitgård; created by Giovanni Pietro Vitali and Simone Landucci
10. The Movements of Passion in the Danish Jane Eyre
© 2023 Ida Klitgård, CC BY-NC 4.0 https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0319.16
Introduction
This essay sets out to study the movements of the word ‘passion’ in the novel, both as a movement of feeling and as a movement of meanings. Here movement is to be understood as a pun on the changing semantic nature of the word ‘passion’ and a key passionate feature of Jane Eyre’s nature: she is both moved and moves her reader. But as the translation of a word does not happen in a vacuum, the translation stands and falls with the translations of the contextual words. These contexts may make the word in focus slip and slide in mysterious ways, revealing the translators’ specific understanding of the text. My analysis of both the word and its contexts reveals that even though the word contains many complex meanings in English, the Danish translations seem to release a limited variety which portray Jane in a certain way.
There are several Danish translations of Jane Eyre, especially old ones (see the Translations List at the end of this volume). The first translation is from 1850 by an unknown translator. Then follow two further translations in 1894 and 1895 by Vilhelm Møller and Sofie Horten. Horten’s translation was reprinted several times before a new translation by Emma Sunde was published in 1917. I have, however, decided to focus on the three most recent translations as they are readily available to current readers of Jane Eyre. The first was translated in 1944 by the Danish translator and writer of books on Victorianism, Aslaug Mikkelsen (1846–1964). This translation has been reprinted several times, including the edition used here, from 1971. The most recent reprint is from 2011. The two more recent translations were made by Christiane Rohde (1944-) in 2015 and by the translator Luise Hemmer Pihl (1940-) in 2016. The first translation is typical of the period as it proves to be an abridged version. In those years it was not uncommon to turn major foreign novels into briefer works, aimed at entertainment only. The same is the case with Peter Freuchen’s translation of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick into a so-called ‘man’s novel’, as it says on the back of the cover.1 The two recent translations depart from such abridgement and translate the novel in full. Together, the three translators release specific readings which emphasise that there is no real one and only translation, even if reviewers often forget this fact, as Matthew Reynolds has noted:
Reviewers of translations rarely keep this fact in mind. Typically, a translation is either ticked off or praised (but usually ticked off) for catching or failing to catch the ‘tone’ or ‘spirit’ of ‘the original’. But the original has no tone or spirit in itself: it takes the readers to imagine those qualities into being. In fact, there is fundamentally no such thing as ‘an original’: there is only the source text that gives rise to interpretations in collaboration with the readers. So what is really happening when a reviewer feels that a translation ‘fails to catch the tone of the original’ is that the printed translation is doing something different from the implicit translation that is in the reviewer’s mind.2
Aslaug Mikkelsen is a particularly clear example of this. The novel has indeed been abridged, but not just because the times cried for light entertainment, for Mikkelsen had mixed feelings about Charlotte Brontë’s achievements as a writer. In her book, Foregangskvinder i engelsk litteratur [Pioneering women in English literature] (1942) Mikkelsen criticises what she terms Brontë’s unbalanced and unequal development of plot, and she deplores the pretentious melodrama of interludes which, she says, break all laws of realism.3 She also has no admiration for ‘de lange, stærkt konstruerede, til Tider fuldkommen umulige samtaler mellem personerne’ [the long, strongly constructed, at times completely impossible conversations between the characters] which may be due to Brontë’s unfamiliarity with how real people actually express themselves. Brontë has no sense of humour, Mikkelsen argues, and her language is often too hysterically bombastic.4 It is exactly such passages that Mikkelsen has abridged or deleted altogether. On the other hand, Mikkelsen admits, Brontë is also blessed with the talent of capturing her reader in the way she conveys her perceptions through vivid observations: she has the gift of ‘den dybe, lidenskabelige Følelse’ [the deep, passionate feeling]. In fact, the word passion [lidenskab] is identified by Mikkelsen as the key quality in the novel, and that is why I have chosen to focus on it.5
Even though we have no such translational reflections from the two most recent translators, they are also interesting figures. Christiane Rohde is in fact an actress, not someone educated in languages, and Luise Hemmer Pihl has a degree in English and Italian, and her translation is printed by her own small publishing house. She has also translated a number of La Fontaine’s fables as well as Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights and Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey. So, unlike Aslaug Mikkelsen, who also translated George Eliot, Jack London, Upton Sinclair, Harriet Beecher Stowe and Rudyard Kipling, we are thus not dealing with any of the prolific, established translators of British fiction in Denmark, but with passionate readers and translators who, for the first time in decades, have introduced the complete text to a Danish audience.
