Asian Classics on the Victorian Bookshelf: Flights of Translation 0198866275, 9780198866275

Table of contents :
Dedication
Contents
Preface
List of Illustrations
List of Abbreviations
Prologue: A Soldier’s Rubaiyat
1. A Century of Translation
2. Taking an Interest
3. Circulating
4. Canonizing
5. Translating
6. Publishing
7. Reading
Epilogue: Flights of Translation
Appendix
Index

Citation preview

Asian Classics on the Victorian Bookshelf

Asian Classics on the Victorian Bookshelf Flights of Translation A L E X A N D E R BU B B

Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, OX2 6DP, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © Alexander Bubb 2023 The moral rights of the author have been asserted First Edition published in 2023 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: 2022947261 ISBN 978–0–19–886627–5 DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198866275.001.0001 Printed and bound in the UK by Clays Ltd, Elcograf S.p.A. Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work.

Contents Preface List of Illustrations List of Abbreviations Prologue: A Soldier’s Rubaiyat

ix xvii xix xxi

1. A Century of Translation

1

2. Taking an Interest

33

3. Circulating

63

4. Canonizing

89

5. Translating

118

6. Publishing

166

7. Reading

192

Epilogue: Flights of Translation Appendix Index

228 235 241

Preface I am quite ready to take the oriental learning at the valuation of the orientalists themselves. I have never found one among them who could deny that a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia. —Thomas Babington Macaulay, Minute on Indian Education (1835)1 . . . the names of Firdusi, Sa’di, Omar Khayyám, Jami, and Háfiz, have a place in our own temples of fame. They have won their way into the book-stalls and stand upon our shelves, side by side with the other books which mould our life and shape our character. —Introduction to The World’s Great Classics: Oriental Literature (1899)2 During the last two centuries, those enthusiasts who have heralded the imminent merging of national literary traditions into a new, joint configuration—world literature—have often given shape to their vision by imagining a universal library. The idea of a single institution, housing everything of value written in any language, has made such a development seem not only desirable but inevitable. This observation is not mine but was made recently by Aamir Mufti, citing among other exponents Goethe (who coined the term Weltliteratur in 1827 after reading a Chinese novel) and Macaulay, whose infamous remarks eight years later buttressed his recommendation that English-language schools should be established in India to foster an educated class sympathetic to British rule. The universal library is and continues to be an enticing notion, Mufti admits, provided one overlooks certain inconvenient questions. Who assembles this library, and to what end? By what principles do they decide which books to admit and which to exclude? How are books categorized, and in what language is the catalogue written? Most importantly, perhaps, who may enter and borrow from this library? For Mufti, these objections give the lie to any blithe assumption that globalization enables texts and ideas to travel unmolested around the world, any more than it permits a free and equal trade in commodities. On the contrary, he remarks, 1 T.B. Macaulay, Speeches: with his Minute on Indian Education (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1935), p. 349. 2 Epiphanius Wilson (ed.), The World’s Great Classics: Oriental Literature (4 vols, New York: Colonial Press, 1899), I, iii. Wilson correctly uses an apostrophe to register the glottal stop in Sadi, and acute accents for the long ‘a’ in Khayyam and Hafiz (though he has overlooked Jami). Nineteenthcentury orientalists used a wide variety of diacritics and to prevent confusion I have avoided them in my own transliteration.

x Preface ‘world literature has functioned from the very beginning as a border regime’, in which some texts or languages are privileged over others.3 That a ‘border regime’ is in operation within the world library becomes obvious if we extrapolate Macaulay’s dictum. So pure is the metal of European thought, his image suggests, that when brought up for assay and set on the scales, even a small and random assortment of nuggets will prevail over a whole wagonful of ore from the mines of Asia. Better fifty tomes of Europe than an archive of Cathay, apparently, to paraphrase Tennyson’s Locksley Hall (written in the same year as Macaulay’s Minute). Now let us extend the ratio: isn’t Macaulay inviting us to suppose that the latter might with facility be reduced to the dimensions of the former? Would not we (i.e. Europeans) be well served if efficient translators would compress the cumbrous oriental archive into fifty convenient volumes? Such a curatorial enterprise would require that a circumscribed canon of texts, or extracts, be admitted to the library and much else turned away, and in Mufti’s account (which draws ultimately on the work of Edward W. Said), such was the task upon which British orientalists were already well advanced by 1835. He convincingly argues for the fundamental continuity between world literature and orien­tal­ism, by showing how the former came into being only when the extra­or­ din­ar­ily diverse range of writing practices and traditions observable in ‘the East’ had been ‘absorbed, recalibrated, rearranged, revaluated, reclassified, reconstellated . . . and, in short, fundamentally transformed’ by the work of European trans­ lators, mainly active in the nineteenth century.4 I have no intention of disputing Mufti’s thesis. But I do wish to ask one question. How might our understanding of this process change if, instead of considering the universal library only as a concept, we attempted to discover it in historical actuality? That is, what if we focussed on real books, on real bookshelves, belonging to real people? Lord Macaulay wrote most of The History of England in his study at Wallington Hall in Northumberland, but that is not the library to which I am referring. In fact I am not alluding to any specific location, but rather to the overall biblioscape that Richard Gottheil seems to be describing, when he claims that the Persian poets Firdausi, Sadi, Omar Khayyam, Jami, and Hafez have come to populate the bookstalls and bookcases of the West. Made in a critical introduction to an anthology of their poetry—the first of four ‘oriental’ volumes published in the World’s Great Classics series at the turn of the century—Gottheil’s remarks suggest that the Persians stand on an equal footing (‘side by side’) with the European classics. Furthermore, they seem to have attained that position, mysteriously, by their own exertions (‘they have won their way’) rather than through any intermediary. From streetside stalls (he does not say shops) they accost the casual browser, but 3 Aamir  R.  Mufti, Forget English!: Orientalisms and World Literatures (Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press, 2016), pp. 1, 5, 9. 4  Ibid., p. 48 (Mufti’s italics).

Preface  xi when housed on a domestic bookshelf (he does not say library), they take on a more decided, indeed a quasi-religious significance. To Gottheil, a secular Jew, the bookcase constitutes a sort of shrine, standing in relation to the greater canon of literature in the same way perhaps that a Roman’s household gods stood in relation to the city temple. Such grandiose rhetoric deserves scrutiny, and so I have set about testing the truth of Gottheil’s assertions. Could Persian poetry really have contributed to shaping the individual ‘character’—and thus to ­moulding the collective ‘life’—of British and American readers at the fin de siècle, and if this was so then what were the specific poems that accomplished this? Did those readers’ bookshelves hold one Asian book to fifty European, or did they choose a more balanced ratio for their universal libraries-in-miniature? My findings will become apparent in the following chapters—findings, on reflection, that I could scarcely have imagined when I began my research eight years ago on a snowy day in Syracuse, New York. But even though at that stage my destination remained obscure, I had at least discerned three dark spots in our existing know­ledge which I thought I might throw some light on. The first of these lacunae was connected with what Raymond Schwab termed, forty years ago, the Oriental Renaissance. Schwab’s historical focus was on the 1780s and 1790s, when Sir William Jones and his associates carried out groundbreaking research in Calcutta. Despite the profound impact their translations would make in the short term on Romantic literary culture, Schwab’s argument is that in the course of the following century Jones’s cosmopolitan attitude was negated by a wilful ignorance of Asian culture based on the conviction of white racial superiority. Though it continued to flourish in France and Germany, in Britain orientalism failed to recapture the attention it had drawn in its heyday and grew steadily ‘ephemeral’ to public life.5 In spite of Schwab’s tendency to overgeneralize, this narrative has proved remarkably persistent. In her Imperial Babel (2014), Padma Rangarajan points out Schwab’s shortcomings while broadly acquiescing in his thesis, overlooking the obvious fact that orientalism did not lose steam after Jones’s untimely death in 1794, but rather gathered speed relentlessly.6 By 1894, the volume of literature from Asia available in English was vastly greater and more comprehensive than the fragmented corpus of Jones’s lifetime. More importantly, a number of texts now existed in multiple translations—allowing readers to differentiate—and most importantly, editions had been made catering explicitly for the non-expert reader. Some up-to-date studies (e.g. Reza TaherKermani’s 2020 The Persian Presence in Victorian Poetry) have begun to pay heed to the burgeoning world of popularization, but academic interest remains weighted towards translations made for the benefit of oriental scholars, colonial 5  Raymond Schwab, The Oriental Renaissance: Europe’s Rediscovery of India and the East, 1680–1880 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), p. 43. 6 Padma Rangarajan, Imperial Babel: Translation, Exoticism, and the Long Nineteenth Century (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014), p. 111.

xii Preface officials, missionaries and other specialist readerships.7 Cheap and popular works were sometimes made by people with a highly imperfect knowledge of the source language, and yet sold more copies than authors with the proper credentials. There has been a failure to take such works seriously—Rangarajan refers to Matthew Arnold’s Sohrab and Rustum, a basically accurate retelling of a well-known ­episode in Firdausi’s Shahnameh, as ‘merely costume’. We might make amends, however, if we are willing to take up a challenge issued recently by Annmarie Drury: ‘what would happen to our understanding of “world literature” if we read the poetic translations that most Victorians read?’8 Inattention to popularizers (a fuller explanation of this term will follow in Chapter 1) has been a problem in the study of European languages too, but that is starting to dissipate. David Damrosch has described the effect of Charles Jervis’s 1742 ‘popular translation’ of Don Quixote in eighteenth-century Britain, while Chantal Wright has partly vindicated Dostoyevsky’s first English translator, Constance Garnett. For decades critics only saw it as their task to pick apart the latter’s flawed Russian, rather than to try and understand the ‘formative’ influence her verbal choices had exerted on a generation of English readers.9 In the area of Asian literature, however, the disparity remains pronounced. This has a bearing on the other two lacunae I propose to address. Firstly, there has been a tendency to treat the mediation of colonial cultures and contexts to the British public as two distinct areas of activity: the highbrow (anthropology, comparative religion, art, and collecting) and the popular (travel writing, fiction by Kipling and Henty, stage melodrama, imperial exhibitions, and the spectacles of the Kiralfy brothers).10 Historians have certainly allowed for the permeation of one sphere by the other, but, with some exceptions, translation has been treated as though it could only have been consumed by the wealthy and educated, when in reality it was communicated in different forms to different audiences.11 Lastly, when researchers have specifically examined translation, focus has usually rested exclusively on the translators, their intentions and methods (often with reference to their prefaces and explanatory notes, and sometimes to their manuscript drafts or correspondence). The intended audience and how it responded (favourably or unfavourably) to the translation, still less the unintended 7 See also several of the essays in Pouneh Shaban and Michelle Quay (eds), The Routledge Handbook of Persian Literary Translation (Abingdon: Routledge, 2022). 8 Rangarajan, Imperial Babel, p. 121; Annmarie Drury, Translation as Transformation in Victorian Poetry (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), p. 225. 9 David Damrosch, ‘Translation and National Literature’, in Sandra Bermann and Catherine Porter (eds), A Companion to Translation Studies (Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2014), p. 351; Chantal Wright, Literary Translation (London: Routledge, 2016), p. 99. 10  For a detailed study of the latter sphere of activity, see Neil Hultgren, Melodramatic Imperial Writing: From the Sepoy Rebellion to Cecil Rhodes (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2014). 11  One study that has considered the multiple audiences for a translated work, and their development over time, is Dorothy Maria Figueira, Translating the Orient: the Reception of Śākuntala in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 1991).

Preface  xiii audiences who more often than not made unbidden use of a translator’s work, have not been much thought of in these investigations. This is an important omission, because the major forces we can perceive with hindsight to have shaped literary culture over time—what we might call the macro-history of ­literature—often look different when viewed from the vantage point of an individual reader in the past. Book reviews, trade periodicals, and booksellers’ adverts are among the sources that have helped me trace the contours of the period’s literary topography, and the fact that such sources have yielded various references to the ‘oriental classics’, rhet­oric­al contrasts of the ‘old world’ of the East with the ‘new world’ of the West, and figurations of the universal library, very much supports Mufti’s narrative. But what actually happens at the microlevel, when world literature is compressed into someone’s household shelf, is thoroughly unpredictable and may even resist the dominant values pressing in on that person from their surrounding context. A single text may trigger a ‘flight’ from those values, propelling the reader with the same momentum by which it initially escaped the orientalist archive, and flew, chaotically, to an untold number of individual bookcases. I am not referring merely to cases of orientophilia, since infatuation with ‘the East’ proceeds from the same entrenched habits of thought as the denigration of it. But I do mean alternative ways of reading, more sensitive and more generous modes of conduct, and forgotten etiquettes of intercultural encounter. To excuse, or do any special pleading, for the translators and orientalists mentioned here is far from my intention, but I would like to suggest that the principles, or modalities, at work in the production of the Victorian oriental canon may be undermined by the practice. As evidence of the latter, the physical book has been central to my approach. In 2016, I bought a secondhand copy of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam that had been enriched with extensive marginalia by its former owner, a Canadian schoolteacher named Winnifred Carruthers. This purchase, motivated by curiosity, proved a turning-point. I began to seek out more translations from Persian containing inscriptions, bookplates, annotations, underlining, booksellers’ stickers, and other signs of use. Later I broadened my remit to all Asian languages, and amassed a collection of more than one hundred books that I now call AVaTAR— the Archive of Victorian Translations from Asia and their Readerships. A col­ lect­or of Yiddish schoolbooks, Miriam Borden, gave an interview in 2021 in which she explained what she looks for on the antiquarian market: ‘I’m interested in books that have a voice’, she said.12 In developing AVaTAR, I too have sought out books that have a story to tell, books that may initially give off just a murmur of past usage, but which begin to speak audibly once their former owners have been identified. With the help of online public records (birth and death registers, 12  Borden was interviewed by Nigel Beale on The Biblio File podcast: https://thebibliofile.ca/ book-collector-miriam-borden-on-rescuing-the-yiddish-language (accessed 8 Oct. 2021).

xiv Preface burial lists, the census, local newspapers, and so on) this is an activity that has proved time-consuming but eminently doable. And so while some books in AVaTAR did belong to well-documented individuals (like the Radical MP John Bright, or the Indian dancer Ram Gopal), most sat originally on the shelves of ‘ordinary’ Victorians and Edwardians, whom it has been my privilege to grow acquainted with. For the sake of brevity, I have not generally explained the full process whereby I determined that the ‘E.J.C.’ who presented Winnifred Carruthers with her copy of Omar Khayyam, and left his initials on the flyleaf, was Ernest John Chave of Woodstock, Ontario; or that James Gemmell Knight was a Liverpool printer; or that Willoughby Connor was a Hobart Freemason; or that the strange dedicatory verses written inside Herbert Ormerod’s copy of the Hitopadesha were alluding to the recent death of his wife. Moreover, within the space of this monograph I was only able to mention a small selection of the books. However, a descriptive catalogue of the full collection, with provenance notes, biographical sources, and photographs, is available at https://avatar-books.com/. For the time being AVaTAR remains in my own hands, and I warmly welcome enquiries and requests to view items. Given the centrality of AVaTAR to my enquiry, it is fitting that first thanks should go to the many booksellers who helped me form the collection, by patiently responding to my emails or by allowing themselves to be drawn into long, ­distracting conversations on the shopfloor. I am especially grateful to Ted at Mythos Center Books in Frontenac, Minnesota, who made a lonely trip to his warehouse during the Covid-19 lockdown to inspect a copy of the Bhagavad Gita for me, and John Randall from Books of Asia who has been of assistance on several occasions. Also Stephen Foster of Foster Books, West London, without whose fascinating stock of miniatures I would not have discovered my 9cm × 6cm pocket edition of Confucian maxims. Librarians and archivists, too, have generously given their time to follow up my queries related to such tantalizing catalogue descriptors as ‘ownership marks’ or ‘pencilled annotations’. In the digital age it was a privilege to see Elaine Webster, the National Trust’s curator at Mompesson House in Salisbury, turn to handwritten accession registers to help me trace the provenance of their fascinating annotated Ramayana. The staff of the Wilson Library at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill were so kind as to send me some scans of J.M. Dent & Co documents gratis, after I missed a crucial folder during my visit in 2020. Emily DeVore, Amanda Wahlmeier, Andrew Gustafson, and Darryl Jerome of the Johnson County Genealogical Society helped me track down obituaries and other information on Stewart Bruce Terry, the former owner of one of my AVaTAR books. A useful morning spent with the Mark Samuels Lasner Collection at the University of Delaware was only made possible by the collector himself graciously coming down to open the reading room for me outside of normal library working hours. And a special mention must go to Louise

Preface  xv Anson of Kilmacrew House, County Down, who let me occupy her sitting room all afternoon, and brought me endless cups of tea while I consulted some family papers related to the Chinese translator Helen Waddell. The typescript of this book benefited tremendously from the kind attention and input of my Roehampton colleagues Mary Shannon and Susan Greenberg, of my mentors Elleke Boehmer and Javed Majeed (both of whom championed this project in its early stages, when it was known as ‘Persia in Pocket Edition’), of my friends Sebastian Lecourt and John McBratney, and above all of Annmarie Drury who read almost the whole manuscript. In addition, I received much help and encouragement over the years from Dominic Brookshaw, Sinéad Moriarty, Clare Broome Saunders, Mary Ellis Gibson, Jan Montefiore, Chris Murray, Rajeswari Sunder Rajan, Jonathan Rose, Edmund  G.C.  King, Shafquat Towheed, Nicola Kirkby, Shengyu Wang, Santanu Das, Ankhi Mukherjee, Brian Murray, Julia Hartley, Paul Babinski, Mishka Sinha, Angus Nicholls, Maddalena Italia, Claire Chambers, and Sukanya Banerjee. Thank you to all the seminar and workshop participants who commented on my ongoing research, in particular Saronik Bosu of New York University, who pointed out that the physical bookshelf could be used as both a ‘metric’ and as a ‘metonym’ for nineteenth-century ecumenical reading cultures. Thank you to my funders: without the financial support of the Leverhulme Trust, Marie-Skłodowska Curie Actions, and the Trinity Long Room Hub at Trinity College Dublin, none of this would have been possible.13 Thank you to my family for their help in proofreading, with a special thanks to my grandmother Diana Bubb, who gave me a copy of Arthur Waley’s One Hundred and Seventy Chinese Poems that she had annotated as a schoolgirl in the 1940s, and who made a habit of asking me, somewhat pointedly, whenever the opportunity arose: ‘is your book finished yet?’ And thank you finally Tarun, the friend who entered my life like a fragrance, or like the sound of Urdu (as my dedication page could be translated into English), who has held me above water, preserved me from mishap and dismay, encouraged all my whims, demanded clarity in thought and expression, and taught me when to stop.

13  Co-funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 programme under Marie Skłodowska-Curie Grant Agreement No. 713730.

List of Illustrations 0.1 Corporal Palmer’s Rubaiyat (with permission of the Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales)

xxv

1.1 Frontispiece to The Rose Garden of Persia (author photograph)

14

2.1 West Norwood Cemetery, London (author photograph)

51

3.1 Brooklyn Museum, north-east corner (author photograph)

77

3.2 Los Angeles Central Library, detail of ‘Phosphor’ (author photograph)

79

4.1 Stewart Bruce Terry’s commentary on Mencius (author collection)

106

4.2 Confucian Analects with tram ticket (with permission of WM College)

113

5.1 Patten Wilson, ‘Sohrab Taking Leave of His Mother’ (courtesy of Yellow Nineties 2.0)

146

5.2 James Legge, The Chinese Classics, with a Translation, Critical and Exegetical Notes, Prolegomena, and Copious Indexes: Volume 4, Part 1, p. 53 (author photograph)

149

5.3 Helen Waddell, Lyrics from the Chinese, p. 1 (author photograph, copyright permission granted by Louise Anson)

150

6.1 Ernest Griset’s cover design for Vikram and the Vampire (1870) (courtesy of Hathitrust)

177

7.1 Way of the Buddha (1906) annotated by Duncan Lorimer Tovey (author photograph)

219

List of Abbreviations AVaTAR Archive of Victorian Translations from Asia and their Readerships (author’s personal collection) Beinecke Beinecke Library, Yale University Berg Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection at the New York Public Library BL British Library Bodleian Bodleian Library, University of Oxford Bristol Special Collections, University of Bristol Library Brotherton Brotherton Library, Leeds University Columbia Butler Library, Columbia University CUL Cambridge University Library Special Collections FSL Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington DC Houghton Houghton Library, Harvard University Huntington Huntington Library, San Marino, California HRC Harry Ransom Center, University of Texas at Austin JMA John Murray Archive, National Library of Scotland LMA London Metropolitan Archives LRO Liverpool Record Office Morgan Morgan Library, New York NLI National Library of Ireland NLS National Library of Scotland NSW State Library of New South Wales, Sydney NYPL Manuscripts & Archives Division, New York Public Library Pforzheimer Carl H. Pforzheimer Collection of Shelley and his Circle, New York Public Library Reading Archive of British Printing and Publishing, Special Collections, University of Reading SLV State Library of Victoria, Melbourne SOAS Special Collections, School of Oriental and African Studies, London Syracuse Special Collections Research Center, Bird Library, Syracuse University TCD1 Department of Manuscripts & Archives, Trinity College Dublin TCD2 Department of Early Printed Books & Special Collections, Trinity College Dublin UCLA Young Research Library, University of California Los Angeles UNC Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Virginia Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library, University of Virginia WSRO West Sussex Record Office, Chichester

Prologue A Soldier’s Rubaiyat

In the State Library of New South Wales is a very small book, 5cm × 8cm, bound in worn green leather, with a chalky-white stain swirling along its reverse side. At some point, water, probably rain, has soaked through its pages, tinging them pink at the corners with the red ink of the pastedown. Its spine is only long enough to admit a stencilled name—‘Omar Khayyam’—and to that, turning inside, the title page adds just two further, scrupulously accented words: Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. There is no mention of the translator, nor indeed that the book’s contents were originally written in Persian—though if we turn to the back, a short biographical afterword gives us the few known facts about the eleventh-century astronomer to whom the collection of ruba‘i or quatrains are attributed. It also reveals this English version to be the first of four made by the Victorian poet and recluse Edward Fitzgerald. His 1859 translation ‘attracted very little attention at the time of its publication, but of recent years it has had an immense vogue, and has been read and appreciated by thousands.’ That is all, more or less, that the book carries by way of editorial baggage. Whereas in 1859 Fitzgerald himself had offered his reader ten pages of preface, by 1907 the Edinburgh firm of Nimmo, Hay & Mitchell seem to have felt that Omar Khayyam needed little introduction— or at least no more than did Thoughts from Emerson, Winnowings from Wordsworth, A Tennyson Treasury, and the five other literary works we find advertised in the rear endpapers as forming entries in their Miniature Series.1 This then was a cheap, one-shilling edition of an English classic author. Sized for the pocket, it was intended for a reader who was already familiar at least with the poem’s title, and who desired perhaps a portable copy that could be referred to at spare moments. The pocket in which this copy was carried was a soldier’s, Corporal Thomas Ambrose Palmer, a farmer from Mangain, New South Wales, who enlisted in 1915 at the age of thirty-six and was sent first to Egypt, then France.2 He returned safely from the Western Front, and the Rubaiyat is bundled with a collection of his war letters and diaries. He may have acquired the book before, during, or even after the war; but the way it has been archived, and the evident rain damage, would suggest that Palmer bore this book on his person across the battlefields of Europe. In this he was not alone. As we will see later, the 1  NSW: MLMSS 9831 (Thomas Ambrose Palmer letters, diary and papers, 1916–19). 2  For Palmer’s war record, see National Archives of Australia: B2455, Palmer, Thomas Ambrose.

xxii Prologue Rubaiyat was one of the poems most commonly read by First World War combatants (and not only English speakers). Indeed, Nimmo, Hay & Mitchell reissued their miniature Omar in 1914, possibly with a view to this vast and mobile readership, though the little book in Sydney is from the original 1907 print run.3 Palmer has crammed every available space in the tiny book with annotations, saving only those pages on which are printed the actual quatrains of the poem, which it appears he wanted to preserve clean. Shafquat Towheed and Edmund King describe how books were passed and swapped between soldiers in the trenches as part of a communal reading culture.4 Not so with this item. The annotations would be hard to read even without the water stains, and could not have been intended for another reader—unless it were a hypothetical future reader, such as a son or daughter. No, these quotations (for the notes consist entirely in extracts from other poems) were designed as supplementary material to Palmer’s own reading and re-reading of the Rubaiyat. Grouped together principally in the front endpapers, they signal the points of reference and ‘frame of mind’ with which he felt the text should be approached.5 This was what it originally meant to ‘illustrate’ a book, to cite Thomas Dibdin’s definition from 1809: ‘bringing together, from different works, (including newspapers and magazines, and by means of the scissars [sic], or otherwise by transcription) every page or paragraph which has any connexion with the character or subject under discussion.’6 As we lever open its crinkled pages, the book thus discloses a vista of its owner’s remarkable reading habits, and evokes too the bookshelf—actual or mental—on which it once assumed its place, the global bookshelf of Thomas Palmer. Appropriately, we find also that the principal subject this soldier wished to illustrate was ‘connexion’ itself—or rather, the resonances and sympathies he detected between poems drawn from distant parts of West, South, and East Asia. Of course, Palmer could hardly carry a library in his knapsack, and he may have decided to use his Rubaiyat as a commonplace book to preserve the chance fruits of his browsing in YMCA huts and hospital day-rooms. But there is clearly a more deliberate selection and ordering at work. The miniature Omar does serve as a substitute for weightier pages, because the excerpts all bear some analogous relationship to the longer text in whose wings they shelter. Moreover, several of them appear to have been transcribed from memory. On the front pastedown can be recognized the preamble to Tennyson’s late poem ‘Akbar’s Dream’ (1892), given 3  The copy bears no date of publication, but may be dated from its characteristics, as described in A.G. Potter, A Bibliography of the Rubāiyāt of Omar Khayyām (1929; repr. Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag, 1994), p. 15. 4  Shafquat Towheed and Edmund G.C. King, ‘Introduction’, in Towheed and King (eds), Reading and the First World War: Readers, Texts, Archives (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), p. 12. 5 H.J.  Jackson, Marginalia: Readers Writing in Books (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2001), p. 25. 6  Thomas Frognall Dibdin, Bibliomania; or Book Madness: a Bibliographical Romance, in Six Parts (London: privately printed, 1809), p. 669.

Prologue  xxiii here verbatim on the left, with the original for comparison (the book’s cramped dimensions obliged Palmer to split each line in two). O God in every temple I see people that see Thee feel after Thee each religion says Thou art one—without equal if it be a mosque people murmur the holy prayer has people ring the bell from love of Thee sometimes I frequent the Christian church & sometimes the mosque But it is Thou whom I seek from temple to temple Thy elect have no dealings either with heresy or orthodoxy for neither of them stands behind the screen of your truth Heresy to the heretic and Religion to the orthodox

O god in every temple I see people that see thee, and in every language I hear spoken, people praise thee. Polytheism and Islam feel after thee Each religion says, ‘Thou art one, without equal.’ If it be a mosque people murmur the holy prayer, and if it be a Christian Church, people ring the bell from love to Thee. Sometimes I frequent the Christian cloister, and sometimes the mosque. But it is thou whom I search from temple to temple. Thy elect have no dealings with either heresy or orthodoxy; for neither of them stands behind the screen of thy truth. Heresy to the heretic, and religion to the orthodox, But the dust of the rose-petal belongs to the heart of the perfume seller.7

‘Akbar’s Dream’ is a dramatic monologue spoken by the Mughal emperor (1542–1605), a Muslim ruler celebrated for the pluralist approach he adopted in governing his multi-faith Indian empire. Tennyson read about Akbar’s Sufiinfluenced beliefs and his attempt to synthesize a unitary religion in the Ain-iAkbari, an account of his reign translated into English in 1873 by the orientalist Heinrich Blochmann.8 Corporal Palmer has not transcribed Tennyson’s own poem, however, but rather the preamble or epigraph that he extracted from Blochmann’s introductory essay. This was a Persian composition produced by the emperor’s vizier Abu’l-Fazl (Palmer renders the name ‘Abdul Fazi’), which he apparently meant to be inscribed on a Hindu temple as a deterrent to would-be Muslim iconoclasts. In preference to the English poem with its oriental colouring, then, Palmer has chosen as his first insert a primary text from the same linguistic

7  Christopher Ricks (ed.), The Poems of Tennyson (London: Longman, 1969), p. 1441. Tennyson abridged Blochmann’s text, and so must have been Palmer’s source. For the original, see H. Blochmann and H.S. Jarrett, The Ain i Akbari, by Abul Fazi ’Allami, translated from the original Persian (3 vols, Calcutta: Asiatic Society, 1873–94), I, xxxii. 8  For Tennyson’s sources for ‘Akbar’s Dream’ and his wider interests in non-Christian literature, see Kirstie Blair, Form and Faith in Victorian Poetry and Religion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), pp. 189–96.

xxiv Prologue tradition as the Rubaiyat. Indeed, he has not quoted Tennyson’s verses at all, but only ‘An inscription by Abdul Fazi on a temple in Kashmir’. And if he mistook the name of the Persian vizier in English, his attempt two pages later to transcribe it in the Perso-Arabic script was a little nearer the mark.9 As we delve deeper into Palmer’s notes, let us think about the rationale for his choice of ‘illustrations’. Omar Khayyam’s nineteenth-century translators, and to a degree his readers, can be divided into two parties: those who honoured him as a sceptical hedonist, preferring the company of cupbearers to that of the clergy; versus those who insisted that he was a Sufi, and his wine and taverns mystic symbols of a higher spiritual reality. They represent two Victorian responses to the erosion of Christian doctrine, the first rejecting religion outright, the second adopting non-Christian faiths or pursuing (like the Theosophical Society, founded in 1875) a monist or pantheist solution. Palmer evidently fell into the latter camp and, mirroring the comparative practices of the Theosophists, seeks to illustrate or ratify Omar’s beliefs by citing a number of writers past and present. His second quotation, following Abu’l-Fazl, reflects the same tradition of Indian religious syncretism, as expounded by the medieval Hindi poet Kabir. My brother kneels—so says Kabir To stone & brass in heathenwise But in my brothers voice I hear Mine own unanswered agonies His God is as his fate assigns His prayer is all the world’s—& mine.

It is possible that Palmer had come across the One Hundred Poems of Kabir translated in 1914 by Rabindranath Tagore. But these lines are not Tagore’s—in fact they are not a translation at all, but rather an imitation of Kabir written by Rudyard Kipling, and used as a chapter heading in his novel Kim (1901).10 Nevertheless, they do faithfully recreate one of the poet’s distinctive mannerisms,11 and Palmer, who may have considered them genuine, must have intended them to complement Abu’l-Fazl. They also find their pendant at the other end of the book, in a contemporary quotation from the American dialect poet Joaquin Miller: ‘In men whom men condemn as ill / I find so much of goodness still, / I[n]

9  I am conjecturing here, as the writing is so awkward as to be almost unintelligible. ‘Fazl’ has been spelt using the medial fā’ instead of its initial, followed by sīn instead of ẓā. Whoever wrote these characters knew his limitations, however, and used pencil (Palmer’s notes are otherwise in pen). 10  Rudyard Kipling, Kim (London: Macmillan, 1902), p. 358. As with ‘Akbar’s Dream’, Palmer has slightly misquoted—Kipling’s text has ‘saith Kabir’, ‘My own’ and ‘as his fates assign’. 11  Nearly all of Kabir’s vanis conclude with ‘kahat Kabir’ or ‘kahe Kabir’ (Kabir says).

Prologue  xxv men whom men pronounce divine / I find so much of sin & blot— / I hesitate to draw a line / Between the two, where God has not.’ Though Miller refuses to draw a line between sinner and saved, these tolerant lines draw a line under the Rubaiyat itself, for Palmer has written them out directly below the Persian slogan with which Fitzgerald chose to conclude his translation: TAMÁM SHUD (‘it is all’). All Victorian readers of the Rubaiyat, whether sceptic or Sufi, recognized the poem’s message that one must savour the wine of life, and die gladly upon hearing the fatal beat of Azrael’s wings: ‘While the Rose blows along the River Brink, / With old Khayyám the Ruby Vintage drink: / And when the Angel with his darker Draught / Draws up to Thee—take that, and do not shrink.’12 This simple credo seems to have consoled more than one soldier of the Great War, and Palmer’s response is to choose perhaps the most prominent space in the volume—the blank verso facing the poem’s opening page—for the third of his oriental pendants (Figure 0.1). This quotation is drawn not from the Perso-Indian tradition, however, but from the Japanese:

Figure 0.1  Corporal Palmer’s Rubaiyat (with permission of the Mitchell Library, State Library of New South Wales) 12  Edward Fitzgerald, Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, the Astronomer-Poet of Persia (London: Bernard Quaritch, 1859), p. 10.

xxvi Prologue Fire of the Autumn turns to Red & Gold the greeness [sic] of the leaves before their grave receive them but for ever pure & cold the white foam blossoms on the tossing wave Yasuhide

The verses are by the ninth-century poet and official Fun’ya no Yasuhide, and an English reader of the 1910s enjoyed multiple routes of access to them. They were available in a standard scholarly text edited by Professor Basil Hall Chamberlain, as well as in a slim number of John Murray’s cheap ‘Wisdom of the East’ series, Clara Walsh’s Master-Singers of Japan (though her decorous Georgian style is markedly different from the proto-Imagism of the lines above).13 Palmer may even have read an article by the brilliant young poet-critic Yone Noguchi, printed in the Melbourne Herald six months before the outbreak of war, which mocks Yasuhide and his overblown style. But his actual source was an Anglo-Japanese collaborative translation, Sword and Blossom Poems, printed on crêpe paper at Tokyo by the ingenious Hasegawa Takejiro, a publisher who specialized in packaging Japanese literature for European audiences.14 Whether or not Palmer drew any formal connection between the five-line tanka and four-line ruba‘i, he chose it as an autumnal pendant to the Persian, and as a touchstone perhaps for the growing melancholy he expressed in letters home to his fiancée Nell: Trust you are O.K. & not worrying unduly. It’s a sad old world this and the best anyone gets is a few years together with those they love & if I get through this business all right I’ll have reason to be grateful, remembering all the boys who have gone under . . .15

The Textual Horizon Out of this tiny volume opens a vast horizon of possible intertexts, and from artefacts like it we may achieve a global outlook on cultural production and 13  Basil Hall Chamberlain, The Classical Poetry of the Japanese (London: Trübner, 1880), p. 121; Clara Walsh, The Master-Singers of Japan (London: John Murray, 1910), p. 87. For the possible influence of Sword and Blossom Poems on the Imagists, see Yoshiko Kita, ‘Imagism Reconsidered, with Special Reference to the Early Poetry of H.D.’, PhD thesis, Durham University (1995), p. 38. 14 Yone Noguchi, ‘Japanese Essays: Poetical Vulgarity’, Herald (Melbourne), 31 Jan. 1914, p. 4 (reprinted from the Westminster Gazette); Shotaro Kimura and Charlotte  M.A.  Peake, Sword and Blossom Poems, from the Japanese (3 vols, Tokyo: Hasegawa, 1907–10), II, 18. Yasuhide’s lyric is also quoted by a reviewer in the Bookman, XXXV/205 (Oct. 1908), 61. 15  NSW: MLMSS 9831, T.A. Palmer to Ellen Honora Wilson, 21 Apr. 1918.

Prologue  xxvii consumption in the nineteenth century. Palmer’s reference points are not exclusively Asian (the rear endpapers also bear some words of Ruskin on the power of education), but the bulk of the annotation, grouped prominently at the front of the book, testifies to his evident interest in non-Western literature. His curiosity may have predated the war, or it may have been inspired by his three months’ gunnery training in the Middle East. But of greater significance is the likelihood that he cultivated this interest privately, without formal instruction, using the literature at his disposal in the 1910s. This book takes its impetus from readers like Corporal Palmer, who invested their time and money in studying what Victorians conceived as the ‘classic’ literature of the major Asian languages, and who were motivated to do so not because of any professional commitment (academic, mercantile, missionary, or otherwise), but by spiritual yearning, imperial enthusiasm, speculative philosophy, or eccentric theories, a search for alternative sexual and gender norms, travel, friendship, escapism, and various other forms of personal curiosity. This is what I mean by a ‘general reader’—not a category defined by class or intellect, but by a relationship of amateurism to the source-languages. Such readers were often obliged to resort to dense and technical books which were never intended for use by non-experts. But when possible, they consumed the accessible, affordable, popular translations that began to appear in the 1840s and multiplied rapidly during Palmer’s lifetime. Traditionally denigrated by specialists, these popular editions enabled an important and remarkable transition whereby, in the course of a few decades, many texts that had been hitherto the preserve solely of orientalists and antiquaries spread their boards and executed a dramatic flight from the scholar’s desk to the domestic bookcase. It is generally accepted now that the ‘common’ or ‘general’ reader has been a label of convenience which obscures the ‘obstinate, irreducible individualism’ of every historical person, and the particular conditions shaping their response.16 The individuals who populate these pages, and include country gentry, urban bourgeoisie, working men and women, children and adolescents, British, Irish, American, African American, and Australian readers, repeatedly expose the limitations of such vague terms. I continue to use them, however, inasmuch as they reflect translators’ priorities and appear in their correspondence. In the many unsolicited ‘pitches’ addressed to various publishers that I have read, proposers of new translations invariably claim that they will find favour with some nebulous class of average educated people. The writers of such letters focussed their efforts like rays of light towards a vanishing point called the ‘general reader’, beyond which emerged—on the other side of the reading process—a refracted spectrum of interpretations produced by multifaceted individuals like Corporal Palmer.

16  Anthony Grafton, ‘Is the History of Reading a Marginal Enterprise? Guillaume Budé and his Books’, Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America, XCI/2 (1997), 141.

xxviii Prologue The practice of such readers may be thought of in the terms used by Virginia Woolf in 1925: ‘guided by an instinct to create for himself, out of whatever odds and ends he can come by, some kind of whole . . . Hasty, inaccurate, and superficial, snatching now this poem, now that scrap of old furniture, without caring where he finds it or of what nature it may be so long as it serves his purpose and rounds his structure.’17 The archetypal solitary autodidact that Woolf seems to have in mind was a generalization: many readers arrived at Kabir or Omar Khayyam not through a deliberate programme of study, but through happenstance. Many others did not read alone, but were introduced to Asian authors by friends, teachers, and clubs. But the wish or ‘instinct’ for coherence—the wish to minimize the random element in one’s browsing and maximize meaningful return—is something Palmer shares with many distinct individuals. My goal has been to explain both how these popular editions were made, and also how they were read. Indeed, I aim to give a picture of the whole cycle, from the conception and execution of translations, through the process of production and publication in either book form or periodical, dissemination to libraries and bookshops, and ultimately their consumption by readers and recirculation among other readers (not forgetting that many laypeople read older or more difficult translations in addition to, and in some cases in preference to, the new popular editions). In pursuit of this goal, a project that began in speculation bulged exponentially as new findings and potential approaches came to light—including a huge cast of largely forgotten translators. Of necessity it became a study of translation, of book and reading history, and of poetry, prose, and drama originally written in Hindi, Persian, Arabic, Sanskrit, Chinese, and Japanese. The obstacles to such an enquiry were clear: I had knowledge only of the first two languages, and that far from expert. I would have to borrow the instruments of my methodology from several disciplines, and write a book that could never adequately repay all its intellectual creditors. That it raises issues which it has not the scope to conclusively resolve, and plumbs depths which it cannot fully survey, I freely admit. Nevertheless I have presented my research in the form in which I judge it will be of most use to scholarship. I decided that only by aiming at comprehensiveness (and inevitably falling short), could I give an impression of the plenitude and diversity that characterizes the Victorian consumption of ‘oriental literature’. Moreover, the very occurrence of that vague, problematic designation so frequently in contemporary sources made me realize that to understand both translators and readers of the nineteenth century, I would in some ways have to emulate them. While some delved deep into one literary tradition, the bent of others—restless, eccentric, prejudiced, ­misinformed, imaginative, or comparative—carried them widely if superficially across a range of languages. Such practices were authorized by the existence of 17  Virginia Woolf, The Common Reader (London: Hogarth Press, 1925), pp. 11–12.

Prologue  xxix monolithic notions such as ‘the East’, which I had been well taught—and now teach my own students—to deconstruct. But nonetheless I, too, would have to read Confucius in the morning and Rumi in the afternoon, so to speak, if I was to perceive the various skewed frameworks that individuals or groups might piece together in order to connect such incongruous authors. Having observed the impulse to order Asian texts manifesting itself throughout the literate public, I would be better placed to articulate one of this book’s central arguments: that an effort was underway in the nineteenth century to assemble an Oriental Canon as a supplement to the Greco-Roman classics. That effort is described fully in the book’s central chapter, Chapter 4, which integrates the findings of the first three chapters and lays the groundwork for the final three. The reader will notice that each of my chapters is named for a different part of the process whereby a text crosses from one culture to another—‘Translating’, ‘Publishing’, ‘Circulating’, ‘Taking an Interest’, ‘Reading’, ‘Canonizing’—and yet may be puzzled as to why I have not arranged them in ‘chronological’ order. This is in part because the order in which these stages arise is not the same for every text. Sometimes a publisher decides to issue a text before its translation has been undertaken. Sometimes (often, in fact) the business of sorting and sifting texts into a canon does not come until after the translators have done their work— rather, the translators engage with and attempt to influence canon-makers before and during the act of translation. Moreover, it was necessary first to map out the social, cultural, and political background, as well as the institutional structures at work in the period under consideration, so that when I came to describe the production and reception of individual translations I could more effectively situate them within their context. Thus Chapters 1 to 3 serve the purpose of naming the many source-texts under discussion, showing how each entered the English language and was diffused through English literature. They examine the difference between academic and popular translations, explain how readers accessed translations (as well as original texts), and point to the various motive forces driving interest in Asian literature—an interest that spread and increased steadily in the course of the century. The second half of the book focusses more closely on the production and consumption of translations, with Chapter 5 investigating and comparing the methods and motivations of individual translators. Chapter 6 turns to the publishing world and its internal processes—proposal, editing, printing, illustration, marketing, pricing—by which the texts assumed their material form, while Chapter 7 examines their reception and usage by a variety of readers (though reader responses are cited and referred to throughout the book). In all chapters, discussion will range widely across the breadth of the Victorian oriental ‘canon’, but to reduce the risk of disorienting my own readers, most chapters are linked with a key text that illustrates the issues at stake in that chapter. In Chapter 2, the focal text is the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam; Chapter 4 dwells on the teachings of Confucius; an extended comparison of different translations of the Ramayana

xxx Prologue is the centrepiece of Chapter 5; while in Chapter 7, Sadi’s Gulistan offers a common touchstone for a host of Victorian readers. In their aim to recover and locate the presence of texts like these within the wider reading culture of the time, the first three chapters build on the sustained labour of many scholars to shift our outlook away from national contexts towards global patterns of circulation, and to understand the act of writing or reading as an event that often takes place at the juncture of multiple international networks. Such an approach, Caroline Levine writes, ‘allows us to reconceive what is proper to Victorian literature: Tolstoy and Whitman, The Arabian Nights and Euripides, Fénelon and Gilgamesh, The Adventures of Peregrine Pickle and the Bhagavad Gita.’18 The second half of the book, meanwhile, could not have been written without the intensive research over the past fifteen years into ‘ordinary’ readers of the nineteenth century, and the electronic tools (better catalogues, digital texts, the Reading Experience Database) that scholars in this area have created or promoted. Translation theorists, notably Lawrence Venuti, and contributors to the ongoing debate on world literature have informed my methodology throughout the book, but my most important interlocutor has been Annmarie Drury. Her Translation as Transformation in Victorian Poetry (2015) considers texts such as Fitzgerald’s Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam in the light of nineteenth-century translation theory (a subject fervently debated in contemporary periodicals) and she makes poetry central to her enquiry, since most of the aforementioned theorists held prosody to have ‘an intrinsic relationship to cultural and national identities’. Thus, poetry was the literary form in which the characteristics, temperament, and spirit of foreign nations was most apparent—a view held by many of the trans­ lators and readers mentioned in this book. Furthermore, Drury explains how the rapid expansion of the field of translated literature, to include many works bearing no relationship to the anglophone literary tradition, ‘tests and transforms’ English poetry.19 Victorian writers display a remarkable openness to foreign literature, a phenomenon observed long ago by Lionel Stevenson.20 But only more recently have we begun to understand their willingness to confront their readers with foreign word and script—as Robert Browning’s Ferishtah’s Fancies (1884) bombards its readers with chunks of Hebrew—and to bend English verse to admit foreign forms—as does Browning, again, with the Arabic tāwil octameter in ‘Muléykeh’ (1880), a poem which Drury suggests could possibly have inspired the ‘culturally expansive range of speakers and subjects’ in Tennyson’s late works, among them ‘Akbar’s Dream’.21 In this, poets were stimulated by translators 18  Caroline Levine, ‘From Nation to Network’, Victorian Studies, LV/4 (Summer 2013), 664. 19 Drury, Translation as Transformation, p. 3. 20  Of the Pre-Raphaelites, Stevenson writes, ‘their preoccupation with foreign literatures put an end to the parochialism that was stultifying English authorship.’ Lionel Stevenson, The Pre-Raphaelite Poets (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1972), p. 26. 21 Drury, Translation as Transformation, p. 146.

Prologue  xxxi seeking to bring unfamiliar texts before an untrained public, and in turn they furnished translators with new stylistic strategies for doing so.

