II. The World Work in Language(s)

Matthew Reynolds

Yu JongHo (유 종호) translated Jane Eyre into Korean twice. The first version, published in 1970, ‘used ornate and literary Chinese vocabulary’ — as Sowon S. Park explains — while the second, which came out in 2004, was in ‘more up-to-date modern Korean’.1 Something similar happened in Croatia, on roughly the same timeline: Giga Gračan and Andrijana Hjuit’s 1974 translation (researched by Sasha Mile Rudan) was modernized by Gračan in 2008 to incorporate linguistic forms that had come into being since the country’s independence in 1991.2 As these episodes make clear, the substance that a translation is done into (its ‘target language’, in the idiom of Translation Studies) is not a fixed entity but a fluid medium. Sometimes it mutates fast — as in Korea and Croatia — but it is always changing to some degree. What is more, the culture that a translation is published into is rarely, if ever monolingual, while — as we began to see in Chapter I — the borders that can be used to distinguish languages from one another, and so differentiate ‘monolingual’ from ‘multilingual’, are themselves hazy and porous. How can our thinking about language, and about translation, best grasp this complex, shifting linguistic terrain which world works like Jane Eyre inhabit and traverse?

One stark instance of translation in a multilingual context, discovered by Ulrich Timme Kragh, is a 2011 Jane Eyre published in Chengdu, Tibet, in which an abridged Chinese version by Daming Li [李大明] and Jing Li [李晶] is reprinted in parallel text with its Tibetan translation by Sonam Lhundrub. Readers with varying degrees of competence in one language, or the other, or both are all catered for by this publication. There is another, though less visible, layering of languages in the anonymous 1904 translation published in Milan, which one might loosely say is ‘in Italian’, though it is so closely based on the French of Noëmi Lesbazeilles-Souvestre (1854) as to be more of a linguistic blend. Here is a small example, from the novel’s second sentence:

La mattina, avevamo errato per un’ora nel boschetto spogliato di foglie3

Observe the closeness, in both structure and vocabulary, of the second translation to the first, and in particular the proximity of ‘errato … nel boschetto spogliato di foglie’ to ‘erré … dans le bosquet dépouillé de feuilles’ (both of which might be back-translated word for word as ‘wandered in the copse stripped of leaves’). Now note the difference in the phrasing from a selection of later Italian translations:

Al mattino, in realtà, avevamo gironzolato per un’ora tra gli arbusti spogli (2014S)4

Of course, Standard Italian and Standard French, as closely related romance languages, have a lot of linguistic material in common. Italian syntax and lexis can overlap with French and not sound foreign in the least — as ‘mattina’ overlaps with ‘matin’ and ‘ora’ with ‘heure’ pretty consistently throughout the translations. Nevertheless, it is clear that the translator and publisher of the 1904 Milan Jane Eyre were prepared to print a significantly more Frenchified kind of language than appears in the later translations. The concept of ‘linguistic repertoire’ can help us describe this phenomenon: it means the range of language actually ‘exhibited in the speaking and writing patterns of a speech community’, rather than that prescribed by grammar books and dictionaries.5 So we can say that the linguistic repertoire exhibited in the 1904 translation includes a mix of elements. The same is likely to have been true of the repertoires of many readers, since the translation was published in northern Italy, long open to French culture, only three decades after the formation of the Italian state, when the standardization of the Italian language was not as comprehensive as it has become today.

The history of Italian since the country’s unification in 1870 is a textbook instance of the general truth that, as the historian Eric Hobsbawm pointed out, standard national languages are ‘almost always semi-artificial constructs’.6 In the early years of the new state, fewer than 10% of its inhabitants spoke Italian, and a long process of education has been needed to disseminate the official, standardized form of the language, though, even now, very many Italians think of themselves as being bilingual across the standard language and their local dialect.7 We can see related shifts in usage leaving tiny traces in our Jane Eyre translations. Between 1904 and the 1920s and 30s, the form ‘avevamo errato’ [we had wandered] must have come to seem, though not incorrect, not quite idiomatic in this context, at least to the ears of most of the translators — perhaps too recherché or poetical, or simply too French. The words that seemed best suited both to the imagined scene and to publication in print had become different: ‘girato’ (which we might back-translate as ‘wandered’ or ‘taken a turn’); ‘gironzare’ (more like ‘wandered around’) along with the related ‘gironzolato’; ‘camminato’ (straightforwardly ‘walked’); ‘fatto una breve passeggiata’ [gone for a short stroll]; and finally, becoming established as the go-to translation for ‘wandered’ over the last 50 years or so, ‘vagando’/‘vagato’, or the semantically very similar but more resounding ‘vagabondare’. This group of choices shows phrasing that feels idiomatically Italian branching off from phrasing that overlaps with French (where ‘erré’ remained a common choice for translators at this point),8 though the one exception (‘errato’, 1956) reveals the continuing soft border between the languages. A more consistent difference is that, since 1904, no Italian translator has felt the need to write, in the manner shared with French, ‘spogliato di foglie’ (‘stripped of leaves’): the one word ‘spoglio’ (or an equivalent) becomes enough. (Another crux in the line, how best to render into either language the very English garden feature that is a ‘shrubbery’, raises the different issue of realia in translation, which I will not go into here).9