Therefore, my analysis will not follow any pre-existing methodology of translation criticism but will move in a philological way through various reflections generated by the three translations. I adopt the methodology of attention to ‘key words’ introduced in Chapter IV, adding my particular emphasis on contextual words: even when a key word is translated in the same way, the words around it can introduce significant differences. To emphasise my point, it is impossible to analyse the implications of the translations of a single word without involving the contextual words by which it is surrounded.
The Word ‘Passion’ in English and Danish
As noted in Chapter III above, the noun ‘passion’ has several meanings according to The Oxford English Dictionary (OED). Here are the main definitions of the word’s meanings in English, which I give in full from the online OED, as this is a philological study:
- Senses relating to physical suffering and pain (such as Christ’s)
- The sufferings of a martyr
- A suffering or affliction of any kind
- In oaths and asseverations, with reference to 1.
- Senses relating to emotional or mental states
- Intense anger; rage; temper
- A fit of temper; an outburst of anger or rage
- Strong affection; love
- Sexual desire or impulses
- An object of love or sexual desire
- An intense desire or enthusiasm of something; the zealous pursuit of an aim
If we look at the vertical, and thus chronological, development of this list, it is interesting to observe how the meanings move from Christian connotations of Christ’s pain and suffering to the pain and suffering of humankind, both physically, mentally and emotionally. Such states are characterised by fits or outbursts and may cover both spectrums of emotions from hate to love, as long as they are intense. Later on, such states of passion turn into metaphors of sexual desire. We have come a long way from the old pious context. The list ends with a blander meaning of the word, covering a want or need for something.6
When we turn to a modern thesaurus, it offers the following links that encapsulate the continuing complexity of the word in contemporary usage:
resentment; sentiment; spirit; temper; warmth; zeal; agony; animation; distress; dolor; eagerness; ecstasy; fire; fit; flare-up; frenzy; heat; hurrah; indignation; ire; misery; outbreak; outburst; paroxysm; rapture; storm; suffering; transport; vehemence; wrath; zest; affectivity.7
Thus, the word refers to intense and often explosive feelings, whether they be lovable or disagreeable.
In Cassin’s Dictionary of Untranslatables, the philosophical untranslatability of the word is divided into three categories: 1. Passion and suffering: the passions of the soul that affect, as Descartes said, ‘the union of the soul and the body’, which constitute the ‘irrational substance of life’; 2. Passion as both love and suffering, related to pain and pleasure, action, and passivity; 3. Passion as opposite to wisdom as wisdom constitutes an ability to resist, a constancy or courage of the soul.8 Thus, human existence seems to be a tug-of-war between diametrically opposite emotions in which passion paradoxically forms both one of the sides, and constitutes a tug-of-war in itself as it forms a divided state of being. As we will see in Jane Eyre, it is precisely this double split between passion as both love and pain, faced with the restraints of Cassin’s ‘wisdom’, or ‘reason’ as it is called in the novel, which haunts Jane throughout. This dilemma is supported by Giulia Sissa in her philosophical discussion of the split between the active and the passive represented in the word ‘pathos’, which is related to passion:
Psychic life is movement. The mind moves. Psychic life is passion. The mind is, in fact, moved. The vocabulary of feeling in European languages is organized around these two poles: on one hand, the idea of turbulence, a becoming, an instability — something starts moving and transforms itself, there is a psychic activity; on the other hand, such an activity is the effect of an external cause to which the mind finds itself exposed, which it undergoes, passively. Something happens to it and transforms it. Agitation is the form that passivity takes.9
So let us now look at one of those European languages: Danish. At first sight the translation of ‘passion’ into Danish does not offer major obstacles as we have the same word ‘passion’ alternating with the more habitually used ‘lidenskab’ (equivalent to and derived from the German Leidenschaft). In the great Dictionary of the Danish Language (Ordbog over det danske sprog) which covers the language from 1700 to 1950, ‘passion’ is defined not only as the suffering of Christ, but also as a strong mental movement, such as desire, especially erotic desire. The dictionary also refers to the expression ‘have en passion for’ [have a passion for] meaning having a preference for something, to like something.10 Thus, the Danish word seems to follow the development from the religious to the worldly meanings as detected in the OED.
In the modern Danish Dictionary (Danske Ordbog) the word firstly covers a strong feeling based on urges, inclinations or instincts. Secondly, it refers to having an interest in or love for something. Lastly, it refers to a piece of classical music, such as an oratorium.11 In this way, the modern definitions lean more towards the last, bland definition in the OED.
When turning to a major English-Danish dictionary, Engelsk-dansk Ordbog, ‘passion’ is defined as 1) equal to ‘lidenskab’; 2) an emotional outburst or affect; or 3) the passion of Christ.12
To sum up, the Danish definitions cover the same variations as the English definitions, except for the ones referring to compassion, indignation, hate or wrath, which are nowhere mentioned. Also, the split between love and pain or passion and reason is never indicated in either of the two works. So the general impression to the modern reader is that ‘passion’ is a more pleasing and less inherently complex experience in Danish than in English. Thus, modern translators may invest something more one-sided in the word than was the case in the England of the 1840s.