Setting Some Limits I have confined my enquiry approximately to the years between 1845 and 1915, partly for practical reasons but also because I believe this period to be note­worthy. The following, first chapter will give an overview of oriental translation from the late eighteenth to the early twentieth centuries, and will touch straight away upon the great interest generated by Persian literature in the Romantic period—the same phenomenon Raymond Schwab, somewhat too grandly, termed the ‘Oriental Renaissance’.22 Schwab argued for his specialist period as one surpassingly open to foreign thought and writing of all kinds, before its legacy was ­forsaken by the Victorians. Though I am wary of making the same sort of generalization, my dissenting view is that while the cosmopolitan appetite Schwab ­cele­brates did fall away somewhat in the 1830s and 1840s, it rallied from the midcentury onwards.23 The data gathered by Peter France and Kenneth Haynes based on the Nineteenth-Century Short Title Catalogue would seem to bear this out: they found ‘Eastern’ texts to make up 11.6 per cent of all English translations published in 1810. In 1850, that figure was down to 7 per cent, climbing to 9.9 per cent in 1870 and 16.8 per cent by 1900.24 My explanation for this is the increasing availability of translation, after 1845, in various popular forms. Of course, if we go only by these percentages, the public in 1900 was not significantly more interested in oriental literature than at the beginning of the century. But looking at it another way, the total number of translations (in all languages) published annually had more than doubled in that period, and while in 1810 a relatively select and priv­il­ eged class of ‘general’ reader had access to the work of the pioneer orientalists, in  the fin de siècle a much larger public drawn from all sectors of society was en­gaging with their successors. The period 1845 to 1915 is one wherein classic literature drawn from Asian languages became widespread and diffused throughout the reading culture of the United States, Britain, and its empire. It might well be asked why I did not push my argument further, and try to  ­ determine whether the Victorian bookshelf was not truly a global one, 22 Schwab, Oriental Renaissance, p. xxiii. 23  Louise Curran, ‘Reviews of Foreign Literature: Some Special Problems’, Victorian Periodicals Newsletter, XX/2 (1973), 1. 24  Peter France and Kenneth Haynes, ‘The Publication of Literary Translation: An Overview’, in France and Haynes (eds), The Oxford History of Literary Translation in English, Volume 4: 1790–1900 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 149. Moreover, where a text was translated through an intermediary language, France and Haynes assigned it to the intermediary’s column. Thus their figures likely underrepresent late Victorian popular oriental translations, which were often made from French or German rather than from the original.

xxxii Prologue accommodating literature from across the European languages, Africa, and beyond. Again, there were practical objections to such a vast enquiry, but more significantly, the popularization of Asian texts and the emergence of a popular audience for them raises some particular issues and challenges. In comparison with their counterparts working in French, German, or Italian, the community of oriental trans­lators in English was characterized by a much sharper contrast between highly trained experts and novices with the barest understanding of the source languages. Furthermore, unlike the Divine Comedy or Don Quixote, many Asian texts were being studied for the first time, and in such a situation trans­ lators typ­ic­al­ly enjoy considerable liberty in their handling of the text. Thirdly, the ever-present possibility of misinterpretation or misrepresentation reminds us that up to the 1880s virtually all oriental translators were not native speakers. Though they often relied heavily on ‘native’ informants, they were scarcely answerable to any native public, and in most cases their activities were to some degree involved in the complex power relations of imperial rule. All these issues make the popular consumption of Asian texts an important area of enquiry, especially as with one or two exceptions (notably Omar Khayyam), the phenomenon has been very little studied. France and Haynes comment that through the period of their survey, Asian translations intended for the ‘general public’ are outnumbered by those ‘designed for specialists and students’.25 They make no conjecture, however, as to the size of those two classes of reader, and this very much begs the question Drury asks in the closing paragraphs of Translation as Transformation: how might our understanding of this history change if we concentrated our attention on the translations that ‘most Victorians’ actually read?26 Finally, a caveat—and a cautionary tale. Beyond a few much-admired texts, like the Arabian Nights, serious readers of Asian literature were a relatively small group. Not tiny by any means, but small in comparison with the much vaster public for travelogues and fictions about the mysterious East. In 2017, I spent an afternoon at the Leeds Library, a private subscription library that is unusual in having preserved its borrowing registers from the early twentieth century. They also hold an old copy of Herbert Giles’s History of Chinese Literature, a cheap and accessible guidebook of 1901, once well-represented in lending collections on both sides of the Atlantic. But approval by a library committee does not guarantee interest among patrons. Between 1910 and 1912, only one reader borrowed it from the shelves of the Leeds Library, ‘Miss Baines’, while in that same period Robert Hichens’s 1904 novel The Garden of Allah, which features a decadent Algerian poet and abundant local colour, was loaned thirty-one times.27 Small wonder that towards the end of his career Giles wrote to a Chinese academic 25  Ibid., p. 140. 26 Drury, Translation as Transformation, p. 225. 27  Leeds Library: Borrowing Ledgers GI 1908–1957 and GA 1910–1970, and Share Book 259.

Prologue  xxxiii based in Switzerland, telling him how ‘l’apathie anglaise pour tout ce qui se ­rapporte à la Chine’ had been one of the greatest ‘chagrins’ of his life. Indeed, it was quite common for orientalists to criticize the perceived indifference of the British to their activities, and to Asian culture generally. ‘I believe that linguists are undervalued instinctively’, complained Richard Francis Burton in 1874, ‘because they are popularly supposed to be too clever by half.’28 Furthermore, how did Miss Baines react when she opened the History of Chinese Literature— with interest and wonder, or bafflement? At present we are apt to celebrate any intercultural encounter that might set an example for tolerance and understanding in our divided world, but as Nan Z. Da has recently challenged, do incidents like this have any ‘mappable’ consequences beyond their immediate circumstance?29 Even prolonged study did not necessarily foster the earnest and convivial exchange that idealists may have hoped of face-to-face encounters with actual Asians. I have often reminded myself of what took place when Moncure Conway met the exiled Egyptian nationalist Orabi Pasha, in Ceylon. A lifelong enthusiast of Persian poetry, the American writer thought to engage Arabi in a discussion of Hafez and Omar Khayyam, only to discover his companion was a soldier and Wahhabist with scant regard for such poets. Conway’s overture was reduced to an awkward and quizzical gesture, his nonplussed companion bluntly changing the topic to British policy in the Sudan, and the American Civil War.30 Bearing all this in mind, I have tried not to overstate my case. But I will show nonetheless that not all intercultural dialogues were as abortive as this one. Conway would find other, sympathetic listeners, and inspire hundreds of his readers to take up the study of Asian religions. Miss Baines may not have enjoyed Giles’s History, but if so it did not deter her from developing her oriental interests, for later she borrowed Okakura’s Ideals of the East. Their experiences form just single incidents of weather within a larger climactic change that suffused the literary atmosphere generally, and was triggered when the orientalist archive that had been steadily accumulating through the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries began to lift off and float away from the stacks.

28  UCLA: Collection 1506 (Herbert Allen Giles Papers, 1877–1929), H.A. Giles to Hain-jou-kia, 11 Nov. 1927; Morgan: MA Unassigned (Richard Francis Burton to anon., 2 Apr. 1874). 29 Nan Z. Da, Intransitive Encounter: Sino-U.S. Literatures and the Limits of Exchange (New York: Columbia University Press, 2018), p. 10. 30  Moncure Daniel Conway, My Pilgrimage to the Wise Men of the East (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1906), p. 166.

1 A Century of Translation On 13 June 1857 it was reported in London that the 3rd Bengal Cavalry had mu­tin­ied at Meerut, and that a conspiracy was afoot to organize a general rising throughout the army.1 The Great Rebellion had begun. Six weeks later, seventytwo-year-old Leigh Hunt wrote to a friend in Calcutta, but the war—which would so brutally disfigure any prospects for mutual respect and sympathy between the people of India and their arrogant rulers—was little on his mind, it seems. Pray tell me how literature stands in the East, both Eastern and English, and whether there is yet such a thing as a selection of all the best stories (in English) from the Persian and Hindoo poets and others. There ought to be and it ought to be called the Eastern Story Teller, and sell famously.2

Poet, critic, and political gadfly, friend of Keats and Hazlitt, Hunt was a Romantic who had stood on the beach at Shelley’s funeral and yet survived into the third decade of Victoria’s reign. He would certainly have experienced the tremor of interest in non-Western literature that passed through British letters in his youth, and which gave rise to Byron’s Giaour (1813), Southey’s Curse of Kehama (1810), Moore’s Lalla Rookh (1817) and Landor’s Poems from the Arabic and Persian (1800). Most literary-minded people of that generation had some knowledge of Sir William Jones, who had founded the Asiatic Society in 1784—the year of Hunt’s birth—and had been the chief progenitor of the dictionaries and grammars in Persian, Sanskrit, Arabic, and the modern Indian vernaculars that tumbled out of Calcutta in the years following, along with a representative selection of literary translations to serve as aids in learning these tongues. Persian, which remained the official medium of administrative and judicial proceedings in the East India Company’s territories up to 1832, was the priority: it accounts for the bulk of translations emerging in this period, and its literature was the first to attain general recognition and admiration in the West. One of Jones’s followers, Joseph Champion, gave English readers a first, much abridged, version of the Shahnameh in 1788, rendering Firdausi’s epic of the legendary kings of Iran in the heroic couplets of Pope’s Iliad. Among several versions of 1  ‘Foreign and Colonial News’, Illustrated London News, XXX/863 (1857), 560. 2  Thornton Leigh Hunt (ed.), The Correspondence of Leigh Hunt (2 vols, London: Smith, Elder, 1862), II, 286: James Henry Leigh Hunt to David Lester Richardson, 26 June–28 July 1857.

Asian Classics on the Victorian Bookshelf: Flights of Translation. Alexander Bubb, Oxford University Press. © Alexander Bubb 2023. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198866275.003.0001

2  Asian Classics on the Victorian Bookshelf Sadi’s thirteenth-century Gulistan (Rose Garden), an influential collection of didactic stories, it was Francis Gladwin’s 1806 volume that found favour in the 1840s with Ralph Waldo Emerson and the Transcendentalists, who disseminated it among American readers.3 Another text which attracted their attention was the Sanskrit Bhagavad Gita, in the 1785 prose of Charles Wilkins—like Jones, a founding member of the Asiatic Society. Jones’s own activity was polyglot and prolific. He brought for the first time to English notice Kalidasa’s drama Sakuntala (from the Sanskrit), the Muallaqat (seven Arabic odes that were supposedly hung on the Kaaba in pre-Islamic times), and the great Persian lyricist Hafez. The last was received principally in the form of his famous couplet on the Shirazi Turk, whom Jones tactfully transformed (in six lines) from a comely boy into a grammatically feasible, but historically improbable girl. Sweet maid, if thou would’st charm my sight, And bid these arms thy neck infold; That rosy cheek, that lily hand, Would give thy poet more delight Than all Bocara’s vaunted gold, Than all the gems of Samarcand.4

While bearing in mind these landmarks of English translation, it is also vital not to lose sight of French, Italian, and especially German scholarship, which was often far in advance of its British and American counterparts. With a copy of Joseph von Hammer’s translation at his side, Goethe was much better-placed to write his lyrical tribute to Hafez, the West-östlicher Divan (1819), than English con­tem­por­ ar­ies who—had they no German—knew the poet only in extracts. Thus, largely through the agency of the East India Company, a variety of major Persian writers became at least partially accessible in English between 1770 and 1820, along with a number of important Sanskrit and Arabic works (a Quran had already been published in 1734, courtesy of the London solicitor George Sale).5 More familiar to Hunt than any of these texts, though, will have been the Arabian Nights, which entered English literature from the French of Antoine Galland in the first decade of the eighteenth century. Numerous unauthorized ‘Grub Street’ translations of Galland ensured the Nights a special status in English reading

3 John  D.  Yohannan, Persian Poetry in England and America: A 200 Year History (Delmar, NY: Caravan Books, 1977), pp. 24, 113. 4 Lord Teignmouth (ed.), The Works of Sir William Jones (13 vols, London: John Stockdale, 1807), X, 251. 5  Sale’s was the first translation founded at least in part on the original Arabic (though Maracci’s Latin edition was no doubt constantly at his elbow). An earlier English version based on du Ryer’s French text had appeared at London in Charles I’s time, ‘for the fatisfaction of all that defire to look into the Turkifh vanities’. See The Alcoran of Mahomet (London, 1649).

A Century of Translation  3 culture long before the first Arabic-to-English version appeared in 1838,6 by which point the tales formed part of the furniture of every affluent (and many working-class) English child’s imagination. They were enjoyed as fervently by Tennyson and Walter Bagehot as by the dyer’s son and future Chartist, Thomas Cooper, who in the late 1810s borrowed the ‘enchanting’ collection from the circulating library run by Mrs Trevor, a stationer at Gainsborough in Lincolnshire.7 Even non-readers may have absorbed the stories through advertising or the the­ atre. Aladdin or, The Wonderful Lamp had appeared at Covent Garden as early as 1788, and by 1831, when it was staged at Bury St Edmunds, it was becoming known as a pantomime throughout the country. Other tales followed suit. In 1861, Her Majesty’s Theatre in London advertised ‘Flying Women of the Loadstone Island . . . the Most Startling Romance of the Age’, while at the end of the century the Kiralfy brothers would stage a series of spectacular Nights productions at Olympia.8 The popularity of the Nights encouraged publishers to support a range of analo­ gous ventures, and at this point Hunt’s remarks become rather puzzling—because the anthology he envisages had already been anticipated by more than one publisher. The editor of Tales of the East, brought out by Ballantyne of Edinburgh in 1812, ransacked the work of out-of-copyright European orientalists to fill his three volumes. Anything answering to the description ‘popular romance’ was admissible, including Alexander Dow’s version of a Persian textbook used by the Mughal nobility, the Bahar-i-Danish—one story from which gave Thomas Moore the scenario for Lalla Rookh.9 In a period when taxation and paper costs kept the price of new works of literature relatively high, oriental rechauffés made economic sense whether in book form, or in sixpenny number publications like The Library of Romance and The Story-Teller, which carried not only Nights-style tales but also caizi jiaren (Scholar and Beauty) stories popular in Ming and Qing China.10 Among these was the Haoqiu Zhuan, translated by a Canton merchant in the 1760s and again in 1829 by the future governor of Hong Kong, John Francis Davis (who titled his version The Fortunate Union).11 Leigh Hunt himself enjoyed a similar work, the Yu Jiao Li (Two Fair Cousins)—referring to it as ‘my beloved

6  Paulo Lemos Horta, Marvellous Thieves: Secret Authors of the Arabian Nights (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press: 2017), p. 91. 7 Roger Ebbatson, ‘Knowing the Orient: The Young Tennyson’, Nineteenth-Century Contexts, XXXVI/2 (2014), 125; Walter Bagehot, ‘The People of the Arabian Nights’, National Review, IX/17 (1859), 44–70; Thomas Cooper, Life of Thomas Cooper (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1872), p. 34. 8  Marina Warner, Stranger Magic: Charmed States & the Arabian Nights (2011; repr. London: Vintage, 2012), pp. 354–63. 9  Robert Irwin, The Arabian Nights: A Companion (London: Tauris Parke, 2005), p. 264. 10  See the May 1843 issue of The Story-Teller; or, Table Book of Popular Literature: a Collection of Romances, Short Standard Tales, Traditions, and Poetical Legends of All Nations, in which is reprinted a caizi jiaren story, ‘The Shadow in the Water’, that was originally translated by John Francis Davis in his Chinese Novels (London: John Murray, 1822). 11 Peter J. Kitson, Forging Romantic China: Sino-British Cultural Exchange, 1760–1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), pp. 32–3.

4  Asian Classics on the Victorian Bookshelf Chinese novel’ and passing his 1827 copy onto Thomas Carlyle.12 Publications like The Story-Teller, which mingled Chinese with Middle Eastern stories, helped create a fabular notion of Asia as a realm of marvellous tales, and brought them to a sixpenny audience long before non-narrative, more ‘serious’ genres found a non-elite public. How to make sense, then, of Hunt’s eager query in 1857? Was his want of an ‘Eastern Story Teller’ merely the forgetfulness of an elderly man, or was he dissatisfied with what London booksellers and periodicals could presently offer him? Though Hunt asks for ‘the best stories’, he also specifies that they be by ‘poets’, and the Yu Jiao Li was not poetry. Nor would educated Chinese have classed it among their ‘best’ literature. Written in the late seventeenth or early eighteenth century, it long postdates the canon of poetic masterpieces, and though its nearcontemporary The Dream of the Red Chamber has now achieved the status of a classic novel, in Hunt’s time it would have been regarded as light reading.13 The Story-Teller’s editor, Robert Bell, admitted as much when he suggested to his readers that ‘a sample of the short popular fictions of that stately empire may help to prepare the way for the profounder speculations of enterprising publishers.’14 Even Davis’s forbiddingly titled Poeseos Sinensis Commentarii (1830) mostly ­contains the tea-picking ballads and other popular verse upon which English ­students of Chinese would have cut their teeth in 1820s Hong Kong.15 The ­situation for ‘Persian and Hindoo poets’ was of course better, though even then English ­readers of Hafez had to rely on such guides as Richardson’s Specimen of Persian Poetry (1774) and Hindley’s Persian Lyrics (1800)—both of which feature a mere handful of odes, annotated with parallel text for the benefit of the language learner. The issue of what is canonical (in both Eastern and Western eyes) shall be treated fully in Chapter 4, but other considerations which are relevant here—and which may have troubled Hunt—are what is genuine, and what is representative? Generally speaking, discerning Victorian readers desired authentic cultural artefacts, and authenticity for them was measured by antiquity. But the older a text, the harder it is to verify its genuine provenance and unadulterated content, and even if it is genuine, whether it adequately represents, say, the Persian literary trad­ition is quite another question. Again, the prevailing view (with some notable exceptions) was that classic texts epitomized Persian taste and sentiment, and were a better guide to the essential qualities of that nation and its people than modern vernacular literature. But how were the East India Company’s translators to delineate the canon of Persian literature when they were accessing it through a 12  Hunt (ed.), Correspondence of Leigh Hunt, II, 161 (Leigh Hunt to Southwood Smith, 23 Mar. n.y.). 13  Chloë F. Starr, Red-Light Novels of the Late Qing (Leiden: Brill, 2007), p. xxi. 14  The Story-Teller (May 1843), p. 110. 15  Eva Hung, ‘Chinese Poetry’, in Peter France (ed.), The Oxford Guide to Literature in English Translation (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 224.

A Century of Translation  5 third, intermediary culture—that of Mughal India? And how were their counterparts at Canton and Malacca, far from China’s literary centres and reliant on possibly reticent or conservative informants, to understand the difference between the ancient texts formally denoted ‘jing’ (classic), and those that were merely very old and universally admired? Considerable uncertainty on these matters in the early part of the century was an encouragement to firms like Ballantyne with their Tales of the East—a compendious publication but, as I have already hinted, a ragbag. It editor used the Bahar-i-Danish (Spring of Knowledge) to supplement the Arabian Nights of which it is partly derivative, but this text originated in Mughal Lahore and is of much lower importance in the global history of letters. The socalled ‘Persian Tales’ in the second volume are in reality the mysterious Mille et Un Jours pieced together—and perhaps largely invented—by the French traveller François Pétis de la Croix in the 1710s, while the accompanying ‘Tales of the Genii’ are altogether ersatz productions from the pen of the army chaplain James Ridley. Hunt may well have felt, then, that he wasn’t quite getting the real thing. His fellow Romantics, in spite of their infatuation with the Orient, had in fact done very little actual translation or paraphrase—Landor’s Poems from the Arabic and Persian are not even paraphrase, but out-and-out pastiche with a derisory intent.16 Among the poets of that generation only Moore truly studied, his books (now held by the Royal Irish Academy) testifying both to his efforts and to the limitations imposed on the private enthusiast in the early nineteenth century. Moore knew French but not German, which enabled him to read Sadi’s Gulistan in an old Paris edition that may have been more congenial than the English versions of Gladwin or James Ross, whose preface makes it perfectly clear that his only an­tici­ pated public is the East India Company cadet (‘the Persian tyro of Bengal’).17 For Hafez, however, he was thrown back on Richardson and Hindley. The other Persian texts in his collection reflect Company translation priorities (and, to some degree, Mughal tastes), being generally works used to inculcate good prose and wise conduct. Thus we find the Tutinama (Tales of a Parrot), a series of cautionary tales about adultery, but of Firdausi, Nizami, and the other major Persian writers not a trace. Moore may also have found himself priced out: though prolific and successful in his lifetime, he was never a wealthy poet, and the books he possessed must have represented a considerable investment. Perhaps this is why he owned only the first instalment of Terrick Hamilton’s four-volume Antar (1819), an Arabic saga attributed to the eighth-century poet Al-Asma‘i (and this was supplied gratis

16 Yohannan, Persian Poetry, p. 34. For a much fuller discussion of Romantic engagements with Persian literature, see Hasan Javadi, Persian Literary Influence on English Literature (1987; repr. Costa Mesa, CA: Mazda, 2005), pp. 72–107. 17  James Ross, The Gulistan: or Flower-garden, of Shaikh Sadī of Shiraz (London: J.M. Richardson, 1823), p. 25. Thomas Moore’s library at the Royal Irish Academy is classed under the shelfmark ML. For Moore’s ignorance of German, see Wilfred S. Dowden (ed.), The Journal of Thomas Moore (6 vols, Newark: University of Delaware Press, 1983–1991), V, v, 1867.

6  Asian Classics on the Victorian Bookshelf by the publisher). Alternatively, he may merely have found the translation im­pene­trable. Of the two dozen works of oriental research in his collection, only the slim Specimens of Arabian Poetry (1796) by the Cambridge divine J.D. Carlyle, makes any acknowledgement of the needs or interests of the non-expert reader. Carlyle’s is typical of the specimen-book genre that prospered in the early nineteenth century, an unsystematic sample of short excerpts chosen for their ‘­elegance’ or ‘novelty’, and translated intermittently, ‘to fill up an idle hour’ between diocesan engagements. Yet, in spite of his diffidence, Carlyle’s fond hope that the volume might offer ‘a sort of history (slight indeed and imperfect, yet to an English reader perhaps not uninstructive) of Arabian poetry and literature’ foreshadows the more methodical and purposeful anthologies that were to come.18

Costello and The Rose Garden, 1845 Though it is hard to quantify, a demand for a more accommodating style of ­edit­or­ship akin to J.D. Carlyle’s can be detected among the rising generation of the 1830s and 1840s—a demand that remained unsatisfied, for the time being. In October 1843, the elderly Moore made an irritable diary entry about strangers writing him speculative letters in the hope of getting his autograph: ‘Sir, though personally unknown to you, I venture to ask you a question which your familiarity with the Persian Poets will enable you to answer. Do you think a new translation of Hafiz would at the present moment be well received etc etc.’19 Nothing appears to have come of this enquiry. Meanwhile, in County Kildare, the future reformer and suffragist Frances Power Cobbe (1822–1904) was using her parents’ books and Marsh’s Library in Dublin to compensate for the formal education denied to her as a young woman. Having digested most of the Greek and Latin authors, her interests ‘centred more and more on the answers which have been made through the ages by philosophers and prophets to the great questions of the human soul. I read such translations as were accessible in those pre-Müller days, of Eastern Sacred books; Anquetil-Duperron’s Zend Avesta (twice); and Sir William Jones’s Institutes of Menu.’20 Cobbe refers to Friedrich Max Müller, the Oxford Sanskritist who from the 1860s onwards would lecture on philology and theology to packed houses of 18 J.D. Carlyle, Specimens of Arabian Poetry, from the earliest time to the extinction of the Khaliphat, with some account of the authors (Cambridge: John Burges, 1796), pp. i–ii. For a discussion of the ‘Specimen’-style anthology in the Romantic period, see Colleen Glenney Boggs, ‘Specimens of Translation in Walt Whitman’s Poetry’, Arizona Quarterly, LVIII/3 (2002), 36. 19  Dowden (ed.), Journal of Thomas Moore, vi, 2354. The correspondent was one George Abingdon of Brighton. 20  Frances Power Cobbe, Life of Frances Power Cobbe, as told by herself (2 vols, London: Richard Bentley, 1894), I, 71. Kate Flint highlights Cobbe’s autodidact efforts to catch up with her formally educated brothers in The Woman Reader, 1837–1914 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), p. 224.

A Century of Translation  7 non-experts (among them J.S.  Mill and Gerard Manley Hopkins).21 No such resource existed in her youth, though general-interest periodicals like Fraser’s and the New Monthly occasionally carried instructive articles and reviews. In 1822, for ex­ample, ‘P.W.R’ addressed ‘the English reader who is acquainted with the translations of Sir William Jones’, soliciting his agreement that Hafez and Sadi ‘will scarcely yield in competition’ with Britain’s poets.22 Dedicated linguists and antiquarians would send for the Proceedings of the Asiatic Society from Calcutta, while the Company-sponsored Asiatic Journal was printed at London and provided Indian commercial and political intelligence with a smattering of literary matter. And in 1820 the house of Longman, it would seem, attempted to tap the latter’s market with a new journal, the Annals of Oriental Literature, tilting the content in favour of cultural researches. Priced at a daunting six shillings, it folded almost immediately, but its inaugural page of contents hints at the sort of reader the publisher may have envisaged: one who would be diverted by ‘An Essay on the Life and Genius of Firdausi, the great Epic Poet of the Persians’, but who also took a practical interest in Asian and African affairs encompassing the geographic (‘Account of a Mission to Ashantee’) and military (‘Origin and Increase of the Chinese Tartarian Army’).23 One reader of the short-lived Annals was a young protégée and admirer of Moore’s, Louisa Stuart Costello, who had just had her short adaptation (from a French translation) of an episode in the Ramayana rejected by the publisher William Fearman. She at once sent it off to the editors, who printed it in their third and final issue.24 Costello (1799–1870) was the daughter of an Irish infantry officer who, after her father’s premature death, was obliged to support herself and her ailing mother by her pen. In the 1840s she was turning out two or three books every year, including novels, travelogues, biographies, and translations, with no fixed sphere of activity and no special interest in Asia (at the time of her rejection by Fearman, she was actually studying Italian to further expand her range of literary activity).25 It was thus very much a short-term commercial venture, based on an empty niche she perceived in the book market, when in 1845 she inaugurated

21 Cary H. Plotkin, The Tenth Muse: Victorian Philology and the Genesis of the Poetic Language of Gerard Manley Hopkins (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1989), pp. 20, 55. 22  ‘Persian and Arabic Literature’, New Monthly Magazine and Literary Journal, IV/13 (Jan. 1922), 263. France and Haynes count four Persian, two Arabic, and two Chinese translations featuring in Fraser’s in the 1830s (‘Publication of Literary Translation: An Overview’, p. 144). 23  Annals of Oriental Literature, I/1 (June 1820), 9. 24  Bodleian: MS.Don.c.203, f.108 (Louisa Stuart Costello to William Lisle Bowles, 18 July 1819). The episode was the accidental killing of Yajnadatta by King Dasaratha. 25  Costello did also translate some of the pseudo-oriental tales written by the Frenchman ThomasSimon Gueulette in the early eighteenth century: The Thousand and One Quarters of an Hour, and The Adventures of the Mandarin Fun-hoam. For a full discussion of her life and work, see Clare Broome Saunders, Louisa Stuart Costello: A Nineteenth-Century Writing Life (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).

8  Asian Classics on the Victorian Bookshelf an unacknowledged epoch by publishing a little-known book called The Rose Garden of Persia. The Rose Garden is a digest of five articles Costello published in Fraser’s Magazine between 1838 and 1840,26 and presents an anthology of Persian poetry culled from the works of Jones, Gladwin, von Hammer, Garcin de Tassy, Quatremère, and other orientalists, who are helpfully listed in an appendix. To this professional community she is strategically apologetic. As the book went to press she wrote to the East India Company’s librarian, H.H. Wilson, to check the orthography of the couplet from Hafez that appears on her title page. The book, she explained to him, ‘gives biographies and specimens of Persian poets, merely for the English reader, but I think a great Oriental scholar like yourself will not disdain the attempt to do honour to his favourites, even though the unskilful should presume to do so.’27 The couplet in question, which Costello plucked from Jones’s Persian Grammar (where it is used to exemplify ‘the third person of the preterite’28), is given without attribution, citation, or translation. To the layman the foreign script serves no purpose other than the ornamental, but to the Persianist it is a tacit acknowledgement of his expertise, offered just before the start of a preface that unambiguously addresses the non-specialist: The softest and richest language in the world is the Persian: it is so peculiarly adapted to the purposes of poetry, that it is acknowledged there have been more poets produced in Persia than in all the other nations of Europe together: yet, except Sadi and Hafiz, and, it may be, Ferdusi, there are few whose names even are known to the general English reader; and the too common impression is, that there exists a great monotony in their verse, both as to sound and sense.29

In this striking opening sentence, Costello vindicates Persian as a major literary language, identifies it with the common inheritance of ‘the other nations of Europe’, and ascribes ignorant preconceptions to her putative reader. These are instantly excused, however, on the basis that the general public has been inhibited from exploring Persian literature by ‘the idea that it belonged exclusively’ to orien­tal­ists. Costello thus invites the uninitiated to enter territory hitherto ‘untrodden by all but learned feet’—a metaphor that puns, perhaps, on another meaning of feet. For as her preamble also makes clear, her anthology is to be concerned exclusively with poetry: poetry which has so far been rendered mainly

26 ‘Specimens of Persian Poetry’, Fraser’s Magazine, XVIII/100 (Apr. 1838), 447–66; XVIII/105 (Sept. 1838), 348–60; XIX/112 (Apr. 1839), 486–500; XX/116 (Aug. 1839), 127–38; and XXI/124 (Apr. 1840), 414–25. 27  BL: Mss Eur E301/9 (Louisa Stuart Costello to Horace Hayman Wilson, 23 Feb. 1845). 28  Teignmouth (ed.), Works, V, 227. 29  Louisa Stuart Costello, The Rose Garden of Persia (London: Longman, Brown, Green, & Longmans, 1845), pp. i–ii.

A Century of Translation  9 in English, French, or German prose, an emasculating process which has robbed the original of its ‘forcible expressions’, ‘bold metaphors’, and ‘sentiments of fire’, and left behind a bald record of tropes and similes. The ironic gendering at play here (a restoration of heroic qualities by a female translator, amending the work of an entirely male body of scholars) is brought home by the myth Costello subsequently relates about the origin of rhythmical composition. The world’s first line of poetry was, according to legend, uttered spontaneously by the Sassanid king Bahram Gor as he grappled with a wild tiger.30 The Rose Garden differs from William Ouseley’s Persian Miscellanies (1795) or Samuel Rousseau’s Flowers of Persian Literature (1801), and indeed from the Specimens of Arabian Poetry that Moore kept on his cottage shelves, in that it is not a sample of miscellaneous extracts, but attempts to provide a structured overview of the Persian canon. Flowers of the East (1833), a Persian anthology created by Ebenezer Pocock of Bristol, also adheres to the former pattern. Though its author aspires to ‘supply a desideratum in general literature’, the Flowers are really a mixed bouquet of poetry and prose not yet apprehended by established trans­ lators, artfully strung together (so it is claimed) after the fashion in which Persian poets are said to thread on a metrical necklace their individual pearls of verse.31 Costello’s goal instead is reflected in her choice of title: not a display of cut ­flowers, but a complete and self-contained garden. In horticultural terms, we might say her preference was for perennials rather than the blooms of a season. She orders her extracts chronologically by author, subdividing these thematically (‘On True Worth’, ‘In Praise of Wine’), adds light-touch historical context and explanatory notes, and thus arranges a cohort of sixteen major figures—including Firdausi, Sadi, Hafez, Nizami, Jami, Rumi, and Attar—who provide a superficial but ef­fect­ ive crash-course in Persian poetry. In these respects, her work is more com­par­ able to the Greek and Latin collections that appeared in the same generation, such as George Burges’s Public School Selections (1852), and The Golden Treasury of Ancient Greek Poetry (1867). Joseph Phelan sees Costello’s priorities as illustrative of the two orientalisms Edward Said spoke of in his landmark study: a Romantic Orientalism, based on a free-floating ‘collection of dreams, images, and vocabularies’ that can be adopted and manipulated by both Asian and European agents for a variety of purposes, and the ‘systematic and scientific’ orientalism that is committed to the collation and application of knowledge about Eastern cultures.32 The latter, which is the

30  Ibid., pp. ii–v. ‘Forcible expressions’, ‘bold metaphors’, etc. are phrases lifted from Jones. 31  Ebenezer Pocock, Flowers of the East, with an Introductory Sketch of Oriental Poetry and Music (London: Hamilton, Adams, & Co., 1833), p. v. My thanks to Fatima Burney for bringing this anthology to my attention. 32 Joseph Phelan, ‘Empire and Orientalisms’, in Matthew Bevis (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Victorian Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), p. 802; Edward  W.  Said, Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient (1978; repr. London: Penguin, 2006), p. 73.

10  Asian Classics on the Victorian Bookshelf helpmeet of colonial rule, comes to supplant the former in the course of the nineteenth century, and its ordering impulse might be detected in Costello’s project. Like the Cambridge orientalist Edward Byles Cowell, who gave her book an approving if condescending review in 1847, she is preoccupied by the notion of Persian literature being representative of Persian nationality and identity. As Phelan points out, this Victorian bias leads to a magnification of Firdausi as the Homer or Chaucer of his language. The Shahnameh had attracted relatively little attention from William Jones, but it takes up almost 20 per cent of Costello’s text.33 Phelan exaggerates, however, the gap between the practice of Victorian Persianists and that of their precursors in the early part of the century. Firdausi does indeed come to assume a central position, a realignment mirrored by the increasing focus on epic poetry in other languages like Sanskrit. But he never eclipses Hafez on the literary horizon—least of all that horizon as it was perceived by the general public. Phelan quotes Costello’s rendition (‘in the accents of Pope or Johnson’) of Firdausi’s satire on his fickle patron Mahmud of Ghazni, but this specimen is not  representative of the volume as a whole. Costello’s dominant concern is with lyric poetry, the bulk of her selections comprising philosophic odes, allegorical descriptions of nature, and poetry on the great lovers of Persian le­gend, such as Layla and Majnun, or Khusro and Shirin. Even her selections from the Shahnameh are governed by this bias, with much the largest extract being related to the courtship of Jamshid. Stressing that her version is based only very loosely on James Atkinson’s prose translation, Costello dwells particularly on the inner thoughts of the young princess who, a soothsayer has foretold, will marry the famous hero. King Gureng’s lovely daughter lies   Beside a fountain gently playing; She marks not though the waves be bright, Nor in the roses takes delight: And though her maids new games devise, Invent fresh stories to surprise   She heeds not what each fair is saying . . .34

Costello’s unusual rhyme scheme here, quite alien to the measured verse of Pope  or Johnson, may have been taken from Shelley’s ‘The Cold Earth Slept Below’. But the poet she sought chiefly to emulate—as she had in her earlier

33  ‘Persian literature is national’, Cowell remarks (his italics), ‘and without this all literatures are worthless.’ E.B. Cowell, ‘The Rose Garden of Persia’, Westminster Review, XLVII/2 (July 1847), 274. 34 Costello, Rose Garden, p. 34; her source is James Atkinson, The Sháh Námeh of the Persian Poet, Firdausí (London: Oriental Translation Fund, 1832), p. 17.

A Century of Translation  11 anthology of medieval French troubadours and minstrels35—was Thomas Moore. Her approach to the French is analogous to her method with the Persians. Unlike Browning and other poets later in the century, she is not especially interested in imitating foreign prosody (with one possible exception),36 but she does draw on the abundance of metres and stanza forms in Moore’s Irish Melodies to impart a songful, vital, and perhaps ‘national’ quality to her renditions. Lacking Moore’s facility, her words seldom lift off the page, but she applies her method with some success to the versification of existing prose translations. Here is a passage in Silvestre de Sacy’s edition of the Pandnama (a book of proverbial counsel at that time attributed to Attar), describing the mixed fortunes visited on men by the inscrutable deity, and Costello’s condensed reworking (with original for reference). ‫آن یکی راݣـنج ونعمت می دهد‬ ‫وان دݣر را رنج وزحـمت می دهد‬ ‫آن یکی را زر دو صد همیان دهد‬ ‫دیݣـری در حرست نان جان دهد‬ ‫آن یکی بر تخت باصد عـز و ناز‬ ‫وان دݣر کرده دهان ازفآقه باز‬ ‫آن یکی پوشیده سنجاب و سمور‬ ‫دیݣری خفیه برهنه در تنور‬ ‫آن یکی بر پستی کمخا ونخ‬ 37‫وان دݣربر خاك خواری بسته يخ‬ Il donne à l’un les richesses et les plaisirs; l’autre a en partage les chagrins et l’affliction: celui-ci reçoit de lui deux cents bourses remplies d’or; celui-là expire, faute de pain: celui-ci est placé sur le trône, au milieu des grandeurs et des délices; celui-là n’a pas même de quoi apaiser la faim qui le dévore: l’un est vêtu d’hermine et de martre; l’autre est étendu tout nu dans un four: l’un repose sur des tapis de soie d’étoffes précieuses; l’autre est ignomineusement couché sur la terre, exposé à toute la rigueur du froid et de la gelée.38 One lies on Persian silk reclined, One naked in a frozen wind; One scarce can count his heaps of ore, One faints with hunger at the door.39 35  Louisa Stuart Costello, Specimens of the Early Poetry of France (London: William Pickering, 1835). 36  The exception is ‘The Caravan’, a short piece attributed to the Mughal poet Faizi, although I have found no source for it. Allowing for the fact that English feet are accentual and Persian quantitative, Costello’s pacey hendecasyllabics here precisely accord with the metre in which the Shahnameh was composed and, significantly, recited. 37  Silvestre de Sacy, Pend-namèh, ou le livre des conseils (Paris: Imprimerie Royale, 1819), p. 453. Spelling as in de Sacy’s text. 38  Ibid., p. 3. 39 Costello, Rose Garden, p. 103.

12  Asian Classics on the Victorian Bookshelf In this example, Costello has taken Attar in prose and restored him to his coup­ lets, but such conformity is rare. It is much more common for her to deliberately ignore the original poetic forms, in spite of her major source, Von Hammer, taking care to reproduce them in German. From him she would have known that Omar Khayyam wrote in quatrains rhyming AABA, and that Rudaki’s lament for Bokhara or ‘Ju-yi Muliyan’ consists of ten lines structured around one recurring end-phrase or radif. Nonetheless, she put the former into the seven-syllable lines used by ‘Anacreon’ Moore for translations of his favourite Greek lyricist (a poet with whom Hafez had already been much compared), while Rudaki was realized in an ABABCC stanza containing iambic lines of varying lengths. Not a vestige of the original prosody remains, though the lingering quality of the final couplet in Costello’s Rudaki-stanzas (longer by two syllables than their preceding lines), hints at the way the tenth-century poet turns over his memories of the beautiful city he was forced to abandon, using the radif ‘aayad hami’ (is always coming).40 But a ‘faithful’ interpretation was never Costello’s intention. Indeed, her writing is at its most lively when most unscrupulous. Her objective rather was to seek out analogous forms that would strike a chord with English readers and illuminate the poet’s meaning for them; and in the cataleptic trochaic tetrameter that she borrows from Moore, Costello arguably gives a more accurate impression of the mingled scepticism and humility of Omar Khayyam than many of his subsequent translators. All that nature could unfold, Have I in her page unrolled; All of glorious and grand I have sought to understand. ’Twas in youth my early thought, Riper years no wisdom brought, Life is ebbing, sure though slow, And I feel I nothing know.41

While by no means wildly off the mark, the canon of poetry Costello frames is uninformed by Persian commentators, and distorted by the priorities of East India Company translators. Her editorial interventions are also hardly without faux pas and clumsy generalization. ‘Most of the Asiatic poets are Sufis’, she avows, quoting Hafez’s ode on ‘Earthly and Heavenly Love’—a translation which Parvin Loloi has shown not be Hafez at all, but a passage from the Bustan of Sadi.42 40  Joseph Von Hammer, Geschichte der schönen redekünste Persiens (Vienna: Heubner und Volke, 1818), pp. 39–40; Thomas Moore, The Complete Poetical Works of Thomas Moore (London: Longmans, Green, Reader, and Dyer, 1869), pp. 1–40; Costello, Rose Garden, p. 43. 41  Ibid., p. 70. 42  Ibid., pp. 1, 4. Parvin Loloi, Hafiz, Master of Persian Poetry: A Critical Bibliography (London: I.B. Tauris, 2004), p. 331.

A Century of Translation  13 Her spelling of Pandnama as Peridnama, perhaps thinking of the peris or winged sprites who feature in Lalla Rookh as well as Beckford’s Vathek, is another blunder which was sharply criticized in Cowell’s review.43 Her worst mistake, but one that Cowell is either too kind or too cautious to contradict, is her inclusion of Elmocadessi (Al-Maqdisi), an author who wrote not in Persian at all but Arabic. For all these defects, however, there is an appealing strain of enthusiasm and reverence running through Costello which, especially when contrasted with Cowell’s tone, further complicates our understanding of her as a practitioner of ‘scientific’ orientalism. Cowell fully approves of her effort at an ordered, chronological, national canon—so much so, in fact, that he hijacks it for his own ends. Punctuated by sparse references to Costello, his review replicates her sequence of poets and assesses each in turn, effectively overwriting her views with his own and rendering her work redundant. He subtly advertises his intellectual mastery over the field of Persian literature, always tempering his praise with criticisms that serve to subordinate it to Western standards of judgement. If Iran has produced more poets than any other country, then ‘even more than the usual proportion’, he reminds his readers, were ‘worthless’. Moreover, that proportion has risen sharply: Cowell’s narrative culminates in the decline of Persian poetry after the fifteenth century into mannerism and triviality, a trajectory of decadence entirely absent in Costello. He breaks off his sequence sharply at Hatefi (d. 1521), whereas the Rose Garden continues into a chapter on Faizi, and Costello’s original articles in Fraser’s include a number of more modern poets such as Urfi, Hilali, and Kashefi. While he greets Costello’s volume with courtesy, therefore, Cowell can be seen sim­ul­tan­ eous­ly moving to reassert academic sovereignty over his territory. Unsurprisingly he deprecates the ‘mad partiality’ of Sir William Jones, so frequently quoted in the Rose Garden, ‘to whom Eastern literature was an El-Dorado of all that is beautiful’.44 Costello’s affection for the orientophile polyglot and the passionate, Romantic tone of his criticism is revealing of how, in its effort to instruct lay ­readers, her work gestures not just forward but also backward in time, and partakes of both Said’s categories.45 Her mixed strategy, and divided affinities, would be echoed by many subsequent translators who sought to engage a lay audience, while keeping on the right side of academic gatekeepers. The Rose Garden of Persia was issued by the large mainstream press of Longman— the same publisher, in fact, to whom Costello had sent a submission twenty-five years earlier for their abortive Annals of Oriental Literature. That was in Thomas Longman III’s time, however, and his son may well have greeted Costello’s second offering with scepticism, if we are to judge by the helpful prods delivered by her

43  Cowell, ‘The Rose Garden of Persia’, 293. 44  Ibid., 308, 273. 45  For an example of Jones’s ardent language, see his description of an unnamed allegorical poem about the love of Ferhad for Shirin: ‘a blaze of religious and poetical fire’. Teignmouth (ed.), Works, III, 247.

14  Asian Classics on the Victorian Bookshelf

Figure 1.1  Frontispiece to The Rose Garden of Persia (author photograph)

patron Moore (‘I shall take care to urge your suit to them and try and soften their booksellers-hearts’).46 It was an expensive volume to produce, with well over half the production costs associated with the beautiful arabesque borders designed for each page by the author’s brother Dudley, based on tracings made of manuscripts 46  Pforzheimer: Misc Ms. 2135 (Thomas Moore to Louisa Stuart Costello, 13 June 1842). Moore does not mention a title, but given that Costello’s usual publisher was Bentley, it is likely his appeal to Longman’s was on behalf of the Rose Garden.

A Century of Translation  15 in the library of the Asiatic Society in London (Figure 1.1). These expenses are likely to have contributed to the book’s high price and meagre advertising budget, and in turn reduced its sales. One thousand copies of the Rose Garden were printed, of which 517 copies were sold in its first year at twelve shillings and ninepence. But by 1848 Longman must have concluded that at that price its public had been exhausted, and the remaining stock was disposed of cheaply to the bookseller-turned-publisher Henry G. Bohn.47 The Rose Garden covered its costs and netted Costello about £40 (on the half-profits system), but there was no second edition. It would not be widely distributed until its multiple reprintings by George Bell (in 1887), Gibbings (1899 and 1911) and T.N. Foulis of Edinburgh (1907, 1913, and 1924). If her readers were few, they could be loyal. The Persophile publisher Thomas Fisher Unwin, of whom more in Chapter  6, and his wife Jane Cobden bought Bell’s reprint and kept it on their shelves long after it was superseded by other books. Large parts of the Rose Garden were reproduced in other works (not always credited), such as the fascinating hodgepodge of knowledge compiled by John Henry Freese, an English merchant-turned-educator domiciled in Brazil, and titled Everybody’s Book (1860).48 Costello’s muddling of Sadi for Hafez was an error perpetuated by plagiarists like the Irish barrister E.V. Kenealy, who relied on her in his 1864 Poems and Translations. It must also be remembered that many who were unable to access copies of Costello in her lifetime will have obtained a  thorough (albeit distorted) summary courtesy of Cowell in the Westminster Review. The young Walt Whitman was one such, a deep interest in Sufism emer­ ging many years later in his poem ‘A Persian Lesson’.49 All this makes it difficult to gauge Costello’s direct influence, but as an underqualified anthologist, using crisp presentation and attractive illustration to appeal exclusively to a lay audience, her book set a number of precedents, scouting trails that would be more confidently explored by publications in the second half of the century.

The Rise of the Popularizer, 1850–1915 In a recent article on Sanskrit erotic poetry, Maddalena Italia describes a ‘pivotal moment’ at the beginning of the twentieth century that witnessed the ‘percolation’ of the texts she studies, in English translation, ‘from the scholarly sphere to that of 47  Reading: MS 1393 (Records of the Longman Group), 1/A5, Divide Ledger D4, p. 46. Longman spent £5 12s. 1d. on publicity in the first year. By contrast, more than £27 was bestowed the following year on a title with an identical print run, Coley’s Practical Treatise on the Diseases of Children, which sold little more than one hundred copies and made a spectacular loss. 48  John Henry Freese, Everybody’s Book: or Gleanings Serious and Entertaining, in Prose and Verse, from the Scrap-book of a Septuagenarian (London: Longman, Green, Longman, and Roberts, 1860), pp. 371–95. 49 Loloi, Hafiz, p. 331; Roshan Lal Sharma, ‘Walt Whitman and Sufism’, Spring Magazine on English Literature, II/2 (2016), 40.