These instances give us an idea of the variable linguistic terrain through which translation operates. Languages change, mingle and pull apart, and translation participates in those processes. It can collaborate with the growing standardization of a language, reinforcing, by its choices, the boundary between what is taken to belong to that language and what is not. Evidence from corpus-based studies that translations, in general, display less lexical variety than source texts bears witness to this role: translators often prefer words that seem unsurprising so as to demonstrate their obedience to the norms of the language they are translating into.10 But translation also reveals the work that is continually involved in the maintenance of a standard, and therefore draws attention to the unruly diversity of actual and possible usages with which standardization is always in conflict. It has the power to make unusual choices, even if it does not exercise it often. As Lydia H. Liu has shown in her discussion of interplays between English and Chinese, when languages come into contact, translators venture ‘hypothetical equivalences’ which may then become solidified through repeated usage and end up in bilingual dictionaries.11 In our Italian samples, as ‘vagato’/‘vagando’ comes to dominate translation of ‘wandered’, we can see a tiny instance of the re-adjustment of equivalences between languages that keeps on happening, even centuries after the first Italian-English dictionaries, as the languages continue to interact and change. And translation contributes to such changes — indeed, in the case of Chinese, the encounter with English and other European tongues caused substantial alterations to lexical, grammatical and discursive norms:12 we will see how this relates to Jane Eyre translations in Essay 12 below, by Yunte Huang. Translation, then, cannot be understood as bridging differences between languages that are each internally consistent and separate from one another. Rather, as Mike Baynham and Tong King Lee have suggested, its work is that of ‘managing difference’ — both the differences that can distinguish one language from what is defined as another, and those within such languages, which are themselves inevitably heterogeneous and changing.¹³

A theory of translation, then, needs to start from a point that is conceptually prior to the organization of linguistic variety into countable languages conceived as different from one another. It cannot take the separation of languages as a given, and must feel the weight of the argument, made by Robert Young, that ‘the idea of a language as a discrete entity was a concept devised by European philologists’. Young gives the telling example of G. A. Grierson, a philologist and civil servant who was tasked with producing a Linguistic Survey of India at the end of the nineteenth century. Grierson realised that colonial subjects in India thought of themselves, not as speaking separate languages, but rather as participating in something more like a dialect continuum. As he wrote: ‘it thus follows that, while the dialect-names in the following pages have been taken from the indigenous nomenclature, nearly all the language-names have had to be invented by Europeans’.14 Grierson’s predicament is repeated wherever languages, or rather what we are henceforth going to have to call ‘language(s)’, are studied. The linguist Tore Janson has observed that ‘there are few generally accepted rules or criteria for deciding when two ways of speaking should be regarded as being the same language and when they should be seen as two separate ones’.15 The word ‘few’ turns out to be an overstatement, for it transpires from his discussion that there are in fact no such generally accepted rules or criteria:

People who understand each other are usually regarded as speaking the same language, and those who speak the same language are supposed to understand each other. But here, there are many exceptions. For example, Swedes and Norwegians usually understand each other without difficulty, but Swedish and Norwegian are regarded as different languages. On the other hand, many Americans from the Midwest do not understand Londoners, and vice versa, but they are supposed to be using the same English language.16

Janson therefore brings in his own preferred test, which is to ask what speakers themselves think. As we have seen with G. A. Grierson, this approach does not necessarily yield the desired answers, and Janson hits an even tougher difficulty in the case of the Khoisan people of Southern Africa:

When it comes to the Khoisan languages, it is not possible to ask. The speakers in some cases have no names at all for their languages, nor of course for dialects. So, this whole line of reasoning is without meaning for them until the Westernized way of thinking about languages has been taken over into their culture.17

It turns out that this ‘Westernized way of thinking’ did not take shape until a fairly late moment in European history. For instance, the medieval poet Dante, even though he would afterwards be hailed by nineteenth-century nationalists as father of ‘the Italian language’, did not himself think that he spoke or wrote Italian: ‘Dante did not think of Latin as one language and Italian as a completely different one, which is the common view nowadays. In his mind there really existed only one language, which manifested itself either as written Latin or as one of the written popular languages’ — those popular languages included what we would now call French and Provençal, as well as all the various dialects that made up what we would now call Italian.18

As the idea of there being ‘a language’ starts to crystallize (in Italy, Janson sees this happening among a small circle of literati in the century after Dante) it becomes codified in writing, with some texts held up as examples, together with the construction of grammars and dictionaries.19 But this process does not — of course — encompass the great variety of language as it is actually used in a given area, above all in speech. As Alastair Pennycook has put it: ‘the codification of languages is not so much a process of writing down what already exists as it is a process of reducing languages to writing’. This means that there is — always and everywhere — a yawning, indeed unbridgeable gap between languages as they are recorded and known, and the actual language-use of people to whom the codified languages are attributed. It follows that — in Pennycook’s words — ‘the notion of [a] “language” does not refer to any real object’.20 Working from a different range of references, Naoki Sakai reached the same conclusion: ‘the unity of [a] language is like a regulative idea. It organizes knowledge, but it is not empirically verifiable’.21 Nevertheless, as Pennycook cautions, ‘the effects of repeated construction and reconstruction’ of the idea of there being such a thing as a language ‘are very real’: ‘these inventions have a reality for the people who deal with them’.22 They have reality, for instance, for any anyone told by state powers that their way of speaking does not correspond to ‘the language’, and that they need to change it. And they have reality for translators.