What about the other Danish word ‘lidenskab’? According to Dictionary of the Danish Language, it arrived from Germany in the mid-eighteenth century as a ‘foreign’ substitute for ‘passion’. It derives from ‘leiden’, to suffer, in German. It was received with a certain amount of skepticism, as a sarcastic source from 1759 says:
‘“Lidenskaber! hvad vil det siige? Er det en liden Skabere?” — “Nej. Lidenskaberne ere de Affecter, som sætter Sindet i Bevægelse, saasom Vrede, Had, Kiærlighed, Misundelse.” — “Naa, nu begriber jeg det, det er Sinds Lidelser”.’
(‘“Passions! What does that mean? Is it a small [the Danish word ‘liden’ is archaic for ‘small’] creator?” — “No. The passions are the affects which put the mind in motion, such as anger, hatred, love, envy.” — “Ah, now I understand, it is mental illnesses”’ [the Danish word ‘lidelser’ may both mean sufferings and ‘illnesses’].)
Another old source suggests that the word should not be incorporated in any dictionary as:
‘Affect og Passion ere […] meget forstaaeligere end vort nye Lidenskab, som er hverken tydsk eller jydsk, og kunde af en Ulærd antages for Lidenhed, sat imod Storhed’
(‘Affect and passion are […] much more intelligible than our new “Lidenskab”, which is neither German, nor Jutlandish, and could be reckoned as smallness compared with greatness by an unskilled person [here there is a pun on the word ‘Lidenhed’ which means smallness and connotes sufferings at the same time] put against grandeur’).13
Thus, the new word ‘lidenskab’ in Danish is at first perceived as less important than ‘passion’. However, the development of its meaning is very similar to the development of the meanings of ‘passion’. In the modern Danish dictionary, the meanings span from 1) a violent feeling which is difficult to control and which may lead to unfavourable behaviour, such as an obsession; 2) a strong interest for or love of something; to 3) irresistible erotic love.14 So interestingly, in opposition to ‘passion’, which has more pleasing connotations in Danish, ‘lidenskab’ may indeed be used in cases of anger and hate, and situations where the movement has negative consequences. This is a plausible guess because the word was received with hostility in the Danish language.
Translation Analysis
The analysis will reveal which word, ‘passion’ or ‘lidenskab’, the translators select to emphasise the contextual situation of negative vs. positive feelings. This development becomes clear when traversing the following selection of examples in the novel.15
Passion and Wrath
1.
|
Brontë |
|||
|
“Dear! dear! What a fury to fly at Master John!” “Did ever anybody see such a picture of passion!”(Ch. 1) |
“Vorherre bevares! Sikken en lille furie — at fare sådan løs på hr. John” [the second line has been left out](p. 14). |
“Gud bevare os! Sikken en heks og lige i struben på Master John!” “Jeg har aldrig set magen til hidsighed!” (p. 12). |
“Du milde! Sikken en furie, som hun farer løs på Master John!” “Har man nogen sinde set mage til sådan et raseri?”(p. 10). |
Here the young Jane is attacked by her cousin John Reed, but she fights back. The children are then separated, and Jane is scolded. The expression ‘picture of passion’ brings associations of a painting of a passionate scene as if what is going on is prototypical behaviour when angry. The three translations here all neglect the idiom of the ‘picture’ and reformulate it. As for ‘passion’, Mikkelsen avoids translating the whole sentence altogether. Rohde, in turn, translates ‘passion’ into ‘hidsighed’ [hot-temperedness] which is more on a par with the source text. Pihl translates it into ‘raseri’ meaning anger or wrath. The picture allusion has been rephrased into ‘jeg har aldrig set magen til…’ [I have never seen anything like such hot-temperedness] or ‘Har man nogen sinde set mage til…’ [has anybody ever seen anything like such anger].
When it comes to the surrounding context, the translations undergo a development from Jane as a Fury and her attack described as ‘fare’ [get at]. In Mikkelsen’s translation the sentence can be back-translated into ‘For goodness’/God’s sake! What a little Fury — to attack Mr. John like that!’ Rohde translates it into ‘For God’s sake! What a witch — and directly at Master John’s throat!’ In this way the contextual picture of Jane transforms in a more violent fashion from a hot-tempered child to a wicked witch almost about to strangle Master John. Pihl opts for a calmer solution by translating ‘Dear, dear’ into ‘Du milde!’, i.e., ‘Oh my!’ The rest is close to Mikkelsen’s translation. This example is in alignment with the Danish use of the word ‘passion’ as a positive state. If it had been used here, the reader would have been in doubt as to whether Jane’s fit was being perceived as a good thing, contrary to the source text’s rendering of it as the work of a Fury.