16  Asian Classics on the Victorian Bookshelf non-specialist literature’.50 That moment was triggered by the highly successful publications of Edward Powys Mathers, who like Costello did not translate at all directly from his source-texts, but through the intermediate language of French. For me, the Rose Garden does not represent such a singular turning-point. Rather, it betokens a gradual sea-change that took place over the coming decades, first in the reception of Persian poetry and later of other classic texts from different Asian traditions. Throughout the second half of the nineteenth century, professional translation activity continued apace. Antiquated or incomplete translations were updated—new versions of the Quran, for example, came out in 1861 and 1880— while other works, from East Asia especially, appeared in English for the first time. We have already seen how caizi jiaren stories found their way from China to English readers well in advance of the Confucian classics. The translation of the latter began, just as with Persian and Indian texts, under Company rule in Bengal (in 1809). But the instrumental figure in sinology would be the missionary James Legge, who laboured at Hong Kong through the middle decades of the century on his versions of the Analects, Shijing, Shujing, and other texts. Japan, barred to prying Westerners for so long, remained a closed book until the Japanese Odes of F.V. Dickins appeared in 1866, followed by A.B. Freeman-Mitford’s Tales of Old Japan (1871). It is crucial to appreciate, however, the bifurcated perspective that restricted European understanding of East Asian literature at this time. On the one hand, career-scholars like Legge were heavily committed to antiquity; on the other, a small amount of Qing Dynasty fiction and Mitford’s Tales—their plots based largely on bunraku (puppet plays) and kabuki he saw performed in the theatres of Asakusa—offered insights into the China and Japan of recent times.51 The years between, for all but a few experts, must have appeared a blank. The Tang Dynasty poets like Li Po (b. 701) and Du Fu (b. 712), now familiar names in the West, only began to enter the general frame of reference at the turn of the century, while most of the classic novels (such as the Tale of Genji from medieval Japan, and the sixteenth-century Journey to the West from China,) would not be properly appreciated until the advent of Arthur Waley’s much-loved versions between 1925 and 1942. As in the first half of the century, most of these pioneer translations were never intended seriously as commercial propositions, except as textbooks. Many were subsidized by the Oriental Translation Fund, set up in London in 1828, while Legge’s Chinese Classics were underwritten by the tea and opium merchants Jardine Matheson. But developing in parallel with these academic ventures was a fastgrowing corpus of popular, commercial books, some of which were paraphrases dug opportunistically from the ready quarry of existing literature, while others were 50  Maddalena Italia, ‘Eastern Poetry by Western Poets: Powys Mathers’ “Translations” of Sanskrit Erotic Lyrics’, Comparative Critical Studies, XVII/2 (2020), 206. 51  Hung, ‘Chinese Poetry’, pp. 224–5.

A Century of Translation  17 fresh translations contributing to—and potentially competing with—professional knowledge. This was particularly the case in Japanese studies, with Dickins’s Japanese Odes being expressly intended ‘for the benefit of students of Japanese’ while the Tales began as a series of articles in the Cornhill Magazine, Mitford complementing his stories with personal observations on Japanese history, manners, politics, and religion, and illustrating them (going one better than Costello) with woodblock prints commissioned from local artists.52 The same pattern of knowledge diffusing at different levels simultaneously can also be seen in other languages, with the condensers of epic poetry and other long works often managing to bring out their abridgements in advance of the longawaited full translations. Thus Frederika Richardson’s Iliad of the East was issued by Macmillan in 1870, the same year that Ralph T.H. Griffith unveiled the first of his five-volume met­ric­al translation of the Ramayana. The fifth would not appear until 1874. Sir Edwin Arnold stole a march on K.M. Ganguli in exactly the same manner, bringing out Indian Idylls in 1883 just at the outset of the latter’s thirteen-year project of publishing the Mahabharata in its entirety. The curate Arthur George Warner died before publishing his metrical Shahnameh, the magnum opus being finally completed by his brother in 1925, more than forty years after Helen Zimmern’s effective prose summary, The Epic of Kings, and ninety years after James Atkinson’s much more partial rendition. The want of such an edition, moreover, had been felt for some time, as we can see in this humorous verse of 1858: Firdausi; you’ll not master in the Persian, If unassisted by an English version, His sixty thousand couplets in a trice; Let Atkinson’s abridgment then suffice.53

Why did productions for the general reader begin to multiply now, rather than in the early decades of the century when Byron, encouraging Moore to press ahead with the composition of Lalla Rookh, had famously told his friend ‘the public is orientalizing’?54 Basing her argument on the number of articles on Indian subjects (her specific interest is Sanskrit) appearing year-by-year in journals like the Edinburgh Review, Mishka Sinha has proposed that the spike in interest apparent in Byron’s generation was in fact followed by a lull of some twenty years. She attributes this decline to the predominance of utilitarian ideals, noting moreover 52  Frederick Victor Dickins, Hyak Nin Is’shiu, or Stanzas by a Century of Poets, being Japanese Lyrical Odes (London: Smith, Elder, 1866), p. vi. 53  Quoted in Reza Taher-Kermani, The Persian Presence in Victorian Poetry (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020), p. 97. 54 Leslie A. Marchand, Byron’s Letters and Journals (12 vols; London: John Murray, 1973–96), III, 101 (Byron to Thomas Moore, 28 Aug. 1813).

18  Asian Classics on the Victorian Bookshelf that Britain is the exception—in continental Europe and the USA, intellectual and cultural interest in India rose throughout the course of the nineteenth ­cen­tury.55 That is one possible explanation. Another is that readers may have become surfeited with overfamiliar tropes and subjects, particularly in respect to Persian literature. Jones, Moore, and Isaac D’Israeli (who had published Mejnoun and Leila, a prose version of the great Persian love story, in 1797) had certainly helped school the British public in the commonplaces of Persian belles lettres, and it was this crust of cliché that Edward Fitzgerald seems to have vaguely imagined breaking through in 1846. That year he wrote to his friend E.B. Cowell of how ‘it would be a good work to give us some of the good things of Hafiz and the Persian poets; of bulbuls [nightingales] and ghouls [i.e. guls = roses] we have had enough.’56 Cowell himself adopted nearly the same wording in his review of Costello’s Rose Garden the following summer: ‘enough has been said of guls and bulbuls, and it is high time to select those things that can really throw light on man and his development.’57 A dozen years later the fruit of Fitzgerald’s ambition would ripen, diffidently enough, in the 250 copies of his privately printed Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám (1859), most of which were relegated to the penny box outside Bernard Quaritch’s bookshop near Leicester Square. Once rescued by the Irish orientalist Whitley Stokes, and distributed among a small group of friends who included Dante Gabriel Rossetti, the verses stunned readers who were entirely unprepared for the trenchant force of their wit and scepticism.58 Fitzgerald’s intervention, like Costello’s, should not be seen as a pivotal moment but rather as the beginning of a slow pivot. Thirty years later, he was arguably better known for his version of Aeschylus’s Agamemnon than of Omar Khayyam. In 1888, a passionate admirer of the former, the politician Lord Selborne, was having dinner with a friend who had been one of the early aficionados of the ­latter. When he compared Fitzgerald’s work with that of expert linguists, like the Oxford classicist E.D.A.  Morshead, Selborne was led to think that ‘a translator might be too good a scholar’.59 ‘Perfect translations’, he reasoned, were impossible, something that was true of prose and even more so of poetry, and therefore the pursuit of an exact understanding might actually lead the translator away from a desirable outcome, not towards it. Presumably Selborne would allow the need for a reasonable knowledge of the source-language; but beyond a certain point, 55  Mishka Sinha, ‘Corrigibility, Allegory, Universality: A History of the Gita’s Transnational Reception, 1785–1945’, Modern Intellectual History, VII/2 (Aug. 2010), 301. 56  Quoted in Yohannan, Persian Poetry, p. 97. For D’Israeli’s story, see Romances (London: Cadell and Davies, 1799). It is notable, as Drury highlights in Translation as Transformation (p. 162), that Fitzgerald had versified a passage from D’Israeli’s Mejnoun and Leila at some point in the early 1840s. 57  Cowell, ‘The Rose Garden of Persia’, 274. 58  John Drew, ‘Whitley Stokes and the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám’, in Elizabeth Boyle and Paul Russell (eds), The Tripartite Life of Whitley Stokes: 1830–1909 (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 2011), p. 115. 59  Sir Mountstuart E. Grant Duff, Notes from a Diary, 1886–1888 (2 vols, London: John Murray, 1900), II, 184.

A Century of Translation  19 he seems to suggest, expertise yields diminishing returns. The politician and his friend had astutely realized that the power of Fitzgerald as a translator derived, paradoxically, from his intuitive approach and his altogether dilettante attitude. Fitzgerald had studied Persian, under Cowell’s tuition, as a hobby, and it was Cowell who first supplied him with manuscripts of Khayyam’s quatrains. But the choice to publish was not prompted by academic trends, and not at all by his detection of a gap in the market (even though the only English renditions of Khayyam then extant were Costello’s small selection). Fitzgerald’s mini-masterpiece came about through the unusual degree of personal sympathy he felt maturing between him and the medieval astronomer, whose poetry he so daringly ­transcreated—retaining Khayyam’s stanza-form and rhyme-scheme, but freely editing and amalgamating, and above all stringing the quatrains together into a lyrical sequence that runs from dawn (‘Awake! for Morning in the Bowl of Night’) to dusk and death. It was the ordering of discrete quatrains into a continuous poem—indeed, a psychological progression—that enabled the work’s tremendous success and encouraged so many translators to jump on the bandwagon, among them E.H. Whinfield (1882), Justin Huntly McCarthy (1889), Richard Le Gallienne (1897), and Edward Heron-Allen (1899). Even so, this craze for Khayyam, which Chapter 2 will treat in greater depth, could not really commence in earnest until after Fitzgerald died in 1883 and ceased to control the issue of his poem. Ironically, popular acclaim had been far from the mind of the Suffolk recluse, who published all four editions of his Rubáiyát anonymously. Having established a timeline, then, for the literary developments that concern us, how might we actually define a popular translation, or a popular translator, as against what I refer to variously in this book as scholarly, academic, or professional translations? We could refer to the famous dichotomy drawn by Schleiermacher in his 1813 essay ‘On the Different Methods of Translating’. Either the translator leaves the author ‘in peace’, as Schleiermacher puts it, and ‘moves the reader toward him’; or he does the opposite, leaving his reader in peace ‘as much as possible’ while endeavouring to move the foreign author towards his position.60 Popular translators might be thought of as favouring the second approach, pri­ori­ tiz­ing the needs and/or tastes of their English-speaking audience potentially to the detriment of accurate comprehension. Alternatively, we could define popular translators as those who identify texts that have already been translated for one or more specialist audiences, and who produce accessible editions for the general public (usually working primarily from the existing translation, or from an equivalent in French, German, or another European language). Taking another look at Fitzgerald, however, we can see how hard it is to make such tidy distinctions. Like his friend Cowell, he translated from the original, not an intermediary 60  Friedrich Schleiermacher, ‘On the Different Methods of Translating’, trans. Susan Bernofsky, in Lawrence Venuti (ed.), The Translation Studies Reader (3rd edn, Abingdon: Routledge, 2012), p. 49.

20  Asian Classics on the Victorian Bookshelf language (although it may be relevant that he first essayed a translation not into English, but into Latin). Moreover, after considering some other poets who had already been treated by Persianists, and who might therefore have been con­ sidered ready for wider dissemination, he chose instead one who was more or less new to English letters. On the other hand, he was clearly attentive to the needs of the domestic lay reader, taking pains to set the quatrains to ‘tolerable English music’, as he modestly put it. For this he was rewarded with tremendous acclaim, and yet he shunned a celebrity he had never sought. Far from keeping an eye on shifts in public taste, he lived a secluded life, paying no heed to trends and fashions, writing long letters with capital letters in the middle of his sentences after the manner of the eighteenth century. Then again, in other respects he was uncannily in tune with the zeitgeist. ‘His bent was for reduction, for concentration, for distillation’, remarks Daniel Karlin, who found those same letters ‘filled with projects for furbishing up old classics, making them palatable to a modern audience’ (one road not taken was a revamp of Richardson’s Clarissa). Fitzgerald even customized the books in his library, cutting down their pages by half and then rebinding them.61 The issue is further vexed by the variety of terms that the translators I have examined use to denote themselves and their work. Costello describes herself as ‘collecting’ major poets together in a spirit of ‘bonne volonté’. The book represents ‘my endeavour to make them popular’, though she confesses that Persian poetry is too vast a field to be adequately represented by any single presentation of ‘specimens’.62 The title pages of later anthologies credit their creators with ‘gathering’, ‘arranging’, ‘compiling’, or ‘editing’. Evading, perhaps, the obligations or ex­pect­ations attendant on a ‘translator’, various writers have instead ‘rendered’, sometimes ‘versified’ the text in their native language; or they have preferred the neologisms ‘Englished’ or ‘Done into English’. Others have been more forthcoming about their lack of linguistic proficiency, claiming merely to have ‘paraphrased’, ‘adapted’, or ‘epitomized’ the source or even, more boldly, to have ‘retold’ it. Among the more eccentric subtitles I have come across are ‘some echoes of Arabian poetry’ and ‘reconstructed from the Anvari-Soheīli’.63 These terms reflect diverse mentalities and methodologies on the part of translators, and since it seems impossible to come to a satisfactory definition based either on translational practice, or on the kinds of text that are selected for translation, I would like to propose a loose, simple, but I think accurate distinction, based on audience. A specialist translator knows with considerable certainty who his or her readers will be, within the foreseeable future; a popular translator, however, may only speculate. The former were often writing for students, or for an audience connected with some 61 Daniel Karlin, ‘Introduction’, in Edward Fitzgerald, Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, ed. Karlin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), p. xxxix. 62 Costello, Rose Garden, pp. x–xii. 63  Owing to this confusion of terms, and to avoid reinforcing the hierarchy between ‘real’ trans­ lators and ‘mere’ paraphrasers, none of the writers of the Victorian translations cited in this book are described in the footnotes using ‘(trans.)’, ‘(ed.)’, or any other qualifier.

A Century of Translation  21 i­nstitution—whether that be the India Office, the Hindu College in Calcutta, or the London Missionary Society—which had undertaken to purchase or could be expected to purchase a large portion of the copies. The latter may have targeted certain audiences—people interested in folklore, Theosophists, tourists visiting Japan, schoolchildren—but not being able to say for sure if that constituency would prove amenable to the book, or buy sufficient copies to make it a success, they had to appeal to a spectrum of potential readers. Popular translators may have been unable to agree on a standard nomenclature, but this did not belie any vagueness of purpose. On the contrary, the prefaces fronting their translations often state definite objectives, and this is particularly pronounced when one further verb begins to proliferate: ‘popularize’. As mentioned, Helen Zimmern’s The Epic of Kings was an abridgement of the Shahnameh that appeared long before a complete edition of that foundational work of Persian literature was available in English. Her preface briskly ac­know­ledges a prior translator, the East India Company officer James Atkinson, before expressing regret that his even more abbreviated version of 1835 was too fragmentary to form a satisfactory narrative. ‘This version, which is half in prose, half in verse, alternately ambitious and monotonous,’ she remarks, ‘possesses few attractions for the general reader’. In deference to Atkinson, Zimmern did not know Persian, but since her goal was ‘a paraphrase and not a translation’, this was no obstacle. ‘All I needed’, she explains, ‘was at hand in the form of Professor Jules Mohl’s French version.’ Like Costello, then, Zimmern operated through an intermediary language, and it is appropriate (and perhaps not coincidental) that her statement of intent is strongly reminiscent of her predecessor’s. ‘My endeavour to make them popular’, which is tucked apologetically into the final paragraph of Costello’s preface, becomes the very first sentence of Zimmern’s: ‘It has been my endeavour in this book to popularize the tales told by the Persian poet Firdusi in his immortal epic.’64 Her text enjoyed greater success than The Rose Garden, going rapidly into a second, cheaper edition, and this was undoubtedly helped by a supportive publisher (Thomas Fisher Unwin), and by Zimmern’s canny stratagem of ­persuading much more famous, male cultural figures to lend their prestige to the volume. Edmund Gosse contributed a long prefatory poem, ‘Firdausi in Exile’, while his brother-in-law, the painter Lawrence Alma-Tadema, produced two striking illustrations. Zimmern also prolonged the text’s lifespan by bringing out a (minimally) revised version for children four years later, titled Heroic Tales, Retold from Firdusi the Persian, with a corresponding reduction in price. The custom of redacting the erotic content of the Arabian Nights for family consumption is well-known, and goes back at least as far as 1812,65 but we have largely forgotten how the Persian epic (or more specifically its episode of Sohrab and Rustam, which had inspired 64  Helen Zimmern, The Epic of Kings: Stories Retold from Firdusi (London: T. Fisher Unwin, 1882), p. v. 65  The Beinecke Library holds a manuscript dated to 1812 that appears to be a set of notes for a book, to be titled ‘Tales of the East, being a Collection of the Celebrated Eastern Histories &

22  Asian Classics on the Victorian Bookshelf Matthew Arnold’s eponymous poem in 1853) once seemed destined to become a nursery standard. At least six other English children’s versions followed in Zimmern’s train between 1886 and 1930, some evidently intended for the use of schools or dramatic societies, before fashion carried it quietly out of favour.66 Making no apology for her ‘ignorance of Persian’ (an admission made in the second sentence of her preface), Zimmern evidently saw her activities as fulfilling a legitimate role within the literary economy: the role of popularizer. Whereas the independently wealthy Fitzgerald undertook his study of Persian in the true spirit of amateurism, Zimmern conducted her research efficiently from a desk in the British Museum reading room. Here she met chief librarian Richard Garnett, who introduced her to the Shahnameh and may have suggested it as a subject, and she completed her project in time for the autumn book-buying season of 1882. For her, writing for the general public was not a hobby but a livelihood and profession. She produced no further works of Persian translation, but moved on instead to Icelandic folklore, an explication of Schopenhauer’s philosophy, an anthology of extracts from modern European novelists, and the first English edition of Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil. Her entire career, in fact, was shaped by the concept of popularization—the presentation of a technical or specialized subject in a generally intelligible or entertaining form—and the growing recognition of it as a valuable, if not essential, form of writing. The OED records the first such usage as occurring in 1799.67 Seventy years later, the vocation was far enough advanced for Matthew Arnold to set forth a kind of manifesto for it in Culture and Anarchy: The great men of culture are those . . . who have laboured to divest knowledge of all that was harsh, uncouth, difficult, abstract, professional, exclusive; to humanize it, to make it efficient outside the clique of the cultivated and learned, yet still remaining the best knowledge and thought of the time, and a true source, therefore, of sweetness and light.68

Arnold’s ‘humanizers’ were active in all fields of research: theology and biblical exegesis, archaeology, classical music, political economy, agriculture and, above all, science and medicine.69 This was the natural outcome of a situation in which Adventures known as the Arabian Nights Entertainments, etc, etc, the whole Rearranged & Illustrated for Family Readings’. Beinecke: Osborn d348. 66  These included Kate M. Rabb, National Epics (Chicago, IL: A.C. McClurg, 1896); Ella Sykes, The Story Book of the Shah (London: Macqueen, 1901); and Elizabeth  D.  Renninger, The Story of Rustem (New York: Scribner, 1909)—like Zimmern, all female authors. See Yohannan, Persian Poetry, pp. 228, 293. 67  See http://www.oed.com/view/Entry/147914?redirectedFrom=popularize#eid (accessed 2 Aug. 2018). 68 Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy: An Essay in Political and Social Criticism (London: Smith, Elder, 1869), p. 49. 69  See Bernard Lightman, Victorian Popularizers of Science: Designing Nature for New Audiences (Chicago, IL and London: University of Chicago Press, 2009).

A Century of Translation  23 research was beginning to be publicly funded, and in which new discoveries impacted on the lives (and convulsed the settled beliefs) of a population that was increasingly literate, and yet simultaneously baffled by advanced concepts and abstruse terminology. ‘It is inevitable’, reflected the Arabic professor A.J. Arberry in 1938, that as a scientific discipline grows ever more specialized, the researcher ‘tends to divorce himself more and more from those principles of a universal and fundamental character which alone avail to keep him in sympathy with the general public and the general public in sympathy with him.’ Late Victorian scholars could not expect to emulate Sir William Jones, who in his day had stood in ‘the vanguard of linguistic research’, yet who still managed to share some of his early breakthroughs—along with interdisciplinary observations on law and religion— with ‘the ordinary reader’.70 Notwithstanding the impossibility of straddling the parallel paths of scientific accuracy and humane letters, Arberry’s British Orientalists praises a number of  his undaunted predecessors who tried nevertheless to draw on the essential ‘human appeal which lies at the root of all oriental studies’—among them Edward Denison Ross, who ‘mirrored learning to the public’, and the Turkish prodigy E.J.W. Gibb who expressed a wish to satisfy ‘the non-orientalist reader’.71 There was often a practical side to their idealism. Institutions like the School of Oriental and African Studies, which Ross founded in 1916, needed funding, as did largescale research projects like the Linguistic Survey of India (1894–1928). Others championed their respective sub-fields, like that most famous of Victorian orien­ tal­ists Sir Richard Burton, who gave his vociferous backing to Arabic studies. Ever the Islamophile, he criticized the Government of India’s preference for Sanskrit and Indian vernaculars, and considered it his duty to awaken the British Empire to a consciousness of its role as the world’s largest Muslim polity.72 Ever impecunious, too, Burton constantly essayed money-spinning publication projects, his wife Isabel pitching one of many non-starters to Chatto & Windus in 1884: It has long struck him that in these days of revivals & abstracts & popularizations something might be done for the old romances of chivalry. For instance Amadis de Gaul is a name known to most people but who has ever seen the book: Do you not think that it might take the public taste if carefully boiled down to a single handy volume.73

Others sought to enlist public sympathy for countries in which they had studied and travelled, and in which the maintenance or overturning of the status quo

70 A.J. Arberry, British Orientalists (London: William Collins, 1943), p. 38. 71  Ibid., p. 25; E.J.W. Gibb, Ottoman Poems (London: Trübner, 1882), p. 7. 72  Richard F. Burton, ‘The Book of Sindibād’, Academy 646 (20 Sept. 1884), 175. 73  BL: Add MS 88877 (Isabel Burton to Andrew Chatto, 1 June 1884).

24  Asian Classics on the Victorian Bookshelf might benefit their friends and informants. Bringing out his Ottoman Poems in  the wake of the ‘Bulgarian Horrors’ in 1876, Gibb was keen to persuade his ­readers that Turks were not ‘illiterate barbarians’. At the turn of the century Sir Edwin Arnold acted as willing apologist for Japanese imperialism in Korea and Taiwan, while Edward Granville Browne campaigned for the Persian constitutionalists in their struggle for democratic reforms.74 British Orientalists offers a useful reminder that academics, explorers, colonial officers, and other recognized specialists also successfully engaged in popularization. But naturally it deals only with that class of writers and their exploits, and not at all with the unaffiliated enthusiasts who also made signal contributions, or with the full-time scribblers for whom popularization was not a secondary activity but their métier. This is unsurprising, as there is a well-established pattern of intellectuals overlooking or deliberately sidelining neophytes. In the standard histories they have been dismissed as traducers and counterfeiters (a view reinforced, for different reasons, by post-Saidian scholarship) or at best given only a condescending appreciation. The thoroughgoing, standard histories of individual Asian literature and their reception in English that have appeared in the last fifty years, such as John D. Yohannan’s Persian Poetry in England and America, follow much the same course. Although he admits that the Rose Garden was the ‘first genuine anthology of Persian verse’, Yohannan credits its author with little by way of independent judgement or influence: ‘Miss Costello’ was attracted to manuscripts in the Bodleian, we are told, ‘having an artistic bent’, and her anthology ‘rendered a valuable service’.75 For Helen Zimmern and her Epic of Kings, meanwhile, his 400-page monograph reserves no mention at all. This is a particularly unfortunate omission when we consider that the people mentioned in the previous paragraph were (1) entirely male; (2) all connected in some way with the business of empire. By contrast, many popular translators were women, and some approached the established domain of British orientalism from quite marginal positions. Zimmern, in fact, was both a linguistic outsider and an outsider to Britain altogether, with no prior investment in its imperial project. Born in Hamburg, daughter of a Jewish lace merchant, she arrived in Nottingham as a child and naturalized as British the year before publishing The Epic of Kings. But by the end of the 1880s she had emigrated again, to Italy, and spent the rest of her life in Florence.76 Though certainly not an anti-imperialist, allegations of Italian atrocities in Libya prompted her to point out that Britain, ‘with her own record of the Indian Mutiny and of the Soudan’, was of all nations the least fit to criticize.77 74 Gibb, Ottoman Poems, p. 7; for Arnold’s correspondence with the Japanese envoy Kato Takaaki, see the Edwin Arnold Papers at Duke University, Rubinstein Library. 75 Yohannan, Persian Poetry, p. 68. 76  National Archives: HO 334/10/3427 (Naturalization Certificate: Helen Zimmern). 77  ‘In India the British had short shrift for the rebels, who certainly had a patrie to fight for.’ Charles Lapworth and Helen Zimmern, Tripoli and Young Italy (London: Stephen Swift, 1912), p. 27.

A Century of Translation  25 It would be naïve to suppose that all popularizers were performing a disinterested public service. Several of the writers I will mention resemble less Arnold’s ‘great men of culture’ than they do the purveyors of ‘superficial knowledge’ J.S.  Mill reproved in The Spirit of the Age (1831). ‘The grand achievement of the present age is the diffusion of superficial knowledge’, complained Mill, arguing that the ‘moral or social truths’ that needed to be held up for public contemplation, in a world undergoing rapid change, were instead being submerged below a tide of abstracted information.78 Yet if we don’t look for the real vectors of transmission, whereby certain stories, characters, images, and metaphors detached from their native traditions and produced an impact in English literature, then our ideas of cultural exchange will be fundamentally flawed. In 1895, the artist Patten Wilson produced a series of celebrated illustrations of episodes in the Shahnameh which he published in the Decadent periodical, The Yellow Book. There is little that could be called decadent about them: they depict martial scenes of chivalry, inspired by a text that even in the most prejudicial European accounts of Persian literature constitutes the undisputed ‘golden age’ of poetry before its efflorescence and decay. The choice of subject may well have reflected an editorial decision to change the tone of the magazine, however, since its scandalous art editor Aubrey Beardsley— an orientalist himself of sorts, in his enthusiasm for Japanese shunga erotica—had just been fired. I am only speculating at this point, but if we are one day to uncover the genesis of these artworks, we will need to put away the long-established and constantly repeated assumption that Wilson derived his imagery from Sohrab and Rustum. On the contrary, a contemporary source tells us categorically that the drawings were ‘inspired, not by the poem in which Matthew Arnold tells how Rustum killed his own son unwittingly in single combat, but by reading a prose translation of Firdausi Tusi.’ The availability of translations at the time, as well as the close correlation between Wilson’s choice of subjects and the emphasis of Zimmern’s narrative, makes it highly likely that The Epic of Kings was the book in question.79

Popular Commodities: Scarcity and Surplus in the Literary Marketplace In an essay of 1956, Harold Rosenberg wrote about the unenviable position of the ‘middlemen’ who make it their business to communicate the difficult and erudite to the masses. To the artists or originators, popularizers are people who steal and 78  F.E.L. Priestley and J.M. Robson (eds), The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill (33 vols, Toronto: University of Toronto Press), XXII, 232. 79 Walter Shaw Sparrow, ‘Some Drawings by Patten Wilson’, The Studio, 23 (Aug. 1901), 193. Wilson’s first drawing was of an archer—the same subject chosen by Alma-Tadema for his frontispiece to Zimmern’s book—and there are further similarities which are discussed in Chapter 5.

26  Asian Classics on the Victorian Bookshelf falsify their intellectual property, discounting their scarce goods by flooding the market with cheap imitations.80 Their feelings are akin to the contempt of a couturier for the knockoff retailers who copy his patterns and profit by his ingenuity. Translation is an interesting field in which to study this dynamic, because what is popularized is already an imperfect reproduction. Every article of merchandise stands in a subsidiary position, at once ancillary to and deviant from its original. This may be why debates in this period about translation practices, even though they are phrased in the dichotomies of true/false, faithful/unfaithful, and authentic/ spurious are often, one feels, really arguments about the value accorded to literary labour—in terms of money or prestige—and how that is affected by the scarcity or availability of certain texts. If we think about translations as existing in a marketplace, in which some goods are inaccessible to those with less spending power, less leisure time, or less cultural capital (in the form of prior knowledge), then condensed or abstracted texts have an important role to play. In the case of a narrative, this might take the form of an abridgement or synopsis; in the case of scripture and philosophical works, arrangements of extracts with explanatory notes; from the oeuvre of a major poet, edited selections might be offered, or a range of poets grouped historically or thematically. E.D.  Root, who described himself as ‘an American Buddhist’, published in 1880 what is really an original poem on the life of Buddha (‘a versified, annotated narrative’ as he calls it), but accompanied by quotations from the Dhammapada, and other citations—for the purpose of comparison— from Lao Tse and Confucius. With thrifty candour, Root explains that English translations of Eastern philosophical works ‘are expensive, and beyond the reach of the mass of readers’. Therefore he set about procuring the relevant volumes (‘with great difficulty, and considerable expense’) and, having digested them, has in his work ‘epitomized, and brought within the scope of the masses . . . all that is needed to form a correct biographical narrative of the keenest-minded of all religious, Heaven-sent Ariels [i.e. Gautama Buddha]’. Root’s book could be had for $1.81 As William St Clair has remarked, ‘anthologies, abridgements, and adaptations’ have often mitigated the gap between those who could afford to buy new literature and scientific writing at the time of publication, and poorer readers who had to wait until those books had been discarded and entered the second-hand market. They were the means by which ideas ‘trickle[d] down’, a role they continued to fulfil long into the era of the slow-to-develop public libraries. ‘They help to 80  Harold Rosenberg, ‘Everyman a Professional’, in The Tradition of the New (New York: Horizon, 1959), pp. 71–3. 81  The price in Britain was five shillings. E.D. Root, Sakya Buddha: a Versified, Annotated Narrative of his Life and Teachings; with an Excursus, Containing Citations from the Dhammapada, or Buddhist Canon (New York: Charles P. Somerby, 1880), pp. vi, 12. Thanks to Sebastian Lecourt for drawing my attention to this work.

A Century of Translation  27 bind a society together, uniting the reading experiences of one generation with that of others.’82 Following Costello’s early blueprint, late Victorian anthologies like W.A. Clouston’s Arabian Poetry for English Readers (1881) and Samuel Robinson’s Persian Poetry for English Readers (1883) encapsulate in their titles the project to make accessible to educated people a representative sample of a foreign canon of writing. Not all anthologies aimed at the quintessence of a single literary tradition. From the mid-1850s, a different variety began to emerge: the ecu­men­ic­al digest that juxtaposed texts from various languages to demonstrate the unity of religious traditions. Rather like Leigh Hunt and his ‘Eastern Story Teller’, Oxford classicist Benjamin Jowett remarked speculatively to James Legge that he would appreciate a ‘book containing all the best things in the great religions of the World. Such a book would be a stay to the minds of many persons.’83 The prototypes for this work were conceived not in Britain but in America, by a trio of Unitarian ministers: William Rounseville Alger, who published Poetry of the East in 1856, Moncure Conway and his Sacred Anthology of 1874, and Pebbles, Pearls and Gems of the Orient by Charles D.B. Mills (1882). Much the most popular, the genesis of Conway’s selection lay in his years at the Harvard Divinity School in the early 1850s, and the friendship of the Transcendentalists. Supposedly, Thoreau asked him one day what texts featured in his curriculum, and when Conway told him ‘the Scriptures’, Thoreau startled him by replying ‘Which?’ Emerson lent him the Bhagavad Gita in Wilkins’s translation, and the Dasatir: ‘these were revelations, like peaks and lakes of regions unknown to my spiritual geography.’ Like Francis Power Cobbe in the previous decade, Conway struggled with editions unsuitable for the lay reader (‘through vulgar superscriptions of literalism illuminations of the palimpsest shone out’), an experience that must have influenced his editorial approach.84 Crucial to its development was his correspondence with Max Müller who, humorously alluding to Francis Palgrave’s much-loved compilation of English verse, once referred to the Sacred Anthology as ‘your Golden Treasury from the Sacred Books of the World’.85 A collection of letters now at the University of Oregon reveals the extent to which Müller acted as consultant on Conway’s project, correcting 82  William St Clair, ‘The Political Economy of Reading’, the John Coffin Lecture in the History of the Book, School of Advanced Study, London, 2005, p. 11: http://oldemc.english.ucsb.edu/emccourses/novel-mediation-s2011/novel-mediation/Articles/stclair.pdf (accessed 4 Aug. 2018). 83 SOAS: CWM/LMS/China/Personal/James Legge Papers/Box 10 (Benjamin Jowett to James Legge, 24 Mar. n.y.). It is likely this undated letter was sent after 1875, when Legge was appointed Professor of Chinese at Oxford. 84  Moncure Daniel Conway, “Books that Have Helped Me”: reprinted from the “The Forum” (New York: D. Appleton, 1888), pp. 94–5. A Zoroastrian text, the Dasatir is purportedly ancient but now generally believed to have been written in the sixteenth or seventeenth century under the influence of Suhrawardy’s Illuminationism (an Islamic philosophy akin to Neoplatonism). The first English translation was published at Bombay in 1818. 85 Columbia: MS#0277 (Moncure Daniel Conway Papers), Box 16, Max Müller to Conway, 13 Aug. n.y.

28  Asian Classics on the Victorian Bookshelf various rudimentary errors (‘the Bhagavad Gita is an episode of the Mahābhārata, not the Rāmāyana’), and granting permission to reprint extracts from his version of the Dhammapada. The professor even offered advice as to the typeface, and urged ‘altogether a more elegant dress’ for the fledgling volume.86 Conway and Müller’s cooperation demonstrates that the interaction between scholar and popularizer need not be fraught with suspicion and resentment. It also throws an interesting light on the coterminous activities of Müller, who in the early 1870s was readying the ground for what would prove the era’s most ambitious and prestigious orientalist undertaking, Oxford University Press’s fiftyvolume Sacred Books of the East. Müller’s general preface to the series tactfully praises the pioneering ‘dilettanti’, ‘enthusiastic sciolist[s]’, and ‘devoted lovers’, who had pressed forward and published maps to new regions of thought, while the true savants laboured yet over their magna opera. But he also regrets the harm they have done in persuading the public that the Vedas, Zend Avesta, the various Tripitakas, Quran, and other holy works are full of ‘primeval wisdom’ and ‘sound and simple moral teaching’. Disappointment awaits anyone who picks up the Sacred Books of the East, Müller warns, expecting ‘to find in these volumes nothing but gems’.87 Müller was not directly snubbing Mills’s Pebbles, Pearls and Gems of the Orient—indeed, his remarks antedate its publication. Rather he was exploiting a lapidary discourse that, as Annmarie Drury points out, glittered throughout the corpus of Victorian translation, in such volumes as Lady John Manners’s Gems of German Poetry (1865) and Herbert Giles’s Gems of Chinese Literature (1884).88 Such language may have been particularly prevalent in Asian researches, however, given the genuine sense of discovering new texts, supported by stereotypical associations of the Orient with the exquisite or gaudy, and with fabulous wealth. Costello offered her readers ‘precious poetical gems’, for instance, while William Jones (according to the facetious Cowell) found in Bengal his ‘El-Dorado’.89 The metaphor plays host to various meanings. There is the implication that the treasures of oriental literature are waiting to be plucked whole from the ground— an unskilled labour of love, that perhaps anyone might perform.90 Gemstones, of course, must also be cut and polished, and this would suggest further employment for the abridgers and popularizers. Profit was certainly a motive for some among 86  University of Oregon: A-085 (Friedrich Max Mueller letters to Moncure Conway), Müller to Conway, 14 Dec. 1873 and 5 Feb. 1874. 87 Max Müller, ‘Preface to the Sacred Books of the East’, in The Upanishads: Part I (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1879), pp. ix–xii, xxi. 88 Drury, Translation as Transformation, p. 226. 89 Costello, Rose Garden, p. ii. 90  The Hungarian orientalist Ármin Vámbéry compared Turkish folklore to ‘precious stones lying neglected in the byways of philology for want of gleaners to gather them in’. This remark was translated by R.  Nisbet Bain, in Turkish Fairy Tales and Folk Tales (London: Lawrence and Bullen, 1896), p. 5. Bain’s was an English edition of Turkish tales originally published in Hungarian by Ignác Kúnos (1860–1945).

A Century of Translation  29 this crew, and analogies might easily be drawn between foreign exploiters of India’s material wealth and looters of her literature. Emily Mace highlights this monetary aspect of the metaphor, as well as the sense in which Müller himself uses it in his preface: deep down in the mine there is indeed some ‘sound and simple moral teaching’, but to get at it you will have to first toil through layers of useless rubble, and even ‘noxious vapours’. Or as Conway put it, truths of universal value can only be extracted from the world’s Bibles by discarding the ‘local and temporary’ matter which encases them.91 To add a final inflection, one also senses sometimes hovering in the background of these discussions the old adage about throwing jewels of wisdom to those without the taste or learning to appreciate them—an image Richard Burton resorted to when one of his translations ran afoul of the reviewers: Perpend what curious fate be mine, How queer be Fortune’s rigs, That set my sweets before the swine, My pearls before the pigs!92

Müller was making an important point. Scriptures are not self-help tracts or works of belles lettres, brimming with sweetness and light, but complex historical documents that need to be understood in their proper context. The purpose of the Sacred Books series was to supply that context—were it ever so ‘commonplace’ and ‘tedious’—in an exhaustive manner. ‘Extracts will no longer suffice’, asserts Müller as he surveys the field in 1879.93 But suffice for what? Did modern scientific standards, or imperial prerogatives, demand comprehensiveness? And when everything is translated, is everything consequently domesticated and absorbed into English literary culture—or will some things always resist transplantation outside their native soil? Surely that is the popularizer’s role. But if Müller’s remarks are taken to their logical conclusion, their offices will be made redundant by the modern standard edition. Today, a search on Amazon will soon make plain that the Penguin Classics and Oxford World’s Classics, employing professional translators, have indeed gained the upper hand over gifted amateurs. But throughout the fin de siècle and into the Edwardian period, the ‘dilettanti’ would continue to flourish, and the intriguing interplay between their activities and recognized scholars’ would persist (sometimes in a collaborative spirit, in other cases ter­ri­ tor­ial and acrimonious). Sir Edwin Arnold stands out as the most successful author in this period: a genuine scholar in Sanskrit and Persian, somewhat of an 91  Emily Mace, ‘Comparative Religion and the Practice of Eclecticism: Intersections in NineteenthCentury Liberal Religious Congregations’, Journal of Religion, XCIV/1 (Jan. 2014), 85–6. 92  Trinity College, Cambridge: Houghton 4/213 (‘The Reviewer Reviewed’, a pamphlet issued in 1881 to defend Burton’s version of The Lusiads against its many critics). 93  Müller, ‘Preface to the Sacred Books of the East’, p. xii.

30  Asian Classics on the Victorian Bookshelf impostor in Arabic and Japanese, he published a wide variety of translation and original poetry between the 1860s and the end of the century, including a collection of Islamic ‘gems’, Pearls of the Faith (1883).94 His English version of the Bhagavad Gita, The Song Celestial (1885), achieved huge commercial success, bested only by his blank verse epic based on the life of Buddha, The Light of Asia (1879). Richard Burton, too, would finally make his fortune with The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night (1885–8), although this ribald and erotic retelling of the familiar Arabian tales represented, I will argue, an elitist reaction against the popularizing trend. In a move which circumvented indecency laws but also sharpened the exclusivity of his publication, each of the sixteen volumes was sold to subscribers only, at a guinea apiece—a price which increased still further when the volumes were subsequently traded on the collectors’ market.95 This marked the upper extreme on a pricing spectrum which underwent, at its opposite end, a similarly dramatic dip, as falling paper and printing costs (and the expiration of copyrights) brought translations from Asian languages into the reach of the clerk or even workman. By the First World War, many of the texts that will feature in the following chapters were available either in standard cheap series, like Everyman’s Library, or in John Murray’s one- or two-shilling Wisdom of the East books, fifty-one of which were issued between 1905 and 1916 (the series resumed after the War and carried on till the 1960s). The price of Costello’s Rose Garden, too, came down with each reprinting, from the original price of twelve shillings and ninepence in 1845 to seven shillings and sixpence in 1887. By 1899 it could be had for a crown, by 1911 for one shilling and sixpence. Meanwhile, brand-new anthologies, like Holden’s Flowers from Persian Gardens (1902) or May Byron’s Light in the East (1912), were launched directly into this bracket. At such a price, forethought was not required in the acquisition of foreign literature—texts could be picked up on a whim, and discarded just as haphazardly, perhaps to be found by another reader. Chance acquisitions could open up undreamt-of vistas. Ultimately, the key development in the course of the period this chapter has surveyed was the evolution of an open market in translation, with most major texts served by a variety of English versions appealing to different interest groups and price brackets. By the first decade of the twentieth century, there were at least eight English translations of Hafez in print, and at least six more circulating secondhand. Three versions of Sadi’s Gulistan could be had for less than three

94 In Pearls of the Faith (London: Trübner, 1883), each chapter is named for one of the ninety-nine attributes of God. The Arabic text for each attribute is given, and then an English transcription. Arnold mistranscribes ‘Al-Malik’ on page 9 (giving it a long ‘a’) and ‘Al-muṣawwir’ on page 42 (rendering the letter sād as ‘z’). Both are errors characteristic of someone who learned the alphabet in India while studying Hindi/Urdu or Persian, rather than Arabic. 95 Mary S. Lovell, A Rage to Live: A Biography of Richard and Isabel Burton (1998; repr. London: Abacus, 1999), p. 689.

A Century of Translation  31 shillings and sixpence, with others available at higher prices. Five translations of  the Ramayana had been produced (and one prose synopsis), and three of Sakuntala (with another to follow in 1912). In some cases this development was belated in its arrival, but swift in its progress. For well over a century the only English Quran available was Sale’s, a text derived to a greater or lesser extent from the Latin of Maracci.96 When a wholly primary translation finally appeared in 1861, it issued from the pen of a High Church clergyman, J.M.  Rodwell, who wasted no opportunity to discredit the holy revelation.97 A fascinating document is Richard Burton’s much-used copy of this book, the marginalia of which show the great intellectual renegade, whose sympathies were professedly with Islam over conventional Christianity, constantly chafing with disgust and frustration. On page xxii, where Rodwell avers that Mohammed was an epileptic (‘of a highly nervous and excitable mother’), and thus susceptible to the delusion that he was appointed God’s final and definitive Prophet, Burton has inserted the blunt contra­dic­tion, ‘So he was’. Where Rodwell criticizes Islam for condoning slavery and polygamy, Burton points out that Christian scripture is not free of these blemishes, while the suggestion that the charismatic Mohammed willfully deceived his followers is dismissed by Burton as the narrow thinking of a ‘man who cannot understand what genius means’.98 Not long afterwards, however, E.H. Palmer completed his sympathetic Quran translation in a spirit of cultural relativism, and after decades of scarcity the public now had the luxury, and the predicament, of choice. An 1881 article in the Edinburgh Review compared the three Qurans for the benefit of the newcomer, weighing the literalness of Sale against the ‘poetic inspiration’ of Rodwell and the ‘freshness and buoyancy’ of Palmer, who attempted to reproduce the effect of vernacular Arabic by using modern English slang. Should one read the Quran as Muslims do, with the surahs in the conventional sequence, or should one—as the Review recommended—prefer the ‘scientific’ editorship of Rodwell who attempted to organize them in chronological sequence?99 Three years later one of the nineteenth century’s most adventurous readers, Lafcadio Hearn, informed a friend of these and other factors to be considered in making one’s purchase: There are two English translations besides Sale’s—one in Trȕbner’s Oriental Series, and one in Max Muller’s “Sacred Books of the East” (Macmillan’s beautiful Edition). Sale’s is chiefly objectionable because the Suras are not versified: the chapters not having been so divided in early times by figures. But it is horribly 96  Some selected passages from the Quran, though, were published by E.W. Lane (1843). 97  For an autobiographical fragment that reveals something of the roots of Rodwell’s interest, see LMA: P69/ETH/A/002/MS04238 (Parish Register of St Ethelburga). 98  Huntington: 634991, J.M. Rodwell, El-Kor’ân; or, The Korân: translated from the Arabic (London: Quaritch, 1876), pp. xxii–xxiii, 251. 99  ‘The Korān’, Edinburgh Review, CLIV/316 (Oct. 1881), 356–61.

32  Asian Classics on the Victorian Bookshelf hard to find anything in it. The French have two superb versions: Kazimirski and La Beaume. Kazimirski is popular and cheap (3fr 50); the other is an analytical Koran of 800 4to pp, with concordance, and designed for the use of the Government bureaux in Algeria . . . I have a great plan in view: to popularize the Legends of Islam and other strange faiths in a series of books.100

In addition, a rumour was abroad that Edwin Arnold—a personal idol of Hearn’s—was preparing his own popular translation, though this never came to pass. Hearn’s reading habits were exceptionally focussed on the non-Christian. But what of his correspondent, civil servant W.D. O’Connor, or any other reader who could only spare a limited amount of time to such literature—or who perhaps encountered and absorbed it involuntarily, as it circulated in their daily diet of text and image? The next chapter will begin to suggest the motives for general readers in turning to these translations, before Chapter 3 explains their practical opportunities for obtaining them, and surveys the widespread background presence of Asian literature and points of cultural reference in the wider Victorian scene. 100  Berg: ALS from Lafcadio Hearn to W.D. O’Connor, 29 June 1884. Hearn was mistaken about the Sacred Books of the East—the series was published by Oxford University Press, not Macmillan.