Translators of novels are typically writing for publication in print, in a state market. Certainly this is the case for all the Jane Eyre translators we discuss in the these pages. And so they are subject to the sociopolitical linguistic pressures that bear on that medium, as we saw with the Korean and Croatian translations at the start of this section. Yet what translators are translating into is not only the written form of a language, destined for the regulated arena of print publication. They are also translating Jane Eyre into a context of reception, a readership; and the readership for a translation — indeed, for any book — is always multilingual, as the Tibetan and Chinese parallel text can serve to remind us. This fact needs emphasizing because, as John C. Mather has pointed out: ‘though language diversity is an everyday social fact everywhere, most countries recognize only a small number of “national” languages and “official” languages’.23 Such limited recognition seems especially to prevail in the study of literary texts, where what Suresh Canagarajah has defined as ‘monolingual orientation’ is sustained by the generally monolingual and predominantly national structuration of the academic disciplines of literature and languages.24 But, in fact, printed texts, however regulated their language, always enter into the minds of readers who — however thoroughly schooled they may or may not have been — necessarily bring diverse linguistic repertoires to the collaborative work of reading. And so it is that Juan G. de Luaces, translating into the highly policed, printed language of Franco’s Spain, could angle his words so as to enable readers to catch the egalitarian spark of Jane Eyre (as Andrés Claro shows in Essay 5 below); and so it is also that several translators under the Islamic Republic in Iran could signal connections between Jane Eyre and a banned genre of romance writing, as Kayvan Tahmasebian and Rebecca Ruth Gould show in Essay 8. When they negotiate the expectations of their publishing markets, translators have the power to make something new happen out of the mix of language(s) that they are working with. As we have begun to see, and will see more fully in the pages that follow, this can happen (or indeed not happen) in a multitude of ways.

The theory of translation that I have been advancing, and the practice of critical scholarship that is presented in this publication, puts translation at the centre of the study of world literature. That is where it should have been at least since David Damrosch launched the latest phase of world-literary theorisation in 2003, with his celebrated announcement that ‘I take world literature to encompass all literary works that circulate beyond their culture of origin, either in translation or in their original language’.25 But this founding utterance did not in fact start an academic vogue for the linguistically informed, textually alert and materially grounded study of the circulation of texts through many languages via translation. Indeed, ‘astonishing as it may seem’ — as Mary Louise Pratt has said — ‘language has not been a category of analysis in the now vast academic literature on globalization’.26 Instead, there has been an air of shadow-boxing about many of the trend-setting publications that have emerged from the United States academy, with a theoretical commitment to the importance of translation matched by a lack of attention to it in practice. Rebecca Walkowitz’s Born Translated: The Contemporary Novel in an Age of World Literature, for instance, sets out to approach ‘world literature from the perspective of translation’, only then to restrict its attention to the thematization of translation in ‘anglophone works’.27 As Damrosch recognises in a 2020 update to his programme, ‘we need to develop better ways of working both with original texts and in translation’.28 The present publication hopes to offer an example of one such ‘better way’, and so to join the several admirable instances of what Emily Apter has called ‘a translational model of comparative literature’²⁹ which do in fact exist, even if they have perhaps tended to flourish in parts of the world other than the United States. The pioneering Reception of British and Irish Authors in Europe series, founded by Elinor Shaffer, dates back to 2002; Barbara Cassin’s Vocabulaire Européen des Philosophies is from 2004 and Michael O’Neill’s Polyglot Joyce: Fictions of Translation from 2005. Among more recent work is the expansive research dossier on Les Mystères urbains au XIXe siècle: Circulations, transferts, appropriations edited by Dominique Kalifa and Marie-Ève Thérenty (2015), the Multilingual Locals and Significant Geographies project led by Francesca Orsini which focuses on North India, the Maghreb and the Horn of Africa (2016–21); as well as the varied research presented in Migrating Texts: Circulating Translations around the Ottoman Mediterranean (2019), edited by Marilyn Booth, or Translation and Literature in East Asia: Between Visibility and Invisibility by Jieun Kiaer, Jennifer Guest and Xiaofan Amy Li (2019), or Translation and World Literature, edited by Susan Bassnett (2018).30 All this research — and there is much more that could be cited — addresses the complexity of what happens when texts circulate through language(s) and across cultures. The present publication hopes to boost that company, drawing on the resources of multiplicitous cultural and linguistic expertise, digital media and collaborative close reading to give as full an account as we can of what it means for one novel, Jane Eyre, to inhabit a world of language(s).