2.
In this passage, ‘passionate’ is either translated into ‘hidsig’ [hot-tempered] or ‘vred’ [angry]. Again, we see two diverging interpretations of Jane’s passion. It is as if Jane becomes more and more cross over time, and thus the Danish adjective ‘passioneret’ would be impossible here, as it would give connotations of a positive trait. In Rohde, Jane is hot-tempered and ‘uartig’, that is, ‘naughty’, and in Pihl she is angry and ‘uforskammet’, or ‘rude’. So in Rohde, Jane comes across in a childish manner, whereas in Pihl she appears stubbornly exasperated in a more adult way.
The threat of expulsion, ‘send you away’, is translated into the Danish equivalents of being sent away. The same is, however, not true of Bessie’s expression of certainty ‘I am sure’. Pihl translates this into a phrase with the same form and content, whereas Rohde adds an emphatic ‘så sikkert som amen i kirken’: this is roughly equivalent to ‘which is as certain as the amen [being said] in church’ which is again equivalent to the English expressions ‘as sure as fate’ or ‘as sure as eggs is eggs’.
It is noteworthy that both translators decide to translate ‘you’ into ‘De’ and ‘Dem’ which are the formal addresses equivalent to the French ‘vous’ or the German ‘Sie’, even though Jane is a child. It might have been expected that the recent translations would abandon this, at this address is very formal in modern Danish. On the other hand, they signal that there is a master-servant relationship involving distance and reverence at stake here.
3.
|
Brontë |
|||
|
‘I had felt every word as acutely as I had heard it plainly, and a passion of resentment fomented now within me.’(Ch. 4) |
‘[the first part has been left out] og jeg ligefrem kogte af harme’ (p. 32) |
‘Jeg havde følt hvert ord som et stik i hjertet. Hele mit sind kogte af harme’ (p. 40) |
‘Jeg havde hørt hvert eneste ord lige så skarpt som tydeligt, og nu gærede en lidenskabelig følelse af nag i mig’ (p. 39) |
It must be noted that in this passage there is a textual variant. Brontë’s manuscript and the first edition read ‘fermented’ (to undergo a chemical process involving yeast; to excite), whereas the second and third editions, both published during Brontë’s lifetime, give ‘fomented’ (to soak with heated liquid, to stimulate), as here. Both variants have been perpetuated in later editions. In our case, it seems likely that Mikkelsen and Rohde were working from source texts with ‘fomented’, since they both give ‘kogte’ [‘boiled’], while Pihl was faced with ‘fermented’, since she translates ‘gærede’ [‘fermented’]. However, given the similarity between the two words it is impossible to be sure.
In this example, Jane feels a passion of resentment. The most recent translation by Pihl is the only one to include a translation of this: ‘en lidenskabelig følelse’ [‘a passionate feeling’] whereas the others leave it out and only speak of the fermenting/fomenting issue. Here the German derivative ‘lidenskabelig’ has been selected to denote a negative psychic movement inside Jane where ‘passioneret’ would have given the reader a different impression.
The phrase ‘I had felt every word as acutely as I had heard it plainly’ also receives different treatments by the translators. Mikkelsen leaves it out, and the two others focus on Jane hearing the words, and thus they struggle to render Jane’s emotional experience of what is being said. Rohde says that Jane had felt every word as a stab in the heart, which correctly merges listening and feeling, but Pihl settles with a more limited explanation of Jane hearing every single word acutely and plainly. Her emotions are instead carried into ‘en lidenskabelig følelse af nag’ [‘a passionate feeling of resentment’].
So far we have learned that when passion and being passionate is a sentiment of pain, suffering and rage, either the sentences are completely reformulated, or the Danish ‘lidenskab’ or ‘lidenskabelig’ is preferred, which give us the impression of situations in which Jane is a victim of damaging feelings she is unable to control. The next examples tell us about the translators’ choices when ‘passion’ refers to love.
Passion and Love
4.
In this passage, all the translators except Mikkelsen have maintained the melodramatic French expression and thus maintained a foreignising effect. Mikkelsen, however, seems to have domesticated everything into ‘being in love’ as this is what ‘forelsket’ [being in love with (verb)] and ‘forelskelse’ [being in love (noun)] refer to. In this way, the ambiguities of the great passion have been reduced to plainly being in love, which has a simple, romantic air to it.
When it comes to the English mention of ‘passion’, Rohde keeps the Danish direct equivalent, which has positive connotations, whereas Pihl translates it into ‘lidenskab’, which has mixed connotations of powerful emotions out of one’s reach. This word is, paradoxically, also used for ‘ardour’ by Mikkelsen and Rohde. Ardour refers to fervour, intense devotion or burning heat, so it could certainly be another way to describe passion, and thus ‘lidenskab’. But Pihl is the only one who incorporates the ‘burning heat’ motif as she chooses ‘glød’ [‘glow’].