2 Taking an Interest In 1830, a twenty-­eight-­year-­old Harriet Martineau borrowed Sale’s translation of the Quran from her local library in Norwich. Meeting a friend on the way home, she was asked, ‘what do you bore yourself with that book for? You will never get through it.’ Little did the friend suspect the serious purpose that Martineau had in mind: she was going to win twenty guineas for writing an essay that would explain Unitarianism to Muslims.1 The story demonstrates that nineteenth-­ century motives for consulting translations from Arabic or other languages were as idiosyncratic as the individuals themselves. Nonetheless, several general factors can be seen at work stimulating interest in Asian literature and endowing it with cultural capital—­some specific to the British public, others applicable also in the United States and elsewhere. The issue of reader motivation will be raised again, especially in Chapter 7, but at this stage it is worth identifying the major stimuli so that, at the very least, we can look beyond the oft-­repeated assertions of im­per­ ial historians like P.J. Marshall and Bernard Porter that the British public’s attention was never decisively captured by the East, despite Britain’s intricate entanglements there.2

Growth Factors: Tolerance and Travel One contributing trend, and the reason for the Central Unitarian Association offering such an essay prize in the first place, was the growing attitude of religious tolerance and ecumenism. Unitarians have not traditionally proselytized, and it is very unlikely the essay was intended to spearhead a mission to Arabia. Rather, the purpose of the exercise was to adopt the perspective of the imagined Muslim audience, using analogies from Islamic tradition to explicate the Northern doctrine. If in 1830 (just one year after Catholic Emancipation), we would only expect a progressive denomination like Unitarianism to sponsor such an approach, by the middle of the period such open-­mindedness had become matter for mainstream discussion. In 1867, Emanuel Deutsch was employed as an assistant

1 Maria Westman Chapman (ed.), Harriet Martineau’s Autobiography (3 vols, Boston, MA: Houghton, Osgood, 1879), i, 115. 2 P.J.  Marshall, ‘British-­Indian Connections c.1780 to c.1830: The Empire of the Officials’, in Michael J. Franklin (ed.), Romantic Representations of British India (London: Routledge, 2006), p. 60.

Asian Classics on the Victorian Bookshelf: Flights of Translation. Alexander Bubb, Oxford University Press. © Alexander Bubb 2023. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198866275.003.0002

34  Asian Classics on the Victorian Bookshelf librarian in the British Museum when his essay on the Talmud appeared in the Quarterly Review. ‘A mighty change has come over us,’ the Jewish scholar told readers of the Tory periodical that, earlier in the century, had viciously attacked Martineau and her coreligionists: We, children of this latter age, are, above all things, utilitarian. We do not read the Koran, the Zend-­Avesta, the Vedas, with the sole view of refuting them. We look upon all literature, religious, legal, and otherwise, whensoever and wheresoever produced, as part and parcel of humanity. We, in a manner, feel a kind of responsibility for it. We seek to understand the phase of culture which begot these items of our inheritance—­the spirit that moves upon their face. And while we bury that which is dead in them, we rejoice in that which lives in them. We enrich our stores of knowledge from theirs, we are stirred by their poetry, we are moved to high and holy thoughts when they touch the divine chord in our hearts.3

The Quarterly essay was reprinted as a book and proved highly influential, not least on George Eliot who befriended Deutsch and is thought to have used him as the basis for Mordecai in Daniel Deronda.4 Her careful notetaking reminds us of the fine-­grained textual habits that an evangelical upbringing instilled, leaving behind skills that could be repurposed after the childhood dogma had been rejected. In recent times, open-­ minded members of Western societies have wanted to learn about alternative religious practice—­yoga, for example, and various forms of meditation and prayer. By contrast, as Susie Paskins has commented in a study of the British reception of Buddhism, their counterparts in the nineteenth century were much more interested in doctrine.5 When we consider this, we can see how a man like Henry Maynard may have been unconventional in his attitudes but not in his intellectual training. Born in the late eighteenth century, Maynard was a merchant trading with South Africa, a confirmed evangelical of a highly serious and yet also ‘intensely individualistic’ disposition. After his wife died prematurely, it was noticed that he kept a small image of Buddha in his bedroom. ‘That truth was generally not found on the side of the majority was his belief ’, commented his daughter Constance, who remembered his reading to her in the evenings from the orientalist Monier Monier-­Williams (his monographs on Indian religion, rather than his literary translations) and the Bengali reformer Keshub Chandra Sen, ‘or else passages from William Law the mystic, with glimpses of Jacob Behmer [sic]’. This would have been around 1862, when 3  Emanuel Deutsch, ‘The Talmud’, Quarterly Review, CXXIII/246 (Oct. 1867), 418. 4  Jane Irwin (ed.), George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda Notebooks (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), p. xxxi. 5  Susan Karin Paskins, ‘Imagining Enlightenment: Buddhism and Kipling’s Kim’, PhD dissertation, Birkbeck, University of London (2017), p. 13.

Taking an Interest  35 Constance was aged just thirteen. Such an atmosphere was undoubtedly stimulating for a young woman who would later join one of the first cohorts at Girton and become a pioneer of female education, though these bedtime readings were exclusively of a religious character. As was typical of evangelical households at the time, no novels—­excepting those of Sir Walter Scott—­were permitted within the walls.6 Those who chose to research non-­Christian religion were a varied class, by no means free of bigotry, and with varied motives. Hence a correspondingly wide range of books existed to serve their multiple constituencies. To compare two Chinese examples, the lurid, sensational and eye-­catching volume Dragon, Image and Demon (1886), was created by two missionaries determined to expose the ignorance and superstition of the ‘Celestial Empire’. A decent readership then, or so it appeared to the spirited authors, still yearned to see the Devil thwarted. Alternatively, Confucius: the Great Teacher (1890) by the army officer G.G.  Alexander offered a much more sympathetic introduction, and similarly sober—­ perhaps surprisingly—­ were the handbooks issued by the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge (such as Buddhism, authored by the Pali expert T.W. Rhys Davids). Their publications attempted to trace con­ tinu­ities between Eastern faiths and Christianity rather than vindicating one at the expense of the others. Mentioned in the last chapter, the most remarkable manifestation of this ecumenical spirit was probably the genre of books led by Conway’s Sacred Anthology. The seriousness with which some readers treated this exercise can be seen in a copy of the Anthology owned by James Vila Blake (1842–1925)—another Unitarian, who ministered to the congregations in Quincy and subsequently Evanston, Illinois. The book came into Blake’s hands during his pastorate at Quincy in the 1880s, and he has highlighted in pencil hundreds of individual passages, adding moreover such interesting handwritten notes as a reminder for himself to refer to a periodical article on Chinese literature he had pasted into his scrapbook. His focus in Conway’s first chapter, ‘Laws’, is on the ethic of reciprocity as mirrored in Leviticus, Confucius, and the classic Tamil text, the Kural—­an ethic which clearly undergirds the ‘Covenant’ he later established with his congregation in Evanston.7 ‘Love thy neighbour’ and ‘do unto others as you would have them do unto you’ are among the most consistent moral principles in world religion, though cultural differences can be masked by Christian translators’ habit of drawing on such familiar biblical formulations. The same tendency is evident when we read the text of the Sacred Anthology, and is consonant with its fundamental Christian basis, but we learn 6 C.B. Firth, Constance Louisa Maynard, Mistress of Westfield College (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1949), pp. 57, 39, 44. 7 Blake’s Covenant was subsequently adopted by a number of other Unitarian churches. Mark  W.  Harris, Historical Dictionary of Unitarian Universalism (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2004), p. 545.

36  Asian Classics on the Victorian Bookshelf something new when we actually handle the book, as Blake did over a century ago, and find that Conway’s ascriptions sit quite unobtrusive and abbreviated in the margins (e.g. ‘Christian. Matt.’ for Matthew’s gospel). They do not direct the reader, and thus for Blake to have come back to the book, allowing his eye to be guided by his own earlier markings, will have been to see quotation first and citation second, giving himself the option of absorbing a philosophical point before identifying its source.8 The annotations partly represent his personal musings, but also his professional work as a minister and sermonist, and finally as a poet. Blake’s verse is not discursive but lyrical and romantic: he sings the running waters and tree tops, and the divinity of common things, such as the experience of sitting with his daughters on the shore of Lake Michigan. His choice of metaphor, however, in describing this outing, in one of his last volumes, Discoveries (1904), is redolent of Blake’s lifelong cultural practice. Translate, O ye who can, And do into the words of man, These heavenly glories, And make me stories Of them, water and skies Sunny, and loving eyes, Night things in choir, And beach-­built fire: And since my language foreign is, Let some one tell me what is his, And if he hath a dialect As wealthy, wilful, uncorrect As Heaven. Or was it never? Or when, if any ever? Yet I would yield my life to hear That day divine once syllabled in ear.9

Universalist sentiments of the kind we see in Blake had been made possible by the steady erosion of Christian dogma in the course of the century. Some kept their faith, often grappling with doubt, or leaving their fold to join an alternative denomination. For others, the consultation of foreign scripture represented a

8 AVaTAR Misc.S.8a: Moncure Daniel Conway, The Sacred Anthology (New York: Henry Holt, 1874), pp. viii, 6–26 passim. Blake’s address in Quincy is written on the flyleaf. His books were later given to the Meadville Theological School and so the pencil highlighting, though consistent in style, may not be attributed to him with absolute certainty. The annotations, however, match the handwriting on an autographed letter: Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library, SC 134 (James Vila Blake to Mrs Woods, 12 Oct. n.y.). 9  James Vila Blake, Discoveries (Chicago, IL: Thomas P. Halpin, 1904), p. 202.

Taking an Interest  37 more decided rejection of conventional religion altogether. Though he received the bulk of his commissions from the Catholic Church, the Irish ecclesiastical sculptor James Pearse (1839–1900) was privately a sceptic who amassed a diverse collection of religious books—­a practice not uncommon among Freethinkers eager to vanquish their orthodox opponents in debate.10 It was presumably for this reason that he picked up a copy of Sale’s Koran at J. Darcy’s bookshop on the Dublin quays sometime after 1860. Pearse’s opinions were hardly shared by his son Patrick, a fervent Catholic who went on to lead the Easter Rising of 1916, but nonetheless the Quran was retained in the library of the experimental nationalist school he set up in 1908. The family’s books lined the walls at St Enda’s and were available for use by the boys, though they have left no obvious signs of use in the Quran.11 James Pearse is representative of a substantial class of rationalists with broadly heterodox interests. Rarer, but by no means insignificant, were those who resolved to replace their lost Christian faith with an entirely new religion. Among Victorian converts to Islam, the best known are Abdullah Quilliam and Marmaduke Pickthall, but one of the earliest was the peer and diplomat Henry Edward John Stanley (1827–1903). Stanley’s early publications demonstrate once again the tessellated nature of nineteenth-­century amateur orientalism, by which odd fragments and touchstones were assembled gradually into an idiosyncratic mosaic. In 1854, he produced a translation of a Chinese phrasebook devised for merchants by French Jesuits; in 1856, a selection of Romanian poetry. This Balkan publication reflected his role as attaché to the British Embassy at Constantinople, which coincided with the Crimean War and made him peculiarly sensitive to the delicacy of Britain’s position vis-­à-­vis the Ottoman Empire and her millions of Muslim subjects in India. Like Richard Burton, his affection for Turkey was mirrored by equal and opposite feelings towards Russia, though, unlike Burton, his seat in the House of Lords gave him considerably more clout when he chose to praise the connection between religion and jurisprudence encapsulated in the word Islam: ‘it is patriotism, legality, tradition, constitution, right’, he wrote in ‘Islam as a Political System’, published in 1865 in his collection of essays, The East and the West: our Dealings with our Neighbours.12 The fast-­growing facility of Asiatic travel, which was substantially eased by the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, can also be identified as a growth factor in the reading of translations—­though any survey of bookish tourists will inevitably be skewed towards the wealthier classes. We must also be cautious of biographies or

10  Brian Crowley, ‘ “His Father’s Son”: James and Patrick Pearse’, Folk Life: Journal of Ethnological Studies, XLIII/1 (2004), 73–4. 11  George Sale, The Koran; commonly called the Alcoran of Mohammed (London: Thomas Tegg, 1838). The volume contains a bookseller’s stamp and is still at St Enda’s School, now the Pearse Museum, Dublin. 12  Henry Stanley, The East and the West: our Dealings with our Neighbours (London: Hatchard, 1865), p. 141.

38  Asian Classics on the Victorian Bookshelf autobiographies that would lead us to perceive arrival in the Orient as a moment of unprecedented, epiphanic discovery. Stanley’s arrival in Constantinople in 1850 had a profound effect on him, but his journey to conversion nine years later did not begin on the Bosphorus. It can be traced to Cambridge where he studied Arabic and even, ultimately, to his childhood reading of the Arabian Nights.13 Most travellers had read about Asia before they went there, though for some an upcoming trip may have acted as a prompt for preparatory research. This was particularly true of the early twentieth century, by which time the wide choice of books in the market allowed individuals to tailor a course of reading centred on a particular country. Such an individual was Mary of Teck, who in 1893 married the future George V. The couple undertook two tours of India—­in the winter of 1905–6 and again in 1911–12—for which she prepared diligently, amassing a shelfload of histories, memoirs, guidebooks and translations that were later donated to the Royal Commonwealth Society. Queen Mary was time-­rich: according to her official biographer she sometimes read for six hours a day.14 But one of the more striking aspects of her collection is its affordability. While certain specialist items (such as Oertel’s Buddhist Ruins of Sarnath or Challey’s Administrative Problems of British India) would have taxed a shallower pocket, her choice of five poetic and philosophical works will not have cost her more than two shillings each. These were all Wisdom of the East books: Sadi’s Scroll of Wisdom (1906), Brahma-­knowledge: an outline of the philosophy of the Vedanta (1907), The Way of the Buddha (1909), The Rose Garden of Sa’di (1910), and The Bustan of Sadi (1911). Indeed, if we set aside two volumes which came into her possession later in life, the translations in Queen Mary’s collection were slim, portable books drawn exclusively from cheap series.15 The sixth work of Indo-­Persian literature on her shelf was an 1899 Everyman’s Library abridgement of the Mahabharata by Romesh Chunder Dutt—­something that would have been highly relevant during the second tour, when her husband was crowned Emperor of India at the Delhi Durbar. The site chosen for a delegation of pandits to make their oblations to the British monarch was on the bank of the nearby Yamuna River at a point where, as told in the epic, Yudhishthira sacrificed a horse and became ruler of all Hindustan.16 Travel is a contingent, unfolding experience however, and we should not expect travel reading to always derive from clear causes and yield measurable effects, nor for there to be such a neat congruence between literary narrative and physical itinerary. Not all travellers have a definite object in mind, and if there is

13  Jamie Gilham, Loyal Enemies: British Converts to Islam, 1850–1950 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), p. 23. 14 Charlotte Cavendish, The Biography of H.M.  Queen Mary (London: A.E.  Marriott, 1930), pp. 69–70. 15  CUL: GBR/0115/RCMS 89 (Queen Mary Indian collection). 16  John Fortescue, Narrative of the visit to India of their majesties, King George V and Queen Mary (London: Macmillan, 1912), p. 171.

Taking an Interest  39 something that they seek, they often reach it by a roundabout or serendipitous way.17 The complexities that we must appreciate might be illustrated by giving an ex­ample of the savvy of Tokyo booksellers, for though we might expect the American globetrotter to prepare herself mentally before taking passage for Japan, or even during the long Pacific voyage, this was not necessarily the case. Hortense Mitchell, an heiress who married the art collector Arthur Acton, instead bought her copy of Mitford’s Tales of Old Japan (a Macmillan’s Colonial Library edition) on arrival from a local shop, as did the Wyoming cattle baron H.E. Teschemacher.18 They will have viewed Tokyo life, then, with their own eyes and on the page, negotiating its modern streets while at the same time exploring the eighteenth-­century city that is limned in Mitford’s pages. Generally speaking, travellers’ perspectives were shaped by an interplay between day-­to-­day experiences and textual encounters—­a relationship sometimes of corroboration and reinforcement, but sometimes also of contradiction. One such clash took place in the minds of avid Arabian Nights readers who arrived in the Levant only to find it did not match their literary expectations. As Mary Roberts has observed, intrepid female travellers who penetrated the harem were often dismayed to find that alluring interior furnished after the manner of an English drawing room, while during his consular career Washington Irving resented a Turkish diplomat for wearing European dress. ‘The Arabian Nights Entertainments, that joy of my boyhood,’ he complained to a friend, ‘is fast giving way to the levelling and mon­ot­on­ ous prevalence of French and English fashions.’19 Disappointments of this sort soon became a cliché of Eastern travelogues, a fact that disturbs Bassnett and France’s rather too simplistic claim that the fast-­ growing consumption of travel accounts was—­ along with breakthroughs in philology—­one of two main forces driving popular interest in Asian translations.20 After all, the familiar comic mechanism of such episodes depends on the reader being acquainted first with the fiction, before being confronted with the reality. As with travel, so with travel writing: it is misguided to seek convenient sequences whereby one activity begets another, though they can operate in concert. In August 1848, Mary Louisa Lefroy, the seventeen-­year-­old daughter of an Irish parliamentarian, read Harriet Martineau’s Eastern Life and copied out a long

17  For a fuller account of readers in transit within the British imperial system, see Bill Bell, Crusoe’s Books: Readers in the Empire of Print, 1800–1918 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022). 18  NYU La Pietra, Florence, MAIN 1457 and AVaTAR Jp.S.1b: A.B. Freeman-­Mitford, Tales of Old Japan (London: Macmillan, 1894). Both books bear the sticker of Maruzen Kabushiki Kaisha, a Tokyo bookseller and publisher. 19  Mary Roberts, ‘Contested Terrains: Women Orientalists and the Colonial Harem’, in Jill Beaulieu and Mary Roberts (eds), Orientalism’s Interlocutors (London: Duke University Press, 2002), p. 190; Muhsin Jassim Ali, Scheherazade in England: A Study of Nineteenth-­Century English Criticism of the Arabian Nights (Washington, DC: Three Continents, 1981), p. 46. 20  Susan Bassnett and Peter France, ‘Translation, Politics, and the Law’, in France and Haynes (eds), Oxford History of Literary Translation in English: Volume 4, p. 50.

40  Asian Classics on the Victorian Bookshelf extract in her commonplace book. The extract does not contain Martineau’s own observations of Alexandria, however, but rather her English version of a description of Pompey’s Pillar translated into French by Silvestre de Sacy from the Arabic of Abd al-­Latif al-­Baghdadi, a genial physician who roamed Egypt in the twelfth century.21 Thus, a travelogue may act as a portal to a translation. Another pitfall we must avoid is to assume an equivalence between the country someone is travelling in and the books they choose to read in it. As Kate Flint points out, travellers often immerse themselves in books to shield themselves from uncongenial surroundings.22 Corporal Palmer read the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam pre­sum­ ably because it offered some relief from the daily adversities of the Western Front—­although whether that was because it transported him to the exotic East or because, on the contrary, this thoroughly domesticated English classic reminded him of home comforts, is uncertain. The palaeontologist C.W. Andrews seems to have taken his copy everywhere: Christmas Island (1902), Cairo (1904), USA (1907), Singapore (1908)—he wrote all his destinations down in the end­ papers.23 This Rubaiyat was an integral part of his experience of travel and, one presumes, the discomforts and dislocations that came with it, but it travelled with him generally and not merely to Asia. In fact, the most interesting juxtapositions occur when the relationship between text and place depends in large part on the reader’s own peculiar subjectivity. In the 1920s, Vita Sackville-­West was en route to Tehran to join her husband in his new post. Crossing the Indian Ocean aboard the SS Rajputana, she set about learning Farsi, but chose something different to hold her attention in the evening: The parties of Proust gain in fantasy from being read in such circumstances . . . they recede, achieve a perspective; they become historical almost, like Veronese banquets through which flit a few masked Longhi figures . . . I re-­enter their company after struggling with the Persian irregular verbs.24

Growth Factors: Global Empire and Metropolitan Anxiety Queen Mary and Vita Sackville-­West’s were not strictly leisure trips, but were occasioned by their husbands’ official roles. Palmer and Stanley also travelled to

21  Bodleian: MS. Talbot e. 17 (commonplace book of M.L. Talbot, 1847–8). 22  Kate Flint, ‘Travelling Readers’, in Rachel Ablow (ed.), The Feeling of Reading: Affective Experience & Victorian Literature (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010), p. 31. 23 Natural History Museum, London: MSS. SHE B/Box 2/10, copy of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam given to C.D. Sherborn by C.W. Andrews. 24 Louise DeSalvo and M.A.  Leaska (eds), The Letters of Vita Sackville-­West to Virginia Woolf (London: Hutchinson, 1984), p. 109 (Sackville-­West to Woolf, 8 Feb. 1926).

Taking an Interest  41 the Middle East as envoy and soldier, respectively, and even Andrews, who excavated in various British colonies, could be seen as an imperial actor. Another obvious but subtle influence to consider, then, were the various states of mind engendered by empire. Before any of these readers’ journeys to Asia were undertaken, Ralph Waldo Emerson had toured Britain in 1847–8 and felt convinced that the ‘self-­conceited modish life’ he saw about him, preoccupied with ‘trifles’ and ‘hating ideas’, would find its necessary antidote through prolonged contact with India. Oriental literature has a quality of ‘largeness’, Emerson finds, ‘that astonishes and disconcerts English decorum’, and which may give to England’s torpid system a salutary jolt. ‘For once there is thunder it never heard, light it never saw’. Citing the preface to Wilkins’s translation of the Bhagavad Gita, which his friend Thoreau had recently been studying at Walden Pond, he predicted the coming of ‘an irresistible taste for orientalism in Britain’.25 Surveying the British literary scene just two years after the publication of Costello’s Rose Garden, Emerson not only forecast that the empire would play a role in Britain’s cultural prosperity commensurate with its contribution to her material wealth. He actually suggested that the intellectual stimulus of the former could counteract the sluggish complacency begotten by the latter. To whatever degree the appetites of British readers were broadened by their polyglot empire, something that undoubtedly multiplied in the course of the next seventy years were declarations that it should and must be so. ‘It is only natural’, Justin Huntly McCarthy told readers of his prose version of Khayyam’s rubaiyat, ‘that the ruling island of an empire so largely eastern should come in the fullness of time to have that “taste for orientalism” which Emerson predicted.’26 Translators had a personal interest in furthering their profession and selling their books, and it is common to find not only amateurs like McCarthy but also academic scholars using their prefaces to pass comment on the readerly agenda. Musing on why the study of Sanskrit plays like Sakuntala had not recommended itself more to Europeans, Monier Monier-­Williams even framed his envisaged audience in terms of imperial duty (anticipating, in a more politically charged manner, the British ‘responsibility’ for Asian texts spoken of by Deutsch in his essay on the Talmud): The English student, at least, is bound by considerations of duty, as well as curiosity, to make himself acquainted with a subject which illustrates and explains the condition of the millions of Hindús who owe allegiance to his own Sovereign and are governed by English laws.27

25  Ralph Waldo Emerson, English Traits (Boston, MA: Phillips, Sampson, 1856), p. 257. 26  Justin Huntly McCarthy, Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam (London: David Nutt, 1889), p. xxxiii. 27  Monier Monier-­Williams, Śakoontalá; or, The Lost Ring (3rd edn, Hertford: Stephen Austin, 1856), p. vii.

42  Asian Classics on the Victorian Bookshelf It is notable that Monier-­Williams composed this preface specifically for the third, 1856 iteration of his Sakuntala which was priced at five shillings. Mindful of the broader public to a degree unusual in a mid-­century scholar, he seems to have been determined that ‘a plain edition’, as he called it, should appear for the benefit of those unable to afford its predecessors of 1853 and 1855 (a luxurious book costing over £2).28 In the 1850s, five shillings was standard for a cheap reprint of a recent publication, and put Monier-­Williams on a par with, say, Carlyle’s Life of Sterling—­though to put that figure in perspective, only 2–3 per cent of British households would have been able to regularly spend that sort of money on books.29 Other translators made a special case for Islam, and the responsibility of Britons to acknowledge the faith practised by one in every five of their ‘fellow subjects in the British Empire’. T.W. Arnold, Professor of Arabic in the University of London, knew full well how the Muslim population of India had been convulsed when Great Britain went to war with the Ottoman Sultan, hereditary guardian of Mecca. But he skirted over this political controversy in the essay he contributed to Oxford University Press’s ‘Unity Series’ in 1922, offering instead a utopian vision in which airships and telegraph lines would reinforce the bonds of cultural sympathy that already united Britain with her dependencies. Islam may historically have been disdained as an alien, hostile creed, Arnold concedes: But the increased facilities of communication between one part of the globe and another, and the consequent shrinkage of the world must soon compel men to recognize that the old geographical obstacles that have hitherto kept men apart have largely disappeared and will, in the future, tend even more rapidly to make the intellectual content of human thought common to all the civilized races of the earth.30

Arnold was not alone in his sentiments. As Annmarie Drury has found in her investigation of the Omarian phenomenon, ‘belief in the viability of translation as a force for cultural melding played an important role in the imperialist ethos of late-­Victorian Britain.’31 His particular hope is that common doctrinal points in the Abhrahamic religions will ease the reconciliation he seeks, especially the commonality of mystic practices (he gives special credit to R.A. Nicholson for elucidating these points in his recent translations of Rumi). Arnold then is advocating ideas that had been in currency already for several decades, and 28  Letter from Monier Monier-­Williams to Henry Hart Milman, 2 Oct. 1855 (collection of John Randall). 29  Richard D. Altick, ‘English Publishing and the Mass Audience in 1852’, in Writers, Readers, and Occasions (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1989), pp. 147–8; Edward Cheshire, ‘Results of the Census of Great Britain in 1851’, Journal of the Statistical Society of London, XVII/1 (Mar. 1854), 47. 30  Thomas Walker Arnold, ‘Europe and Islam’, in F.S. Marvin (ed.), Western Races and the World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1922), p. 152. 31 Drury, Translation as Transformation, p. 178.

Taking an Interest  43 undergirding this rather lofty discourse of imperial cosmopolitanism, we might also cite many more pragmatic examples in which knowledge of the Islamic world is proposed as a desirable acquisition for those looking to keep up with world affairs and Britain’s role in them. When Costello’s Rose Garden was noticed in a university magazine, the reviewer remarked on what a shame it was that ‘of the poets of that highly political region’, only a few were known to the English ‘general reader’.32 At the other end of our period, in 1908, John Murray encouraged customers to spare a shilling for The Confessions of al-­Ghazzali, one of its new Wisdom of the East titles, because the work (known in Arabic as al-­ munqidh min al-­ḍalāl) was much read among the Young Turk leaders in Istanbul, ‘and indeed most of the rising Muhammedan thinkers’.33 But did the public pay any heed to these exhortations and inducements? Well, in its first ten years of publication The Confessions of al-­Ghazzali sold 2,352 copies, which would suggest the existence of an appreciable British audience for spiritual autobiographies by medieval Persian philosophers—­though whether many of those readers were motivated by a desire to know what occupied Enver Pasha in his ruminative hours is hard to say.34 Certainly, there were people who, by their own accounts, were fired with imperial enthusiasm—­or who were at least initially set along that shining path—­by their enjoyment of oriental translations. In the late 1890s, Indian civil servant M.E. Grant Duff met Sir George Taubman Goldie, a fellow colonial administrator who played a pivotal role in the formation of modern Nigeria, and asked him what had originally turned his attention to Africa. Goldie replied simply, ‘The Arabian Nights’: ‘They produced,’ he said, ‘the very strongest effect on my imagination; and after I had become my own master, at one-­and-­twenty, I left the army, which I had joined as an Engineer, went off to Egypt and pushed on to Khartoum, with vague dreams of a future in Abyssinia. That came to nothing, and it was on the op­pos­ ite side of the Continent that I was fated to work.’35

Goldie’s is not the only account of this sort, but in most cases there was a more complex interaction between empire, the ideology of the popularizer, and the priorities and reactions of their individual readers. Emerson’s prediction has been quoted often enough. Less frequently repeated is the succeeding paragraph, in which he raises a doubt as to what form the ‘taste for orientalism’ will take when it penetrates to the public at large. For Britain’s intellectual progress, he writes, is led by a tiny minority of the studious and contemplative, whereas the nation’s power 32  ‘The Rose Garden of Persia’, Oxford and Cambridge Review, II/4 (May 1846), p. 363. 33  JMA: Acc.12927/277 (Confessions of al-­Ghazzali book file). 34  JMA: MS.42740–42 (copy ledgers). 35  Mountstuart E. Grant Duff, Notes from a Diary, 1896–1901 (2 vols, New York: E.P. Dutton, 1905), II, ii, p. 170.

44  Asian Classics on the Victorian Bookshelf stems from the hungry millions making up the remainder of the population, who have a remarkable knack for turning the knowledge generated by these ‘perceptive’ people to their own gain. Emerson’s words are those of a man who advocated a cultural elite, and they sound a warning for the popularizer: your idealistic gestures towards interculturality may well be ignored by the mining engineer or oilman bent on equipping himself with some basic knowledge for the ground zero of colonial extraction. Readers will digest knowledge according to their own priorities. Hence, what we might read today as imperial propaganda was interpreted by Theosophists and liberals according to their own lights. Edwin Arnold was a convinced imperialist, but many of his readers were not: through their experience of his writing, some Indians would even come to articulate their own discourse of cultural nationalism. M.K. Gandhi, who first read the Bhagavad Gita in Arnold’s English version while studying law in London, is a signal example from the 1880s, though less well known is the delightful party hosted by Motilal Nehru on his sixth-­fourth birthday, for which all guests had to come dressed as favourite works of literature. The veteran Congress leader impersonated The Light of Asia.36 And the proposition may be reversed, too: we may safely assume that not everyone who read Romesh Chunder Dutt’s abridgements of the Hindu epics were alive to the liberal nationalist politics embedded between his lines, or that they would have found them palatable. None of this should be taken to show the weakness of the impact made by imperial (or anti-­imperial) projects on the day-­to-­day consciousness of distant British readers. The fundamental point is that empire exerted an often subtle but continuous pressure on the outlook of Victorian readers; and its effects, even if quite invisible to its stakeholders, cannot be exaggerated. Neither should we suppose that only British readers were susceptible to its influence. Imperial sentiment registered across the topography of American society, too. Some striking evidence is offered by the decidedly cosmopolitan Ladies’ Reading Club of Houston, which upon its formation made the decision to spend each year studying the literature, art, and history of a specific country. In their first year they selected Egypt, because according to one member in 1885 ‘it was attracting the attention of the civilized world on account of the conflict in the Soudan and the tragic fate of the gallant Gordon.’37 During the following two decades their annual themes included China, Japan, and ‘Oriental Literature’ in general, along with various European nations. Different, equally revealing evidence is offered by Annmarie Drury. Noting the ecumenical ideals that many British admirers of the 36 Alexander Bubb, ‘Tracing the Legacy of an Experimental Generation: Three Iconic Indian Travellers in 1890s London’, in Susheila Nasta (ed.), India in Britain: South Asian Networks and Connections, 1858–1950 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), p. 50; Arvind Mehrotra, Partial Recall: Essays on Literature and Literary History (Ranikhet: Permanent Black), p. 35. 37  Elizabeth Long, Book Clubs: Women and the Uses of Reading in Everyday Life (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2003), p. 36.

Taking an Interest  45 Rubaiyat cherished, Drury detects a contrasting anxiety and scepticism about ‘cultural fusion’ in the United States that manifested in a whole sub-­genre of Omarian parody and facetious spoofing.38 No word has been more persistently misused in discussions of late nineteenth-­ century imperialism and globalization than ‘triumphalist’. Even Rudyard Kipling, one of the most strident advocates of Anglo-­American imperium, issued repeated warnings that the British sphere was entering upon the terminal phase that eventually befalls all empires: decadence.39 The discourse of decline and how it might be reversed is integral to British imperial thought at the turn of the century, taking hold just as the literary and artistic worlds become increasingly preoccupied with notions of degeneracy, corruption, regression, and the possibilities for new expression these might offer. Thus, inasmuch as the demand for Asian translations was driven by imperial forces, it was also necessarily associated, especially at the close of the century, with fears not only for the British Empire but for the survival of ‘Western civilization’ in general. In an article written for the Hearst press in connection with his American lecture tour of 1901, during which he read from his version of Omar Khayyam, Richard Le Gallienne spoke of ‘an epochal sadness’ afflicting the world, a melancholy ‘which has before marked the cul­min­ ation of great civilizations, the triumphal exhaustion of great moral forces’. It is in the United States, he goes on to say, that the consequent taste for ‘pessimistic’ poetry like Khayyam’s is at its most pronounced, for it is there that the ill trends gauged by political economists are at their most pronounced. Le Gallienne remains vague as to what coming crisis these tendencies are hastening, though a few months earlier he had predicted in the same newspaper an inevitable war between capital and labour.40 Several years later, a columnist in the Christian Life drew the same connection between pessimism and interest in Khayyam, though pointing to a different cause: the erosion of faith by science, which while increasing our material understanding and prosperity has failed to explain ‘the overwhelming mystery of existence’. Those who feel oppressed by this mystery, the Unitarian periodical remarks, have adopted the Rubaiyat as a substitute scripture.41 The most complete connection between capitalism, empire, and universal decay, however, was made by those who pointed to the pall of disenchantment spread across the world by industrial modernity, bringing with it an erasure of magic, myth, and tradition. Lafcadio Hearn, whose diverse literary tastes were ­mentioned at the end of the previous chapter, sounded this note throughout his career but especially during the last fourteen years of his life, which he spent in 38 Drury, Translation as Transformation, p. 178. 39  Alexander Bubb, Meeting Without Knowing It: Kipling and Yeats at the Fin de Siècle (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), p. 124. 40  Richard Le Gallienne, ‘Pessimism in Literature’, New York Journal and Advertiser, 23 Dec. 1900 and 10 Mar. 1901. 41  ‘The Philosophy of Omar Khayyam’, The Christian Life, 3 Apr. 1909.

46  Asian Classics on the Victorian Bookshelf Japan. ‘There are no ghosts, no angels and demons and gods: all are dead,’ he wrote in 1893 to Professor Basil Hall Chamberlain, one of his friends in Tokyo. ‘The world of electricity, steam, mathematics, is blank and cold and void.’42 Hearn saw translators, in particular translators from Asian languages, in heroic terms, as artists who were combatting this trend and potentially rescuing the West from deracination. A few months before he gave W.D. O’Connor his summary of translations of the Quran then available, he expressed agreement with his friend’s distaste for Matthew Arnold, who was a ‘colossal humbug’ and ‘un­utter­ ably dreary’ in comparison with his orientalist namesake: Don’t you think Edwin Arnold far the nobler man and writer?—I love that beautiful enthusiasm of his for the beauties of strange faiths and exotic creeds. This is the spirit that, in some happier era, may bless mankind with a universal religion in perfect harmony with the truths of science and the better nature of humanity.43

Asian literature plays, then, a double role in the theorization of decadence: some commentators perceive the growing taste for it as the outcome of widespread pessimism and weltschmerz, while others propose it as a prophylactic against such ailments. This is a complicated matter, not least because, ironically, it was the very man Hearn disdained who had been one of the first to hint at such a remedy. Like Emerson and Thoreau, in the late 1840s and 1850s Matthew Arnold was pre­occu­ pied with Wilkins’s translation of the Bhagavad Gita, and the former’s remark on the ‘largeness’ of the sacred poem has an affinity with Arnold’s praise for ‘the Indian virtue of detachment’. The notion that Sanskrit literature might inculcate an objective, detached, and serene vision as a corrective to English narrowness, materialism, and self-­obsession became a powerful discourse that would inform Theosophy and ultimately persist long after the period covered in this book.44 It was also a discourse that spread in time to other languages. Introducing his translation of the Muallaqat in 1885, Charles James Lyall claimed that ‘no poetry better fulfils Mr Matthew Arnold’s definition of “a criticism of life” ’.45 Asian texts were thus subject to competing narratives of decadence and primitivism, a dichotomy that reflects the fundamental paradox in Western understandings of Asia itself. The historical interpretation established by Edward Said is 42  HRC: MS-­1890 (Lafcadio Hearn Collection), 2.2, Hearn to B.H. Chamberlain, 12 Dec. 1893. 43  Berg: ALS from Lafcadio Hearn to W.D. O’Connor, 1 Mar. 1884. Hearn’s heroization of Edwin Arnold can also be seen in two letters he wrote to the Englishman now held by the University of Iowa, Special Collections (shelfmarks MsL.H436.ar and MsL.H436.ar2). 44 Matthew Arnold, ‘The Function of Criticism at the Present Time’, in R.H.  Super (ed.), The Complete Prose Works of Matthew Arnold (11 vols, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1960–77), III, 174. 45  Charles James Lyall, Translations of Ancient Arabian Poetry (London: Williams and Norgate, 1885), p. xviii.

Taking an Interest  47 that the colonizers saw their new possessions as societies that had fallen into decline, and which were therefore unable to resist European encroachment. The cultural achievements of such nations lay in a far-­distant Golden Age, whereas their modern arts and literature were derivative and contemptible. Among those who perpetuate this narrative, typically, are the colony’s Western-­educated elites who wish to revive that glorious past as part of their programme of cultural nationalism.46 Meanwhile, by studying the Golden Age, the colonial power may be able to co-­opt this nationalist programme while also avoiding decadence and moral exhaustion itself, by extracting the primitive vitality presumed to still reside, vestigially, in the colony and infusing it into metropolitan culture. This is a compelling model and seems to explain accurately the European understanding of India. But it would be incorrect to extrapolate it, without adjustment, to the whole of the Asian continent. Ross Forman has shown how models of cultural hegemony based on India can tell us little about attitudes to China, which was entangled with British power in a way that is particular and not readily com­par­ able.47 Furthermore, Arabic literature was not necessarily perceived as having followed a consistent trajectory of decline: on the contrary, it was seen to have passed through phases of dispersion and rediscovery in a manner akin to European culture. Mohammed ousted the idols from the Kaaba, replacing them with a stern new monotheism. And perhaps he tore down also the Muallaqat—­ that is, the seven odes that supposedly hung in the air around them, inscribed on sheets of Coptic linen. But as the vernacular changed during the succeeding centuries, clerics perforce turned to the poetic tradition in order to understand the classical Arabic of the Quran. Nineteenth-­century Arabists like Lyall or Terrick Hamilton were inclined to see this event as a moment of rediscovery during which ‘theologians’ became ‘humanists’—perhaps it was even an opportunity for cultured urbanites of the Baghdad court to regain some of the heroic values of their desert forebears.48 The analogy with the European Renaissance, in which Christendom successfully harnessed the arts and learning of pagan antiquity, is obvious and thus the Islamic world may have been seen as following a parallel path to the West. Possibly, in the latter’s age of doubt and vacillation, it could even offer an alternative. And again for different reasons, Persian history confounded attempts to neatly chart the path of cultural decline against the ebbing of political power. As mentioned in the previous chapter, most scholars held to the idea that the national standard of poetry dropped away after about 1500—yet this was precisely when the country, reunited under the Safavids, was entering the period of its greatest power and sophistication. E.G. Browne went further than most. For 46 Edward W. Said, Orientalism (1978; repr. New York: Vintage, 1979), p. 233. 47 Ross  G.  Forman, China and the Victorian Imagination: Empires Entwined (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 12. 48 Lyall, Translations of Ancient Arabian Poetry, p. xxxix; Terrick Hamilton, Antar, a Bedoueen Romance (4 vols, London: John Murray, 1820), I, xv–­xvii.

48  Asian Classics on the Victorian Bookshelf him, Persian writing had originally flourished only as the Abbasid Caliphate began to totter in the 800s. It was therefore ‘essentially the literature of a decadence’, and its ‘pessimism’ and ‘pantheistic spiritualism’ were decadent characteristics.49 Such a counterintuitive model should give us pause for thought when contemplating writers of the late nineteenth century who proposed to import into the jaded, fin-­de-­siècle metropole of London the influence of poets like Hafez or Nizami, to whom they imputed vitality and lyrical richness. Returning to Deutsch’s ringing call for the universal study of scripture, quoted at the start of this chapter, we can see that even his optimistic language is suffused with anxiety. ‘We children of this latter day’, he writes, evoking both the youth of Western civilization and its belatedness, seek to analyse the ‘phase[s] of culture’ through which our textual inheritance has passed, discarding that which is dead and recovering that which is still vital. Deutsch’s rhetoric suggests scientific progress, an upward teleology, and yet there is also here a latent sense of time foreshortened: the end of history approaches. Thus, while the notion of administering an invigorating cultural infusion is connected to a variety of imperial idealism that endorsed cultural melding, it also needs to be seen as intrinsically bound up with the fear of decadence and European decline. At the same time, the Victorian use of decadence as a concept for interpreting the literary history of Asia operates differently, sometimes contradictorily, across its various countries and cannot be reduced to a simple binary whereby the modernizing West is counterpoised to the stagnant East.

The Cult of Khayyam The overwhelming popularity of Omar Khayyam that emerged in the last decades of the century owed something to each of the major stimuli we have just examined. Indeed, the Rubaiyat has already been mentioned under three of the four headings above. The devoted following that developed around the poem affords us a wealth of evidence to demonstrate not only how the interests of different audiences can overlap considerably, but also how a single text could possess multiple valencies—­ not least for Le Gallienne, for whom the poem constituted both the ideal complement to the ‘epochal sadness’ of the late nineteenth century, yet also its possible antidote. Furthermore, it is through the cult of Khayyam that we can perceive these ‘growth factors’ intensifying, for without doubt the poem came into vogue in a decisive manner—­suggestive even of a generational shift. 49  Berg: ALS from E.G. Browne to T. Fisher Unwin, 12 May 1901. Unwin had commissioned a history of Persian literature from Browne, but the latter could not decide how to chronologically divide the two volumes. The evolution of Persian literature, he protested, is so much less voluminous than its decadence.

Taking an Interest  49 Following its rescue from the penny box in 1861, news of the anonymous translation—­and of Fitzgerald’s authorship—­percolated gradually through literary society. But such was the scarcity of copies that even elite readers who knew of the work were not necessarily familiar with its text. ‘Have you seen, or do you possess, the Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám?’, asked Austin Dobson of the book collector Frederick Locker-­Lampson in 1875. ‘I want greatly to read it.’50 Nine years later the situation appears to have changed little. The Edwardian critic Arthur Quiller-­Couch, then an undergraduate, recalled that the poem’s very existence ‘was known to half a dozen men in Oxford at the most’. Among his generation, though, there was an unspoken yearning for something new. The Pre-­Raphaelite milieu who had been the Rubaiyat’s first admirers no longer inspired sympathy, while the Victorian poets of stature seemed now spent and faintly ridiculous: Tennyson ‘pontifical’ and ‘lapidary’, Browning simply incomprehensible.51 Since Fitzgerald had died in 1883, moreover, this anecdote marks the cusp of the massive unauthorized reprinting of the translation, and its distribution to readerships far beyond undergraduate coteries. By 1899, Clement King Shorter, editor of the Illustrated London News, was remarking on the vast middle-­class public that had not only embraced the poem but had done so in the same spirit as their social betters. Like the Oxford students, they had lost their appetite not simply for mid-­ Victorian writers, but specifically for those who grappled earnestly with doubt, science, and social change. ‘There must be much in Carlyle and Sterling and Emerson which can make no appeal to the young men of to-­day who are under thirty’, Shorter remarked. ‘They are buying those ten thousand copies of the half-­ crown “Omar Khayyám” that have been already disposed of to the booksellers.52 The ‘mental struggles’ confronted in the middle of the century, Shorter clarified, were still present but had ‘assumed other aspects’. In 1909, fifty years after its original publication, his views were corroborated by an insightful Times Literary Supplement columnist, who suggested that the Rubaiyat had been to the 1880s and 1890s what In Memoriam had been to the 1850s and 1860s. If Tennyson’s public were agnostics, they remained positivists who strove to attain a new accommodation with doubt. But when faced with the same dilemmas, their children willingly acquiesced to perplexity and incertitude. Thus, the Rubaiyat sat neglected for decades, ‘but when its day came it so exactly fitted the needs of that generation that it lay for a time on every table and its stanzas were in every mouth’.53 By 1911, it had become such an essential component of fin-­de-­siècle poetry that Grant Richards, the publisher who originally sponsored Le Gallienne’s 50 Houghton: MS Eng 62 (Letters to Frederick Locker-­Lampson, 1874–93), Austin Dobson to Locker-­Lampson, 17 Nov. 1875. 51  Arthur Quiller-­Couch, Memories & Opinions: An Unfinished Autobiography, ed. S.C.  Roberts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1945), pp. 81, 75. 52 Clement King Shorter, ‘A Literary Letter’, Illustrated London News, CXIV/3130 (15 Apr. 1899), 542. 53  ‘Edward Fitzgerald’, Times Literary Supplement, 376 (25 Mar. 1909), 109.

50  Asian Classics on the Victorian Bookshelf version, had begun to issue it in uniform editions alongside A Shropshire Lad, The Ballad of Reading Gaol, Sonnets by Lord Alfred Douglas, and a number of older works including In Memoriam. He called it the Omar Series.54 This is a British chronology, and it is important to remember that developments followed a different course in the United States, where Fitzgerald’s copyright did not run. An 1869 article by Charles Eliot Norton in the North American Review caught the attention of educated readers in Boston, Philadelphia, New York, and elsewhere, among them Colonel James Watson who went at once to his bookseller and demanded ‘the poetical works of Omar’. Once the bookseller had understood that his customer was not referring to Homer, he ordered a copy from London which Watson promptly replicated on a press in Ohio.55 The Watson facsimile ran only to a hundred copies, but a much larger commercial edition was issued by the firm of J.R. Osgood in 1878. Only one year later the most accomplished and artistic of American pirate publishers, Thomas B. Mosher, was listening to a lecture on hygiene in his home town of Portland, Maine when he heard the speaker quote these lines: The Moving Finger writes; and, having writ, Moves on: nor all thy Piety nor Wit   Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line, Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.

From that hour Mosher was a devotee of Fitzgerald’s translation—­and later, of Le Gallienne’s. He printed several editions of both, and supposedly liked to tell ­people ‘I think I need Omar every hour.’56 Thus, the American surge of curiosity about Khayyam anticipated its British counterpart by at least ten years, though interest peaked at the same point in the 1890s and 1900s. During these decades the single firm of Houghton Mifflin marketed six different formats of the poem—­ Folio, 16mo, Popular, Comparative, Phototype, and Edition de Luxe—­and sold nearly 30,000 copies in total.57 ‘Craze’ and ‘mania’ are overused words, but in this case there is no hyperbole. Numerous phenomena could be cited to illustrate the ubiquity the Rubaiyat attained in its various translations, not least the still larger corpus of re-­translations undertaken and printed by hobbyists.58 But perhaps the most eloquent testimony is delivered by the various Americans born at the turn 54  See https://seriesofseries.owu.edu/omar-­series/ (accessed 1 Sept. 2021). 55 Edward Fitzgerald, Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, the Astronomer-­Poet of Persia, ed. William Augustus Brown (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1900), pp. 113–14. 56  ‘Curtain Goes Down for Last Time in Career of Thomas Bird Mosher’, Portland Evening Express, 1 Sept. 1923. 57  Houghton: MS Am 2030 (Houghton Mifflin Company Records, 1866–1968), 32 (Book Sales 1891–1907) and 33 (Book Sales 1905–23). 58  There are far too many of these to list, though particularly interesting examples are the Esperanto version of William E. Baff, the Greek translation published in 1902 by the English schoolmaster Ernest Crawley, and one Father Carroll of New York who produced a Gaelic Rubaiyat in 1901. See HRC: Omar Khayyam Collection, Box 2.