Jane Eyre as a World Work in Language(s)

What it is for Jane Eyre to be a world work in language(s) will become more apparent in the chapters and essays to come. It will never be fully evident, however, even when or if every word and every visualisation has been digested. What we offer is — and could only ever be — a partial anthology of views. Each discussion grasps only some aspects of the phenomenon it addresses (as is always the case with any critical analysis). And the languages, contexts and translations that we treat are only a sample of those in which Jane Eyre exists. It follows that Jane Eyre cannot be known as a world work in language(s), but only approached with the awareness that that is what it is. Any instance, or group of instances, that we are able to study belongs to the larger network of continuities that embody the world work Jane Eyre; but that larger network necessarily exceeds our grasp. Any reader of Jane Eyre for pleasure — or any other motive — is in a similar position. Hence, as we saw in the Introduction, the need to accept an ontology of incompleteness, of the kind advocated by Francis B. Nyamnjoh: ‘incompleteness as a social reality and form of knowing generative of and dependent on interconnections, relatedness, open-endedness and multiplicities’.31

In this, the case of Jane Eyre is far from unique. Many texts, having originated in English or another language, have gone on to exist in a similar number and variety of translations. The kind of study that we offer here could be repeated for each of them. Yet, though the broad traits of the phenomenon may recur, the detail in each case is of course different, including the question of how the originary source text — the text in which any work begins its life — relates to and is changed by what the work goes on to become. As we have seen, the idea of ‘potential’ has a complex temporality. We cannot be sure what potential any text has to generate other texts until after it has done so. By the same token, translations do not just change the world work, whose ongoing life they sustain by their existence as instances of it. They also change the originary source text, because they reveal in it the latent potential that has been realised in them. We have visualised this progressive realisation through space and time in the interactive maps that form part of this publication. I will present them fully in Chapter III, but it may be helpful, in thinking about potential, to open the  Time Map . Take a moment to watch the translations unfold through time, then press the pause button at the bottom left of the map, and slide the cursor all the way to the left, to a moment in 1847 before any translations have started to appear. You can feel the shadow of their incipience. The potential that they will realise must already be there, as we know because, from our point of view in the present, its realisation has already happened.

How does the originary Jane Eyre change in the light of this futurity? Our sense of the structure of the text, and our impression of the power of different moments, is likely to be affected by the re-shapings that we have encountered so far in this volume, as well as those that lie ahead. The figure of Bertha Rochester may take on a somewhat different force as it foreshadows its re-workings in South America, India, Egypt and Lebanon. There is also the question of how the world of language(s) imagined in the novel relates to the world of language(s) through which the novel makes its way. When seen from the perspective of its translational afterlives, the novel’s own concern with translation assumes new prominence; above all, the strange scene when, having fled Thornfield, and been reduced to homelessness and hunger at Whitcross, Jane reaches an isolated house where, looking through a window, she sees, in a kitchen, ‘two young, graceful women’ dressed in mourning: they seem strangely familiar to her, though she has never seen them before. What follows is startling, so I will quote at length:

A stand between them supported a second candle and two great volumes, to which they frequently referred, comparing them, seemingly, with the smaller books they held in their hands, like people consulting a dictionary to aid them in the task of translation. This scene was as silent as if all the figures had been shadows and the firelit apartment a picture … When, therefore, a voice broke the strange stillness at last, it was audible enough to me.

‘Listen, Diana,’ said one of the absorbed students; ‘Franz and old Daniel are together in the night-time, and Franz is telling a dream from which he has awakened in terror — listen!’ And in a low voice she read something, of which not one word was intelligible to me; for it was in an unknown tongue — neither French nor Latin. Whether it were Greek or German I could not tell.

‘“Da trat hervor Einer, anzusehen wie die Sternen Nacht.” Good! good!’ she exclaimed, while her dark and deep eye sparkled. ‘There you have a dim and mighty archangel fitly set before you! The line is worth a hundred pages of fustian. “Ich wage die Gedanken in der Schale meines Zornes und die Werke mit dem Gewichte meines Grimms.” I like it!’32

Jane is cold, wet through, exhausted and all but starving, and yet her attention is held (and goes on being held long after the extract I have given) by this living picture of two people engaged in translation. Stranger still, the scene is manipulated so that she can hear their words even though they are spoken in a ‘low voice’ and she is on the other side of a closed, glass window, in the open air, on a ‘wild night’. So some authorial magic has been sprinkled over the scene, dislodging it from the constraints of realism. But then, despite this fantastical dissolution of a barrier, a new obstruction appears, for what Jane is able to hear she cannot understand, no more than ‘sounding brass’ (itself a quotation from a translation, the King James version of the Bible).33 Yet this obstruction too is overcome, though only partially, by another piece of implausible narrative manipulation: ‘at a later day, I knew the language and the book; therefore, I will here quote the line.’ Quote it, yes; but translate it? — no, thereby dividing the novel’s readership both in 1847 and since. A few will know German and recognise the quoted text; others may be able to read the German words but not know that they are from Friedrich Schiller’s lurid, powerful romantic drama Die Räuber (The Robbers, 1781), and in particular from a vision of the Last Judgement that has come to the villain, Franz, in a dream: ‘then one stepped forth who, to look upon, was like a starry night … [and another figure said:] “I weigh thoughts in the scale of my wrath and deeds with the weight of my fury”’. Perhaps most readers will neither recognise the source nor understand much or any of the language, unless they are using a modern edition that translates these words from a classic English novel into English.