5.
|
Brontë |
|||
|
‘Real affection, it seemed, he could not have for me; it had been only fitful passion: that was balked; he would want me no more.’ (Ch. 26) |
‘Virkelig kærlighed til mig syntes det ikke, at han kunne have næret; det havde kun været en opblussende lidenskab, som var blevet skuffet; han ville ikke have mere brug for mig’ (p. 207) |
‘Han kunne ikke føle ægte hengivenhed for mig, det havde kun været en krampagtig blind lidenskab. Den var forbi, og jeg var uønsket’ (p. 344) |
‘Det forekom mig, at han ikke kunne nære sand hengivenhed for mig; det havde kun været en ustadig lidenskab; den havde stødt på en hindring, han ville ikke vide af mig mere’ (p. 351) |
Jane’s constant worries about Rochester’s feelings for her are represented in various ways. Rochester’s ‘affection’ is either translated into ‘kærlighed’ [‘love’] or ‘hengivenhed’ [‘devotion’], thus representing it as something strong or something more tempered.
The ‘fitful passion’ (i.e., a sporadic spell of passion) is translated into either ‘opblussende lidenskab’ [‘blazing/rising passion’], ‘krampagtig blind lidenskab’ [‘convulsively/forcibly blind passion’] or ‘ustadig lidenskab’ [‘changeable/fickle passion’]. Even though these interpretations all agree on the negative aspects of ‘lidenskab’, they leave us with different impressions of Rochester and may have a bearing on our analysis of how Jane sees their relationship. Mikkelsen and Rohde have taken the liberty to forecast the thematic spheres of fire and blindness, but it may not be appropriate to explicate these at this moment in the novel.
The fitful passion is ‘balked’, meaning stopped and prevented from going on by her resistance. Mikkelsen translates this as ‘skuffet’ [‘disappointed’], Rohde ‘den var forbi’ [‘it was over’], and Pihl ‘havde stødt på en hindring’ [‘had met with an obstacle’]. All these examples are very different and do not quite describe Rochester’s stubbornness as Jane imagines it.
In the following examples, we leave behind passion as simply anger, hate or fickle love and turn to the complexity of passion as both pleasure and pain in the face of wisdom, reason and sense, which is so characteristic of the adult Jane and the entire scope of the novel.
Passion and Wisdom
6.
|
Brontë |
|||
|
‘[in Jane’s mind] Sense would resist delirium: judgment would warn passion.’(Ch. 15) |
‘Fornuft kæmpede mod fantasier; den kolde dømmekraft advarede lidenskaben’ (p. 118) |
‘Fornuften kunne ikke modstå den vidunderlige drøm, min dømmekraft kunne ikke hamle op med min lidenskab’ (p. 175) |
‘Fornuften blev ved med at modstå vildelsen: dømmekraften blev ved at advare lidenskaben’ (p. 180) |
Jane’s inner self is in turmoil after having both heard about Rochester’s passion for Céline and having heard sweet words from his lips towards her. She has received mixed messages and does not know what to think, so there is a raving tug-of-war between being sensible and feeling a strong love for Rochester. The three translations all translate ‘passion’ into ‘lidenskab’ rather than ‘passion’, which would truly refer to passions of the heart in a more elevated way. As for the noun ‘delirium’, it refers metaphorically to a temporary disorder of the mental faculties, as in fevers, disturbances of consciousness, characterised by restlessness, excitement, delusions, hallucinations, etc. Mikkelsen has decided on ‘fantasier’ in the plural [‘fantasies’], and Pihl translates it as ‘vildelsen’ [‘the delirium’]. Here Rohde’s translation is the odd one out as her translation reads ‘den vidunderlige drøm’ equivalent to ‘the wonderful dream’. This lifts the torturous inner frenzy into a much narrower range as the translator passes her judgment on the meaning of ‘delirium’ as constituting merely girlish fancies. In fact, both Mikkelsen and Rohde give the impression of Jane’s state as being mere reveries of the imagination.
Such biased interpretation can also be found in Mikkelsen’s translation of ‘judgment’ into ‘den kolde dømmekraft’ [‘cold judgment’]. Here the others just have the most obvious equivalent, ‘min dømmekraft’ [‘my sense of judgment’] or ‘dømmekraften’ [‘judgment’].
7.
Rochester imagines that the cast of Jane’s forehead expresses that she will stay in control of things, no matter what primitive ‘heathen’ passions may rage inside her mind on a par with a wild, uncontrollable weather — she will obey the voice of conscience diligently. It is a key passage, but it has been severely abbreviated and adapted by Mikkelsen. This means that the word ‘passions’, this time in the plural, is only translated by Rohde and Pihl. And they both opt for ‘lidenskaberne’, which by now in the translations has proven to be their favourite option.