Taking an Interest  51 of the century who shared their names with the Persian poet. Among these were Ezra Pound’s son Omar (1926–2010), the five-­ star general Omar Bradley (1893–1981), the Utah senator Omar  B.  Bunnell (1912–1992), and the fashion designer Alexander Kiam (1894–1954), who was dubbed ‘Omar’ at prep school and later adopted the nickname professionally.59 Mosher’s self-­professed ‘need’ for Omar on an hourly basis recalls the writer for Christian Life, who pointed to the Rubaiyat’s role as a touchstone, or even ‘a kind of sacred scripture’ to his disciples. That such a materialist vision of the universe could soothe and console rather puzzled Fitzgerald, who reacted with amazement to the news that Leslie Stephen had taken to reading the poem after the death of his wife.60 He would have been still more surprised to learn that Thomas Hardy asked the Rubaiyat to be read to him on his deathbed, or to see the gravestone I observed in West Norwood Cemetery inscribed with one of the quatrains (Figure 2.1).61 If the Rubaiyat was a way of life for some readers, for  others it was a way of death. Moreover, Mosher’s remarks highlight the

Figure 2.1  West Norwood Cemetery, London (author photograph)

59  Adrian Room, Dictionary of Pseudonyms: 13,000 Assumed Names and their Origins (1998; repr. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2014), p. 261. It should be noted that Omar is also a biblical name (he is listed as one of Esau’s grandsons in Genesis 36:11). 60  Alfred and Annabelle Terhune (eds), The Letters of Edward Fitzgerald (4 vols, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980), III, 704. 61  Evelyn Hardy, Thomas Hardy: A Critical Biography (London: Hogarth Press, 1954), p. 321.

52  Asian Classics on the Victorian Bookshelf interpersonal nature of many readers’ experience: they conceived their reading as a dialogue with the medieval poet, an ongoing relationship that deepened with each re-­reading. This mysterious rapport was the ideal subject for ‘Bookish Company’, a series of articles written by the critic Andrew Lang in 1889 that dwell on the bond between reader and author. Omar Khayyam lived for a time at Merv, Lang notes, a Central Asian city then much in the newspapers owing to its stra­ tegic value in the ‘Great Game’ being contested between Britain and Russia. But if this imperial reverberation may pique our interest, Lang suggests, what will hold our attention is the strange impression of ‘finding . . . ourselves in the past’: It is as if the fable of repeated and recurring lives were true, as if in the faith, or unbelief, or merriment, or despair, or courage, or cowardice of men long dead, we read the echoes of our own thoughts, and the beating of hearts that were once our own.62

The notion of communicating with the dead will have been particularly resonant for someone like Lang, who was involved in psychic research. But it also pertains to the hidden objective of the article, which was to promote the new prose translation devised by his friend Justin Huntly McCarthy. McCarthy’s preface represents a departure from the practices of earlier translators, since in place of contextual information and learned commentary, he instead foregrounds his personal relationship to the text. Indeed, he begins by presenting himself not as an author but as a fellow-­reader. Born in 1859, the year Quaritch published Fitzgerald’s first edition, McCarthy was Lang’s junior by fifteen years and consequently encountered the Rubaiyat at a formative age, when the poet Mary Robinson, slightly older and as yet unmarried, lent him her copy from which he made a small handwritten transcript. He subsequently carried this about with him on a tour of Italy, reading it so constantly that, as he wrote in his preface, ‘even now the winds of Verona and the waters of Venice . . . seem to bear the burden rather of the dear old Persian singer than any echo of Romeo, or Tasso, or Horace. I made myself a kind of little religion out of Omar.’63 In the same way that the Arabian Nights became for several older Victorians a focus of nostalgia for their lost childhood, the Rubaiyat is the key to McCarthy’s adolescence. A dedicatory poem he attached to the translation suggests that to re-­read its quatrains is to experience a painful retraction of time, and to be ‘haunted’ by a face that may be his own, or Robinson’s:

62 Andrew Lang, ‘Bookish Company: Omar Khayyam’, Wit and Wisdom, VII/173 (31 Aug. 1889), 265. 63 McCarthy, Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, p. ix.

Taking an Interest  53 My youth lies buried in thy verses: lo, I read, and at the haunted numbers flow, My memory turns in anguish to the face That leaned o’er Omar’s pages long ago.64

The pages and lines McCarthy reads are always ‘Omar’s’. He forms a ‘little religion’ not from the poetry, but from the poet himself. What expectations is McCarthy trying to encourage in his readers? From what he says, it would seem the most successful translator is the most suave. Rather than eliding his presence, he uses his personal charisma to effect an introduction between us and his old friend the author, tactfully facilitating the conversation. This effort at sociability extended to the design of the physical book. McCarthy’s preface refers to the want of a ‘companionable’ volume, a hint which is not lost on Lang, who in ‘Bookish Company’ also complains of the ungainly width of both Fitzgerald’s and Whinfield’s volumes. ‘If we want Omar at all, we want him in a volume for the pocket’, Lang writes, and the latest offering from McCarthy recommends itself to the reader ‘in a very handy shape indeed’. This new ‘pocketable’ edition was not merely cheap or convenient, but was designed to support the illusion of kinship with Khayyam. It was for these affective stakes that translators like Eben Francis Thompson were competing when they continued to enter an already crowded field in the early twentieth century. In 1907, the Massachusetts lawyer and amateur Persianist brought out his Behtarīn Edition, making the extraordinary claim that it would prove ‘the BEST because the most INTIMATE’.65 This sense of personal kinship could be taken to an extreme of self-­ identification, no more so than in the case of Guy Bates Post, an actor who took the leading role in Omar, the Tentmaker, a romantic comedy that premiered at New York’s Lyric Theater in January 1914. When an interviewer for the women’s magazine, the Delineator, asked him how he felt towards Omar Khayyam, Post responded immediately ‘I love him’. ‘Of course! Most of us do’, replied the journalist, before gently encouraging the actor to distinguish between the ‘Omar of literature’ and the dramatic character he and the playwright Richard Tully had created for Broadway. Carried away by his enthusiasm, Post ignored the implication: ‘I LOVE him . . . I approach him with reverence. His lovableness is remarkable even when he is cynical . . . I play him as I do because I believe I know him—­know him better than anyone else!’66 As gushing and absurd as this may seem to us, its significance lies in the way that Post seeks to vindicate his interpretation by claiming 64  Ibid., p. lxi. 65  UCLA: MS 378 (Collection of Material about Omar Khayyam, 1872–1948), Box 4, Eben Francis Thompson folder. 66  Glen Visscher, ‘Guy Bates Post Talks about His Other Self ’, Delineator, LXXXV/22 (Aug. 1914), 10.

54  Asian Classics on the Victorian Bookshelf a greater knowledge and more intense devotion to Omar than any of his potential critics. This is what McCarthy means by foregrounding his present activity as a translator with his past experience as a reader: implicitly, he is using the same justification as Post for his interpretative decisions. By McCarthy’s own admission, his Persian was ‘at the best but beggarly’, and he clearly relied upon the 1867 French version of J.B. Nicolas. But linguistic competence was not necessary for the intervention he was trying to make. McCarthy’s was the first English version in prose rather than verse, and more importantly his was the first to completely detach the quatrains from the dawn-­to-­dusk arc in which they had been arranged by Fitzgerald. Later translators had deferred to this conceit—­even Whinfield’s learned edition of 1882 concludes with quatrains dwelling on death, while its cantos, titled ‘Alif ’, ‘Be’, ‘Te’, and so on after the letters of the Persian alphabet, suggest a sequence. But in McCarthy the quatrains become again independent units with a pungent aphoristic quality, some having the ring of sage counsel and others of Sufistic gnosis. Lang himself seems to have appreciated this effect, and in his own practice as reader went farther, by isolating individual lines within quatrains. Among those marked by vertical pencil strokes in his own copy are: ‘Among men nothing succeeds save counterfeit and hypocrisy’, and ‘to be good is all; the rest avails not’.67 At this point it is worth emphasizing that McCarthy’s translation, while targeted at a non-­expert readership, was not intended for wide circulation. He was writing for dilettantes like himself: readers who had spent a few hours with a Persian grammar, and could con the phrase ‘Diwan-­i-­Hafez’ printed plainly in large, nastaliq script across the cover of his edition of Hafez’s ghazals (no English transliteration provided). The same readers would probably have understood, as Thompson evidently envisaged, that ‘behtarīn’ means ‘best’. McCarthy is thus addressing the non-­academic readership, but carving out a niche within it. This makes his second edition of 1898 doubly instructive. For the retitled Quatrains of Omar Khayyam, McCarthy’s publisher David Nutt replaced the original plain cloth cover with a green and gilt jacket featuring an Arabesque archway design. More compact page-­setting, and the removal of the preface as well as 20 per cent of the quatrains, reduced the volume from 218 pages to 94, resulting in a book that was slimmer, more portable, and cheaper: priced at three shillings and sixpence instead of the original ten shillings, and $1 in the United States where it was distributed by Brentano’s.68 The intention was clearly to reach a larger readership, though whether the decision was McCarthy’s or his publisher’s I have been unable to determine. Whoever was responsible, the most striking effect of this

67  HRC: PK 6516 M3, Justin  H.  McCarthy, Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam (London: David Nutt, 1889), pp. 30, 36. 68  The Athenaeum, 3209 (27 Apr. 1889), 550; Publishers’ Circular LXIX/1694 (17 Dec. 1898), 731; The Annual American Catalogue, 1898 (New York: Office of the Publishers’ Weekly, 1899), p. 146.

Taking an Interest  55 editorial retrenchment was that the ‘mass of translation’ originally presented by McCarthy as the accumulation of many years’ hobbyism was now sequenced according to Fitzgerald’s template. The second edition begins at daybreak, with an immediate command to the cupbearer (‘Rise, boy’) to fetch some wine. Spring (‘the time of roses’) is approaching, and Omar discourses on the faded grandeur of kings turned to dust. Eventually the flowers do bloom, and then wilt, and we close with dusk and the prospect of the grave. The overall effect is by no means pleasing, since it regiments the poetry into clusters defined by topic, and thus we go through at one point an entire phase of quatrains themed around potters and clay. Nevertheless, the consecutive arrangement was evidently what readers had begun to expect by 1898, or at least were thought to expect. Whoever may have been responsible—­author, publisher, or a third-­party editor—­in this fashion McCarthy’s individualistic experiment, premised on his own longstanding devotion to Khayyam, was ultimately brought into line with the dominant culture of reading that had come to surround the Rubaiyat. The readers referred to in this chapter have for the most part represented the better-­off segments of society, and an objection could well be raised that the motives I have identified would have been less readily applicable to the working classes. Certainly, foreign travel was an impossible luxury for such readers—­ though not the armchair globetrotting enabled by travel accounts. Not all journeys were undertaken for leisure, moreover, as some of the soldiers and emigrants cited later in this book will attest. In regard to imperialism, empirical studies have suggested that Britain’s disenfranchised took little interest in an enterprise in which they held no stake. But postcolonial scholars like Bill Schwarz have pointed out the limitations of conventional evidence in this area, and argued persuasively for the existence of a submerged imperial consciousness that only becomes visible under certain provocations.69 As for the aesthetics of decadence, within the period itself one can find many voices asserting that only those who were free of exhausting labour could afford to be world-weary. There aren’t enough roses and wine to go round, the Daily Mirror noted ruefully in 1909, and in the unlikely event of Khayyam’s epicurean philosophy taking hold among the London poor it could only have a destructive influence. ‘Where in the modern, sore-­pressed world of Dreadnoughts and taxes does it lead them? It can only lead them to unutterable discontent or to a sad parody of Persian indolence.’70 In the United States, journalist William McIntosh expressed similar misgivings in Elbert Hubbard’s socialist magazine, the Philistine. Persian poetry and metaphysics offer

69  Jonathan Rose, The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes (2nd edn, New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 2001), pp. 335–41; Bill Schwarz, Memories of Empire: The White Man’s World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), pp. 216–17, 338–40. 70  ‘Where Omar Leads’, Daily Mirror, 31 Mar. 1909, p. 7.

56  Asian Classics on the Victorian Bookshelf no consolation to a Brooklyn abattoir worker, who considers himself hardly b ­ etter off than the livestock who daily pass under his hand: When on Gowanus’ hills the whistle blows What dreams are mine of Hafiz’ wine-­red rose? And when I drag my leaden feet toward home No sensuous bulbul note woos to repose.71

A survey of autobiographies by working-­class activists and radicals, however, demonstrates that these predictions of demoralization and intellectual paralysis were far from accurate. Robert Blatchford (1851–1943) was a keen Omarian and often quoted (and pastiched) Fitzgerald’s translation in his socialist newspaper, the Clarion.72 It was in the Clarion’s pages that the suffragist Annie Kenney first read the quatrains, while her brother Rowland shared his memory of them with his foreman on a construction site (the foreman, a kindred spirit, had already recited ‘The Lotos-­Eaters’ by heart).73 Welsh miner Wil Jon Edwards (1888–1962) spent a penny on a paperback Rubaiyat from the bookstall of the Rationalist Press Association in Aberdare, and bricklayer’s son Jesse Collings (1831–1920) also obtained his own copy, which he kept always upon the table in his bachelors’ lodgings.74 Edwards enthusiastically endorsed Khayyam’s invitation to ‘grasp this sorry Scheme of Things’, and set about remoulding it according to the desire of the Independent Labour Party. In contrast, Collings, perhaps in keeping with a man who eventually joined the political establishment (he represented Birmingham for the Liberal Unionists), managed somehow to tailor Khayyam to fit his own quintessential narrative of hard work, sobriety, and self-­help. He concludes the eighth chapter of his memoir by quoting the same lines heard by the young Thomas Mosher in Maine: ‘I learnt one special lesson from him, namely, well to consider a step before it is taken, and that a deed once done cannot be recalled: “The moving finger writes, and having writ moves on . . .” ’.75 This adds an entirely new branch to popularization. We have seen how a poem originally intended for a strictly limited coterie audience became a staple of the middle-­class drawing room through the agency of profit-­driven publishers—­and, 71  William McIntosh, ‘The Rubaiyat of O’Mara Khayvan’, The Philistine: a Periodical of Protest, I/4 (September, 1895), 125. McIntosh was managing editor of the Buffalo News. 72  See, for example, two items in the Clarion issue for 16 Dec. 1904: ‘A True Song’ (p. 1) and ‘The Clarion’s Latest’ (p. 8). 73  Annie Kenney, Memories of a Militant (London: Edward Arnold, 1924), p. 23; Rowland Kenney, Westering (London: J.M. Dent, 1939), p. 78. 74  Edwards also attempted, unsuccessfully, to initiate a newspaper feud with the local magistrate, Sir Thomas Marchant Williams, an amateur Persianist who had derided Khayyam in a recent article. Wil Jon Edwards, From the Valley I Came (London: Angus and Robertson, 1956), pp. 123–5. 75  Jesse Collings, The Life of the Right Hon. Jesse Collings (London: Longmans, Green and Co, 1920), p. 49. Collings’s recollection may not be fully trustworthy, since when he was a young man the Rubaiyat was very little-­known in Britain.

Taking an Interest  57 in the United States, pirates. We have seen how an influential actor like McCarthy, asserting an authority over the text based upon his deep personal sympathy for Omar, attempted to reshape public reception of the quatrains in the 1890s, before ultimately yielding to the narrative alignment established by Fitzgerald and entrenched by commercial success. Finally, alongside such elite attempts to steer the text’s destiny, we may see at the same time journalists like Robert Blatchford broadcasting it to working-­class readers who interpreted it, and exploited it politically, in a variety of idiosyncratic ways while middle-­class fellow-­travellers like McIntosh or the Mirror columnist looked on disapprovingly.76 There is, then, no limit to the Rubaiyat’s permeation of British and American reading culture at the turn of the century: the major driving forces we have identified propel it into all quarters, while the relationship of intimacy that readers are encouraged to develop with the text leads each to look upon it as a private revelation. But there were limits to the nineteenth-­century public’s capacity for absorbing its lessons, and for facing and tolerating cultural otherness in general.

The Limits of Victorian Cosmopolitanism In 1884, Arthur Quiller-­Couch could find only a handful of men at Oxford who had heard the name Omar Khayyam, but in the same year a benefactor of the women’s college of Somerville, Amelia Edwards (1831–1892), was corresponding with Charles James Lyall. The Indian civil servant was then close to completing the translations from pre-­Islamic Arabian poetry mentioned a few pages ago, and for his next project, Edwards urged him to abandon his plans for a critical edition of the Rubaiyat (‘that can wait—& scholars can wait for it’) and instead continue the popularizing work he had begun in a recent article: The ’Omar you depict is myself, yourself, ourselves; a dreaming, hoping, despairing, enquiring, impatient soul, who cannot help questioning time & eternity—­ even though he knows it is in vain.

Edwards suggests that Lyall dismantle the narrative scheme devised by Fitzgerald, and present the ‘detached’ quatrains in prose, thus producing an ‘intelligible’ and ‘honest’ version ‘as all can enjoy, & rely upon’.77 76  In a similar vein, Blatchford’s contemporary and editor of the Labour Champion, Tom Maguire, exploited widespread familiarity with the Arabian Nights to get his point across. For his restaging of Sinbad’s encounter with the Old Man of the Mountain as a confrontation between worker and capitalist, see Ingrid Hanson, ‘Serfs, Saints and Comrades: Working-­Class Medievalism and the Narratives of Victorian Socialism’, in David Matthews and Michael Sanders (eds), Subaltern Medievalisms: Medievalism ‘from below’ in Nineteenth-­Century Britain (London: Boydell & Brewer, 2021), pp. 148–50. 77 Somerville College, Oxford: letters to Sir Charles Lyall deposited by his daughter, Miss D.H.D. Lyall, 20 XI 1969 (Amelia B. Edwards to Lyall, 3 Dec. 1884).

58  Asian Classics on the Victorian Bookshelf At first sight, Edwards’s letter seems an ideal piece of evidence for the existence of the kind of non-­expert reader I have hypothesized. She professes a powerful, instinctive affinity with the foreign author, despite vast distances of time and culture, yet laments her want of knowledge and cries out for guidance from some disinterested Arnoldian pundit: ‘when I read Mr Fitzgerald . . . it seemed to me that Mr Fitzgerald was certainly right. I consulted Mr Stuart Poole, & he convinced me in quite the opposite direction. I read your article, & all you say seems to me to be true! I go round like a weathercock.’ However, her enthusiastic response also illustrates the limits to Victorian understanding. Firstly, in her reading of existing commentaries Edwards has become trapped in the long-­ running debate over whether Omar Khayyam was a Sufi, or if he in fact repudiated Sufism. Several popular translators tried to use this question as a lever to prise their man out of the hands of scholars, coming down strongly on one side or the other, and leaving their browbeaten readers unable to see that the elusive Persian poet might well, like Whitman, have contained multitudes. Secondly, Edwards cannot tolerate the unfamiliar cadence of the Persian rhyme that Fitzgerald so memorably imitates. Danny Karlin has contrasted the AABA scheme characteristic of the ruba‘i with the ABBA stanza adopted by Fitzgerald’s friend Tennyson for In Memoriam, producing a ‘measured language’ which Fitzgerald himself described as ‘mon­ot­ on­ous’. While Tennyson’s stanzas gesture towards conformity and resolution, the Persian verses ‘refus[e] to form a couplet, to pair with anything else’, and thereby became for Fitzgerald ‘an emblem of intellectual and spiritual solitariness’.78 That sound of solitude jarred upon Edwards, however, who complained of ‘uncomfortable quatrains, where the third lines all go begging for a rhyme & leave one’s ear unsatisfied’. Some were willing to listen to this imported prosody—­notably Robert Browning, a more famous correspondent of Lyall’s who received help from him in imitating the Arabic tāwil metre in ‘Muléykeh’ (1880).79 But others were unwilling or unable to suppress their native hankering for familiar cadences. Lastly, Edwards asked Lyall to produce a non-­sequential prose translation that people like herself could ‘rely upon’ (the underlining is hers). Five years later, McCarthy’s version would in some measure answer to her description, but as we have already seen this translation was undertaken not to bring clarity to the general reading public but to serve his own dilettante project—­and his innovations were, in any case, eventually curbed to meet middlebrow expectations. A combination of individual reluctance, then, and larger forces at work in shaping publishing and taste managed to significantly constrain Victorian readers’ ability to understand foreign texts. They were hardly helped, moreover, when 78  Karlin, ‘Introduction’, p. xlv. 79  Hédi A.  Jaouad, Browning upon Arabia: A Moveable East (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), p. 110.

Taking an Interest  59 translators attempted to justify their interpretation on the basis of some mysterious personal affinity with the long-­dead author, or on the unrivalled strength of their own emotional response to the source text. Two contemporary examples from Australia illustrate the proprietorial interest that translators of widely differing persuasions took in the man they invariably referred to as ‘Omar’. During the First World War, Francis Dyson of Sydney published an English version of Nicolas’s French translation as a fundraiser for the Red Cross, later reissuing it with an eccentric preface identifying Khayyam as an exemplar of Sufi mystical thinking. Dyson, then, represents the ecumenical strand we have already identified. But shortly after his intervention, the Tute brothers of Rosebud, Victoria returned from the war wishing to claim Khayyam as part of the imperial experience. Privately printed in suburban Melbourne, the Tutes’ translation had been commenced years earlier in the boredom of ‘a lonely Indian station’, and their audience was consequently prompted to recognize the elegiac verses as an embodiment of the translators’ sacrifice in service of the Raj. ‘They conjure for the authors memories of exile and toil,’ the preface remarks, ‘heat and discomfort.’80 In prefaces like these, the subjective not only validates the translation but is clearly expected to enhance its appeal. They make it easier to understand Le Gallienne’s extraordinary tactics with the Rubaiyat, which anticipated what he would subsequently attempt, as we will see in Chapter 5, with Hafez’s ghazals. As he told his publisher Grant Richards, his aim was confusion: to ‘get Omar shaken up in a new Kaleidoscopic combination of himself & his translator’.81 Reading statements like these, one begins to suspect whether those who made them did not allow their own priorities to quite eclipse concern for the historical author whom they ostensibly venerated. Is there such a great distance between their actions and the more explicitly chauvinistic opinions voiced by members of the Omar Khayyam Club in London, some of whom seem to have believed that the Rubaiyat was more or less an invention of Fitzgerald, with Khayyam providing at most an incidental inspiration?82 One of its spokesmen, Edmund Gosse, suggested as much in a 1902 attack on ‘the absurd multiplication’ of translations. ‘We bring you much closer and more trustworthy renderings of your favourite Omar’, Gosse complains, is the catchphrase that ‘these excellent translators cry aloud to the public’. But their efforts are in vain, because everything the public values in the poem was interpolated by Fitzgerald, and nothing more is to be gained from

80 Francis Dyson, Ruba’iyat of Omar Khayyam (Sydney: William Brooks, 1927), p. 3; Richard Clifford Tute and Clifford Sherlock Tute, Translations from Omar Khayyam (Malvern, VIC: McKellar Press, 1919), p. 3. 81  LRO: 920 LEG/124/1 (ALS from Richard Le Gallienne to Grant Richards, 13 Nov. 1896). 82  This attitude alienated a number of people, among them the Hafez translator Walter Leaf: ‘I left the Omar Khayyam Club years ago . . . To tell the honest truth, I don’t think any of them knew or cared anything about Persia or Persian Literature, beyond what they got from FitzGerald.’ BL: Add MS 55126 (Macmillan Papers), Leaf to Frederick Macmillan, 16 Nov. 1910.

60  Asian Classics on the Victorian Bookshelf dwelling on the original. Indeed, for the real Omar Khayyam, practitioner of algebra and astronomy at the Seljuq court in Merv, ‘none of us care sixpence’.83 Is Gosse denying that a translator owes anything to his source? Not quite. He made translations himself from Ibsen, with whom he would not have dared to take such liberties, and so there is a clear double standard at work. But he was intending to be provocative, by adopting an uncompromisingly Parnassian, art-­ for-­art’s-­sake position whereby a counterfeit article may be considered more beautiful, and therefore more legitimate, than the original model which it seeks to replicate. He took the same line in an article on Meredith’s story ‘The Shaving of Shagpat’, challenging his readers to admit their preference for arabesque fantasy over any translation from real Persian or Arabic literature. ‘The true genius of the East breathes in Meredith’s pages’, Gosse claims, and not in ‘the genuine Oriental tales’. Indeed, it is the latter that seem like an imitation, ‘and not a very good imitation’.84 To take these views as normative—­even though Gosse was among the most influential critics of his day—­would be a mistake. I have already noted that Victorian readers set a premium on the genuine, as they conceived it, often assuming the oldest texts to be the most authentic, and we will continue to see how popular translators and many of their readers were heavily invested in the historical existence of poets (even poets who, like Valmiki, may never have lived at all). But Gosse’s words may be taken as a salutary reminder. Having identified various factors that motivated nineteenth-­century readers to delve into the clas­ sic­al literature of fundamentally different cultures, we must accept that, in some cases, their needs could be met as—­or even more—­satisfactorily by imitations and pseudotranslations. Nobody has ever located the mysterious Sanskrit manuscript from which F.W. Bain claimed to have produced A Digit of the Moon (1898), yet his books enjoyed great popularity, as did the erotic poetry which Edward Powys Mathers derived partly from the Kashmiri poet Bilhana and partly from his own imagination. To attempt to distinguish between what is really translation, and that which only purports to be, will not teach us much about a literary culture where these boundaries were not always observed and where different strains of intercultural literature mingled haphazardly. We need to be particularly sensitive to this phenomenon when dealing with publics less well equipped to detect when a writer’s tongue was wedged in his cheek. A sophisticated woman close to the centres of literary gossip could probably tell that the author of the couplets entitled The Kâsidah of Hâjî Abdû el-­Yezdî (1880) was none other than Richard Burton himself, but many less clued-­up readers probably took it to be a real translation from the Arabic. Moreover, neither of those persons may have particularly

83  Edmund Gosse, ‘Introduction’, in George Bentham (ed.), The Variorum and Definitive Edition of the Poetical and Prose Writings of Edward Fitzgerald (7 vols, New York: Doubleday, Page, 1902), I, xxviii. 84  Edmund Gosse, Gossip in a Library (London: Heinemann, 1891), p. 326.

Taking an Interest  61 cared one way or the other. The Kâsidah was widely read, and for many people its more memorable lines (‘He noblest lives and noblest dies / Who makes and keeps his self-­made laws’) became fully integrated, in their poetic vocabulary, with phrases from Omar Khayyam and other historical poets. This ambivalence did not, of course, deter reviewers who questioned Burton’s bona fides as contentiously as they later disputed Bain’s. Indeed, debates over the accuracy of translations in the nineteenth century can be as vigorous as they are baffling. At first, it is hard to see why Le Gallienne, who took the greatest liberties with the Rubaiyat, was also the translator who most publicly broke with the Omar Khayyam Club and set himself against its cult of Fitzgerald.85 It becomes easier to decode these controversies when we perceive that what is driving them is often not questions of linguistic merit, but anxieties over distribution and popularization. Five years after the Kâsidah, Burton began publishing his multivolume edition of the Arabian Nights, taking care in his prospectus to denigrate all previous translations. His predecessors had behaved like theatrical impresarios: rather than illuminating and clarifying the text, they had made it ‘tinselly with limelight’. Or they had been false jewellers, giving the public ‘paste instead of diamonds’. Here we can see another variation on the gemstone/treasure metaphor discussed in the last chapter, with a debate about linguistic fidelity on the surface and, underlying it, a barely concealed attempt to preserve the text’s exclusivity and hence its cachet. Burton’s imputation of falsity and lifelessness to prior translators, and his appeal to a cognoscenti who can tell the difference between real and counterfeit jewels, tremendously irked reviewers like W.T.  Stead who protested that nothing could be more ‘real’ and vital than the mid-­Victorian child’s im­agina­ tive response to the stories. ‘The charm and the magic and the wonder belong to the dog-­eared, ill-­printed editions of our school days,’ Stead cried, ‘and not to Lane nor to Payne nor to Burton, for all their erudition.’86 Stead had quarrelled with Burton earlier over the obscenity of his language. In this article he contests its authenticity, but not on the basis of textual accuracy, which is not a battle he is qualified to fight. Because his purpose is to defend the general readership against Burton’s attempt to safeguard the exclusivity of the Nights, his criterion instead is who best understands the inner ‘life’ of the text—­ translator, or reader. For his part, Burton is striking a posture typical of the im­per­ial servant who has enjoyed privileged access to the East; the same reaction emerged, instinctively, in Rudyard Kipling when he met Justin McCarthy in a London restaurant in 1889, shortly after the latter had published his Khayyam translation: ‘[he] was talking cheap orientalism to amuse me. I wasn’t amused.’87

85  Richard Le Gallienne, ‘Our Book of the Week: Omar Khayyam’, Weekly Sun, 326 (9 Apr. 1899), 1. 86  ‘Literary Notes’, Pall Mall Gazette, 27 Oct. 1894, p. 4. 87  Thomas Pinney (ed.), The Letters of Rudyard Kipling (6 vols, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1990–2004), I, 373 (Kipling to Edmonia Hill, 3–25 Dec. 1889).

62  Asian Classics on the Victorian Bookshelf Both Kipling and Burton saw an authentic artefact that was being popularized and brought into general circulation. In the process it was being diluted with interpolation and imitation, and consequently cheapened as knowledge of it was dispersed. Again, accuracy was not the true casus belli, because in neither case did their reactions reflect their own, highly mercurial translation practices, as demonstrated on Burton’s side by the Kâsidah, and on Kipling’s by the convincing imitations of Kabir that Corporal Palmer wrote down. The real issue was proprietorship, and this contest—­the contest for who should control the process of popularization—­may have done more than anything else to limit readers’ ability to engage with cultural alterity, even as it responded to growing curiosity. Kipling’s sense of value implied in the word ‘cheap’, with its necessary connotation of supply and demand, is revealing and leads us onto a more detailed investigation of how translations circulated as commodities within the literary marketplace. If in this chapter we have identified the factors which assigned cultural capital to certain texts, we will now examine the transactions—­conversational, journalistic, architectural, and, last but not least, the traffic in physical books—­through which this capital was exchanged and invested.

3 Circulating The first, and always the most widespread way in which Asian literature circulated in English was as a fragment: a phrase, an image, a dialogue, a character. Arthur Quiller-­Couch was born in 1863 and, as we heard in the last chapter, went up to university in the early 1880s. As the amiable Cambridge don of later years, he would give a number of popular lectures, in one of which he reminisced about his mid-­Victorian childhood, and an occasion on which a kindly relative had led him inside a camera obscura on Plymouth Hoe. Here he saw the images of pass­ers-­by on the promenade outside being projected silently onto a white table—­meeting and gesticulating, bowing or lifting their hats, swinging their canes or wheeling their perambulators, and eventually strolling off the rim. Regardless of their doom, the little victims played—­they came to the edge of it and so dropped off, like the people in the Vision of Mirza—­dropped off and departed this life into nothingness.

Much like these fleeting phantoms, he reflected, was that great procession of nineteenth-­century men—­Gladstone, ‘aquiline of eye’; Disraeli ‘with a face like a mask’; Lord Salisbury; Ruskin, Darwin, and Huxley; William Morris, Kinglake, and ‘Burton of The Arabian Nights’. They had crossed the national stage and just as swiftly become the stuff of memory.1 Mirza, and his vision of a bridge over which the souls of the living are passing towards the hereafter, is not a personality from Arabic literature. He was invented in 1711 by Joseph Addison (who claimed, improbably, to have learned of him in a manuscript acquired in ‘Grand Cairo’). The Spectator editor pieced together his fable from the imagery of Galland’s Arabian Nights, in particular the tale of Abou Hassan who accosts travellers as they cross the river into Baghdad. He drew also perhaps on the Quranic description of the Chinvat Bridge, a location derived from Zoroastrian myth where the blessed are parted from the damned.2 Like several of the texts mentioned in the preceding pages, then, Mirza descends from a mixed ancestry. But rather than interrogate his questionable authenticity, what

1  Arthur Quiller-­Couch, Studies in Literature, Second Series (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1922), p. 284. 2  For Addison’s interest in the Quran, see Ros Ballaster, Fabulous Orients: Fictions of the East in England, 1662–1785 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 30.

Asian Classics on the Victorian Bookshelf: Flights of Translation. Alexander Bubb, Oxford University Press. © Alexander Bubb 2023. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198866275.003.0003

64  Asian Classics on the Victorian Bookshelf should really intrigue us in this passage is the manner in which Quiller-­Couch chooses an image adapted ultimately from Middle Eastern mythology to evoke his Victorian sense of temporal displacement. The sixty-­four-­year-­old critic finds himself caught in an eddy, at a confluence of memories: Addison is an author he would have read in adolescence, but the magical mechanism of the camera obscura inevitably calls up the supernatural scenarios of the Nights, which no doubt beguiled his young imagination (though not in Richard Burton’s version). Perhaps there was also the suspicion, as he delivered his lecture in the 1920s to a hall of Cambridge undergraduates, that both the Nights and eighteenth-­century orientalia were, like Lord Salisbury and the magic-­lantern show, dropping out of people’s collective memory. Certainly, few today would understand his reference to the Vision of Mirza, whereas among people of his generation it was evidently common currency. Ultimately, the allusion may have been selected quite unselfconsciously, simply because such artefacts circulated ‘cheaply’ in the literary economy of the period and came readily to hand.

Allusion and Quotation The imagery chosen by Quiller-­Couch in his reminiscence is symptomatic of the allusions to Asian literary texts—­sometimes genuine, sometimes ‘counterfeit’— that feature constantly in Victorian fiction, poetry, journalism, memoir, and political discourse, and of the casual manner in which they are often made. The Nights is the greatest source of such allusions, Peter France registering ‘innumerable overt and covert references to its stories’ in the period.3 Djinns or genies recur frequently, of course, often when witnesses are at a want for words to describe the industrial marvels of the age. Mr Hale uses this very simile to evoke the awful power of a steam-­hammer in Gaskell’s North and South, while yet another camera obscura—­this one built by the Edison Company in the early 1890s for filming motion pictures—­was described by its designer as having ‘a weird and semi-­nautical appearance, like . . . the air-­ship of some swart Afrite’ (in this case the choice of words, Marina Warner comments, does point squarely to Richard Burton’s translation).4 The magic carpet, too, lent its glamour to the astonishing swiftness of railway and telegraphic communication. Or alternatively, it pointed up the absence of such facilities, and served as a fanciful go-­between for friends and relatives sundered by the seas. Hard at work on Tales of Old Japan, Mitford wrote to his father from his diplomatic posting in Edo in 1868: ‘I wish some good fairy would give you the loan of a Carpet for a few hours to come and 3  France (ed.), Oxford Guide to Literature in English Translation, p. 150. 4  Elizabeth Gaskell, North and South (London: Penguin, 1995), p. 81; Warner, Stranger Magic, p. 371.

Circulating  65 pay me a visit after the fashion of the people in the Arabian Nights.’5 At the other end of the social spectrum J.R. Clynes, who went to work in the Oldham mills at the age of ten, made his first long journey in 1899 to attend the Trade Unions Congress at Plymouth. He compared the sensation of the train carrying him out of the smog and into rural sunshine to a magic carpet flight in the ‘Arabian Nights’ Entertainments’, using the title associated with the old ‘Grub Street’ editions of the early nineteenth century.6 The Nights represented spiritual or emotional release as well as physical escape. Charlotte Brontë was particularly taken with ‘The Story of the Fairy Peribanou’, which features a tent that magically expands and contracts, and a spyglass that allows its owner to see his beloved across unlimited distances. She made use of its imagery in Chapter 12 of Shirley, and again in Villette (1853) for the scene where Lucy steals from her dormitory by moonlight and watches Graham as he admires a display of fireworks. I kept a place for him in my heart, an older Lucy reflects, . . . a place of which I never took the measure, either by rule or compass: I think it was like the tent of Peri-­Banou. All my life long I carried it folded in the hollow of my hand yet, released from that hold and constriction, I know not but its innate capacity for expanse might have magnified it into a tabernacle for a host.7

Literary allusions to the Nights are not always so rich and complex. Often they dropped altogether casually, even glibly, from the pens of facile writers, who when needing to describe something of fantastic shape or proportion reached hastily for the rote similes of carpet and genii—­oriental clichés whose exotic lustre soon grew to be as tarnished as the Persian rose and nightingale. Such frequency of occurrence begs the question of when these nods to the Nights finally start to tail off and grow remoter from literary discourse. It is hard to give definitive answers, though the admittedly flawed Google Books dataset does suggest a downturn after 1920, at least in references to less well-­known stories. A search for peribanou/paribanou/peri-­banou between the years 1850 and 1870 brings up fifteen occurrences in English texts other than the story itself (excluding periodicals and reissues of the same text). Between 1900 and 1920 the figure is thirteen, but between 1920 and 1940 only five. Better-­known characters like Scheherazade and Badroulbadour hold more or less constant.8 5  CUL: MS Add.8669 (Algernon Bertram Freeman-­Mitford to his father, 20 Oct. 1868). 6 J.R. Clynes, Memoirs: 1869–1924 (London: Hutchinson, 1937), p. 88. 7  Charlotte Brontë, Villette (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. 458. She used the same story to make a joke at the expense of a reviewer who took ‘Currer Bell’ to be male, and who would be consequently surprised if he possessed the magic ivory spyglass, and could glimpse the author in Yorkshire ‘mending a stocking or making a pie’. Margaret Smith, The Letters of Charlotte Brontë (3 vols, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000), II, 480 (Charlotte Brontë to Harriet Martineau, Oct. 1850). 8  Google Books accessed 21 Sept. 2018. Copyright restrictions significantly impinged on attempts to extend the search after 1940.

66  Asian Classics on the Victorian Bookshelf In some cases, allusions like these were evidently recruited for the display of ostentatious and baffling erudition. But of necessity, their sheer frequency in English publications must assume a widespread ability on the part of readers to comprehend them. A good indication that a sophisticated degree of comprehension did exist, and that there was—­at least among elite readers—­an expectation that this should be so is the quotability of Asian texts in everyday speech and ­correspondence. The Arabian Nights played a significant role in the remarkable epistolary courtship of Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning. The letters they exchanged during 1845 and 1846, prior to their physical meeting, feature no less than eleven playful allusions in which the two lovers test each other’s knowledge of the text. References are made to quite obscure tales, such as ‘The Story of the Fisherman’ and ‘The Sisters Who Envied Their Younger Sister’, in which Princess Parizade’s brothers attempt to obtain for her a singing tree, a speaking bird, and the golden water, but are driven back by the screams issuing from a group of black boulders (by way of corroboration, this is the same story James Russell Lowell refers to in his 1849 poem ‘An Oriental Apologue’, in a line likely to puzzle the modern reader). The story that was most frequently on the Brownings’ minds, with its sadomasochistic overtones, was that of Princess Zobeide whose jealous sisters hurl her into the sea. She is rescued by a fairy, who turns the wicked sisters to dogs, and instructs Zobeide to deal them a hundred lashes every night (or else she too will turn into a dog). Browning initiated this stage of their parley by comparing himself to Barrett’s dog Flush, in reply to which Barrett admits the erotic prospect of whipping her flirtatious correspondent, with him resuming the conceit in his next missive.9 In Britain, the fact that a considerable number of men and women had lived for long periods in the East was the principal buttress of such literary common knowledge. In 1869, M.E.  Grant Duff, then Under-­Secretary of State for India, dined in London with Sir John Macneill (his diary does not specify whether this was the envoy sent by Lord Palmerston to Persia in the 1830s, or the railway en­gin­eer who surveyed the course of the Euphrates Valley Railway in 1855). Macneill quoted to him a maxim of Sadi’s on the importance of mercy, and also ‘some striking words’ from an unnamed Persian poet: ‘We are all lions, but lions on a standard—­as the wind blows, the lions move, and we see them move, but not the cause of their motion—­let us then worship the invisible which is the cause of all we see.’ This marks the limit of Grant Duff ’s knowledge, for he did not recognize the quotation. Like many of his peers he was familiar with Sadi and the

9  Elvan Kintner (ed.), The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Barrett, 1845–1846 (2 vols, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1969), pp. 562, 564, 566, 570, 578, 579, 790; James Russell Lowell, Poetical Works (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1876), p. 324: ‘They jabbered like the stones on that immense hill / In the Arabian Nights.’

Circulating  67 Gulistan, but not Rumi whose mystical verses only began to be popularized in the twentieth century.10 Today he is arguably the best-­known Persian author. Contrastingly, many Victorians were on a familiar footing with texts that today would be considered relatively obscure—­though in many cases the ability to quote does not necessarily betoken dedicated reading of the complete text, but only the memorization of excerpted ‘gems’. These were disseminated by the anthologies described in Chapter 1, but also by numerous quotation dictionaries (one of which, edited by Claud Field in 1911, dealt purely with passages from Arabic and Persian).11 Edward Fitzgerald’s translation of Attar’s Mantiq-­ut-­Tayr (Conference of the Birds) sold far fewer copies than his Rubāiyāt of Omar Khayyām, but nevertheless six of its lines infiltrated late Victorian phrasemaking and crop up in all manner of places: For like a child sent with a fluttering Light To feel his way along a gusty Night Man walks the World: again and yet again The Lamp shall be by Fits of Passion slain: But shall not He who sent him from the Door Relight the lamp once more, and yet once more?12

This passage was quoted, for example, by a writer in the Spectator by way of objection to a lecture on biography given by H.H. Asquith in November 1901, in which the former Home Secretary suggested that great lives were chiefly valuable for the examples they set of virtue and wisdom. Are not the paltrier circumstances of lives less great to be valued as well, the author queried, for the examples they give us of human frailty and imperfect knowledge? There may be a connection with a commonplace book that Asquith’s teenaged daughter Violet, later Bonham Carter, had begun keeping two months earlier.13 The same passage found its way into her mementoes, and whether this was a consequence or merely a coincidence, it says something about the pervasiveness of a single quotation (albeit often uncredited) from Attar at this point of time in Britain. In her preface to the Rose Garden, Louisa Costello had written that it was her ambition to make Persian poets ‘familiar in the mouth as household words’, paraphrasing Henry V.14 That a select number of ‘gems’, especially from Omar Khayyam, did enter everyday conversation is undoubtedly true. In fact, the 10  Mountstuart E. Grant Duff, Notes from a Diary, 1851–1872 (2 vols, London: John Murray, 1899), II, 127. The quotation is from Masnavi 1:604. 11  Claud Field, Dictionary of Oriental Quotations: Arabic and Persian (London: Sonnenschein, 1911). 12 William Aldis Wright, Letters and Literary Remains of Edward Fitzgerald (3 vols, London: Macmillan, 1889), II, 457. It appears, for example, in Hoyt’s New Cyclopedia of Practical Quotations (New York and London: Funk & Wagnalls, 1922), p. 445. 13  Spectator, 23 Nov. 1901; Bodleian Library: MS Bonham Carter 503. 14 Costello, Rose Garden, p. x.

68  Asian Classics on the Victorian Bookshelf Rubaiyat became so ubiquitous that it affected people subliminally, and when encountered in bound and printed form the words could seem uncanny. Roger Casement claimed to have never read the poem when a friend posted a copy to the Congo in 1901, where (long before his reincarnation as an Irish rebel) he was compiling a damning report on the Belgian colonial regime. By his account Casement had seen but a few extracts of Khayyam in an issue of the Sketch, and he was thus rather annoyed to discover that his own verse had become ir­rep­ar­ably infected with Omarisms.15 Waiting for a steamer at Luanda two years previously, he claimed to have written in his notebook: For who, when his enfranchised soul could rove Freed from this flesh that one small act could give Would willingly the tainted burden bear And pace his weary round, nor look above Beyond the prison of this gilded air Where flesh is not, were it not flesh is love?

Somehow, he joked, the medieval Persian had gained access to his notebook, and plagiarized him in his 44th quatrain (as per Fitzgerald’s fourth edition). Casement posted the copy back to his friend enriched with facetious annotations, but he continued to dwell consciously on what he had hitherto read unconsciously: after his arrest on the eve of the Easter Rising, a copy of the Rubaiyat was allegedly discovered in his pocket.16 Certainly by 1916, the poem’s best-­known lines were not merely commonplaces but clichés. To give another example from the Irish context, this is why Sean O’Casey has Donal Davoren quote from it in The Shadow of a Gunman (1923). ‘Grasp this sorry scheme of things entire, and mould life nearer to the heart’s desire’, the cowardly poet urges a young lady as he attempts to seduce her in his Dublin tenement, posing as a dashing IRA fugitive.17 The quotation betrays the absence in its speaker of both the moral conviction necessary for political action, and of the genuine emotional experience that gives life to poetry. It is also a joke against the playwright himself, a working-­class Dubliner who had to struggle in the same haphazard, autodidact manner after an original mode of expression, fighting to free himself of recherché Victorianisms. Having witnessed its downward percolation through all levels in society, it was now time for in­tel­lec­tuals to reject the Rubaiyat: ‘[it] has become the choice of all the little bourgeoises in England’, Roger Fry remarked in 1919. ‘God knows what they make of it.’18 Fry 15  NLI: MS 36,200/1/14 (Roger Casement to Richard Morten, 15 Mar. 1901). 16  Adam Hochschild, King Leopold’s Ghost (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1999), p. 285. 17  Sean O’Casey, Three Dublin Plays (London: Faber, 1998), p. 19. 18  Denys Sutton (ed.), Letters of Roger Fry (2 vols, London: Chatto & Windus, 1972), II, 467 (Fry to Marie Mauron, 8 Nov. 1919). Fry’s jaded attitude contrasts strikingly with his excitement upon first

Circulating  69 had recently shepherded towards publication the latest oriental sensation, Arthur Waley’s A Hundred and Seventy Chinese Poems (1918), and in the same year that The Shadow of a Gunman was staged at the Abbey Theatre, this was the literary watershed Dublin’s more privileged readers were crossing. The first Governor-­ General of the newly formed Irish Free State, Tim Healy, found himself in the ironic position of being housed in the former British Viceregal Lodge in Phoenix Park. Paying him a visit in the early 1920s, the surgeon and society wit Oliver St John Gogarty claimed to have discovered Healy at a window, gazing out pensively over a bed of red geraniums. If we can credit his account, Gogarty teased him by quoting from Waley’s hot new anthology—­specifically, one of various wry reflections left behind by the Tang Dynasty official Bai Juyi (772–846). The people of Pa do not care for flowers;    All the Spring no one has come to look. But their Governor-­General, alone with his cup of wine Sits till evening and will not move from the place.19

Proverbs, Maxims, and Aphorisms Probably the most common instance of oriental quotation was the use of pithy nuggets of wisdom and humour. These are a mixed category, drawn sometimes from textual sources (such as maxims of Confucius or hadiths of Mohammed), sometimes from vernacular speech (often recorded in travellers’ accounts), and sometimes from an obscure well of Eastern sagacity. As might be expected, ex­amples of the latter have an uncertain basis in fact, and are often denoted simply ‘Chinese Proverb’, ‘Indian Saying’, ‘Turkish’, ‘Burmese’, ‘Malay’, and so on. Private commonplace books from the period abound in such adages. One anonymous reader of the 1870s jotted down a ‘Turkish proverb’ (‘We govern the unspoken word, but the spoken word governs us’), and a Chinese: ‘No man can see the whole world out of his own window’, in a notebook now at the British Library. Another individual, represented in a collection of commonplace books held by the Cadbury Library at Birmingham, took pleasure in an Arabic saying that cropped up repeatedly in my searches: ‘By six qualities may a fool be known; anger without cause, speech without profit, change without motive, inquiry without an object, putting trust in a stranger, and wanting capacity to discriminate

reading the Rubaiyat as a student thirty years previously: see I, 112 (to C.R. Ashbee and G.L. Dickinson, 4 Apr. 1887). 19  Oliver St John Gogarty, As I Was Going Down Sackville Street: a Phantasy in Fact (1937; repr. London: Sphere, 1968), p. 98.