The relevance of Die Räuber to Jane Eyre is hazy. The play includes a loving couple cruelly pushed apart, and a fractured family, so perhaps Brontë felt it to be a nightmarish pre-echo of her own narrative, haunting it, and making an only semi-comprehensible appearance, like a miniature textual counterpart to the similarly gothic figure of Bertha Rochester. And perhaps this scene of the Last Judgement is a foreshadowing of St John Rivers, who is about to appear, and who, before long, will be reading out a parallel passage of the Bible.34 Probably more important than the particular text quoted, however, is the fact that an act of translation should be happening here, and that it should be so foregrounded by the narrative peculiarities that I have noted. The two young women, who are to become Jane’s friends, and later turn out to be her cousins, welcome Die Räuber, a strange textual visitation from a wild imaginative world, and make the effort to comprehend it; and a moment later they will welcome Jane, a strange human visitation from a wild experiential world, and make the effort to comprehend her. So the framing of the scene suggests a comparison between attending to texts through translation and attending to people through kindness and understanding. In a letter, Brontë had made a similar analogy, describing the minds of others as being like ‘hieroglyphical scrolls’, a ‘hidden language’ that needed ‘construing’,35 and the same suggestion is brought into our scene by the ‘sounding brass’ quotation from the Bible. The whole verse from which it is taken is as follows: ‘though I speak with the tongues of men and of angels, and have not charity, I am become as sounding brass, or a tinkling cymbal’. It is thanks to charity (now often translated ‘love’) that Jane is taken into the house, and comes in time to learn German, and presumably to discover also from her cousins what it was that they were reading on this fateful night. Her incomprehension at the window points forward to understanding later on, when Jane, currently excluded from the sisterly community of translation, will be translated into it.

This use of translation, and its thwarting, to foreshadow a later translingual and affective community is in tune with the general orientation towards future fluency that is created by the book’s narrative structure. As she grows up, Jane encounters many obstacles to understanding and self-expression; but they are all mitigated by our knowledge as readers that she must in the end have achieved both, as they are continually manifested in the narrative that she has written. Attention to the diversity of language(s) is key to this from the beginning. Critical discussion has noted the marked spatial dynamics of the opening pages, the way they articulate a performance of selfhood among constraints as Jane is first excluded from the family group, then secludes herself in the window seat, and later is shut up in the ‘red-room’ — a succession of positionings that anticipate both her own individualistic disposition and the confinement of Bertha Rochester (to which it is uneasily related).36 But attention has not been given to the strife of language(s) that is no less marked in this sequence: the haughtily formal tones of Mrs Reed (‘she regretted to be under the necessity of keeping me at a distance’); the bullying schoolboy jargon of her son (‘Boh! Madame Mope!’); the momentary escape offered by the pictures of remote, northern shores in Bewick’s History of British Birds, together with the evocative writing that accompanies them, including a quotation from James Thomson’s poem The Seasons:

Of farthest Thule ….37

Then there is the comparatively friendly, colloquial discourse of Mrs Reed’s servant Bessie, and the folksy ballads that she sings (‘My feet they are sore, and my limbs they are weary’); the attentive professional accents of the apothecary, Mr Lloyd; and the sanctimonious preaching of Mr Brocklehurst: ‘all liars will have their portion in the lake burning with fire and brimstone’.38 And there is French, first this surprising instance as Jane is carried off to the ‘red-room’:

The fact is, I was a trifle beside myself; or rather out of myself, as the French would say.39

And later in Bessie’s account of the accomplishments attained by young ladies who went to school:

She boasted of beautiful paintings of landscapes and flowers by them executed; of songs they could sing and pieces they could play, of purses they could net, of French books they could translate; till my spirit was moved to emulation as I listened.40

At the prospect of being able to translate, Jane’s spirit is moved. Here too, as in the later scene with German, translation heralds the prospect of joining a community of accomplished self-expression. And this provides a solution to the puzzle posed by that odd phrase ‘as the French would say’ a chapter earlier. Why bring in what the French would say? Because the narrator has become someone whose repertoire includes French and who, as E. C. Gaskell noted of Charlotte Brontë in her celebrated biography:

would wait patiently searching for the right term, until it presented itself to her. It might be provincial, it might be derived from the Latin; so that it accurately represented her idea, she did not mind whence it came; but this care makes her style present the finish of a piece of mosaic.41

The young Jane’s powerlessness is salved by the mature Jane’s skill with words, skill that draws from a multilingual repertoire.

The warm, almost utopian affect attaching to translation and language-learning continues at Lowood school, for instance when Jane has tea with Helen and Miss Temple:

… they seemed so familiar with French names and French authors: but my amazement reached its climax when Miss Temple asked Helen if she sometimes snatched a moment to recall the Latin her father had taught her, and taking a book from a shelf, bade her read and construe a page of Virgil; and Helen obeyed, my organ of veneration expanding at every sounding line.42