Interesting challenges are presented by, for instance, the personification of Jane’s reason as sitting on a horse, which is imagined as an animal of wild feelings: ‘she will not let the feelings burst away and hurry her to wild chasms’. The expression ‘burst away’ refers to a sudden and forcible break away or issuing forth, e.g., from confinement, or a sudden, violent letting-go of emotions. The path to ‘wild chasms’ refers to a deep cleft or gorge in the surface of the earth. Pihl translates the wild chasms into equivalent Danish words, but Rohde translates it into ‘deep water’. I believe the chasms are important as stock props in tales of the Romantic sublime. When they are deleted in favour of the drowning metaphor, we are left with a less typical literary landscape of the period.
Other natural elements of the sublime, such as ‘Strong wind, earthquake-shock, and fire may pass by’ have also been translated differently. They are absent in Mikkelsen, but Rohde heightens the drama of natural disasters by representing them as ‘Orkaner, jordskælv og vulkanudbrud kan vel overfalde mig’ [hurricanes, earthquakes and volcano eruptions may overtake me]. As volcanos are oddly out of place in the Yorkshire scenery, they appear more cataclysmic than the intended fire in the source text. This effect is heightened because they also seem to seize her, not just to pass by, which, as in many of the examples above, turns Jane into a helpless victim. One guess is that Rohde has interpreted ‘earthquake-shock and fire’ as one event: a volcano eruption where fire is spurted out. Pihl, on the other hand, translates it more loyally as ‘Kraftig blæst, jordskælv og flammer kan komme forbi’ [‘strong wind, earthquake, and flames may pass by’], and thus she preserves an instance of the fire leitmotif in the novel.
As for the still small inner voice of wisdom that interprets the dictates of conscience — which is in opposition to the passions raging within Jane — the two most recent translators have interpreted this differently. Pihl translates it more or less directly, but Rohde misses the point by saying that the small voice both interprets and dictates conscience. This gives us the impression that Jane’s inner voice rules over her conscience, but it is in fact the other way round.
8.
|
Brontë |
|||
|
‘I wrestled with my own resolution: I wanted to be weak that I might avoid the awful passage of further suffering I saw laid out for me; and Conscience, turned tyrant, held Passion by the throat, told her tauntingly, she had yet but dipped her dainty foot in the slough, and swore that with that arm of iron he would thrust her down to unsounded depths of agony.’(Ch. 27) |
‘Jeg rejste mig i pludselig rædsel over den kamp mellem samvittighed og lidenskab, som jeg følte, jeg ikke kunne komme udenom [this has been adapted, and the rest has been left out]’ (p. 208) |
‘Jeg kæmpede med min egen beslutning. Jeg ønskede at være svag, så jeg kunne undgå yderligere kvaler. Samvittigheden blev rasende og greb Lidenskaben i struben og fortalte hende vredt, at med sin jernarm ville han kaste hende i endnu kvalfuldere dybder’(p. 346) |
‘Jeg kæmpede med min egen beslutning, jeg ønskede at være svag, så jeg kunne undgå den yderligere lidelses rædselsfulde vej, som jeg så ligge udstrakt foran mig; og Samvittigheden blev en tyran og holdt Lidenskaben i kvælertag, fortalte hende spottende, at hun hidtil kun havde dyppet foden i sumpen, og svor at han med sin jernarm ville kaste hende ned i uanede dybder af kval’(p. 353) |
In the personification of a tyrant, the (male) iron fist of conscience now forcefully dictates Jane to hold her horses, as it were, and not let herself get swayed by her (female) passion for Rochester. If she crosses the line, she will go to hell. Jane longs to let herself be swayed to avoid the constant tug-of war between painful and pleasurable passion and wisdom, but the struggle must go on as she tries to be a good woman.
Once again the word ‘passion’ does not offer major obstacles in the Danish translations. It is translated into ‘lidenskaben’ as so many times before. It is the context that alters the various renditions. When it comes to ‘the awful passage of further suffering I saw laid out for me’, Rohde and Pihl are the only translators who dare translate this phrase. Rohde, however, is quickly done with the description of Jane’s visualisation of a passage of suffering. And here ‘passage’ may refer to a route, a transit or a voyage, or an opening into suffering. Rohde translates it into ‘yderligere kvaler’ [‘further woe’] which completely rids the description of its metaphorical understanding of Jane’s possible transformation as a journey. Pihl translates it more directly into ‘yderligere lidelses rædselsfulde vej, som jeg så ligge udstrakt foran mig’ [‘further suffering’s terrible road, which I saw lying stretched out in front of me’].