70  Asian Classics on the Victorian Bookshelf between a friend and a foe.’20 Occasionally, aphorisms were ascribed more def­in­ite­ly to kings and their ministers or generals, including figures from recent history. The diaries of Charles Eastland de Michele, British Consul at St Petersburg, cover the years 1851 to 1894 and fill more than forty volumes. On the flyleaf of every volume, de Michele wrote out a sensible suggestion made by Hyder Ali (and evidently derived from William Thomson’s 1788 Memoirs of the Late War in Asia): ‘Regular economy supplies the source of liberality.’ Thus the eighteenth-­century ruler of Mysore in southern India unexpectedly becomes the mouthpiece of Victorian patience and frugality.21 The keepers of these commonplace books may have consulted collections like The Birthday Book of Proverbs (1872), which has entries labelled ‘Confucius’, ‘Chinese’, ‘Persian’, and ‘Eastern’, or W.A. Clouston’s Book of Wise Sayings, selected largely from Eastern Sources (1893). In the case of many shorter quotations, the origin will instead have lain in the pages of a periodical or newspaper. This is particularly clear when examining the commonplace-­ cum-­ cuttings book of R. FitzGerald, an Irish immigrant in 1850s Melbourne. During those heady gold-­ rush years FitzGerald fortified himself with practical wisdom, from Longfellow and Ben Franklin (‘time is money’), to the speeches of Charles Gavan Duffy, assorted advice on how to get rich, Pope, Cardinal Newman, Bacon, ‘Locke on education’, doggerel about socialists, and remarks on ‘The Degeneracy of the British Aristocracy’. One of his pages contains this: ‘Learning without thought is labour lost: thought without learning is perilous. – Confucius.’22 Probably this is connected with the summary, copied above on the same page, of an article in the Philadelphia Ledger about the perspicacity of ‘Silent Men’—in this case George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. In the era of mass print, reprintings and re­circu­lations of such extracts can be so frequent as to present a variety of possible routes of transmission. One consequence of this was an ever-­increasing risk of misquotation or misattribution, or a distortion of meaning brought about by, say, the act of reducing a Chinese philosopher to a handful of pithy sayings. A remark on life after death that the post office employee Lewin Hill jotted down in his commonplace book—‘if you do well here you will do well there. I could tell you no more if I preached to you for a year’—turns out not to be ‘Confucius’ at all, but Longfellow’s ‘Cobbler of Hagenau’!23 Such gross errors as this are rare, however. A more common outcome of frenetic scissors-­and-­paste journalism was that phrases became detached from their original context and endowed with new values by their second- or third-­hand audiences. In this way R.  FitzGerald’s 20 BL: Add MS 85456 (anonymous commonplace book); Cadbury Library, University of Birmingham: KHW/A/117 (commonplace book). 21  Bodleian: MS.Eng.misc.e.1401–44 (diaries of Charles Eastland de Michele). 22  SLV: MS 12408 (R. FitzGerald, commonplace book titled ‘Patch Work’). 23  Lewin Hill, Verse, Prose, and Epitaphs from the Commonplace Book of Lewin Hill, C.B.: 1848–1908 (London: Brown Langham, 1920), p. 77.

Circulating  71 commonplace book also contains an archteypal faux ami, an elegiac image about the decay of empire cited from ‘Firdausi’: The spider’s web is the royal curtain in the palace of Caesar; the owl is the sentinel in the watch-­tower of Afrasiyab.

This distich (in the course of transmission the original two lines have been expanded to three) was so well known, and assumed to be genuine, that an irate reviewer demanded to know why it was not to be found in Field’s Dictionary of Oriental Quotations, which we touched on in the previous section.24 It originally entered English literature courtesy of Gibbon in Decline and Fall, who refers to an anecdote given by the historian Cantemir about how Mehmet the Conqueror, after overcoming the defences of Constantinople, stood and recited them in the palace of the Byzantine emperors. William Jones gave an analysis of the lines in his Persian Grammar; they were in turn adapted by Byron for The Giaour, and by Felicia Hemans in her 1849 poem ‘The Last Constantine’.25 Even today they frequently crop up in novels and popular histories, and are variously attributed to Firdausi, Sadi, or—­rather improbably—­Rumi. Yet in actuality there is no primary source. The lines are simply, as Edward Heron-­Allen remarks, a ‘constantly recurring illustration of the vanity of earthly glory in Persian belles-­lettres’.26 This, we may presume, is just what R. FitzGerald valued in them, and while it is important to interrogate the sometimes dubious credentials of orientalia, this should not lead us to overlook the seriousness of an individual reader’s choices. If he had doubted the veracity of the quotation, FitzGerald would probably not have copied it down. Nor would he have cared to embark on further investigation or comparison—­ investigations that may have been intellectually productive for him, even if founded on error. By looking elsewhere on his crowded page, we may notice that FitzGerald has grouped the Persian lines with a passage from Shelley’s Hellas, in which a latter-­day Ottoman emperor challenges a Jewish magician to conjure up the person of his far greater, and more erudite, precursor Mehmet the Conqueror—­surely not an accidental juxtaposition. It can be very hard to trace the provenance of even quite credible adages, such as Mohammed’s remark on the qualities of daffodils which the Scottish poet John Davidson, perhaps knowing Richard Le Gallienne’s oriental interests, quoted to him in 1895: ‘He that has two cakes of bread, let him sell one of them for some flower of the narcissus; for bread is the food of the body, but narcissus is food for

24  Standard (London), 7 Mar. 1911, p. 5. 25 Javadi, Persian Literary Influence, pp. 81–2. 26  Edward Heron-­Allen (ed.), The Ruba’iyat of Omar Khayyām, being a Facsimile of the Manuscript in the Bodleian Library at Oxford (London: H.S. Nichols, 1898), p. 303. Recent misattributors of the lines include Ken McClellan, in his 2009 novel The Last Byzantine (Denver, CO: Outskirts Press), p. 23.

72  Asian Classics on the Victorian Bookshelf the soul.’27 Such a magnificent endorsement did not escape the attention of Victorian horticulturalists. It did the rounds of their various journals and even appeared in the Boy’s Own Paper, where it opened a ‘How To’ piece on growing flowers.28 The seed from which it probably sprouted is a footnote planted deep in the first volume of the Arabian Nights, in its most popular Victorian version—­that of E.W. Lane, who ascribes the remark to Galen.29 At some point along the chain of transmission, it may be, someone has blundered. But given the importance of Galen to medieval Arab medicine, it would be unwise to discount the existence of a hadith attributing the words to Mohammed. In a different but associated pattern, the Arabic proverb quoted by Ferdinand de Lesseps during a speech in 1885 is echoed by so many other French sources that it is impossible to determine its exact genesis. The canal engineer, who had made an opening for European im­peri­al­ism in Egypt but failed to drive a waterway through the Isthmus of Panama, dismissed his critics with the remark ‘les chiens aboient, la caravane passe—­J’ai passé’.30 In cases where we cannot detect any obvious bogusness in quotations, it is probably more productive to ask not for their exact origin, but rather for what was motivating their quotation and requotation. Aphorisms are especially apt to become stale and lifeless with overuse, and thus the importation and eventual naturalization of foreign maxims is a means of reinvigorating our moral vocabulary (and restoring the sting to our reproaches and insults). The vim and zest of vernacular speech in unindustrialized societies, compared to the increasingly standardized idiom of European languages, was a source of fascination for many Victorians—­not least Richard Burton, who kept up a network of informants feeding him choice apothegms fresh from the lips of old men in Egypt. ‘I understand how you require the proverbs & by next week I hope to have a lot ready’, wrote one of his correspondents in 1886. ‘There is an original living near Zagazig, who they say is not to be touched on such matters. So I shall get his collection & will Translate etc.’ Presumably the proverbs were required for Burton’s ongoing Nights translation, either to ornament his characters’ speech or for his accompanying anthropological notes.31 27 HRC: MS-­2412 (Richard Le Gallienne Collection), 5.7, John Davidson to Le Gallienne, 5 Feb. 1895. 28  W.  Watson, ‘Daffodils, and how to grow them’, Boy’s Own Paper, XXIII/1154 (23 Feb. 1901), p.  334. See also Gardener’s Chronicle, VI/131 (1 July 1876), p. 8 and House & Garden, IX/2 (Feb. 1906), p. 94. 29 E.W. Lane, The Thousand and One Nights, Commonly Called the Arabian Nights’ Entertainments (1840; repr. 3 vols, London: Chatto & Windus, 1912), I, 200. For subsequent reappropriation of the lines, see Daniel Swift, ‘Lost and Pound’, Paris Review blog (2 Oct. 2017): https://www.theparisreview. org/blog/2017/10/02/lost-­and-­pound/. 30  [Dogs bark, but the caravan moves on regardless—­I have moved on]. See Discours de réception de M. F. de Lesseps: réponse de M. Ernest Renan (Paris: Lévy, 1885), p. 5. 31 Huntington: mssRFB 1–1386 (Sir Richard Francis Burton papers), Box 28, J.C.J.  Clarke to R.F. Burton, 10 Sept. 1886.

Circulating  73

Visibility in the Public Realm The last two sections have shown how expressions or images derived from Asian literature affected how people wrote, how people spoke, and how people represented speech in writing. But briefly—­for this is a vast topic—­we must also bear in mind that their most concentrated exposure to cultural alterity would often have been in the public realm. They would have witnessed Eastern scenes represented in genre painting, glimpsed oriental motifs in architecture, and encountered commodified otherness in shops, advertising, amusement parks, and on the stage. This has all been thoroughly documented, and so I wish to dwell only on some key instances of Asian literature manifesting in the urban landscape and in popular spectacle, beginning with the theatre.32 Stage productions based on the Arabian Nights, as I have already mentioned, began in the 1830s and have carried on down to the present. Their success did not lead initially to the dramatization of other texts. Rather, it encouraged ersatz productions like the Mikado, and the various plays and comic operas—­even a silent movie—­based on the Willow Pattern, a picturesque ‘legend’ which has no source in Chinese literature but was invented to sell the eponymous Wedgwood crockery. However, at the turn of the century we can also see a gradual rise in drama that depended on original sources, both in the mainstream and avant-­garde the­ atre. In more elite circles, Japanese Noh was patronized by coterie audiences at the turn of the century, as were Sanskrit plays like Shudraka’s Mrichchhakatika (The Little Clay Cart)—the American professor Arthur Ryder even managed to obtain two live elephants for his production at Berkeley’s Greek Theatre in 1907.33 Translated play texts were also retransmitted to their countries of origin—­ Sakuntala, for example, was performed frequently by Indian actors in Monier-­ Williams’s English rather than in the original.34 Historically this was court drama, and in English translation was consumed principally by intellectuals. Conversely, it is from Japan’s two popular forms of theatre, kabuki and bunraku, that we get the narrative which has over the longest period shaped the Western understanding of Japan: the Chushingura, which tells of forty-­seven loyal samurai who make a pact to avenge their dead master. F.V. Dickins and later Mitford (in his Tales of Old Japan) almost certainly saw it performed at Edo, though they chose to render it as a prose novella. Turned once more into a play by John Masefield, who

32 See Jill Beaulieu and Mary Roberts (eds), Orientalism’s Interlocutors: Painting, Architecture, Photography (Durham, NC and London: Duke University Press, 2002). 33 Heidi  R.M.  Pauwels, Indian Literature and Popular Cinema: Recasting Classics (Abingdon: Routledge, 2007), p. 79. The poet Arthur Symons created his own version titled The Toy Cart in 1916, though it closed after two London performances. Romila Thapar describes a 1919 London performance of Sakuntala in Sakuntala: Texts, Readings, Histories (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999), p. 216. 34  See, for example, ‘The New Kalidas Society’, Times of India, 19 Feb. 1902.

74  Asian Classics on the Victorian Bookshelf reshaped it after the fashion of an Elizabethan revenge tragedy, as The Faithful it ran for six weeks at the Garrick Theatre on Broadway in 1919.35 The Faithful is an apt illustration of contrary trends at the time. On the one hand, this was a period in which accuracy was actually taken seriously—­Edwin Arnold was consulted at least twice, for instance, by producers of Indian-­themed plays who wanted to ensure correct costuming and pronunciation of foreign words.36 At the same time, it was impossible to escape the mesh of caricature through which a country like Japan was perceived, something impishly remarked on by the New York Times reviewer: ‘The Faithful’ is most difficult to embody in the theatre because to fishy Occidental eyes, moments of true Japanese sublimity verge perilously on the ludicrous. So the imperial orders which, from time to time in ‘The Faithful,’ bid the characters kill themselves, arouse mutinous memories of ‘The Mikado.’37

Rather than attempting to draw misleading distinctions between ‘serious’ and culturally respectful drama, and the absurdities of melodrama, it is more pro­ duct­ive to understand that nearly all drama was conveyed to Western audiences through a series of distorting lenses. Masefield’s play was not a translation but an adaptation, and it depended on translators who had themselves recast the original to meet the conventions of Western fiction. It was also a narrative filtered through two layers of nostalgia: Mitford’s idealization of ‘authentic’ feudal Japan, and the Japanese nostalgia for the Genroku Era in which the story is set. Furthermore, a powerful touchstone for these interlocking nostalgias were the numerous woodblock illustrations of the forty-­seven ronin made by ukiyo-­e artists, some of which were included by Mitford in his book, and a set of which were reportedly at Masefield’s side during composition.38 His apprehension of the story was mixed, in fact, at a fundamental level with both visual and textual media, and it is unsurprising to find the New York Times reviewer commenting on the ‘reproductions of austere and wintry Japanese prints’ that screened the Garrick forestage. Visual stylistics have continued ever since to drive reception of the narrative, primarily through the numerous Japanese and Hollywood film versions (most recently a Universal Pictures production starring Keanu Reeves that flopped at the US box office in 2013). 35 Kevin J. Wetmore, Revenge Drama in European Renaissance and Japanese Theatre (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), p. 167. 36  He fulfilled this role for the librettist Joseph Bennett, and for the Hungarian impresario Imre Kiralfy whose Empire of India Exhibition opened at Earl’s Court in London in 1895. See Morgan: MFC A753.B471 (letters to Joseph Bennett); and Rubinstein Library, Duke University: Edwin Arnold papers, Box 1 (Imre Kiralfy to Edwin Arnold, 23 Apr. 1895). 37  Alexander Woollcott, ‘The Play’, New York Times, 14 Oct. 1919. 38 Earl Roy Miner, The Japanese Tradition in British and American Literature (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1966), p. 217.

Circulating  75 When we pay attention to the various public representations with which the most popular Asian narratives have been treated, therefore, we will invariably find a complex sequence of mediations, each of which have added a new cluster of associations to the source text. To the visual and theatrical, we might also add the musical. Herbert Giles’s translations of Chinese poetry were set to music by Cyril Scott, as was—­in 1907 and again in 1913—Longfellow’s poem ‘The Leap of Roushan Beg’, which is based on an episode in Chodźko’s Popular Poetry of Persia. Granville Bantock’s oratorio Omar Khayyám (1906–9), moreover, is only the best-­ known of various adaptations that made the ‘Tent-­maker’ not only a staple of the concert hall but of the drawing-­room piano.39 And finally, we cannot overlook a unique mode of public spectacle which fused the painterly, performative, and perhaps also musical tropes that had gathered around the Rubaiyat over the preceding two decades. In 1905, the Krewe of Proteus, the oldest of the secret so­ci­ eties that organizes the New Orleans Carnival, created a magnificent procession of floats fashioned after the much-­loved illustrations created for the Rubaiyat by the American painter Elihu Vedder. These moving tableaux included ‘The Court of Jamshyd’, ‘The Recording Angel’, ‘Parwin & Mushtari’, ‘Bahrám’, ‘Youth and Age’, and ‘The Cup of Life’, and for a final image the inscrutable Sphinx with her paw resting upon an hourglass. An exhibition held some years ago at the Harry Ransom Centre, University of Texas featured a display on this remarkable occurrence. Less widely known, however, is that eleven carnivals prior to their Omarian extravaganza, the Krewe had taken for their theme ‘The Shah Nameh’. In other years they did the Kalevala and Orlando Furioso while earlier, probably more stereo­typed oriental subjects included ‘The Myths of China’ (1885), ‘The Hindoo Heavens’ (1889), and ‘Tales of the Genii’ (1891).40 It would thus be hasty to assume that Omar Khayyam was the first and principal Persian author to capture the imagination of New Orleans. The Krewe of Proteus curated remarkable, meticulously planned events in which an entire urban population was brought into simultaneous acquaintance with major works of world literature (if only in the form of select episodes or tropes). But of more lasting significance, in respect to visible Asian influence in Western public spaces, is the evidence that is today hiding in plain sight, in the form of place names and other modes of public commemoration. In some cases, the nineteenth-­century origin of such names has become obscured or disputed. In 2016, a local official in Mahomet, Illinois announced that a plaque would be set up to clarify that the settlement’s founder had named it, in 1871, after a celebrated Native American chief from his home state of Connecticut.41 A credible 39  See, for example, Liza Lehmann, In a Persian Garden: a song cycle for four solo voices with pianoforte accompaniment, the words selected from the Rubaiyát of Omar Khayyám (Fitzgerald’s Translation) (London: J.B. Cramer, 1896). 40  UCLA: MS 378, Box 4, Scrapbook. 41  ‘What’s in a Name? Mahomet’, News-­Gazette (Champaign), 28 Oct. 2016.

76  Asian Classics on the Victorian Bookshelf etymology, but not one that could explain why there is also a Mahomet in Texas, lying seven miles east of Joppa (as Jaffa is known in the Bible), or why Louisiana has a village called Koran. Elsewhere in the Creole State there is a Saadi Street, running alongside the Intracoastal Waterway as it passes through the city of Houma, while twenty miles away in Thibodaux a row of bungalows face onto Rubaiyat Drive. It can be hard to date street names, though sometimes a nineteenth-­century origin may be inferred from surrounding architecture. Gulistan Road runs off an avenue of those handsome Victorian villas characteristic of Leamington Spa in Warwickshire, while brick cottages line Gulistan Terrace in Dublin—­a street I stumbled across in 2018 on my journey to work. And so, while in the British Isles, where everyone lives in the shadow of empire, it is common enough to have an address styled after Calcutta or Rangoon, Lord Curzon or Henry Havelock, we should note that literary translation too has left its discrete mark. The occurrence of such names in the Victorian period, however, is nothing compared to their proliferation in modern-­day suburbia, where they may be thought of as providing cultural landmarks in a streetscape devoid of physical reference points. In recent times, Rumi has been a popular choice, leaving a Rumi Crescent and Sufi Crescent in East York, Ontario; a Rumi Lane in Zion, Illinois; North Rumi Avenue in Fresno, California; Rumi út in the city of Szombathely, Hungary; and Rumiweg, Farnern and Rumiplatz, Langenthal, both in Switzerland. It is worth our while to consider one final manifestation of the cultural capital that was invested in the names of certain classic authors—­names that again generally go unremarked, because of their lofty position in our cities, but which (more than idiosyncratic street names) can be read as a deliberate statement of civic erudition. The Bibliothèque Saint-­Geneviève opened in Paris in 1851 adorned with plaques listing the great authors of history. In Gordon B. Neavill’s view, this decision by the architect Henri Labrouste inaugurated the custom of carving on the façades of libraries, university buildings, museums, concert halls, and courthouses the names of the great exponents who were studied or emulated within—­a practice that reached its apogee at the turn of century but fell away after the 1930s.42 The main building of the Boston Public Library, completed in 1895, thus features ‘Pilpay’, ‘Firdusi’, Kalidasa, Omar Khayyam, Confucius, Mencius, and Mohammed—­the latter a dubious attribution, since Muslims believe the Quran to be the word of God Himself (Figure 3.1).43 These names make perhaps but little impression among the hundreds carved on the building, though considerably greater prominence was given to Asia when the same architects—­McKim, Mead, and White—­finished their work at the Brooklyn Museum two years later. The

42  Gordon  B.  Neavill, ‘Canonicity, Reprint Publishing, and Copyright’, in John Spiers (ed.), The Culture of the Publisher’s Series, Volume 1: Authors, Publishers and the Shaping of Taste (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), p. 91. 43  Handbook of the New Public Library in Boston (Boston, MA: Curtis, 1895), p. 7.

Circulating  77

Figure 3.1  Brooklyn Museum, north-­east corner (author photograph)

firm commissioned Daniel Chester French to line its attic storey with thirty ­statues commemorating famous Greeks and Romans, and biblical prophets, but also various notables from India, Persia, China, and Japan. There has been some confusion over this scheme, as the huge sculptures do not strictly correspond with the names carved below them, but it is easy to make out Buddha (with his dharma wheel), Zoroaster holding aloft a flame, Manu clutching the tablets of his legal code, and long-­bearded Lao Tse. Harder to discern are Kalidasa, the Hindu philosopher Shankara, Confucius, and four allegorical figures representing Chinese Law, Chinese Art, Japanese Art and the ‘Genius of Islam’.44 The statues are not interspersed but grouped by nation, with personalities from the European tradition assembled on the western, Manhattan-­facing side of the building while the Indian figures gaze down the slope of Eastern Parkway. French seems to have shown some sensitivity in not explicitly depicting Mohammed, but elsewhere the Prophet’s upright figure can be found taking his place among the lawgivers of history, including in G.F. Watts’s 1859 mural ‘Justice’ at Lincoln’s Inn in London, and on the frieze of the US Supreme Court (which also features Confucius). It has been less frequent for architects to make space for the substance of their respective teachings, though the façade of Harvard Law 44 The statues are photographed and identified on this blog: https://diannedurantewriter.com/ brooklyn-­museum-­sculptures-­on-­facade (accessed 12 Aug. 2019).

78  Asian Classics on the Victorian Bookshelf School bears a quotation from the Quran, while two such quotations stare out from the walls of Sterling Memorial Library at Yale. And Library of Congress readers, pausing to admire the view of the Capitol from the end of the north corridor, may heed the admonition carved upon the scroll fixed above the window there: GIVE INSTRUCTION UNTO THOSE WHO CANNOT PROCURE IT FOR THEMSELVES. Confucius, Book XIII, Sec. 9.45 By far the most impressive sculptural arrangement I have seen, however, is the old frontage to the Los Angeles Central Library where it faces out onto Maguire Gardens. Two monumental figures of Phosphor and Hesper, representing the ‘Wisdom of the East’ and the ‘Wisdom of the West’ flank the main entrance, and each looms over a vertical column of great thinkers. As at the Brooklyn Museum, the east–­west axis of the building has been exploited to set up a contrast, or contest, between two imagined traditions, with the additional symbolism of the morning star and his retinue being succeeded (and perhaps superseded) by the evening star—­though curiously the elder deity, who is identified by his name and by a sunrise motif, appears to be responding to the gesture of the younger. With his muscular arm, Hesper grips a plaque bearing such names as Socrates, Virgil, and Thomas Aquinas, to which the graceful Phosphor, with upturned hand, answers: ‘Moses / Zoroaster / Buddha / Confucius / Mohammed / Lao Tse / Hillel / Avicenna / Al Gazali / Badarayana’ (Figure 3.2). Completed in 1926 and thus one of the last of these grand statements in stone, this is also the only one I know of that grants Asian literature, or specifically philosophy, full equivalence with that of the West. A final plaque standing at the apex of the façade, though, gives the final word to Lucretius: ‘Et Quasi Cursores Vitai Lampada Tradunt’ (‘and like runners, they pass on the lamp of life’).46

Accessing the Texts In 1897, the Brooklyn Museum opened with French’s twelve-­ foot statue of ‘KALIDASA’ standing prominently on the east wing. But beyond the high antiquity of the name, and the aspirations or pretensions which it represented, how easily 45  A full description of the Jefferson Building’s ornamentation is available at: https://www.loc.gov/ loc/walls/jeff1.html (accessed 9 Aug. 2019). 46  The names are listed in their vertical order from top to bottom. The sculptor Lee Lawrie and his thematic consultant H.B. Alexander were responsible for the scheme, detailed in Kenneth A. Breisch, The Los Angeles Central Library: Building an Architectural Icon, 1872–1933 (Los Angeles, CA: Getty Publications, 2016), p. 151.

Circulating  79

Figure 3.2  Los Angeles Central Library, detail of ‘Phosphor’ (author photograph)

could one actually obtain Sakuntala or other works of the Sanskrit poet down among the bookshops and libraries of the city below? A contemporary short story would suggest the text was still a rarity in New York of the Gilded Age. In ‘The Rabbi’s Grandson’, a dubious Jewish conversion narrative by Annette L. Noble, the bookseller Nathan Cohen arrives from Germany furiously bent on making his

80  Asian Classics on the Victorian Bookshelf fortune. Setting up premises in the Bowery, he instructs his son in the arts of the trade: . . . turning to take a book from a case near by, he said: “Look at this, Ben! Here is a rare translation of an old Hindoo poem, ‘The Fatal Ring,’ by Kalidasa; only show it to men who seem learned, and be sure that it is never stolen. It will not do to sell it for less than — dollars,” and he named a sum that seemed to Ben very large . . .47

The boy is later thrashed when it seems that the precious volume has been purloined by an unscrupulous bibliophile, but the rarity Noble imputes to Sakuntala is exaggerated in pursuit of her derogatory portrait of Cohen—­a man who rejects his rabbinic calling, and who acquires books only for their monetary value rather than for the knowledge they contain. Admittedly, some editions of the play could command high prices at the turn of the century. In 1887, the London bookseller Bernard Quaritch advertised a copy of Monier-­Williams’s translation at £3, but this was the fine illustrated edition of 1855 that had always been intended as a collector’s item.48 Most readers in 1887 would hardly have paid Quaritch’s prices, when in that very same year John Murray reissued the translation at seven shillings and sixpence, in cloth-­backed books that were widely distributed. Many American readers meanwhile will have already acquired the edition brought out by Dodd, Mead and Co. in 1885. This was the book owned, for example, by Louise E. Bettens (1827–1914), a wealthy widow from Vevay, Indiana who spent the last four decades of her life in New York. Her library, donated after her death to Woodward High School in Cincinnati, contained a number of Asian texts produced by British translators but republished by American presses. She owned a Fitzgerald Rubaiyat issued by Houghton Mifflin and a Light of Asia from Roberts Brothers, both Boston firms, though her copy of The Life and Teachings of Confucius—­the first volume of Legge’s Chinese Classics—­bears the imprint of Trübner of London rather than its American distributor, Lippincott.49 When considering buyers (as opposed to borrowers) of oriental translations, two important trends should be borne in mind. The first is illustrated by a letter addressed to Bernard Quaritch in 1893 by another reader seeking a translation of Sakuntala—­though not the book advertised in 1887. ‘I wish to know if there is an English Translation’, wrote Emilia Gayangos de Riaño from Madrid, ‘edited without

47 Annette L. Noble, Under Twelve Flags (New York: American Tract Society, 1903), p. 227. 48  Catalogue of Works in the Oriental Languages together with Polynesian & African (London: Bernard Quaritch, 1887). Consulted at the Grolier Club Library, New York. 49  Publisher’s Circular, L/1205 (Dec. 1887), 1525; The Library of Mrs Louise E. Bettens (New York: privately printed, 1919).

Circulating  81 the Sanskrit original—­I have read the enclosed article with great interest.’50 Like most of Quaritch’s clientele the correspondent was wealthy and well-­connected: the wife of a diplomat and, furthermore, daughter of a Professor of Arabic who no doubt influenced her literary tastes. Nonetheless, her agenda is decidedly that of an amateur, not a scholar or a collector. She specifically requests an edition without parallel Sanskrit text, which it is clearly her intention to read (her interest sparked apparently by a periodical or newspaper article that sadly has not survived). Thus, London booksellers known for their speciality in oriental books—­ such as Quaritch, Luzac, Watkins, and Arthur Probsthain—­were not patronized exclusively by specialists. But the second, and more important point to consider is that many texts that today would typically be stocked by niche vend­ors were then available in general bookshops. As might be expected, this was particularly the case with items in the cheap classics series that began to emerge towards the end of the nineteenth century (and which will be discussed in Chapter  4). George Bernard Shaw’s copies of The Persian Mystics: Jalalu’d-­din Rumi (1907), and Brahma-­Knowledge: an Outline of the Philosophy of the Vedanta (1911)—both entries in the Wisdom of the East series—­bear the sticker of Hugh Rees’s premises in Regent Street, a general bookshop. At Castle Drogo, the home of grocery millionaire Julius Drewe, a Koran issued in the Chandos Classics in 1890 is stamped ‘W.H. Smith & Son Library 186 Strand’.51 Stickers and stamps in my own collection bear like testimony from around the English-­speaking world: a Rubaiyat picked up as a gift in Vancouver; an anthology of Arabic poetry (again, Wisdom of the East) purchased by a young painter from Angus & Robertson, Sydney; One Hundred Poems of Kabir, translated by Tagore, carried away from Propsting & Morris’s shop on Liverpool Street in Hobart, Tasmania.52 And it should not be assumed that these titles were tucked away on inconspicuous shelves. Indeed, Mishka Sinha has discovered that in 1899 The Song Celestial, Edwin Arnold’s version of the Bhagavad Gita, formed part of a ‘Magnificent Display of Books Suitable for Christmas Presents’ assembled in M.H.  Gill’s shopfront in Sackville Street, Dublin. The same display also featured Egyptian Magic, a work on ancient ritual and religion by the popularizer of Egyptology, E.A. Wallis Budge.53 This widespread availability, it is worth noting, was the case not only for translations but also books printed in Asian source-­languages. A London reader 50  Bodleian: MSS Eng.lett.d.436 (Papers of Bernard Quaritch), f.29: Emilia G. de Riaño to Bernard Quaritch, 26 Feb. 1893. 51  The books are at Shaw’s Corner, Hertfordshire and Castle Drogo, Devon. Both properties are managed by the National Trust. 52  AVaTAR Ps.S.5d: Edward Fitzgerald, Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám (Edinburgh: T.N. Foulis, 1911), rear pastedown; AVaTAR Ws.S.16a: Henry Baerlein, The Singing Caravan, Some Echoes of Arabian Poetry (London: John Murray, 1910), front pastedown; AVaTAR Hi.S.1a: Rabindranath Tagore, Kabir’s Poems (London: Macmillan, 1915), flyleaf. 53  Sinha, ‘Corrigibility, Allegory, Universality’, 308. She cites an advertisement in the Freeman’s Journal, 9 Dec. 1899.

82  Asian Classics on the Victorian Bookshelf wanting the Jataka in Pali in 1889, for instance, could have had it from Quaritch at twenty-­eight shillings. Or she could have paid five shillings for a used copy from Jesse Salisbury in the Gray’s Inn Road. Henry G. Bohn is remembered today for the French, German, and Russian texts he published in his Standard Library, but as early as 1847 his shop in Covent Garden also stocked a good range of Arabic, Persian, Sanskrit, and Hebrew books running to some two hundred titles. In the fashionable Burlington Arcade, meanwhile, F.  Horncastle was offering more than one hundred books printed in Arabic, Turkish, Hebrew, Syriac, Chinese, Armenian, Bengali, and ‘Laplandish’, while at his bankruptcy in 1851 the nearby premises of Alexander Black were found to contain a German translation of Sakuntala, and an Arabic text of the sixth-­century poet-­warrior Antar printed at Paris in 1841.54 For those with specific interests and the means to supply them, it was also common to order directly from ‘the prince of oriental publishers’, Nicholas Trübner, referring to the firm’s monthly American & Oriental Record. Amy Lowell, for instance, would make extensive use of this service when preparing her amateur Chinese translations, Fir-­Flower Tablets, in 1921.55 Any attempt to measure the dissemination of printed matter has to take prices into account. From about 1840 onwards, cheaper materials and industrial processes began to reduce the cost of producing British books—­just at the time that popular translations from Asian languages first began to appear. But as Altick observed, this did not lead to a lowering of prices. Publishers observed a convention whereby a new literary work was marketed at ten shillings and sixpence—­too expensive even for the middle­classes, who typically preferred to spend their money on a subscription to a circulating library. But since Mudie and his rivals were the publishers’ more reliable customers, there was no incentive to change the system.56 Three popular translations published in 1870–1 illustrate the problem: Richardson’s Iliad of the East retailed at seven shillings and sixpence, Richard Burton’s Vikram and the Vampire (a retelling of the Indian supernatural stories known as the Baital Pachisi) at nine shillings, while it seems likely Mitford deliberately padded Tales of Old Japan to make up a pair of volumes priced at an imposing twenty-­one shillings. This inflated market collapsed quite suddenly in the 1880s,57 such that the Dublin buyer browsing M.H. Gill’s Christmas display could have taken home The Song Celestial for two shillings, while increased spending power among clerks and skilled workers created a substantial constituency for the numerous Wisdom of the East books, which were all marked at either

54  The catalogues of Henry  G.  Bohn (1847), Jesse Salisbury (1889), and those prepared by the auctioneers Puttick & Simpson for the sale of Alexander Black’s stock (13–17 February 1851) and F. Horncastle’s (6–7 July 1852) were all consulted at the library of the Grolier Club in New York. 55  Houghton: bMS Lowell 19.1 (Amy Lowell correspondence), Folder 1449. 56 Richard  D.  Altick, The English Common Reader: A Social History of the Mass Reading Public (2nd edn, Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1998), p. 277. 57  Ibid., p. 312.

Circulating  83 one shilling or two. For readers who remained priced out, there was the second-­hand trade which, besides offering lower prices, also distributed oriental translations to rural parts. Those books that settled at the bottom of the market, however, were typically the obsolete leavings of a previous generation, such as an 1832 French translation of the Yuan dynasty verse drama The Chalk Circle, and an ancient copy of the ‘Odes of Hafey’ (read Hafez) that were advertised in 1907 by P.M. Barnard of Saffron Walden in Essex.58 Slow to develop among Britain’s miserly ratepayers, quicker in the United States, and expanding rapidly in both countries when Andrew Carnegie began underwriting their construction in 1883, public libraries also played a significant role in making available often expensive translated works. Translations from Asia, as well as histories, ethnographies, and travel accounts of Asia were certainly a department of literature that well-­funded libraries saw as part of their mandate, as can be clearly discerned if we examine the accession records of a large public institution that grew ex nihilo at a rapid pace: the Melbourne Public Library, later the State Library of Victoria. In 1854, the Victorian Gold Rush was in full swing and its worthies were determined that the wealthy young colony should have a first-­class library. The nucleus of the collection—­some 4,000 books—­arrived in eight shipments despatched by the London bookseller J.J.  Guillaume between 1854 and 1857, and the contents are revealing of mid-­century acquisition pri­or­ ities. The first shipment contained very little fiction (Dickens would not arrive till the sixth cargo), and indeed hardly any living authors (excepting Tennyson and Samuel Rogers). Instead, among the very few books despatched by Guillaume to have been published in the same decade were Austen Layard’s descriptions of the excavations at Nineveh. In the second shipment arrived the library’s first three dictionaries: one English, one ‘Classical’, and A Dictionary: Persian, Arabic, and English by John Richardson. The third shipment contained Horace Walpole, James Mill, and—­rather less edifyingly—­the diary of George IV, but also the nine-­volume collected works of William Jones. Lane’s Arabian Nights came in the fourth shipment, Colman’s Hindu Mythology in the fifth, and the sixth brought the memoirs of the Emperor Babur as well as various historical works on India, Afghanistan, and Islam.59 The Asian focus lay south and west, these regions taking precedence over China and Japan, and by the time the chief librarian produced his report for the trustees in 1869 it would appear that the library had shown a greater commitment to India than to contemporary Britain or most of the countries of Europe. The report divides the forty-­seven-­thousand-­volume collection into two headings: Man and Nature. Taking the first, we find 668 books on India, 58  Select Catalogue of second-­hand books arranged in three lists: topographical books & books of local interest; travels; Oriental languages, etc. (Saffron Walden: P.M. Barnard, 1907). Consulted at the Grolier Club Library, New York. 59 SLV: MS 11614 (Records of J.J.  Guillaume in Account with the Melbourne Public Library, 1854–8).

84  Asian Classics on the Victorian Bookshelf while ‘Asia: Northern and China’ accounts for 359. The European nations rank as follows: France, 1,646; Greece, 827; Germany, 639; Italy, 569; Spain and Portugal, 334; Scandinavia, 265; Holland, Belgium and Switzerland: 200.60 The great building that rose in Swanston Street thus made available, at government expense, a range of translated literature to Melburnians at a stage when the city’s booksellers were still developing their business (though once they were established, a significant stock of ‘exotic’ books would be imported on a commercial basis too). Clearly, Britain’s imperial preoccupations played a large role in determining the books brought to Melbourne. In 1854, Persian was still an important language in India, while a translated history of Afghanistan by the Mughal historian Niamatullah may well have been valued by someone trying to understand how the British had been so humiliatingly defeated in their attempt to subdue that country twelve years earlier. On the other side of the English-­speaking world such concerns were hardly uppermost, but nevertheless Wilberforce Eames ran up hefty bills with Trübner, Quaritch, and Luzac & Co, respectively London’s chief oriental publisher and its two principal oriental booksellers. As New York’s Lenox Librarian, Eames presided over the merger of two private foundations in 1895 before setting out to vastly expand the collection, and within the next ten years he had bought more than six hundred books from the three firms, including such diverse items as a Tibetan dictionary, a collection of Burmese proverbs, and a biography of the Buddhist traveller-­monk Xuanzang.61 If any American tendency can be discerned in Eames’s choices, it is the attention he gives to East Asia—­the entire correspondence with Luzac concerns Chinese books—­whereas it seems British librarians, like their counterparts in Melbourne, tended to concentrate on Arabic, Persian, and Sanskrit sources. Thus, in 1887, the Mitchell Library in Glasgow purchased one translation from Persian (the Masnavi of Rumi), one Avestan, and two Sanskrit. Related acquisitions were Persian Portraits by F.F. Arbuthnot, which features short biographies and extracts of some two dozen poets, and Lotus and Jewel, a collection by Edwin Arnold that contains mostly his original poetry alongside two Sanskrit translations. The Glasgow librarians also ordered four modern works on Asian religion.62 Of these ten titles only one, A.P. Sinnett’s Esoteric Buddhism, had any connection with China or Japan, while books published in 1887 that the library could have acquired but did not included Some Chinese Ghosts by Lafcadio Hearn, a monograph by the French sinologist Terrien de Lacouperie issued in Britain by the folklore specialist David Nutt, and Foster’s Elementary Lessons in Chinese (a useful production of the London Missionary Society). Although the 1880s certainly saw more books appear on 60  SLV: MS 12990 (Augustus Henry Tulk, Report of the State of the Melbourne Public Library, 1868–9). 61  NYPL: MssCol 878 (Wilberforce Eames papers), Box 92. 62  Report on the Mitchell Library, Glasgow: 1887 (Glasgow: Robert Anderson, 1888). It must be noted that the report is incomplete: only ‘major’ books purchased have been listed by title.

Circulating  85 India and the Islamic world than were published on the Far East, over two decades later the ratio remained much the same at the Wigan Free Library in Lancashire. The poetry catalogue for this well-­supported library in a mid-­sized industrial town features twenty-­two translations from Asian languages. All represent classic and canonical literature, with the exception of three volumes by modern poets of India—­Toru Dutt, Laurence Hope, and ‘Aliph Cheem’ (Major Walter Yeldham)— and one living Japanese writer, Yone Noguchi. In addition, there are two original works inspired by Asian sources, The Light of Asia and Richard Burton’s popular pseudotranslation, The Kâsidah of Hâjî Abdû el-­Yezdî. But other than Noguchi, the only East Asian works are Japanese Lyrical Odes by F.V. Dickins (1866) and C.F.R. Allen’s Book of Chinese Poetry (1891).63 All four of these urban libraries—­in colonial boomtown, American cultural and financial hub, a large Scottish industrial city, and its smaller English counterpart—­amassed a considerable selection of translations from Asia, but was this done to meet the expectations of readers, or of trustees? As Mary Hammond has discussed in depth, well into the twentieth century public library committees looked on their most numerous constituency, browsers of fiction, as a nuisance and were reluctant to cater to their appetites.64 Perhaps by investing in ‘highbrow’ genres, like Sanskrit poetry, they could avoid sacrificing their budget to the pabulum of cheap novels, and furnish their shelves with rows of calf and combed-­ marble that would bring a glow of civic pride to the ratepayer, while deterring the horny-­handed and unlettered. Certainly that would offer one explanation as to why Wigan purchased an almost complete set of Oriental Translation Fund publications, expensive books that were designed primarily for Indian officialdom, and whose condition—­when they came many years later into the hands of the specialist dealer John Randall—­bore evidence of little if no use at all.65 And it may also help to explain the apparent preference for scholarly or elite productions over popular guides and abridgements. On the other hand, we cannot be too conclusive about Wigan’s librarians or readers. Among those twenty-­two Asian texts, scholarly editions form only a narrow majority, and the catalogue even gives the impression of a correlation—­deliberate or unconscious—­between them and their popular counterparts, if Robinson’s Persian Poetry for English Readers, for ex­ample, could have served to explicate several more forbidding incarnations of Jami and Sadi, while J.C.  Oman’s Great Indian Epics (1894) might have complemented J.C. Thomson’s 1855 version of the Bhagavad Gita (‘a discourse between Kṛiṣhṇa and Arjuna on divine matters’, the title page informs us, ‘with copious notes’). 63  Henry Tennyson Folkard, Poets and Poetry: A Representative Collection Preserved in the Reference Department of the Wigan Free Public Library (Wigan: James Starr, 1906). 64  Mary Hammond, Reading, Publishing and the Formation of Literary Taste in England, 1880–1914 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), p. 33. 65  Though the Wigan books’ bindings were worn, their pages ‘appeared unopened’. Email to the author, 22 July 2019.

86  Asian Classics on the Victorian Bookshelf Moreover, the poetry catalogue only lists works in the Reference department, whereas in the circulating collection at least one Asian author was extraordinarily well-­represented. ‘The Omar Khayyám cult must have made itself felt in Wigan, for in the new part of Mr H.T. Folkard’s excellent catalogue of the Public Library there are no less than thirty-­six entries about the astronomer poet of Persia,’ noted the Edwardian literary journalist Clement King Shorter. ‘There is no translation to compare with that of Edward FitzGerald. Yet the renderings of John Payne, F. York Powell, and Mrs Cadell are by no means to be despised.’66 This still does not tell us with any certainty how well-­used the books really were, for accurate borrowing data from more than one hundred years ago is no­tori­ous­ly scarce. We must infer what we can: I have no idea how many Dubliners borrowed the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam from Rathmines Public Library (a short walk from Gulistan Terrace), but I do know that in the 1910s their copy repeatedly went missing and had to be replaced.67 Two digital resources from outside the British Isles, however, help to shed clearer light on the matter: the Australian Common Reader database, which brings together six sets of borrowing ledgers principally from mechanics’ institutes, and What Middletown Read, which documents public library loans in Muncie, Indiana between 1895 and 1902. Both databases reveal, first of all, that the Arabian Nights was not only the most requested Eastern text, but one of the most popular translations from any language. It was borrowed twenty-­five times at the South Australian Institute in Adelaide between 1861 and 1862 (the years for which records survive), and fifty times over the eight years documented at Muncie.68 During the respective spans of time, both cities held about twenty­thousand people. An understandably smaller, but nevertheless appreciable readership existed for literature of a more cerebral character. Eight inhabitants of Muncie borrowed The Life and Teachings of Confucius, the first volume of Legge’s Chinese Classics—­not, significantly, the Trübner edition we came across earlier on the shelves of Indiana-­born bibliophile Louise Bettens, but imprinted ‘Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott & Co. / 1874’. It was too early for this book to have reached the public library in Adelaide in 1861 (possibly the only Chinese Classics volumes then existing in Australia were those James Legge sent to his nephew in Brighton, Victoria, where they were apparently an object of local admiration).69 However, five readers were able to borrow one of Legge’s earlier publications, The Rambles of the Emperor Ching Tĭh (1843). 66  Brotherton: BC MS 20c Shorter, Volume 3 (scrapbook labelled ‘Miscellanies C.K.S.’). The publication is unidentifiable but the article is almost certainly by Shorter. 67  Dublin City Archives: C2/LIB/RR/5/1 (Withdrawals Book, 1912–20, Rathmines Public Library). 68  What Middletown Read: https://lib.bsu.edu/wmr/ and Australian Common Reader: http://acr. cdhr.anu.edu.au/spotlight/australian-­common-­reader (both accessed 25 July 2019). Muncie held four copies of the Nights, two of them Lane’s translation (which accounted for forty-­two loans), and one an expurgated Lane ‘adapted to family reading’ (the first copy purchased by the library, and borrowed only twice). 69  SOAS: CWM/LMS/China/Personal (James Legge Papers), Box 10, John Legge to James Legge, 25 Mar. 1874.