The unusual adjective ‘sounding’ there signals a link to the scene of Schiller-translation later in the book with its ‘sounding brass’; and there is another link too. In the later scene, Jane describes Schiller’s uncomprehended German ‘as being in an unknown tongue — neither French nor Latin’ — so, though we have heard nothing of Jane’s going on to study Latin at Lowood, she must have done. French, on the other hand, we do hear about: it becomes her passport to employment at Thornfield Hall, to conversation with her French pupil Adèle and with Adèle’s maid Sophie, and to easy participation in the French world of reference that Mr Rochester has at his disposal. Elaine Showalter and Emily Eells have studied the presence of French in the novel, noting that it is associated with ‘sexual response’ (Showalter), as well as with ‘freedom of speech’, being an ‘outsider’, ‘sympathy’, ‘discipline’ and even ‘smoking’ (Eells).43 These two perceptive studies are significant in showing that ‘bilinguality is an important aspect’ of Brontë’s style; but the range of associations uncovered by Eells pushes against Showalter’s claim (which provides the methodological basis for both essays) that ‘French language and allusions to French literature function symbolically’.44 The assumption here is that Jane Eyre presents a language-world of Standard English, to which Standard French is added for strategic signifying purposes. But the novel’s linguistic landscape is more complex than that, as we have begun to discover. Roy Harris’s word ‘languaging’ can help us to describe what we are seeing. As Nigel Love explains, ‘languaging’ is ‘a cover term for activities involving language: speaking, hearing (listening), writing, reading, “signing” and interpreting sign language’, and it is preferable to phrases like ‘using language’ or ‘language use’ because it does not imply ‘that what is used exists in advance of its use’.45 Jane Eyre explores a range of language(s), and of the languaging practices which generate it/them, all of which take on distinctive tonalities and connotations in particular circumstances. What can be defined as ‘the French language’ is prominent among them, but, crucially, it is used in a way that fragments that definition: there is what Eells herself recognises to be the ‘franglais’ of little Adèle (‘Mademoiselle, I will repeat you some poetry’), and there are also many indeterminate forms that are pieced into the mosaic of Brontë’s style — not only ‘out of myself’ but also ‘translate currently’ (from ‘couramment’), or ‘auditress and interlocutrice’ (in Mr Rochester’s voice — ‘interlocutrice’ is a French form which it seems likely he pronounces with an English accent), together with very many phrases that, though not alien to English, are a bit unusual, and have perhaps been helped into existence by the presence of French in Brontë’s translingual imagination: for example, ‘brilliant fire’ (less common in English than ‘feu brillant’ in French), or ‘curtains hung rich and ample’ (‘ample rideau’ was an ordinary French collocation).46

This borderless Franco-English languaging coincides with an attention to the fractures that can open up within ‘English’. They appear in the narrative voice, as here:

The words in inverted commas are not Standard English but northern and Scottish dialect; but it is impossible to know whether they came onto the page from Brontë’s everyday conversational soundscape in Haworth, her village in Yorkshire, or as a literary allusion to Sir Walter Scott’s novel The Heart of Midlothian.47 Either way, though separated from their surrounding language by the inverted commas (which are also present in Brontë’s manuscript),⁴⁸ the words are woven into it stylistically through the phonetic harmonies they join (‘opaque … onding … canopied’, ‘snaw … all …fell … intervals … hoary’), as well as by their lexical kinship to ‘hoary lea’ which, though not markedly dialectal, has a similarly mixed rural and literary pattern of usage.⁴⁹ Just as with her writing across the French-English continuum, Brontë shows dialect appearing in the voices of her characters as well as in the narrative she writes through Jane. For instance, immediately after the quotation from Schiller at Moor House, the servant Hannah, who is also in the kitchen, chips in:

‘Yes, Hannah — a far larger country than England, where they talk in no other way.’

‘We could probably tell something of what they said, but not all …’50

As in the case of ‘onding on snaw’, difference is created and bridged at the same time: the divergent spelling marks Hannah’s speech as something that Diana and Mary, and indeed Jane, would not themselves utter; and yet they are all perfectly able to understand it, and to recognise it as one of the ways people talk in ‘England’. Again, this exploration of disparity within what can be defined as a national language — what Bakhtin called the ‘heteroglossia’ of ‘socio-ideological contradictions’ and differing ‘points of view on the world’51 — is opened up by, and compared to, the difference between that language and what can be defined as a different one, German. ‘How they can understand t’ one t’ other’ is a question that bears on everyone in the novel, and it is foregrounded by the attention to linguistic diversity in what is shown as being — to adopt Naoki Sakai’s terms — a world not of ‘homolingual’ but of ‘heterolingual’ address, that is, one where it is recognised that ‘heterogeneity is inherent’ in any communicative situation.52

Brontë’s style gives substance to this recognition as it draws from the continuum of French, Standard English and dialects, as well as exhibiting other eclectic features, as critics have recognised ever since the earliest reviews. Margot Peters points to Brontë’s ‘deliberate and flagrant practice of inverting the normal order of the English language’, and Stevie Davis suggests that her knowledge of German may have helped this into being (in the same way as we have seen French influence her phrasing).53 While the inversions do not typically reproduce German word order exactly, it is plausible that the encounter with German may have opened up Brontë’s feeling for how words could be put together. Certainly, the shape of the stand-out inversions transfers more happily into Marie von Borch’s 1887 German translation than into Lesbazeilles-Souvestre’s French translation of 1854 or the anonymous Italian translation of 1904. For instance, from the very first page:

Ella mi aveva proibito di unirmi al loro gruppo.[She me had forbidden …]54

Then there is Brontë’s prolific citation from and reference to other texts, not only the anglophone ones most commonly noticed by scholars in the discipline of English literature, such as Bunyan’s The Pilgrim’s Progress, the King James version of the Bible, and various works by Sir Walter Scott, as well as psychological texts and American slave narratives;55 but also the German of Schiller (as we have seen) and several works in French, including George Sand’s Indiana (1832), Bernardin de St Pierre’s Paul et Virginie (1788) — which had been given to her by her adored French teacher in Brussels, M. Heger — and the Charles Perrault version of the folk tale Barbe bleue [Bluebeard] (1697). Considered as an aspect of style, Jane Eyre’s blending and layering of languages, together with its plurilingual intertextuality, create an expressive medium that presents human languaging as a landscape of heterogeneity.