Jane feels that her conscience is like a tyrant. Again, Rohde does not adhere directly to the source text but represents her conscience becoming furious (‘blev rasende’). This is not exactly the same as feeling that conscience has become one’s ruler as it dictates in a powerful manner what Jane has to do. Pihl, instead, renders the translation faithfully, describing her conscience as a tyrant. The tyrant’s taunting voice is translated into ‘vredt’ [‘angrily’] by Rohde, which echoes the furious conscience. Pihl translates it into ‘spottende’ which is a more direct translation. The depths of agony where Jane may be hurled by the iron arm of conscience are ‘unsounded’, i.e., deep, unfathomed. Rohde translates this into ‘endnu kraftfuldere dybder’ [‘even more powerful depths’], and Pihl translates it into ‘uanede dybder af kval’ [‘unknown depths of agony’]. Thus again Pihl seems more faithful to the exact wording of the novel — and in this case also more lyrical — than Rohde, who translates more freely.
Passion and Warmth
In Chapter 27 we reach a key passage where Rochester confesses his true love for Jane. Here, the word ‘passion’ takes on the complex meanings of movement as suggested by Cassin and Sissa previously.
9.
|
Brontë |
|||
|
‘[Rochester] I think you good, gifted, lovely: a fervent, a solemn passion is conceived in my heart; it leans to you, draws you to my centre and spring of life, wraps my existence about you, and, kindling in pure, powerful flame, fuses you and me in one.’(Ch. 27) |
‘Jeg anså dig for god, højt begavet og en elskelig karakter [the rest has been left out and this sentence merges with the next paragraph]’ (p. 218) |
‘Jeg synes, du er vidunderlig, begavet og yndig. Mit hjerte er fyldt af en brændende oprigtig lidenskab. Mit hjerte søger dit, drager dig til mig og omslynger dig med mit liv, og en ren blussende kraftig flamme smelter dig og mig til ét’ (p. 366) |
‘Jeg anser dig for at være god, begavet, yndig; en brændende, en højtidelig lidenskab er undfanget i min [sic] hjerte; den hælder mod dig, trækker mig til mit livs centrum og kildevæld, smyger min væren omkring dig; og antændt i en ren, stærk flamme smelter den dig og mig til ét’ (p. 374) |
Rochester describes his feelings for Jane: ‘a fervent, a solemn passion’ breeds in his heart. Once again, the Danish authors all translate this new elevated ‘passion’ into ‘lidenskab’. It is simply impossible to find a word that brings with it the new connotations of warmth and gentleness. So we must look for the contextual choices made in translation. The ‘fervent’ and ‘solemn’ nature of this passion takes on different forms. The adjective ‘fervent’ refers to a great sense of warmth or intensity, and ‘solemn’ means that it is grave, sober, earnest. Rohde interprets the passion as ‘brændende, oprigtig’ [‘burning, sincere’] and Pihl as ‘brændende, højtidelig’ [‘burning, solemn’]. Even though they differ, they both agree on representing the fire motif in this situation.
The burning nature of Rochester’s passion is repeated in the subsequent poetic expression of his love: it ‘wraps my existence about you, and, kindling in pure, powerful flame, fuses you and me in one’. His fire reaches out for Jane and pulls her close to him so that they may burn and blend as one single flame, encapsulating both pain and pleasure, passion and wisdom. This merging of the two souls is described as both pure and powerful, thus fusing the purity and the passion of the Victorian and Romantic spirit of the time — or the beautiful and the sublime. Only the recent translators retain this passage. Rohde’s version can be back-translated into the following: ‘embraces you with my life, and a pure burning powerful flame melts you and me into one’. Pihl writes: ‘clings my being around you, and lit in a pure, strong flame it melts you and me into one’. In this way, they both preserve the novel’s crucial duality of passivity and action, immaculacy and potency.
Conclusion
My philological analysis — i.e., asking what does this word mean? — has attempted to capture the Danish understandings of the word ‘passion’ in Jane Eyre. Aslaug Mikkelsen noted how this particular word and trait in Jane’s complex character was a key concern in the scope of the novel. And since the Danish direct equivalent may not be used about negative movements of the soul, in contrast to English, a Danish translator may have to use the Danish synonym ‘lidenskab’ or else entirely rephrase matters. Correspondingly, it turns out from these selected, but representative, examples that when passion is linked to wrath, either the Danish word ‘lidenskab’ is chosen, or the passages are explicated by way of paraphrase. When passion is linked to love in its multiple forms, more strategies may be used. Either it can be rendered as ‘passion’ or ‘lidenskab’, or it may be translated by way of the translator’s interpretation of the word as something romantic rather than emotionally dramatic and forceful. When passion is presented in opposition to wisdom, the word ‘lidenskab’ tends to be used. The same is the case with the ultimate link to warmth and gentleness. So, ‘lidenskab’ is clearly the preferred word overall, even though it had a late and unwelcome inclusion in the Danish language. It has simply grown more versatile than ‘passion’. The word ‘passion’ is only used in the one instance of ‘grande passion … passion’. One possibility is that translators have chosen to use ‘lidenskab’ consistently, roughly as Brontë uses ‘passion’, to cover a similar range. Another might be that they have wanted to avoid using ‘passion’ precisely because it looks the same as the English word, so it would not feel like enough of a translation.