Circulating  87 And one text that both libraries shared in common was the Quran, in Sale’s translation. Five readers requested it in Adelaide—­a civil servant, an engineer, a gardener, and two men of unlisted occupation—­and likewise five in Muncie—­one wine merchant, one carpenter, one ‘day labourer’, and two women (one of whom is known to have been married to a doctor). It would be rash to overgeneralize when comparing two such different contexts, but at the very least this demonstrates that the historically maligned religion and philosophy of the East could interest working-­class readers (who were perhaps more readily welcomed into these two libraries than their British counterparts), as much as it did their social betters.

Conclusion Sales figures for individual books will be given in Chapter 6, when publishers are discussed in their relations with translators. What has been established for now is that nineteenth-­century readers in both large and small urban centres, in Britain, the United States, and Australia, had access to major texts translated from several Asian languages and, more importantly, that demand for these translations did exist. And this is without considering almost at all the unquantifiable mass of periodical readers, some of whom—­like Quaritch’s customer in Madrid—­will have turned to books after enjoying articles or extracts in the monthlies. This is too vast an area to go into fully, save to offer some brief statistics from two widely circulating British publications: between 1875 and 1905 The Nineteenth Century carried fourteen articles containing translations from Asian languages. During the same period, six appeared in Fraser’s (after 1882 Longman’s) Magazine. The translations derived from Sanskrit, Persian, Arabic, Turkish, Akkadian, Chinese, Japanese, Burmese, and Tibetan sources, and while they usually took the form of short extracts, they also included chapters from such books as Edwin Arnold’s version of the Gulistan and Richardson’s Iliad of the East. While my dataset does not represent an overwhelming volume of material over a span of forty years, it must be remembered that this material was supplemented by numerous articles on Eastern travel, politics, and history. Furthermore, I have chosen these peri­od­ ic­als for their general interest and wide circulation among the middle classes—­ readers with a specific curiosity in foreign literature may have instead consulted publications like the Linguist or The Reflex: a Weekly Mirror of World Literature, both products of 1870s Britain, or the Eclectic Magazine, which had appeared earli`ates.70 70  Cheaper periodicals for the lower-­middle classes, while they seldom featured translations of any length, were also by no means bereft of information on Asian literature. The Penny Magazine, for instance, carried an article on Persian poetry in its second year of publication: ‘Poets in Persia’, Penny Magazine, III/127 (Mar. 1834), 117–19. See also ‘The “Rose-­Garden” of Saadi’, Penny Magazine, IV/234 (Nov. 1835), 460–2.

88  Asian Classics on the Victorian Bookshelf But having considered in the previous chapter the various factors that may have turned readers’ attention towards the literatures of Asia, and having now seen how those texts were disseminated to the public, we should now stop viewing texts in isolation. Instead, we need to perceive how translations that initially floated freely in the Victorian cultural field coalesced into clusters, sequences, and hierarchies. When studying nineteenth-­century readers of translations, it is hard to pinpoint the origin of their interest and harder to plot its development. To take the Muncie readers again, before tackling the Quran the majority of its borrowers had checked out something else related to Islam. Carpenter George Sutton had read the travelogue Yusef; or the Journey of the Frangi three months earlier. Day labourer Arthur J. Phillips had read Lalla Rookh the year before. And wine merchant Seymour Cohn was drawn to The Wizard King: a story of the last Moslem invasion of Europe in March 1897, followed by The Prince of India, or, why Constantinople Fell in April 1897, before borrowing With Clive in India in August and finally the Quran in September. However, only in Cohn’s case can we see anything like a consistent interest in Asia, over a span of years. Of course, we have no idea what books these Indianans kept at home, and quite possibly the town library failed to satisfy their oriental cravings. But in most cases their researches were intermittent and unstructured. In the same week in 1892 that she borrowed the Quran, doctor’s wife Louise Phinney also took out the Jewish chronicler Flavius Josephus and a four-­volume history of ancient Arabia and Mesopotamia. But after this raid on the Near East section it would be five years before she returned to that corner of the library. Readers like Queen Mary, whose preparations for her tour of India were discussed earlier, were therefore the exception. Most people lacked the time and resources to embark on the kind of study programme she set herself; many did not have the same compelling motive for study that she did; and more im­port­ ant­ly, many still would simply not have known where to begin and which texts to choose. This is not to set sustained interest at a higher value than passing curiosity—­for the latter variety of reading may be just as influential on a person’s ideas and outlook as the former. My argument is merely that the field of Asian writing was for many a perplexing one in which the organization of texts—­their selection, grouping, and ordering—­was a role waiting to be filled. Who would tell individuals which texts to read and how, and tell libraries what to buy, is the subject of the next chapter.

4 Canonizing In the first full-­length study of reading habits among the Victorian general public, Richard D. Altick emphasized the distinction in the early to middle decades of the century between purposeful study and ‘desultory reading’. The newly literate classes should be given structured reading, the argument ran, which would impart to them practical and moral intelligence in place of the vicious, sensational, and seditious matter which might otherwise capture their attention.1 This was the rationale that supported organizations like the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge (SDUK), which issued the Library of Useful Knowledge between 1829 and 1848. Charles Knight, the Library’s editor, ensured that its entries (covering such multifarious fields of human endeavour as logarithms, cattle-­rearing, and how to brew beer) were distributed as widely and cheaply as possible, and later adopted the same policy with the instalments of his Penny Cyclopaedia. Often enough, this utilitarian programme was reinforced by an unreasoning prejudice against imaginative literature, and almost against curiosity itself in the sense of meandering, ruminative, and digressive enquiry. This might lead us to assume that the useful knowledge movement was one inherently hostile to an interest in such recondite areas as oriental literature, especially fiction and poetry, and that such texts tended therefore to be fortuitously discovered by readers, rather than deliberately retrieved from library shelf or bookshop. There they lay unregarded, no doubt, opening their riches at last only to the ‘idle’ browser who had wandered the aisles in search of something different. This captivating image grows even more appealing when one reads of how leading Victorian orientalists came upon their vocations through happenstance. As E.G. Browne relates in the introductory chapter to A Year Amongst the Persians, he was first drawn to the Middle East aged sixteen by coverage of the Russo-­Turkish War. Determined to fight for the beleaguered Ottoman army, he obtained a copy of Barker’s Turkish Grammar, but failed to understand that the script ran from right to left. Similarly, at age fifteen E.B. Cowell was in the Ipswich Literary Institution when he came upon William Jones’s Poesas Asiaticae Commentarii, changing the course of his life.2 This was desultory reading of the most fortunate and consequential kind, for

1 Altick, English Common Reader, p. 132. 2  Marzieh Gail, Persia and the Victorians (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1951), pp. 97, 133. Asian Classics on the Victorian Bookshelf: Flights of Translation. Alexander Bubb, Oxford University Press. © Alexander Bubb 2023. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198866275.003.0004

90  Asian Classics on the Victorian Bookshelf Cowell’s conversation would provide the stimulant, some years later, for the desultory translation of Edward Fitzgerald. In reality, however, most readers striving to orient themselves in the Victorian biblioscape were guided neither by their personal compass nor the recommendations of authorities, but by a combination of both, and this chapter will explore the interplay between these two regimens of reading: the desultory and the directed. The two were not mutually exclusive, for even the publications of the SDUK could be picked up casually, and unveil surprises. Knight’s Penny Cyclopaedia contained numerous entries on oriental philology and history, all of which beginning A through E (‘Abbasides’ to ‘Ethiopian Language’) were written by the Professor of Sanskrit at University College London, Frederick Augustus Rosen.3 An extract from one of these shows up in a scrapbook kept by William Ayrton, musician and editor of the Harmonicon magazine, in the early 1850s: ‘the Prophet is asserted to have said, “Whoever appoints a person to the discharge of any office, whilst there is another among his subjects more qualified for the same than the person so appointed, does surely commit an injury with respect to the rights of God, the Prophet, and the Mussulmans.” ’ Ayrton adds the citation ‘(Pen. Cyc. Cadi; vi.100)’.4 This is a hadith cited in Al-­Hedaya, a work of Islamic jurisprudence. It was quoted in James Mill’s History of British India, whence it no doubt found its way into Rosen’s definition of ‘Cadi’ (judge) in the Cyclopaedia. Without the useful knowledge movement, Ayrton may never have had the opportunity to surmise—­as he appears to have done—­that the early Caliphate offered a precedent for meritocracy in civil appointments. This was a burning issue during the years he kept the scrapbook, following the bureaucratic debacle of the Crimean War and Gladstone’s establishment of the Civil Service Commission in 1855. And such nuggets of information did not exist in isolation. If, his curiosity aroused, Ayrton had searched the Library of Useful Knowledge for related matter, he would have found the Life of Mahomet (1829) by John Arthur Roebuck. The use for us, in turning first to Useful Knowledge, is to identify some rudiments of the systematic thinking that emerged later in the century, when Sir John Lubbock initiated the period’s most widely publicized and hotly debated programme in directed reading. On 9 January 1886, Lubbock, a banker and Liberal Member of Parliament, gave a lecture at the Working Men’s College in Great Ormond Street, London. Lubbock had entered parliament in the very same month—­February 1870—that the Elementary Education Act was introduced, and it may not have escaped his attention that among his audience were members of the first generation to benefit from the Act’s provisions. His objective was to

3  Charles Knight, Passages of a Working Life, during Half a Century (2 vols, London: Bradbury & Evans, 1864), II, 234. 4  BL: Add MS 60359 (Ayrton Papers), f.84. A further book of Ayrton’s, Add MS 60358, contains some remarks on the ‘Stoic moral’ conveyed by the Tale of Alnaschar from the Arabian Nights.

Canonizing  91 advise the College’s students on what reading to prioritise in their limited leisure hours. In contrast to the evangelical-­cum-­utilitarian mindset that had prevailed earlier in the century, and that had regarded imaginative literature as a pernicious distraction, his recommendations echoed Matthew Arnold’s stress on the classics, and on the diffusion of ‘sweetness and light’ by exposure to all that was most excellent in humane letters. The books he recommended would likely have passed without wider comment had it not been for the manner in which he laid them before his public, in the form of a list: not merely one hundred good books, but the one hundred best books—­or, to use Lubbock’s own phrase, those books ‘most worth reading’. Lubbock’s list has chiefly been remembered for the mockery and criticism it provoked (a public controversy fixated initially on his surprising omission of the Bible), and for the series of rival lists promulgated in subsequent years by William Morris, Lord Acton, Clement King Shorter, and others.5 Reviewing it today, what is remarkable is Lubbock’s diverse, even cosmopolitan selection (just under half the books originate in languages other than English), and the universal application of his didactic purpose—­something the middle-­class daily that publicized the list, the Pall Mall Gazette, picked up on when it titled its report ‘Sir John Lubbock’s Liberal Education’. Lubbock intended that his choices should be representative of literature in a broad sense: his list includes historical, economic, political, and scientific texts, as well as poetry, philosophy, and religion, which were grouped thematically in a taxonomic arrangement reflective perhaps of his other interests (Lubbock was a gifted amateur biologist). He also wanted the list to epitomize human achievement across cultures, and by assembling them into a definitive reading programme, he was hazarding the implication that anyone who aspired to consider themselves an educated person—­whether they be a self-­ improving mechanic of the Working Men’s College, or an Oxford undergraduate—­ should emulate the seriousness and catholicity of taste his list upheld. Those within Lubbock’s circle who had not yet sampled every dish in his banquet of knowledge were somewhat abashed. And that portion of the feast where they may have felt themselves quite as much, if not even more at a loss than Lubbock’s working-­class audience was the oriental buffet. ‘There are in your list about a dozen books which I humbly confess,’ wrote Lord Iddesleigh, ‘to not having read myself,—Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus (barely glanced at once or twice), Confucius, Spinoza, Wake, Mahabharata, Ramayama [sic], Shahnameh; and I am afraid I must add Miss Martineau’s two books.’6 John Ruskin was more violent and openly satirical in his reaction, posting to the Pall Mall Gazette a vandalized copy of Lubbock’s list in which he had brutally scored through the sections on 5 Philip Waller, Writers, Readers, & Reputations: Literary Life in Britain, 1870–1918 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), pp. 68–9. 6  BL: Add MS 49648 (Avebury papers), Iddesleigh to Sir John Lubbock, 25 Nov. 1885.

92  Asian Classics on the Victorian Bookshelf ‘Eastern Poetry’, ‘Non-­Christian Moralists’, and ‘Philosophy’ (sparing only Sir Francis Bacon), and erased every text of an Asian origin with the sole exception of the Arabian Nights.7 Indeed, besides Lubbock’s tactless omission of the Bible, the greatest source of reproach and dissent were these items drawn from the scripture or classical literature of India, China, and the Middle East. In the ori­ gin­al list, they numbered seven: the Quran, the Arabian Nights, three epic poems (the Shahnameh from Persian, and the Ramayana and Mahabharata from Sanskrit), the Analects of Confucius, and the Shijing or Classic of Poetry, a ca­non­ ic­al Chinese anthology compiled between the eleventh and seventh centuries bce. When Lubbock revised his list in February 1886 for the Contemporary Review, he made space for the Bible but stood by his oriental selection, adding St-­Hilaire’s Le Bouddha et sa Religion (intended perhaps as a substitute for actual Buddhist scriptures, only a fraction of which had at that time been translated into English). A further addition, the ancient Sanskrit drama Sakuntala, appeared when the list was published in Lubbock’s self-­help manual The Pleasures of Life (1887)—or, to be exact, it features from the twentieth edition (1890) onwards. Moreover, Lubbock explicitly defended his position in a new preface written for that landmark edition: The Ramayana and Mahabharata, and St. Hilaire’s Buddha, are not only very interesting in themselves, but very important in reference to our great oriental Empire. Kalidasa’s Sakoontala is generally regarded as the gem of the Hindoo Drama, and the Shahnameh is the great Persian Epic. Of the Koran, I suggest portions only. We must remember that 150,000,000 of men regard it not merely as the best of books, but as an actual inspiration. Surely, then, it could not have been excluded.8

Lubbock’s list made two normative presumptions of its audience: as it neared full literacy, the British public would—­or should—­aspire to educate itself universally in a standard corpus of worthy texts. The second presumption is one that we observed earlier, in Chapter 2: that is, that being an imperial public, its common interests probably would (and certainly should) extend to the literature of Asia. Put together, these two ideas produced a third concept, which Lubbock never fully articulated but which came into sharper definition the more his views were challenged. His selection, I argue, amounts to an oriental canon—­or, to adopt the word used by the London Times in 1881, an oriental ‘commonplace’. Praising the publications of Trübner & Co, the Times reviewer remarked that ‘a knowledge of

7  Reproduced in the pamphlet The Best Hundred Books, by the Best Judges (London: Pall Mall Gazette, 1886), p. 7. 8 Reprinted in The 100 Best Books: Sir John Lubbock’s List (London: Amalgamated Press, 1899), p. 10.

Canonizing  93 the commonplace, at least, of Oriental literature, philosophy, and religion is as necessary to the general reader of the present day as an acquaintance with the Latin and Greek classics was a generation or so ago.’9 The equivalence mooted in this sentence between Asian literature and the traditional humanist curriculum is notable for the cultural value it imputes to the former, but even more so for the implication that ‘Oriental’ languages must, like Latin and Greek, be approached in a curricular manner—­especially if the student is self-­taught. And if not quite ‘popular’, the Times concedes (Trübner’s Oriental Series consisted of expensive scholarly editions), the firm is thanked for supplying ‘the ever-­increasing want’ of translations from Asia in ‘at least, a comprehensive form’. Lubbock could not afford to be comprehensive: he had constrained himself to one hundred texts, nine from Asia. By what criteria had he selected those texts, and not others? The next section will answer that question, before the remainder of the chapter scru­ tin­izes the true impact of Lubbock’s idealistic gesture. Publicity he may have gained, but to what degree were his Asian selections genuinely integrated into ‘institutional’ cohorts of texts—­such as guides to reading, popular reprint series, and schoolroom education? And finally, was the enthusiasm surrounding the list the outgrowth of a peculiar, temporary conjunction of events in the 1880s and 1890s, or did the ‘Lubbock moment’ have more lasting effects?

What is an (Asian) Classic? Lubbock was not the first public figure to propose a list of history’s must-­reads. Seven years earlier Frederic Harrison had written in the Fortnightly Review on the need for a ‘rational syllabus of essential books’, though he confined his selection to the ‘common civilization of Europe’. Earlier, in France, the philosopher Auguste Comte had created such a list for his followers, and Charles Augustin Sainte-­ Beuve had attempted something similar in his essay ‘Qu’est-­ce qu’un classique?’ (‘What is a Classic?’).10 Both these men had tallied up their choices in the 1850s, with Sainte-­Beuve venturing to include four non-­Europeans in his pantheon: Firdausi, Confucius, and Valmiki and Vyasa (the supposed authors of the Ramayana and Mahabharata, respectively). Each of these lists can be seen as stages in the movement Jan Gorak traced in The Making of the Modern Canon from the middle of the eighteenth, through the length of the nineteenth and into the twentieth century. In the course of this period the word ‘canon’ ceased to refer exclusively to the Bible, and came to be used mainly in a secular context. It also 9 Quoted in J.J.  Clarke, Oriental Enlightenment: The Encounter between Asian and Western Thought (London: Routledge, 1997), p. 74. The original article, ‘Trübner’s Oriental Series’, appeared in the Times for 13 Apr. 1881, p. 5. 10  Kenneth Haynes, ‘Translation and British Literary Culture’, in France and Haynes (eds), Oxford History of Literary Translation in English: Volume 4, p. 7.

94  Asian Classics on the Victorian Bookshelf grew divorced from its original Greek etymology of ‘rule’, ‘standard’, or ‘law’. By Lubbock’s time, canon no longer meant an antique standard of excellence against which new works of art should be judged, but a body of universally approved texts.11 Nevertheless, the older associations lingered, vestigially, influencing and sometimes frustrating future attempts to redefine that list. A canon is an instrument, fashioned out of dead writers for the use of the living. And thus canon-­framers are always caught in a dilemma: how to respect and preserve what is valuable from the past, while making room for what is needed by the present generation? Lubbock’s detractors may have imagined him bodging together his list the evening before the lecture, but in fact he had been mulling the subject over since at least May 1881, when he stayed with his friend M.E. Grant Duff. ‘We tried to number a list of the 100 books best worth reading’, Lubbock wrote in his diary. ‘Some day I will work this up.’12 It is probable, moreover, that even then he was thinking along global lines. During a holiday to northern France in 1876, he had read three books that would later feature among the hundred: Firdausi’s Shahnameh, the Shijing, and ‘2 vols of Thucydides’.13 For ten years, therefore, Lubbock had been essaying a programme limited in quantity, and yet broader in content than any that had been offered hitherto. By capping his selections, he was forcing himself to make choices, to assign priority—­in effect, he was going to have to split up existing corpora, separating the most important texts from the native traditions that gave them meaning, and recombining them into new, putative unities. The problems this posed for him, and his decision-­making process, are partially visible in his surviving papers, but they come into sharper focus when we compare him with the suave precursor whose intercultural approach would appear—­but only superficially—­most in sympathy with his own. Sainte-­Beuve uses the word ‘classique’ in a curious manner, and this may go some way to explaining why Lubbock uses it barely at all. Even though he had decided quite consciously to stretch and reshape the British idea of a liberal education, he seemingly avoids talking about ‘classics’ or ‘the canon’. Sainte-­Beuve traces the word to its Latin root classicus, meaning a member of the Roman elite—­or, figuratively, the highest class of writer. This patrician etymology reflects the cultural vision of ‘Qu’est-­ce qu’un classique?’, which takes not the least account of ­readers at the outer wall of what Sainte-­Beuve calls the Temple of Taste, searching for a passage to its inner sanctum. Within this temple, he imagines the great authors of history engaged in eternal discourse—­ Homer with Valmiki, Solon with Confucius—­and the temple must be reconstructed and enlarged, he insists, with niches for these Eastern figures. Something that is curiously underemphasized in the essay, though, is the act of reading: Sainte-­Beuve uses ‘auteur’ and ‘autorité’ 11  Jan Gorak, The Making of the Modern Canon: Genesis and Crisis of a Literary Idea (London: Athlone, 1990), pp. 48–52. 12  BL: Add MS 62680 (Supplementary Avebury papers), Diary, 1864–82, 15 May. 1881. 13  BL: Add MS 62681 (Supplementary Avebury papers), Diary, 1872–9, 13 Oct. 1876.

Canonizing  95 twice as frequently as he does the verb ‘lire’. By contrast, Lubbock constantly foregrounds the benefits reading confers on the reader and, by extension, the social utility of fostering a well-­educated population. The discrepancy has its roots in history and politics. Although Sainte-­Beuve’s vision is one of harmony, it was conceived at a moment of crisis. He wrote his essay in 1850, during the turmoil of the short-­lived Second Republic, and he vigorously supported Louis-­Napoleon’s coup a year later. His concern was the reimposition of order after chaos, culturally as well as politically (the coming régime was the same that would remodel Paris to the designs of Baron Haussman).14 Lubbock’s intervention also issued directly from its historical moment, but bound on a different trajectory. Three weeks before the lecture he had retained his seat in the 1885 General Election, the first to be contested under the provisions of the Third Reform Act. In the same letter in which he offered his somewhat shamefaced feedback on Lubbock’s draft list, Lord Iddesleigh alluded to the implications of the Act’s significant widening of the franchise: . . . you think that there is a certain amount of book-­knowledge which every man (qu. the new county electors?) ought to acquire in order to enable himself to understand the mental condition—­past and present—­of the world he lives in, irrespectively of his individual place and occupation therein. Very good . . . but the books should be representative.15

What were the implications of this for the Asian contingent? Gorak observes that many of the nineteenth-­century book listers used grandiose architectural metaphors to emphasize the integrated unity of their selection. This trope was particularly appealing to the framers of national canons: Shakespeare’s works, for instance, were often imaged as a great dome or monument reared above the English nation.16 Clearly, a palace of culture is quite the opposite of what we have already seen was the prevailing notion of orientalism as excavation—­a sifting for ‘gems’ in the layered ruins of history—­yet nonetheless Sainte-­Beuve does unite East and West under one roof in his imaginary pantheon. He does so by focussing on three epic poems, plus Confucius (who is admitted rather grudgingly), and though Lubbock foregoes the metaphor he makes the same choices. In a dome of one hundred bricks, each brick must be a single, substantial article. Ideally, it should have one identifiable author, and it is notable that his only items that did not were the Shijing and the Arabian Nights.17 Epic, then, was the prioritized 14  Christopher Prendergast, The Classic: Sainte-­Beuve and the Nineteenth-­Century Culture Wars (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), pp. 24–7. 15  BL: Add MS 49648, Iddesleigh to Lubbock, 25 Nov. 1885. 16 Gorak, Making of the Modern Canon, p. 62. 17  A single author did not always mean a single text: Lubbock did, rather inconsistently, permit himself the latitude to define the novels of Walter Scott as one book.

96  Asian Classics on the Victorian Bookshelf genre, and not only because it furnished him with long, complete, unitary texts that were readily assimilable to Western ideas of literary prestige. For readers of Louisa Costello’s persuasion, one went to lyric poetry to recover the definitive voices of Persian culture, and Lubbock makes allowances for their point of view. ‘Many, I know, will think I ought to have included Omar Khayyam’, he commented in an article following the lecture. But to his positivist and Darwinian biologist’s mindset, ‘the development of human thought’ took precedence over individual circumstances. The Rubaiyat represented the idiosyncratic viewpoint of an interesting personality from the past, but the Shahnameh was the story of the Persian people.18 Of course, Lubbock is not quite consistent. His various art­ icles and commentaries recommend summaries of the Sanskrit epics, and extracts from the Quran—­thus, he encourages a piecemeal approach even while his system appears to deny it. In some ways, anthologists were his unacknowledged heirs. He also ran into difficulties when he reached languages, like Arabic or Chinese, where there is no central epic poem. But these contradictions and asymmetries were natural consequences of the Babel, effectively, he was proposing: while Sainte-­Beuve’s remained essentially a French national project, Lubbock’s was a British imperial canon. The Temple of Taste is a national monument because Sainte-­Beuve would have his countrymen read the classics not for what is alien in them but for what is familiar. As we have already seen, the temple is the home not of texts but of authors, and the function of Firdausi, Valmiki, and Vyasa’s presence is so they may act as a retinue (‘three magi from the Orient’, as he puts it), for the messianic figure of Homer, the master epic poet.19 As Christopher Prendergast has shown, the logic behind Sainte-­Beuve’s ensemble derives from Aryanist ideas within nineteenth-­century philology. In his system, Sanskrit, Persian, Greek, and Latin are arranged in a lineage culminating in French—­an Indo-­European genealogy that exists only through the exclusion of ‘Semitic’ literature created by Arabs and Jews. The Persian magus was especially useful to him in this regard. ‘Sainte-­Beuve also wrote a separate article on Firdawsi,’ Prendergast notes, ‘the main drift of which was to rescue him from the radical otherness of the ‘Orient’ . . . by domesticating him.’ Through a bizarre list of analogies including Racine, Voltaire, and Ossian, ‘Firdawsi is made to become one of “us” ’.20 Lubbock’s choices meanwhile are justified not by their affinities with European literature, but by their intrinsic value and their large readership in the East (and consequently their relevance to British affairs in that quarter). To reject the Quran under such criteria was unthinkable, especially if Lubbock realized that the list would be scrutinized, as it soon was, in India. Furthermore, his intimation that other religions should be 18  John Lubbock, ‘On the Pleasure of Reading’, Contemporary Review XLIX/2 (Feb. 1886), 249. 19  Marcel Hervier (ed.), Oeuvres choisies de Sainte-­Beuve (Paris: Delegrave, 1926), p. 223. 20 Prendergast, The Classic, pp. 35–6.

Canonizing  97 similarly represented can be seen both in letters from friends he consulted prior to the lecture—­one answered a query about the Rig Veda by informing him (wrongly) that it had not yet been translated—­and in subsequent letters to the press: by including Saint-­Hilaire’s Bouddha in the revised list he seems to have taken a hint from the Head Master of Eton, Edmond Warre. The other Eastern suggestions he received from correspondents (the Hitopadesha and ‘Dialogues of Krishna’, the Gulistan, Omar Khayyam, Muir’s Life of Mahomet, and Edwin Arnold’s Light of Asia) made less impression on him. William Morris issued a vague demand not only for ‘Other Arab and Persian poetry’ to boost Lubbock’s quota, but also Froissart, Boccaccio, Piers Plowman, and the Mabinogion—­ intriguingly he classed all these under ‘Mediaeval poetry’.21 A useful distinction might be drawn here between what Gorak, in his analysis of the book-­listing phenomenon, calls ‘Evaluative’ and ‘Representative’ lists.22 Morris’s was of the former class, being a list of personal touchstones that reflected his self-­confessed bias against ‘cold classicalism’. Lubbock’s focus fixed itself unwaveringly on the ‘Representative’, which in his Asian conspectus meant primarily epic poetry and scripture. In British society, the most obvious precedent for what Lubbock was proposing could be seen daily in any grammar school, with the Greek master watching from his dais while a roomful of boys plodded through their Anabasis. These institutions were the mechanism by which a dead, alien culture was preserved within a living one, but not in its entirety.23 For centuries, pagan antiquity had been distilled and codified for the needs of Christian education and, as we saw in Chapter 2, Emanuel Deutsch had already proposed that much the same might be done for the Quran, the Talmud, and the Vedas: ‘while we bury that which is dead in them, we rejoice in that which lives in them.’ Deutsch glossed over the obvious objection, though, that in these cases the ‘alien’ culture was still alive and still populated with intellectuals who considered themselves the guardian of their own canons. Thus, whenever a scholar like Hindley predicted (in 1826) that we may ‘look forward to a more enlightened æra’ in which Persian would be in­corp­ or­ated into the field of ‘classical’ learning,24 or whenever Legge (whom Lubbock actually met, in 1879, at Oxford) published another volume of his Chinese Classics, a critical ambiguity embedded itself in the conversation: for whom was this corpus being codified? What was dead for some may still be vital to others. The situation with Chinese was especially vexed, since so much of what was translated by nineteenth-­century sinologists might be broadly classed as ‘popular’ literature, and often belonged to genres of popular fiction and drama that were established

21  BL: Add MS 49648, Edward Buck to Lubbock, 10 Nov. 1885; The Best Hundred Books, by the Best Judges, pp. 9–21. 22 Gorak, Making of the Modern Canon, p. 74. 23  Ibid., p. 52. 24  John Haddon Hindley, Persian Lyrics (London: Oriental Press, 1800), pp. 15–16, italics Hindley’s.

98  Asian Classics on the Victorian Bookshelf in China centuries before highbrow/lowbrow distinctions appeared in secular European literature. Even a comparatively recent text like the Liaozhai Zhiyi (1766), a ghost story collection authored by Pu Songling and translated by Herbert Giles as Strange Stories from a Chinese Studio (1880), belongs to a genre of fiction—­wenyan xiaoshuo—­that originated in the fourth century ce, long before the emergence of the European romance.25 By rendering the word jing (經) as ‘classic’, Legge was attempting to understand the Chinese relationship to Chinese antiquity in terms of modern Europe and ancient Greece. By popularizing in English texts that were already popular in Chinese, Giles was implying the existence of a quite different historical consciousness. In both cases, the extreme longevity of Chinese culture, in which nothing could be safely termed ‘dead’, or placed behind a watershed labelled ‘pre-­Islamic’ or ‘pre-­Vedic’, troubled trans­ lators who were perhaps never quite sure whether they were replicating the authentic canon, or generating a new canon of Chinese literature for use in the West. The situation becomes even more complicated when we consider that nineteenth-­century China was a country undergoing rapid change, and that the perception of ‘the classics’ among Chinese intellectuals and reformers may have been altering in response to European influences.26 When Lubbock stood up and told London’s working men to read the Analects and the Shijing to understand China, he was no doubt not au fait with developments in the colleges and teahouses of Shanghai or Hong Kong. But rather than dwell on the obvious fallacies in his approach, perhaps it is better to see his method as one animated by contradiction: a marriage of modern and ancient, ostensibly definitive and yet actually provisional, and suspended between fidelity to its sources and the utility of its audience. Compiling a selection of his writings some forty years later, it is surprising to find Lubbock’s daughter still conscious of the opprobrium provoked by the Asian section. Her defence was that the list ‘was intended as a guide to inter­ nation­al literature for the Englishman in the street’.27 That man (or woman) had Lubbock’s guidance, then. But where was the international library where readers could put his recommendations into practice?

The ‘Classics’ Reprint Series We saw earlier how Lubbock made two normative presumptions of the British public: that they should read a standard canon of texts, and should pay attention 25  Shengyu Wang, ‘Chinese Folklore for the English Public: Herbert A. Giles’s 1880 Translation of Pu Songling’s Classical Tales’, Comparative Literature, LXXIII/4 (2021), 442. 26 Forman, China and the Victorian Imagination, p. 74. 27  Mrs Adrian Grant Duff, The Life-­Work of Lord Avebury (Sir John Lubbock), 1834–1913 (London: Watts, 1924), pp. 231–2.

Canonizing  99 to the East. Implicit in these two norms is a third expectation, that those books of Asia ‘most worth reading’ should be made available in English translation to all readers irrespective of prior knowledge or financial means. As has already been mentioned, Lubbock was obliged to nominate a history of Buddhism (and a French one, at that) in the absence of genuine Buddhist scriptures, while for the Hindu epics he recommended the synopses given in J. Talboys Wheeler’s History of India. In 1886, only a quarter of K.M. Ganguli’s Mahabharata translation was completed and available, while R.T.H. Griffith’s five-­volume Rámáyan of Válmíkí retailed at eighteen shillings per volume.28 Where exactly were his impecunious clerks and mechanics—­ let alone bankers and peers—­ to buy or borrow these poems? The answer lay, of course, partly with popular translations and abridgements. But in regard purely to price, the vehicle that brought these texts finally within reach of ‘the million’ was the cheap reprint series, such as Collins’ Classics, Bohn’s Standard Library, the Aldine Poets, and Everyman’s Library. As Mary Hammond has pointed out, not all reprint series were equivalent. The genre was originally developed in the middle of the century for sale at railway bookstalls, and was characterized by flimsy, badly bound, poorly printed, disposable books priced at sixpence or cheaper. Series like Nelson’s Sixpenny Classics and their rivals at Collins continued to pursue this business model into the first decade of the twentieth century, offering English novels (Dickens, Thackeray, Kingsley, Fenimore Cooper) for ready consumption. By contrast, at the end of the 1860s a new kind of reprint was emerging: a sturdy, one-­shilling or two-­shilling volume in cloth boards or leatherette, a book to take home and keep rather than to discard in a train compartment. Such were the Chandos Classics, Camelot Classics, and J.M.  Dent’s Temple Classics series (the forerunner of his magnum opus, Everyman’s Library). By the close of the century the unmistakable trend was towards this format, overseen by a general editor who curated a mixed list of fiction, poetry, biography, essay, and travelogue that gave physical embodiment to his understanding of Britain’s literary heritage.29 The profit lay in encouraging readers to purchase not merely the books of immediate interest to them, but to invest in this tangible canon by assembling the entire series in a uniform row on their bookshelf. And as N.N. Feltes suggests, Lubbock’s list played an important part in this trend by creating the notion that a series could contain a finite number of books, thereby constituting a quantifiable library of knowledge—­something picked up on by Dent when he launched Everyman in 1905, and announced that the series would eventually number one thousand titles.30

28  ‘Trübner & Co.’s New Publications’, Saturday Review, XXXVII/964 (18 Apr. 1874), 516. 29  Mary Hammond, Reading, Publishing and the Formation of Literary Taste, p. 92. 30 N.N. Feltes, Literary Capital and the Late Victorian Novel (Madison and London: University of Wisconsin Press, 1993), p. 41.

100  Asian Classics on the Victorian Bookshelf It is to these ‘classic’ libraries arising in the first decades of universal literacy that we may properly apply John Spiers’s remark, that the reprint publishers ‘presented themselves as retrieving those texts which are said to define us (whoever “we” are) in a social process of reaffirmed community and continuity’.31 If this was the case, however, then the editors of those series were conscious that a number of the texts which, by their similarity or contrast, leant definition to ‘our’ cultural tradition came from beyond the bounds of Europe. In 1877, the Chandos Classics issued Sale’s translation of the Quran, the first time it had appeared in a cheap edition. The series, brainchild of Frederick Warne & Co., also carried the Arabian Nights (1869), the Talmud (1877), The Fables of Pilpay (1886), and Atkinson’s Sháh Námeh (1886), as well as Isaac D’Israeli’s Curiosities of Literature (1881), which contained among much else the first English version of the story of the Persian lovers, Layla and Majnun. Meanwhile the Camelot Classics, issued by the firm of Walter Scott, styled itself ‘A complete Prose Library for the People’, and thus its editor Ernest Rhys did not select any Persian poetry for the series.32 Instead, he picked the Gulistan, in Ross’s translation, for its fiftieth number (1890), later adding two Sanskrit plays by Kalidasa, ‘The Shakespeare of India’. The best-­endowed series from an Asian point of view, however, was the short-­ lived Temple Classics, which embraced the Mahabharata (1898), Ramayana (1899), Rig Veda (1904), and Bhagavad Gita (1905), as well as Indian Poetry: selections rendered into English verse by Romesh Chunder Dutt (1905).33 The publisher J.M. Dent also marketed a sub-­series, the Temple Classics for Young People, for which he commissioned Fairy Tales from the Arabian Nights (1899) and a children’s adaptation of Dutt’s Ramayana translation, Rama and the Monkeys (1903). A quick glance over these titles is sufficient to reveal the role that commercial imperatives played in selection. Rather than compete for limited readers by printing the same texts, the editors of these three series divided up the East between them. Thus, any oriental canon of the sort Lubbock envisaged was necessarily fragmented. Business instincts also had a more decisive effect on the books’ contents, for few of these translations fall into the class of books with which this study is principally concerned—­books designed by contemporary popularizers for the use of the general reading public. The narrow profit margins of reprint series created a strong incentive for editors to seek titles that were out of copyright, and thus in almost all cases they fastened on old translations produced by East India Company servants in the early part of the century.34 One certainly has to question

31  John Spiers, ‘Introduction’, in John Spiers (ed.), The Culture of the Publisher’s Series, Volume 2: Nationalisms and the National Canon (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), p. 12. 32 John R. Turner, The Walter Scott Publishing Company: A Bibliography (Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1997), p. xii. 33 The last contained excerpts from the Rig Veda, Upanishads, Kalidasa’s Bridal of Uma, and Bharavi’s Penance of Arjun. 34 Hammond, Reading, Publishing and the Formation of Literary Taste, p. 102.

Canonizing  101 whether these Asian texts would have been prioritized had they not been so easily available. Sadly, the extant archives of Warne and Scott are meagre and editorial decisions in those houses difficult to discern. But with Dent, the case is quite different. It is clear from his surviving correspondence that he was pursuing a comprehensive vision akin to Lubbock’s. ‘I claim nothing for EVERYMAN’S LIBRARY,’ he wrote to a colonial officer in Ceylon, ‘except that I want it to be a universal collection, not only of the great things of English literature, but as far as I could to include good translations from many other nationalities.’35 For Dent, ‘good translations’ entailed new work by living experts—­thus, rather than reprint the antiquated Sakuntala of William Jones, he commissioned a new version by Arthur Ryder (the Berkeley professor who staged Sanskrit drama using live elephants). Furthermore, he actively sought to expand the scope of the ‘classics’ reprint list to the Far East. In Spiers’s terms, the ‘community’ and ‘continuity’ that Everyman’s precursors had reaffirmed was the community of British-­ruled Asia, and the legacy of British orientalism in India and the Middle East. The literature of China and Japan, not colonies but sovereign states locked in an unequal trading relationship with the West, had not been included in previous reprint series, and Dent sought to redress that omission by consulting the Yale historian Kan’ichi Asakawa. It is fascinating to see series editor Ernest Rhys (formerly of the Camelot Classics, but now working for Dent) debating the inclusion of a Chinese text in 1917 based on the three factors of readability, public interest in Buddhism, and the text’s relative importance in the world canon that Everyman was delineating: ‘I have taken two opinions on Dr Timothy Richards’ Chinese Journey to the Other World,—rather conflicting. Mrs Archibald Little . . . says she found it intolerably dull, though she is much interested in Chinese Buddhism, & well read in it. The other opinion points to its being a classic, but needing almost expert readers to appreciate it.’36 Ultimately the translation was rejected, and indeed the whole branch of texts Dent was planning with Asakawa (the ‘Eastern Section to the Library’, as he called it) never materialized. The reasons are unclear, but most likely relate to the cost of royalties and the economic impact of the First World War. A concordance of the most overtaxed words in turn-­of-­the-­century periodical journalism would surely include ‘cosmopolitan’. It was used both to praise and to denigrate, attaching itself to discussions of culture, capitalism, immigration, diplomacy, and sexuality, and it is into the choppy waters surrounding this word that publishers sought to pilot series named ‘World’, ‘Globe’, ‘International’, or

35  UNC: J.M. Dent Records, Folder 3769 (J.M. Dent to Sir Anton Bertram, 5 Sept. 1921). 36  UNC: J.M. Dent Records, Folder 2222 (J.M. Dent to Ernest Rhys, 6 Dec. 1916, and Rhys to Dent, 1 Mar. 1917). Asakawa is not mentioned by name, but I infer he was the ‘Professor of Japanese History at Yale’ to whom Dent refers (‘I had a most interesting talk with him, and he was a most delightful fellow’).

102  Asian Classics on the Victorian Bookshelf ‘Universal’.37 In some cases these titles were quite misleading: the World’s Classics (Oxford World’s Classics from 1905) ran for twenty-­two years, and more than two hundred and fifty volumes, before it issued a single non-­Western text.38 But other brands that more shrewdly and self-­consciously promoted themselves as worldly did fulfil, in quantity if perhaps not quality, Dent’s Far Eastern ambitions. This was the case with Gowan’s Cosmopolitan Library, a short-­lived experiment by a Glasgow publisher that in 1912 reprinted the work of two mid-­ century Japanologists, and the much more substantial International Library of Famous Literature, which launched in 1899 with the promise of ‘selections from the World’s great writers ancient, mediaeval and modern’. The trend was especially pronounced in two American ventures, the World’s Great Classics (Colonial Press) and the Universal Classics Library. The first offered the Egyptian Book of the Dead, then entering its first vogue, and otherwise no standalone Asian item but rather national anthologies—­not merely, however, anthologies of Persian, Arabic, Chinese, Japanese, and ‘Hindu’ literature, but a fulsome pick-­and-­mix of Turkish and Hebrew writings, Armenian, Babylonian, Assyrian, and even Malay. The second series, meanwhile, made this startling pitch to the neophyte of 1901: A Library, authoritative and complete, demanded by the broad education that befits a King, a President, a Prince, a Senator, a General, an Admiral or a Governor as he stands to-­day looking through the now open door of the Twentieth Century.39

Some of the shortcomings of serialization become apparent in this prospectus, with its dubious promise to rig out the subscriber with the trappings of humane learning (‘ethics’, ‘philosophy’, ‘metaphysics’, ‘jurisprudence’)—one can imagine a young man receiving a full set of the Universal Classics Library as an ‘improving’ birthday present from a moneyed aunt. The function in this setup of Volume XIX, the Persian Dabistan, is that it ‘enables the reader to see Orientals as they see themselves’. Even better, the blurb goes on, it combines ‘the quaintness of the East with the detail and vivid description of a New York daily.’ This is a uniquely brash example but, as Drury notes, even worthy undertakings like Everyman or Heinemann’s International Library represented ‘a strategy for the accrual of cultural wealth’ and ‘a commodifying task’, whereby foreign texts—­both European and Asian—­were rendered into the form in which they would most effectively satisfy the demands of the anglophone market. As Heinemann’s editor Edmund Gosse told prospective customers in 1890, ‘a search is to be made on all lands and 37  Stefano Evangelista, Literary Cosmopolitanism in the English Fin de Siècle: Citizens of Nowhere (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2021), pp. 3–4. 38 This was The Three Dervishes and other Persian Tales and Legends (1923), translated by Reuben Levy. 39  UCLA: MS 378, Box 3, Prospectus for the Universal Classics Library (Washington: Dunn, 1901).

Canonizing  103 in all languages’ for books that combine high literary value with ‘curious and amusing’ matter.40 And not only were the reprint series essential vehicles for sifting and sorting the world’s literature into a product range in London and New York: they were also a means of recruiting readers in Bombay or Singapore to the Western canon. A typescript draft composed by the editor of the International Library of Famous Literature, intended it seems to promote the series in India, is particularly revealing, beginning as it does in idealistic strains reminiscent of Goethe’s vision for a literary weltmarkt (world market)—‘of all the agencies that unite races or nations none is more powerful than literature’—before conceding that this international exchange can only function once ‘the native student’ has learned the relative values of Western and Eastern goods. ‘Although Indian literature is by no means included neglected’, we are told (the erasure hides a telling slip either by the author, or his typist), in fact the greater proportion of the Library is devoted to Western works. ‘For a variety of obvious reasons, it is clear that the process of assimilation must begin on the Indian side,’ is the conclusion, and ‘that European thought must penetrate Indian before Indian thought can make much impression on Europe.’41 Notably, these were not even the words of an out-­and-­ out chauvinist, but of Richard Garnett, the polymath librarian who in the early 1880s had convinced Helen Zimmern to undertake her popular translation of Firdausi. Like the monumental canons we met with in the last chapter, carved upon American museums and public libraries, it is hard to say how far this expressive endorsement of Asian texts really went. The answer to that question lies with the readers who built, in their own homes, the Victorian global bookshelf. And of these, who either delegated their choices to the likes of Lubbock and Dent, Garnett and Rhys, or who took advantage of the series’ low prices to get what they already knew they wanted to read, there were very many indeed. Initial print runs in Everyman’s Library were variable, but generally numbered ten thousand copies. The combination of Dutt’s Ramayana and Mahabharata in a single volume had to be reprinted after just one year. Their Quran, first issued in 1909, required replenishing every three years, on average, for well over a generation. By 1951, it is estimated to have sold 136,347 copies, putting it within the top 5 per cent of Everyman titles, outselling even Silas Marner and the selected works of John Stuart Mill.42 Each sale represents a different possible outcome driven by the preferences, social circumstances, and networks of the individual (or institutional) buyer. For William  J.  Curtis (1854–1927), a New York lawyer, the Chandos Classics Koran perhaps constituted merely a visible token of his cultural

40 Drury, Translation as Transformation, p. 45. 41  HRC: MS-­1545 (Richard Garnett Collection), 1.1, ‘India and the Library of Famous Literature’. 42 Terry Seymour, A Printing History of Everyman’s Library, 1906–1982 (Bloomington, IN: AuthorHouse, 2011), pp. 127, 208, 164.