This heterogeneity involves class and power, so it also becomes a crucial element in the novel’s social drama. And from this perspective there turns out to be a striking disparity between Jane’s (and Brontë’s) eclectic practice as a writer and her more tightly bordered linguistic performances as a character. When Jane has been brought into Moor House and gets into conversation with Hannah, she takes care to entrench the class difference between them, speaking ‘with a certain marked firmness’ and moving to ‘shake hands’ only once the disparity of status has been firmly established.56 A few weeks later, when she takes charge of a nearby village school, her pupils present her with language difference almost as marked as in the encounter with Schiller: ‘they speak with the broadest accent of the district. At present, they and I have a difficulty in understanding each other’s language.’57 Her response, in line with her duty as a teacher, is to train them in Standard English, along with ‘neat and orderly manners’.⁵⁸ When she gives up the school, having come into her inheritance, she reveals the nationalist pride, and indeed prejudice, that are associated with this endeavour. She rejoices that her best scholars have become:

… as decent, respectable, modest, and well-informed young women as could be found in the ranks of the British peasantry. And that is saying a great deal; for after all, the British peasantry are the best taught, best mannered, most self-respecting of any in Europe: since those days I have seen paysannes and Bauerinnen; and the best of them seemed to me ignorant, coarse, and besotted, compared with my Morton girls.59

The same ideology transpires in her attitude to Adèle, of whom we are told that ‘as she grew up, a sound English education corrected in a great measure her French defects’.60 Jane’s xenophobia appears most viciously in her response to Bertha Rochester, who is pushed beyond the border between human and animal, described as a ‘clothed hyena’ standing ‘tall on its hind feet’, and as possessing a mode of languaging that is past, not only comprehension, but even recognition as language: ‘it snatched and growled like some strange wild animal’.61

So there is an incongruity between the connotations of the novel’s style and the behaviour of its protagonist: that is, between two modes of engaging the aesthetics and politics of language. In the first, a mode of textuality, it is possible for Brontë to welcome the heterolingualism that I have described, because she is producing a work of writing, destined to circulate in the comparatively open interpretive arena of printed literature. But in the second, a mode of individual performance, Jane — as a character — has to be much more guarded in how she behaves with language, because her identity, her status and indeed her ability to survive depend on it. This conflict between the world of language(s) as it can be represented by the narrator, and that same world as it has to be inhabited by the protagonist, provides a powerful instance of what Firdous Azim has called ‘the difficulties in being Jane Eyre, that is, the difficulties of a sovereign femininity placed within a system of patriarchy’, which — she says — are overlooked when the novel is simply labelled ‘an imperialist text’.62 In the narrative, Bertha’s powerful languaging, her ‘mirthless’, ‘tragic’ and ‘preternatural’ laugh, her ‘eccentric murmurs’ and her cry, a ‘fearful shriek’ such as the ‘widest-winged condor on the Andes’ might have sent out ‘from the cloud shrouding his eyrie’ can be deployed to suggest feelings that Jane is barred from expressing in her own person, with the connection being hinted at by successive sparks of phonetic play, as here in the word ‘eyrie’.63 But Jane-the-character cannot accept any of this as significant language, even though Bertha is perfectly well able to speak words, as we know from her brother Mr Mason: ‘“she said she’d drain my heart”’.64 Mr Mason’s own accent is described as ‘somewhat unusual, — not precisely foreign, but still not altogether English’,⁶⁵ but we cannot know whether Bertha’s speech is similar or whether she might have used a kind of language that could be defined, like her identity, as ‘Creole’.66 In any case, her languaging asks to be seen together with Schiller’s German, Adèle’s Franglais, Hannah’s Yorkshire, and all the other varieties of speech performance, as a presence — though in her case a significantly occluded one — in the heterolingual landscape of the work.

Susan Meyer, Deirdre David and Carolyn Berman have thoroughly traced the complications of Jane Eyre’s involvement with Empire, the way it partially faces and partially evades its wrongs — not least in Jane and Mr Rochester’s wounded seclusion at the end, in a society of two, living on funds (both his and hers) whose colonial origins have been made plain, in a house, Ferndean, where Mr Rochester had considered confining Bertha but chose not to because (he said) it was too unhealthy.67 Meanwhile, St John Rivers pursues his severe imperial mission. The language-world of the book is inflected by these complexities and speaks to them, not only in the representation of Bertha’s utterances, but also in St John’s requirement that Jane give up German and start learning ‘Hindostanee’ so as — it turns out — to be able to help him in his missionary endeavours. As Ulrich Timme Kragh and Abhishek Jain argue in Essay 1 below, the possibility of going to India can be read as creating an inspiring prospect for Jane; all the same, this is the one experience of language-learning and translation that she does not enjoy.68 It is another instance, and a stark one, of the politics of language behaviour being negotiated by the protagonist within the heterolingual world created by the work.