This small spectrum of solutions decided upon by the translators has far-reaching implications — not only for the word itself, but for the contextual meanings of the selected cases in point. In the majority of the examples, the Danish Jane is represented as a victim of strong, often negative, emotions that are out of her control. As Sissa said, in European languages the vocabulary of feelings is organized around, on the one hand, turbulence and transformation; in short, activity; and on the other hand, exposure and agitation; in short, passivity. In this respect, the Danish Jane Eyre comes across as more passive than active. And thus, paradoxically, the movements of passion in the Danish translations may seem more under control than the raging passions in the source text. In this way, the translators sit firm and hold the reins. They do not let the Danish versions burst away and hurry them to wild chasms. Their judgment has the last word.
Works Cited
Translations of Jane Eyre
Brontë, Charlotte, Jane Eyre, trans. by Aslaug Mikkelsen (Aarhus: Det Danske Forlag, 1971).
——, Jane Eyre, trans. by Christiane Rohde (Copenhagen: Lindhardt og Ringhof, 2015).
——, Jane Eyre, trans. by Luise Hemmer Pihl (Mørke: Grevas Forlag, 2016).
Other Sources
Cassin, Barbara (ed.). Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014).
Klitgård, Ida, ‘Translation, Adaptation or Amputation? Arctic Explorer-Writer-Anthropologist Peter Freuchen’s Little-Known Danish Translation of Moby Dick’, Across Languages and Cultures, 16 (2015), 119–41, https://doi.org/10.1556/084.2015.16.1.6
Mikkelsen, Aslaug, Foregangskvinder I engelsk litteratur (Copenhagen: P. Haase & Søns Forlag, 1942).
Reynolds, Matthew, Translation: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016).
Schwarz, Helge L., Marianne Holmen, Freddy Volmer Hansen, Egon Foldberg, and Ida Klitgård, Engelsk-dansk ordbog (Copenhagen: Munksgaard, 1996).
Sissa, Giulia, ‘Pathos/perturbatio’, in Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon, ed. by Barbara Cassin (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014), pp. 745-49.
1 See Ida Klitgård, ‘Translation, Adaptation or Amputation? Arctic Explorer-Writer-Anthropologist Peter Freuchen’s Little-Known Danish Translation of Moby Dick’, Across Languages and Cultures, 16 (2015), 119–41.
2 Matthew Reynolds, Translation: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), p. 59.
3 Aslaug Mikkelsen, Foregangskvinder I engelsk litteratur (Copenhagen: P. Haase & Søns Forlag, 1942), p. 138.
4 Mikkelsen, Foregangskvinder, pp. 139–40.
5 Mikkelsen, Foregangskvinder, p. 140.
6 The online etymological dictionary, too, testifies to the fact that sexual desire and fondness are late meanings. See https://www.etymonline.com/word/passion#etymonline_v_7291
8 Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon, ed. by Barbara Cassin (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014), p. 745.
9 Giulia Sissa, ‘Pathos/perturbatio’, in Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon, ed. by Barbara Cassin (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014), pp. 745–49 (p. 745).
10 See ‘Passion’, in Ordbog over det danske sprog, https://ordnet.dk/ods/ordbog?query=passion.
11 See ‘Passion’, in Danske Ordbog, https://ordnet.dk/ddo/ordbog?query=passion.
12 ‘Passion’, in Helge L. Schwarz, Marianne Holmen, Freddy Volmer Hansen, Egon Foldberg, and Ida Klitgård, Engelsk-dansk ordbog (Copenhagen: Munksgaard, 1996), p. 1087.
13 See ‘lidenskab’, in Ordbog over det danske sprog, https://ordnet.dk/ods/ordbog?query=lidenskab&tab=for
14 See ‘lidenskab’, in Danske Ordbog, https://ordnet.dk/ddo/ordbog?query=lidenskab&tab=for
15 The translations discussed are Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre, trans. by Aslaug Mikkelsen (Aarhus: Det Danske Forlag, 1971); Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre, trans. by Christiane Rohde (Copenhagen: Lindhardt og Ringhof, 2015); and Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre, trans. by Luise Hemmer Pihl (Mørke: Grevas Forlag, 2016).