Pheng Cheah has argued that literature ‘opens a world’ by giving shape to its temporality through narrative.69 It should be added that literature opens a world of language(s). In Jane Eyre, that world is one in which multiple linguistic performances are recognised, in all their divergence from one another, as well as in the continuity that joins them. In this textual mode of representing heterolingualism, any utterance, from a shriek to a phrase of Schiller, is welcome as a contribution to the mosaic of Brontë’s style. But to move through that world as a character is different: it is to be subjected to the political and social pressures that divide ‘correct’ from ‘incorrect’, the standard from the dialectal, and national languages from one another, and which can fix class identity from the pronunciation of a syllable. In this layered language-world of Jane Eyre, we can perceive a conflict not unlike that discovered by Édouard Glissant in the ‘poétique forcée’ (‘forced poetics’) of Caribbean writing: ‘à la fois conscience de la presence contraignante du français comme arrière-fond linguistique et volonté délibérée de renoncer au français’ [at the same time an awareness of the constraining presence of French as a linguistic background and the deliberate wish to reject French].70 The language politics that Jane negotiates are not as violent as those Glissant describes. Nevertheless, as a character, she must take care over the social constraints on behaviour in language; while, as a narrator, she has more freedom to channel her — or her author’s — eclectic repertoire, one that mixes the local and the transnational like the language-world in which Brontë lived, a world where she had become a writer of novels through intensive exercises in French composition, done in Brussels; where her sister Emily sat in the kitchen at Haworth (like the ladies at Moor House) ‘studying German out of an open book, propped up before her, as she kneaded the dough’; and where her friend Mary Taylor’s father ‘spoke French perfectly … when need was; but delighted usually in talking in the broadest Yorkshire’.71 The language of Bertha the Creole is largely excluded from this repertoire, as we have seen, and indeed gains its significance from the vehemence of that exclusion; nevertheless, Glissant’s later theorisation of Creole language can also serve as a description of the language-world of Jane Eyre: ‘la langue créole apparaît comme organiquement liée à l’expérience mondiale de la Relation. Elle est littéralement une conséquence de la mise en rapport de cultures différentes’ [the Creole language appears as organically linked to the global experience of inter-relation. It is literally a result of the interplay between different cultures].72 While showing the constraints on Jane’s linguistic performance as a character, Jane Eyre also brings into being the more plural linguistic landscape within which she has to define herself. The world of Jane Eyre’s writing is broader than the channel of Jane Eyre’s speech.

This aspect of the novel grows in prominence when we look back at its originary text from the vantage point of its continuing life through translation. We cannot say, bluntly, that Jane Eyre’s heterolingual language-world has helped to cause its prolific re-making through language(s); for other, very different books have been no less frequently translated. But it does affect, and is affected by, the dynamics of that remaking. The novel’s continuing life is the continuation of something; and that something is changed by the continuation to which it has given rise. It is safe to say that no individual translation matches the language variety of the text that Brontë wrote. Like Jane the character, the translations are all subject to sociolinguistic constraints that inhibit such a performance. But, looked at together, they of course exceed its variety, and massively so. In this sense, the translations extend — and will go on extending — the heterolingualism of the source.

The four essays that follow this chapter focus on several crucial aspects of this dynamic, developing different angles on the practice and theory of translation as they do so. In Essay 1, Ulrich Timme Kragh and Abhishek Jain offer a comprehensive account of Jane Eyre’s afterlife in the many languages of India, also presenting a theory of translation built on Indian knowledge traditions which is in some ways in dialogue with the theory I have outlined: this essay is necessarily long, given the large and complex cultural context that needs to be sketched, and the thirteen languages that come into the discussion. Paola Gaudio, in Essay 2, shows how Brontë’s eclectic style has given rise to persistent textual variants in English editions which have then expanded through translation; giving examples from Italian, she asks how our understanding of translation might shift when the source text itself is variable. In Essay 3, Yousif M. Qasmiyeh traces the novel’s re-materialisations in Arabic, where its linguistic intensities have given rise to a distinctive focus on voice and touch, drawing attention to the importance of sound, not only in a radio version but also in translations for print. And Céline Sabiron, in Essay 4, explores the difficulties that French translators have found in rendering the Franco-English linguistic continuum that I have described in this chapter: what are the possibilities for translation when French has to be translated into French?

Works Cited

For the translations of Jane Eyre referred to, please see the List of Translations at the end of this book.

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Azim, Firdous, The Colonial Rise of the Novel: From Aphra Behn to Charlotte Brontë (London and New York: Routledge, 1993).

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Baynham, Mike and Tong King Lee, Translation and Translanguaging (London and New York: Routledge, 2019). https://doi.org/10.4324/9781315158877

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Brontë, Charlotte, Jane Eyre, British Library Add MS 43474, http://www.bl.uk/manuscripts/FullDisplay.aspx?ref=Add_MS_43474

——, Jane Eyre, ed. by Jane Jack and Margaret Smith (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969).

——, Jane Eyre, ed. by Stevie Davies (London: Penguin, 2006).

Brontë, Charlotte and Emily Brontë, The Belgian Essays: A Critical Edition, ed. and trans. by Sue Lonoff (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1996).

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——, ‘The French aire in Jane Eyre’, Cahiers victoriens et édouardiens, 78 (2013), n.p., https://doi.org/10.4000/cve.839

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——, ‘Comparative Literature and the Global Languagescape’ in A Companion to Comparative Literature, ed. by Ali Behdad and Dominic Thomas (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011), pp. 273–95, https://doi.org/10.1002/9781444342789.ch18

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——, Translation and Subjectivity: On ‘Japan’ and Cultural Nationalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997).

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