104  Asian Classics on the Victorian Bookshelf cap­ital—­he pasted his ornate bookplate onto the front endpaper, but never bothered to cut the internal pages.43 By contrast, A.R.  Orage (1873–1934), British socialist and editor of the New Age magazine, spent years exploring the Mahabharata and owned both the Everyman abridgement and the eleven-­volume edition prepared by Ganguli in Calcutta. Possibly he ‘upgraded’ from short version to long, or used the Everyman as a sort of directory or handbook to the full epic.44 In many cases, as might be expected, readers’ ability to engage with the source text was constrained by editorial practice. Anyone who purchased the Chandos Arabian Nights had been left, wittingly or not, with an edition that had been diligently expurgated of all ‘the parts that parents consider objectionable for their children to read’.45 On the other hand, those mothers and fathers who took home the Camelot Gulistan were in for a shock: the economizing press had reprinted the translation of James Ross, an old Bengal hand who—­because he had written for a jaded audience of long-­dead East India clerks—­had not bothered to amend the several stories about handsome young men and their fervent attachment to other handsome young men. This discrepancy was to have tremendous consequences for a gay reader whom we will meet in Chapter  7. Furthermore, though we may suppose that it was in editors’ interest to create a feast of easily digestible chunks, Edmund Gosse—­in spite of his acquisitive instincts—­had other ideas for the Heinemann books he was stewarding through the press. He wanted his translator to challenge the readership with alien aesthetic standards. ‘Be as exact as possible, please’, he told Herbert Giles, who was responsible for the Chinese entry in a series of short histories of national literatures. ‘I mean don’t shrink from giving what is odd or grotesque in the original—­don’t Europeanize.’46 Perhaps the greatest beneficiaries of ‘classics’ publishing, though, were those for whom the series enabled or stimulated a juxtaposition of Eastern and Western texts. Stewart Bruce Terry (1843–1924) was a Midwestern attorney who in later years took up farming at Morse, near Olathe, Kansas.47 He is unusual in having dated, by month and year, the marginalia he left in his books, and thus it is clear that he bought and read a World’s Great Classics volume, the Analects of Confucius and ‘Sayings of Mencius’, in November of 1912—a natural lull in the agricultural calendar, but also the month when Teddy Roosevelt led the Progressive Party to second place in the US presidential election. An eccentric tract self-­published a few years earlier suggests Terry will have been drawn to the Progressive platform, which advocated transparency in government, antitrust 43  AVaTAR Ar.S.2a: George Sale, The Koran (London and New York: Frederick Warne, 1887). 44  Brotherton: BC MS 20c Orage (Alfred R. Orage book collection). 45  Arthur King and A.F. Stuart, The House of Warne: One Hundred Years of Publishing (London: Frederick Warne, 1965), p. 7. 46  Gosse’s editorial notes have been pasted into a copy of the book now in CUL: S840.c.90.25: Herbert Allen Giles, History of Chinese Literature (London: Heinemann, 1901), see p. 119. 47  The Kansas Historical Society is the best source for details of Terry’s life: Ms. Coll. 518 (Stewart Bruce Terry papers).

Canonizing  105 legislation, and a curb to laissez-­faire capitalism, but also disturbed by its moves to placate trade unions and centralize more power in the federal government.48 The annotations he left in his edition of Chinese philosophy may be read against this important moment in American politics—­the last occasion on which a party other than Republican or Democrat had a credible shot at the White House—­and read perhaps as a measure of his own partisan ambivalence. Notably, most annotators of Confucius I have discovered were drawn to two aspects of his moral system: the principle of reciprocity (do unto others as you would have them do unto you), and his concept of the ‘superior man’. Terry, however, was less interested in Confucius’s ethics than in his political thought, or rather in the way that Confucius and his follower Mencius suggest that personal ethics leads, indirectly, to good government. When both rulers and ruled hold themselves to a social code of justice and propriety, order and harmony are the byproducts. This, at least, appears to be Terry’s train of thought in his developing sequence of shorthand annotations. ‘Love and good will here, are dispositions recipiently passive, and not volitional’, he writes in Book I of the Analects, noting that Confucius’s concept of goodwill is not as active charity but rather as passive respectfulness and filial piety. Having absorbed these principles in Chapters 1 to 4, the dated annotations suggest that he actually skipped forward in the volume to a chapter where their political application is shown. Mencius meets a king who asks him how the counsels of the wise might ‘profit’ his kingdom. ‘Why must your Majesty use that word “profit”?’, replies Mencius. ‘Make benevolence and righteousness your only themes’, he advises, and the ‘profit’ that accrues from them will soon make itself apparent (Figure 4.1). Here Terry has written ‘Profit, is a residue of effort to a purpose . . . Right rule, a profit of justice.’49 The most important piece of evidence in this volume relates, however, not to how Terry interpreted Chinese philosophy but what he read alongside it. Inside the rear cover Terry has pasted a prospectus from yet another series, the World’s Greatest Books. His pencil has ticked off two titles, presumably indicating that he had already read them: Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws, and the Federalist Papers of Alexander Hamilton. American constitutionalism owed much to Montesquieu, while the Hamiltonian vision of ‘positive government’ (denoting an active national government that would override state’s rights to counteract social evils) was one of the guiding principles of Progressivism. Sadly, I have not managed to trace the other two books, and so the opposite anchorage of the bridge that Terry, it seems, has suspended between Confucian virtue ethics and, on the 48 S.B. Terry, Dynamics of Organism and Physics (Kansas City, MO: privately printed, 1908), pp. 95, 152–3, 161–5. On p. 181, Terry cites a story about Confucius to illustrate what he calls the ‘dependencies of social life’ that bind citizens together—­intriguingly, this predates his purchase of the World’s Greatest Books edition. 49 AVaTAR Misc.S.9a: Epiphanius Wilson (ed.), Chinese and Arabian Literature (New York: Colonial Press, 1900), pp. 8, 99.

106  Asian Classics on the Victorian Bookshelf

Figure 4.1  Stewart Bruce Terry’s commentary on Mencius (author collection)

Canonizing  107 far shore, Hamilton’s moral perfectionism, is no longer visible. It would be even more interesting to see his response to Montesquieu who, unlike many Enlightenment thinkers—­notably Benjamin Franklin—­did not take China as a model of efficient rule. Rather, he refused to accept that individual liberty could coexist with the ‘despotism . . . of the mandarins’.50 But what is certain is that the World’s Great Classics provided the means for the sixty-­nine-­year-­old Terry, a veteran of the Civil War, to consult the political canon that undergirded American statecraft, while simultaneously joining an American tradition of taking precepts from Confucius that stretched back, in fact, to the Founding Fathers themselves.51

Mohammed in the Classroom: Schoolbooks and Prize-­Books Many copies of the Analects and the Mahabharata sold in the course of the nineteenth century were intended as gifts, often gifts for the young. I have seen dozens of inscriptions to this effect—­one of the earliest appears in a copy of Persian Fables, for Young and Old, which was dedicated to Arthur, ‘with Uncle Hewlett’s Love, 1834’.52 But these were individual offerings. After the passage of the 1870 Education Act, British board schools embarked on a much larger, more concerted effort at directed reading by presenting books to their pupils in recognition of academic achievement, or often merely for punctuality and good behaviour. Each school term would witness the same ceremony, and the same table piled anew with worthy tomes—­sometimes merely tracts (or novels resembling tracts), but often edifying ‘classics’, for which the reprint series were a convenient reservoir. In fact, prize giving fuelled the series’ growth, and constituted a substantial proportion of their business (such a large market did it generate, John R. Turner argues, that some distributors did their business almost wholly in reward books).53 Canny publishers repackaged volumes from their classics series as prize books. Others, cannier, employed editors to adapt those translations for the schoolroom audience. The man who edited James Atkinson’s translation of Firdausi which had appeared in the Chandos Classics in 1886, for reissue three years later in the publisher’s Prize Library, was none other than Atkinson’s son. It occurred to him, he

50 Mark Hulliung, Montesquieu and the Old Regime (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976), p. 100. 51  Franklin had access to Latin accounts of Confucianism written by seventeenth-­century Jesuits. See David Weir, American Orient: Imagining the East from the Colonial Era through the Twentieth Century (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2011), p. 19. 52 AVaTAR Ps.S.1a: Rev. H.G.  Keene, Persian Fables, for Young and Old (London: John W. Parker, 1833). 53 John  R.  Turner, ‘Books for Prizes: an aspect of the late nineteenth-­century book trade’, in David A. Stoker (ed.), Studies in the Provincial Book Trade of England, Scotland, and Wales before 1900: papers presented to the British Book Trade Index, Seventh Annual Seminar (Aberystwyth: University College of Wales, 1990), p. 5.

108  Asian Classics on the Victorian Bookshelf remarked in a brief preface, that ‘a more popular title’ might be preferable to Sháh Námeh: ‘ “Heroic Exploits” is an adequate designation of the romantic adventures, feats of valour, and deeds of chivalry, which are so graph­ic­al­ly related, and which should prove to the young as interesting as the “Arabian Nights”.’ This was one of the seven children’s versions of Firdausi (mentioned briefly in Chapter  1) that appeared between 1886 and 1930. In the same year it was published in London, a copy of Heroic Exploits was handed to William Norman, aged eight, at Moreland State School in the northern suburbs of Melbourne, for ‘General Proficiency’.54 If Atkinson expected his young readers to be thrilled by the clash of spear and scimitar, the editor who reworked Dutt’s Ramayana for inclusion in the Temple Classics for Young People had other priorities. It is in the magical and marvellous, rather than military, aspects of the poem that ‘lies the charm to children’, Geraldine Hodgson writes, and that suited Rama and the Monkeys for use as a ‘Reading Book for Boys’ Preparatory Schools, and for the lower forms in Girls’ High Schools’ (approximately ages ten to thirteen).55 It was also where the charm lay for W. Heath Robinson, better known for his drawings of whimsical gadgetry, who made seven delightful illustrations for the book. A number of class and gender assumptions seem to have affected how these children’s books were designed and distributed. There are five copies in my collection of juvenile versions of the Shahnameh containing prize bookplates. Four were allocated to boys. Of my two copies of Rama and the Monkeys, both were presented at the same private girls’ school in Liverpool. Moreover, the Dutt abridgement on which the latter was based had already been taken up in certain upper-­class girls’ schools. Specifically, I have seen two examples from the New York area: one that formed part of the borrowing collection of the Spence School on the Upper East Side, and which has acquired from somewhere a strong odour of tobacco, and one signed ‘Helen Tweed / Dobbs 1901–’02’. This belonged to a student (b. 1883, d. 1967) at the Misses Masters Boarding and Day School for Young Ladies at Dobbs Ferry, on the Hudson, where—­intriguingly—­it was not doled out as a prize book, but seems actually to have been used in the curriculum. At the end of Book 6 we find the pencilled words ‘Read Book 8’, and as if to underscore this directive the subsequent chapter heading of Book 7 has been crossed out and ‘Omit’ written in its stead. The start of Book 10 carries the instruction ‘Begin—­read far as possible’.56 Whether the text had been set for history or divinity lessons or simply as a reading comprehension exercise is unclear. Its appearance at ‘Dobbs’ was not an anomaly, however, and should not be 54 AVaTAR Ps.S.7a: Heroic Exploits from the Persian Poet Firdausi (London and New York: Frederick Warne, 1889), p. vii. 55  Geraldine Hodgson, Rama and the Monkeys (London: J.M. Dent, 1903), pp. v–­vi. 56 The first book belongs to Dr Sebastian Lecourt, University of Houston. The second is AVaTAR Sk.S.5b: Romesh Dutt, Ramayana: the Epic of Rama, Prince of India (London: J.M. Dent, 1899), pp. 103, 138.

Canonizing  109 attributed simply to the quirk of an individual teacher. Rather, it should be seen as the result of wider trends within educational culture at the turn of the century, and within the publishing industry that catered to that culture. Narrative and im­agina­tive fiction was increasingly valued in the classroom, where before it had been shunned. This trend produced schoolbooks like Legends That Every Child Should Know (1907), an anthology that reflected both the canon-­framing mindset we have already observed in the adult reprint series, and their soi-­disant cosmo­ pol­it­an­ism.57 The obligation (on child? on parent?) implied by that title is enhanced in the British context by a sense of imperial duty: ‘the Hindus are our fellow subjects’, writes Hodgson in her preface. At the same time, we need to remain aware of the relative importance attached to the lore of the East vis-­à-­vis the core European tradition drawn from Greek and Old Norse. A guide created by the Chicago Public Library in 1912 of books suitable for young people reveals a host of Persian, Indian, Japanese, and ‘Buddhist’ stories, alongside Russian, Irish, and Welsh—­but this stock of world fable is indexed under ‘Legends’, whereas the more dignified ‘Mythology’ is reserved strictly for the denizens of Olympus and Valhalla.58 Of the hundreds of thousands of beneficiaries, one might well ask what proportion so much as bent the boards of their handsome prize books? Leah Price is doubtful whether many germs of fancy, epiphany, or heresy were sown at these prize-­givings, for ‘to receive a book from a teacher or parent strips reading of its transgressive force.’59 Perhaps the answer may depend on the ease or difficulty with which particular children could access the books of their choice. On 19 December 1913 (the Friday before Christmas), Nellie Turner was awarded a prize ‘For Mathematics’ by Principal Burness at the Central Secondary School, Stratford, in the East End of London. She had just turned eighteen, her father worked in a flour mill, and it may have been the only book she received that Christmas. The prize was Everyman’s bestselling Koran, in Rodwell’s translation, with an introduction by the Reverend George Margoliouth. Turner has read the book thoroughly, adding marginalia that match the handwriting in the name box on the prize certificate that has been pasted inside the front cover. She has done what many an adult would have done (we must bear in mind, of course, that years may have elapsed before she actually read the book), by highlighting passages of note and indexing them on one of the rear endpapers. In an unusual arrangement, however, this index takes the form of a table:

57  Legends, states this book’s preface, form ‘part of the history of the unfolding of the human mind in the world’. Hamilton Wright Mabie, Legends That Every Child Should Know: a Selection of the Great Legends of all Times for Young People (New York: Doubleday, Page, 1907), p. vi. 58  Young People’s Books Finding List (Chicago, IL: Chicago Public Library, 1912), pp. 40, 158, 178, 206. 59 Leah Price, How to Do Things with Books in Victorian Britain (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012), p. 163.

110  Asian Classics on the Victorian Bookshelf Christian        Moham. Christ son of God Christ apostle of God p. 438 Trinity God is one God Christ conceived by Holy Ghost Christ created by God 391 Divine birth Divine Birth 119 In this way, Turner literally aligns some of the fundamental tenets of the two faiths, supplementing her method with additional notes in the text (‘see Genesis’, ‘see St Luke’) at points where she has detected biblical echoes. The emphasis is on similarity rather than difference. What we are glimpsing here is an exercise in comparative religion, in which the reader has followed the lead of Margoliouth, who in his introduction remarks even-­handedly that ‘Muhammed may in a real sense be regarded as a prophet of certain truths, though by no means of truth in the absolute meaning of the term.’60 Turner has underscored these words. Whether by doing this Turner was following her own judgement, and thus reading ‘transgressively’ is hard to say. Indexing and cross-­referencing were, it is probable, practices that she was taught at school—­was she therefore acting as she had been instructed, or turning the teachers’ tools ‘against’ them (or at least against what she had been told in Sunday school)? ‘Reverend’ Margoliouth’s role is significant here. Principal Burness may have felt he could safely put a Quran into a young woman’s hands if she might study it under the guidance of a clergyman, but in fact Margoliouth had only spent the early portion of his career in the church, as a curate. The title page would more accurately have described him as Keeper of Hebrew, Syriac, and Ethiopic Manuscripts in the British Museum.61 Tasked with editing Rodwell’s translation, which had so infuriated Richard Burton forty years beforehand, Margoliouth did not tamper with the text but tried to mitigate his predecessor’s bigotry by encouraging readers to approach it in a relativist frame of mind. This may have signified an inadvertent betrayal of the principal’s trust, or we might see it merely as furthering an established Victorian tradition of venerating the Prophet (counterposed against an equally strong tradition of vilifying him). Originating in Carlyle’s lecture on Mohammed in On Heroes, Hero-­Worship and the Heroic in History (1841), this tradition emphasized his qualities as leader and legislator, and is reflected in such later works as The Story of Mohammed (1914), one of the ‘Heroes of all Time’ titles that formed another popular source for school prize-­books in the 1910s.62

60  AVaTAR Ar.S.3b: J.M. Rodwell, The Koran (London: J.M. Dent, 1909), pp. 508, 341, 390, viii. 61  See ‘Margoliouth, Moses’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography and ‘Margoliouth, George’, Crockford’s Clerical Directory 1916–­17 (London: Horace Cox, 1916), p. 1009. 62  Another instance was the play Mahomet that Henry Irving planned to stage in the late 1880s, but which was banned by the Lord Chamberlain. See Kristan Tetens, ‘The Lyceum and the Lord Chamberlain: The Case of Hall Caine’s Mahomet’, in Richard Foulkes (ed.), Henry Irving: A Re-­ Evaluation of the Pre-­Eminent Victorian Actor Manager (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2008), p. 53.

Canonizing  111 All things considered, it is perfectly possible that Nellie Turner’s annotations were entirely in line with what her teachers had expected of her. Though even if her reading was really the opposite of transgressive, this episode may still prompt us to reassess what we think of as Victorian norms, which bear little resemblance to the phobic attitudes common in twenty-­first-­century Britain. It is not hard to imagine the reaction of today’s right-­wing press were white schoolchildren to be presented with copies of the Quran for Christmas.63 In spite of widespread fears at the time concerning the influence that ‘vicious’ books might have on impressionable women and young people, I have seen little evidence of anxiety surrounding oriental translations—­on the contrary, the Quran appears to have been one of the ‘improving’ titles with which Victorian directors of reading, applying a sort of literary Gresham’s law, sought to flush out bad literature.64 The only areas where educators showed reluctance to promote such texts were, ironically, the colonies in which they had their largest audience. Though not excluded outright from Indian schools, ‘native works’ were often deemed unfit because of the ‘objectionable’ moral precepts they set (such as the success of wily tricksters), and in general the system taught students to devalue their own cultures and exalt an English literary canon: no Rama and the Monkeys or The Book of Rustem for these youngsters.65 The bigotry of this policy is highlighted by a side-­project of Annie Besant, the Irish theosophist and tireless campaigner for Indian self-­rule. In 1899, she published The Story of the Great War, an abridgement of the Mahabharata sub­titled For the Use of Hindu students in the Schools of India. ‘When you go out into the world’, her introduction warns the intended audience, you will encounter scoffers who discredit the gods and antique scriptures of India: It is therefore part of the duty of a Hindu boy to understand a little about the sacred books of his religion, so that he may not be shaken by what ignorant or foolish people may say against them . . . The place that a nation holds in the mind of the world depends very largely on its books. If a nation produces great books, that nation is looked upon as great by other nations. If it has no great books, it is despised. There is no nation which has greater books than the Indian.66

63  For an indication, see the front page of the Daily Express for 25 Mar. 2008: ‘Fury over plan to teach the Koran in schools’. 64  See also AVaTAR Ar.S.4a: Sir William Muir, Mahomet & Islam: a Sketch of the Prophet’s Life from Original Sources (London: Religious Tract Society, 1887). A bookplate records that it was given to another East End schoolgirl, Alice Taphouse, in 1892 in recognition of her ‘Excellence in Biblical Knowledge’. 65  Pramod  K.  Nayar, ‘Moral Readership and Political Apprenticeship: Commentaries on English Education in India, 1875–1930’, in Jonathan Rose (ed.), The Edinburgh History of Reading: Subversive Readers (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2020), pp. 149, 155. 66  AVaTAR Sk.S.1a: Annie Besant, The Story of the Great War: Some Lessons from the Mahâbhârata (London: Theosophical Publishing Society, 1899), pp. 6–7. This book’s previous owner was the noted theosophist, Irving S. Cooper.

112  Asian Classics on the Victorian Bookshelf The use of the word ‘nation’ (five times in this short passage) is significant, but not so significant, I think, as the concept that there might exist in 1899 a league table of countries ranked by their production of recognized classics. It is unlikely that such a textbook, authored by a well-­known radical, was commonly adopted in Indian schools: surviving copies are extremely rare, and my own bears the autograph of a Californian theosophist.

Lubbock’s Century, and After The examination of two instruments of directed reading—­school prize-­books and the cheap ‘classics’ series—­has shown the scale on which Asian translations were distributed. I have tried to give a sense of the vast range of readerly responses that were provoked by these systems of distribution, and we have seen the difficulties of determining what in the Victorian context constitutes an orthodox or heterodox reading. But to what degree can these phenomena be ascribed to the appeal of Lubbock’s cosmopolitan vision and, more importantly, was Lubbock’s success confined to his own times or did it have a longer afterlife in the twentieth century? That Lubbock’s voice was heard, in his own time, and his advice followed by the very audience to whom he originally directed his words, is demonstrably true. His papers contain a number of letters from appreciative workingmen, including one addressed ‘Honored Sir’ that asked him ‘what are the best translations of the Koran’?67 And this formative influence was to last well into the next century. Reminiscing in the 1950s, the British communist T.A. Jackson (1879–1955) credited Lubbock with showing him that ‘there were other literatures than English—­ literatures of at least equal merit.’68 Further, material evidence can be found today at the Working Men’s College itself. Tipped in between the sheets of their library’s copy of the Confucian Analects, translated by William Jennings, is the stub of a tram ticket. As I gingerly removed this makeshift bookmark for closer exam­in­ ation, the discoloured outline it left behind on the page betrayed its long presence (Figure 4.2). Indeed, it had probably lain there since before 1938, when the tramways near the college were torn up. The stub’s deliberate use as a bookmark, moreover, may be considered likely given the page on which it has left its manila stain: the passage which so often drew the attention of readers (though not S.B. Terry of Kansas), in which the Master discourses on The Superior Man. When the ‘superior man’ regards righteousness as the thing material, gives operation to it according to the Rules of Propriety, lets it issue in humility, and 67  BL: Add MS 49678 (Avebury papers), J.R. Shannon to Sir John Lubbock, 18 Oct. (n.y.). 68  Quoted in Rose, Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes, p. 130.

Canonizing  113

Figure 4.2  Confucian Analects with tram ticket (with permission of WM College) become complete in sincerity—­there indeed is your superior man! . . . The su­per­ ior man is exacting of himself; the common man is exacting of others.69

Here, then, was at least one ‘common’ reader who heeded Lubbock’s words and sought to transform his life through Chinese philosophy, rather than the acquisition of ‘useful knowledge’ or Samuel Smiles’s bestselling Self-­Help (though—­as a side note—­the two were by no means mutually exclusive, with Smiles enjoying an avid following among Confucians in late-­century Japan).70 There is no evidence that the tram-­ticket student had seen Lubbock’s list, but the book he was reading was a direct outcome of it. It was no. 93 in ‘Sir John Lubbock’s One Hundred Best Books’—the first of two complete series of his re­com­mend­ed titles that were issued by Routledge (fortnightly, from 1892) and by Harmsworth (in 1896). The Routledge brothers, who awarded themselves astronomical salaries in the wake of their lucrative decision, had their eye on orien­tal lacunae. They commissioned the Analects from Jennings, in preference to reprinting James Legge’s dense translation, while their single largest print run—3,000 copies—­was reserved for the Shijing, which up till that point had been

69  William Jennings, The Confucian Analects (London and New York: Routledge, 1895), p. 175. A bookplate (‘Terrero Bequest’) indicates that the book entered the library in 1926. I examined it in 2017, and photographed the tram ticket. 70  Earl H. Kinmonth, ‘Nakamura Keiu and Samuel Smiles: A Victorian Confucian and a Confucian Victorian’, American Historical Review, LXXXV/3 (June 1980), pp. 543, 549.

114  Asian Classics on the Victorian Bookshelf unavailable in any cheap edition.71 Other publishers and authors sought to cap­it­ al­ize on the list’s publicity. It is unlikely to be a coincidence that Frederick Warne added Atkinson’s Shahnameh translation to his Chandos Classics in 1886, or that Zimmern revised her own version for a child audience in the same year. Lubbock’s activities may even have prompted Monier-­Williams to reissue his thirty-­year-­old Sakuntala translation in 1887 with the mainstream press of John Murray. The venerable publisher did not find commercial success with this reprint, but Routledge did so emphatically three years later with their series edition, after Lubbock helpfully added the text to his revised list of 1890.72 Five decades later, a catalogue of the Routledge series was enclosed with a report on the adult education movement drawn up by the American pedagogue Scott Milross Buchanan, who stressed the importance of what he called ‘great books’. For Buchanan, seminars in which students would digest and debate the literature of the past were for him not only the bedrock of collegiate education, but the safeguard of postwar democracy.73 Lubbock has already been identified as the progenitor of the Great Books movement that emerged, after his death, in American universities, but to see this as his chief legacy is to fail to appreciate how the Great Books advocates borrowed only his formula, and not his thinking.74 Great Books has garnered a well-­deserved reputation for Eurocentrism based on  its principle manifestation, the Harvard Classics of 1909—the so-­called ‘Five-­Foot Shelf of Books’ that promised to bestow a liberal education on anyone who could devote fifteen minutes a day to perusing it, and yet contained hardly anything non-­Western apart from Omar Khayyam and the Arabian Nights.75 This reflects the function for which its editor, Charles  W.  Eliot, conceived it. The Harvard Classics were created to sustain the dialogue between American culture and its European roots. Lubbock instead was gesturing towards a more multi-­ directional conversation, albeit one determined by British centrality in an im­per­ ial network. Lubbock’s impact would be better understood as a discursive one. He did not inaugurate, but he did strongly amplify the question of whether Asian texts might be considered ‘classics’ outside the boundaries of their source culture, and whether, once accredited with universal value, they might not be organized into a 71  Patricia  J.  Anderson and Jonathan Rose (eds), Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 106: British Literary Publishing Houses, 1820–1880 (Detroit, MI and London: Gale Research International, 1991), p. 265; Feltes, Literary Capital, p. 47. 72  For correspondence between John Murray III and Monier-­Williams, who decided to bear the cost of reprinting the Sakuntala himself, see JMA: MS.41284. 73  Houghton: MS Am 1992 (Scott Milross Buchanan papers), f.1236. 74  W.B. Carnochan, ‘Where Did Great Books Come From, Anyway?’, Stanford Humanities Review, VI/1 (1998), 53. 75  Joan Shelley Rubin, The Making of Middlebrow Culture (Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press, 1992), p. 27. The Harvard Library also contained a single Persian epigram translated by William Jones, and (in volumes 50 and 51) some information about Asian philosophy and religion.

Canonizing  115 quasi-­curriculum. He instituted a benchmark against which we can track the actions of contemporary readers—­both those who followed his directions, and those who took their own ‘desultory’ road, cutting or meandering across the orderly landscape of books he had envisaged. The former class of reader tried to see how the book in their hands fitted into the national traditions—­notably Chinese, Persian, and Sanskrit—­on which Lubbock lay marked emphasis. These were the kind of people who might use the flyleaf of their Camelot Classics Gulistan to list the other major Persian poets besides Sadi, or who drew a dynastic tree of Iranian kings on the blank pages of their Shahnameh.76 The latter class, meanwhile, made independent use of the growing body of translations at their disposal to feed their own interests, though in doing this many of them, too, followed Lubbock’s example by organizing their discoveries: books were arranged on a shelf, quotations grouped under commonplace book headings, margins annotated with cross-­ references. Such readers were devising their own personal canons. What did this process mean for individual texts and the guises they took on in English? In What is a Classic? (2014), Ankhi Mukherjee explores the seductive authority of book lists, which in their arbitrary simplicity can bestow cultural value while simultaneously dealing damage to both text and reader. ‘Subjugation to knowable contexts’, she remarks, is often the price paid by non-­Western texts when they are inducted into the European languages’ sphere of influence, and so with good reason, ‘canonicity is often seen as a normalizing agent for the anom­al­ ous, the aberrant, and the foreign.’77 Since accession to the canonical world library entails a process of domestication, one might well expect to see this prerogative reflected in the work of translators. Lubbock’s influence undoubtedly extended to them, too, though not all shared his values. Those who, for various reasons, were keen to disseminate their work amongst a wide readership followed his lead, sometimes citing his endorsement of their source-­text in their prefaces. Some even interacted with him directly, like J. Talboys Wheeler who wrote a fortnight after the lecture to request his help in ‘bringing out a revised & popular edition’ of his prose synopses of the Sanskrit epics.78 Other translators resisted the popu­lar­ iza­tion trend, notably Richard Burton and Ezra Pound, and consequently they snubbed Lubbock. From the vantage of 1922, Pound mocked the Arnoldian critics of the previous century, with their ‘hundred best’ lists and their futile ‘hope of improving the moral character of the masses’ by engulfing them in a ‘vast

76  HRC: PK 6541 G2 R7, James Ross, Sadi’s Gulistan (London: Walter Scott, 1890)—this copy belonged to the American publisher Caresse Crosby. She listed Firdausi (‘Firdous=paradise’), Hafez (‘One who remembers’), Omar Khayyam, and Sadi, along with their major works. AVaTAR Ps.S.9a: Helen Zimmern, The Epic of Kings—­a dynastic diagram has been drawn on the flyleaf. 77  Ankhi Mukherjee, What Is a Classic?: Postcolonial Rewriting and the Invention of the Canon (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2014), pp. 8–9. 78  BL: Add MS 49649 (Avebury papers), James Talboys Wheeler to Sir John Lubbock, 21 Jan. 1886.

116  Asian Classics on the Victorian Bookshelf penumbra of books’.79 By this point Pound had himself earned a reputation as an amateur orientalist. Cathay, his 1915 volume of chiefly Tang dynasty poems, had enjoyed considerable success, their austere lyricism helping to establish him as leader of the emerging Imagist movement. Like so many earlier works, it was a slim volume that had been artfully sculpted from larger chunks of scholarship (notably, that of Herbert Giles and Ernest Fenollosa), but Pound’s approach could hardly be more different. Setting to one side Pound’s free verse style, which has already been treated at length by other scholars, what is immediately striking to any reader accustomed to Victorian popular translations is the almost total absence of contextualization. There is no translators’ preface, but a mere three lines to inform us that the poet Rihaku lived in the eighth century ce, and was thus contemporary with the author of the Old English Seafarer (a translation of which is also included in the volume). Poems are attributed and approximately dated by postscripts like ‘By Mei Sheng, B.C. 140’, but there is no citation of the classical anthologies from which they were drawn, nor any explanation of their genre, or the function they served in the society of their day. In a brief afterword, Pound explains that he wished to avoid texts that would necessitate ‘breaks for explanation, and a tedium of notes’.80 Therefore, he selected only short works that could stand on their own merits, their presence justified simply by their ‘unquestionable’ quality as poetry. At the other end of the editorial spectrum, a work like Talboys Wheeler’s is replete with corollary information. Indeed, his four volumes are heavy with anthropological and archaeological data that the Sanskrit text is obliged to support, in an effort to determine whether the events of the Ramayana and Mahabharata have any basis in historical fact. A contrast such as this is likely to be troubling if, as Lawrence Venuti would have us do, we are to think of translation as an ethical undertaking.81 By removing his Chinese poems from their context, Pound has put them out of reach of the ideological agendas that often underlie what may appear to be scrupulous Victorian efforts to position a text against its proper background. When Talboys Wheeler demystifies the Sanskrit epics he is effectively, Gauri Viswanathan has demonstrated, literalizing them. By denying their allegorical dimensions, Talboys Wheeler could focus on individual episodes as evidence of social practices, religious law, and usage in the Vedic era, as part of a dubious effort to cleanse India of ‘Brahminical’ superstition and restore the purity of ‘old Hindu civilization’.82 This anti-­clerical mission of reform grants tremendous influence and authority to the translator, who is to rub away and discard the dross that he considers to have 79  Ezra Pound, ‘Paris Letter’, The Dial, LXXIV/1 (Jan. 1923), 87. 80  Ezra Pound, Cathay (London: Elkin Mathews, 1915), pp. 4, 32. 81 Lawrence Venuti, The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation (2nd edn, London: Routledge, 2008), p. 19. 82  Gauri Viswanathan, Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India (2nd edn, New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), p. 125.

Canonizing  117 tarnished the golden surface of the inner poem. It ties the Sanskrit epics to a national canon, forgetting their presence in other languages and traditions in different parts of Asia (like the Indonesian archipelago). Finally, it assumes the ul­tim­ate legibility of the source, which may, given sufficient exposition, be rendered totally transparent to the English reader. Pound forestalls anything of this sort. By declining to guide his reader, he resists the domestication of the poems, or their ‘subjugation to knowable contexts’. His audience is expected to work hard at the strange text with which they are confronted, an obligation that prioritizes its foreignness and acknowledges those aspects of it which will always remain in­tan­ gible and untranslatable. On the other hand, one must question whether Pound’s deforestation of the editorial lumber that had grown dense in Victorian editions (­and Cathay’s denuded pages would set the fashion for twentieth-­century translation) really led to more candid intercultural encounters. The book’s sub­title, ‘For the Most Part from the Chinese of Rihaku’, must have been rather confusing to contemporaries who did not understand that Rihaku is the Japanese name of the Chinese poet, Li Po. Knocking against this blatant stumbling-­block on the title page, and thinking of the unfortunate readers who perhaps wasted their time vainly looking up ‘Rihaku’ in Giles’s History of Chinese Literature, one suspects that Poundian translation served a similar purpose as other forms of difficult Modernist writing, putting ‘high’ culture out of the reach of those Leonard Basts of the world who, through their middlebrow exertions, had just begun to make good their claim upon the traditional English canon. By excluding Lubbock’s audience, Chinese poetry may be safeguarded for the cognoscenti. Though it is hard to say with certainty, it seems likely that many readers of Asian translation were precisely not those likely to take an interest in avant-­garde poetry like Pound’s, because they were instead in pursuit of the cultural capital represented by ‘the classics’. For followers of Lubbock, the classics meant a world canon, and therefore the most convinced acolytes of world literature, in its 1880s incarnation, may not have been the well-­travelled cosmopolites but the auto­ didacts. In my final chapter we will get a firmer idea of such readers’ preferences—­ whether they tended to view a work within its historical context or divorced from its source-­tradition, and whether they inclined to translators who sought to domesticate for the ease of Western readers, or to stress a text’s complexity, particularity, and fundamental strangeness. The strategies developed by translators—­ both to illuminate, but also to obscure—­are the subject of the next chapter.

5 Translating In 1819, two writers at work on opposite sides of the North Sea made some important judgements pertaining to the relationship between oriental scholarship and imaginative literature. To his lyrical dialogue with Hafez, the West-­östlicher Divan, Goethe appended some notes in which he outlined three types or, as he termed them, ‘epochs’ of translation, with particular reference to some English versions of Sanskrit drama. H.H. Wilson ‘deserves every honour’, Goethe concedes, for introducing to European audiences another of Kalidasa’s remarkable plays, The Mégha Dúta, or, Cloud Messenger. But he regrets the lexical and stylistic choices in Wilson’s translation, which uses ‘supplementary words’ unaccounted for in the text’s plain meaning, and which ‘flatters the Northern ear and senses with its iambic pentameter’.1 In Edinburgh, meanwhile, Walter Scott felt the need to apologize for the anachronisms in his new novel Ivanhoe. The characters speak modern English, Scott confesses in his dedicatory epistle, and he can hardly claim that their ‘Saxon’ and ‘Norman’ manners, or even their costume, are historically accurate. But thinking of himself as a kind of translator, he hoped his reader might forgive him these liberties after considering the course adopted by Antoine Galland with the 1001 Nights: No fascination has ever been attached to Oriental literature, equal to that prod­uced by Mr Galland’s first translation of the Arabian Tales; in which, retaining on the one hand the splendour of Eastern costume, and on the other the wildness of Eastern fiction, he mixed these with just so much ordinary feeling and expression, as rendered them interesting and intelligible . . .2

To achieve this judicious balance, it was necessary for Galland to significantly abridge the ‘long-­ winded narratives’ and ‘monotonous reflections’ of the original—­including its passages of poetry. More shrewdly, he managed successfully to ‘familiarize’ the scenes and situations described in the text ‘to the feelings and habits of the western reader’. The resulting tales, ‘though less purely Oriental’, Scott concludes, ‘were eminently better fitted for the European market’.3

1  Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, ‘Translations’, trans. Sharon Sloan, in Venuti (ed.), The Translation Studies Reader, pp. 65–6. 2  Walter Scott, Ivanhoe: a Romance (3 vols, Edinburgh: Constable, 1821), I, xvii. 3  Ibid., I, xviii.

Asian Classics on the Victorian Bookshelf: Flights of Translation. Alexander Bubb, Oxford University Press. © Alexander Bubb 2023. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198866275.003.0005

Translating  119 Both men were notably concerned with the educated, but non-­specialist reading public, and with the ramifications the evolving disciplines of orientalism might hold for European textual culture as a whole. Scott thus refers in explicit terms to the pursuit of commercial success in the literary marketplace, while the first two types of translation identified by Goethe have, he observes in a similar if less mercenary vein, already manifested in the realm of popular literature (volksbuche). Those first two types make large concessions to the target audience (with Wilson’s Mégha Dúta falling into the second, ‘parodistic’, category) whereas Goethe looks forward to the day when ‘the taste of the masses’ might be sufficiently readied for the third form of translation. This, he envisages in a famous formulation, will ‘achieve perfect identity with the original’ and yet will seek not to overwrite and replace its source-­text, but to complement it. Scott’s and Goethe’s remarks also illustrate the concerns that arose at the close of Chapter 4, relating to the domestication of Asian texts versus an approach that confronts the target readership with the source’s inherent strangeness. Scott considers it not only expedient, but entirely natural that a skilful translator like Galland should seek ways of ‘familiarizing’ what is strange in the moral content, the aesthetic norms, the characterization and narrative method of the Nights, by bending them to the shape of French life in the early eighteenth century. Goethe, however, has a stronger sense of the translator’s obligations to his author and is sceptical of paraphrase, leading him to admonish a certain ‘adaptor’ who had recently reworked von Hammer’s translation of Firdausi in the pages of a German periodical. So far I have referred often to the goal of creating translations that are ‘accessible’, both in terms of their price and availability, and in their content—­the latter being determined by the needs of lay readers to whom the source-­text and source-­ culture would be otherwise, so to speak, a closed book. But in The Translator’s Invisibility, Lawrence Venuti exposes the fallacy inherent in any promise of unhampered access to foreign literature. In a historical arc stretching from the court of Charles II up to the present day, Venuti charts the ascendancy of ‘fluency’ or ‘transparency’ as a standard to which English-­speaking translators should aspire. In its ideal form, such a translation should create for its readers the illusion that they are reading the original text, but for this illusion to succeed the mediating work of the translator must become invisible. This invisibility is reinforced not only by an artistic hierarchy within which translation is classed as a derivative, second-­order activity, but also by a legal regime under which translators have been poorly remunerated, deprived of copyright, and alienated from their own labour. When English became the globally dominant language, an aesthetic preference of the seventeenth century gave rise to the hegemonic translation industry of the twentieth—­an industry that by imperceptibly inscribing British and American values on foreign texts, offers Western readers of today ‘the narcissistic experience of recognizing their own culture in a cultural other’. Against this ‘ethnocentric’ modus operandi, Venuti makes a passionate plea for ‘foreignizing’

120  Asian Classics on the Victorian Bookshelf translations that draw attention to themselves as imperfect experiments in interlingual writing. Though the past three centuries have witnessed the inexorable rise of fluency, Venuti proposes that the study of translation history will disclose alternative theories and practices gesturing towards a literary culture that might have been, and might yet be. Thus we may escape the cycle that entraps us by ‘searching the past for exits’.4 With some frustration, Venuti has felt compelled to remind his readers that a ‘foreignizing’ translation is not merely a literal one. He also insists that the terms he has coined should not be treated as binary labels to be affixed, categorically, to individual examples of translation.5 An actual translation may evince a variety of practices at work, revealing it sometimes to be ambiguous or conflicted in its aims, and I would add that this is particularly likely to be the case—­as we saw with Ezra Pound and James Talboys Wheeler—­when a translator’s goal is the introduction, to a non-­expert audience, of an Asian text to which they can bring little or no contextual knowledge. A major touchstone for Venuti is the debate triggered in 1861 when Matthew Arnold rebuked Francis Newman’s version of the Iliad in a series of lectures given at Oxford. The contorted position taken by Arnold in this exchange, to my mind, may be attributed to the dilemma posed by popularization. In Culture and Anarchy, Arnold championed the ‘great men of culture’ who sought to ‘humanize’ advanced knowledge. By divesting it of all that is ‘difficult, abstract, professional, exclusive’, they aimed ‘to make it efficient outside the clique of the cultivated and learned’. Although this process sounds rather like a form of translation, the exception to Arnold’s advocacy of popularizers was, it would turn out, the solemn task of putting into English a text so fundamental to his vision of European culture as the Iliad. His objection lay in Newman’s use of ballad metre and antiquated diction, strategies which his opponent protested were intended to convey to readers a sense of the Iliad as oral poetry from an ancient and deeply foreign culture. Because Homer was a bard of Archaic Greece who lived centuries before the Classical period, Newman explained, he decided to employ a ‘Saxo-­Norman’ register—­including such words as fain, whilom, wight, wendl, bulkin, callant, gride, and bragly—­to suggest the ‘quaint’ impression the Iliad would have left on listeners in Periclean Athens. Arnold meanwhile insisted that the epic should be rendered in clear, contemporary, flowing and rhyming English (even though the original Greek does not rhyme). To his distress, Newman’s ‘ignoble’ expressions disfigured the essential ‘nobility’ of Homer, and produced ‘an odd and unnatural effect’ on the English ear. The disagreement reflected two sharply opposed philosophies of translation. As Venuti puts it, ‘Arnold wanted translation to transcend, rather than signify,

4  Lawrence Venuti, The Translator’s Invisibility, pp. 12, 33. 5  Ibid., pp. xi–­xiii.

Translating  121 linguistic and cultural differences.’ To him, Homer was a universal poet, who had become part of England’s literary patrimony—­a fundamentally humanist attitude, but one which Newman regarded as ‘utterly false and ruinous to translation’. Rather than encouraging readers to be ‘lulled into the illusion’ that they are accessing the original Greek, Newman insisted, ‘the English translator should desire the reader always to remember that his work is an imitation . . . that the original is foreign, and in many respects extremely unlike our native compositions.’6 Superficially, Newman’s may appear the method less friendly to novices, but in fact his exchange with Arnold revealed his commitment to ‘commercial England’, as he put it, and ‘men of business’ who gave their scant leisure hours to Dickens and Thackeray. Strikingly, if somewhat paternalistically, he also refers to ‘a working man’ and a group of ‘children and half-­educated women’ who according to his account disliked the sound of the hexameters in which Arnold recommended that Homer should be translated, but instead eagerly approved the popular ballad metre that he tested upon them. Though he held a professorship in Latin at University College London (UCL), Newman in fact rebuked academic privilege, protesting that ‘of Taste the educated but unlearned public is the only rightful judge’, whereas in Arnold’s view the ‘sole judge’ of a translation’s quality was ‘the scholar’, his criterion for judgement being ‘whether the translation more or less reproduces for him the effect of the original’.7 This is the point at which Arnold forces himself into an invidious, and untenable, position: the decorous, Latinate English he demands turns out to be merely a form of flattery—­as Goethe would have it—­for the educated ear, a means of reinforcing in the minds of readers who could already understand Greek the narcissistic affinity they felt with the heroes of Troy (whom, Arnold squeamishly objected, should never be described as ‘grunting’ and ‘sweating’). Ultimately, the stances adopted by the two men reflected their attitudes to British society at large, and to the rapid expansion of literacy. Because Newman embraced the cultural differences within the diverse linguistic community to which he was addressing his work, Venuti explains, he ‘allowed those differences’ to inflect his English (which, in its pursuit of an approximately ‘Saxo-­Norman’ register, actually contains modern dialect words from across the British Isles). By contrast, Arnold dreaded the fragmentation of national culture and used his lectures on Homer, among other things, to advocate for the creation of a national Academy. Herein would reside the gatekeepers charged with communicating (in standard English dialect) the ‘nobility’ of Homer to the masses, qualified men who could enforce ‘correct literary opinion’ and might thus conserve the homogeneity of British culture.8 In an article of 2006, Bassnett and France determined that the trend towards domestication, or ‘naturalization’ as they term it, in Victorian translation was

6  Ibid., pp. 101–9.

7  Ibid., pp. 112, 120.

8  Ibid., p. 109.

122  Asian Classics on the Victorian Bookshelf driven by the rapidly expanding popular audience.9 But the Arnold–­Newman controversy would suggest otherwise, revealing as it does an advocate of fluent and decorous English giving vent to an indignant elitism, while archaic diction and other foreignizing practices were used to further a genuinely democratic vision of the literary canon. Newman carefully theorized his approach, but Sergia Adama noticed similar innovations arising, inadvertently or haphazardly, in the work of eighteenth-­century translators of popular French novels into Italian. Beginning her research, Adama found that the major studies of translation history were focussed on ‘theoretical declarations by established intellectuals’, whereas most of the writers she was concerned with knew nothing of the precepts of Horace and Dryden. Their methods were dictated not by theory but by exigency, and were ‘deeply rooted in the needs of the publishing market and in the demands of the active and creative cultural consumption of the readers’. Like many of the books I have examined, these volumes bear title pages that forswear the art of translation, claiming merely to have been ‘compiled by’ or ‘edited by’ their humble authors. Yet by Adama’s reckoning, these have been both underrated in their ingenuity and unrecognized in their long-­term influence. Indeed, she regards them as a useful counterbalance to the lineage of highbrow male trans­lators around which such seminal works as George Steiner’s After Babel (1975) have been structured. They presented her, as she remarks, with an opportunity to ‘recover’ a complex variety of ‘translation practices far beyond established the­or­ies and norms’.10 As a study of the multiple vectors by which classic texts from Asia were transmitted to the general reading public, this book often concerns itself with scholarly works that were repackaged for or repurposed by non-­scholarly audiences. But Adama’s work prompts us to pause and consider what might specifically be learned by looking at popular translators, and observing how their techniques differ from those of scholars and specialists. It encourages us to think about how decisions made contingently, under external pressures, may have shaped the recognition and understanding of major texts in target cultures. This chapter will consider those questions, and make one further claim. Given the major role we have granted to popularizers in the dissemination of Asian literature in nineteenth-­century Britain and America, here too we may find a fruitful area in which to construct, as Adama calls it, a ‘microhistory’ of translation that deviates from the mainstream historical trajectory. In this way we may indeed happen upon, as Venuti predicts, fortuitous ‘exits’ from the dominant logic of fluency and transparency.

9  Bassnett and France, ‘Translation, Politics and the Law’, pp. 52–3. 10 Sergia Adama, ‘Microhistory of Translation’, in Georges  L.  Bastin and Paul  F.  Bandia (eds), Charting the Future of Translation History (Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 2006), pp. 89–90.

Translating  123

The Scholar Versus the Popularizer: Rivalries and Collaborations A paper delivered by Sir Frederic Goldsmid at the International Congress of Orientalists in London in 1892 typifies the scholarly bias in favour of fluent translation, and reveals it to be as prevalent among Persianists as in Homeric circles. ‘When we offer to a reader a book in his own language, originally written in a foreign tongue,’ Goldsmid began, ‘we are not offering him an actual exotic received from other lands.’ Rather, it is an ‘an artificial reproduction’ that we have fashioned, ‘and the less perceptible the counterfeit the better’.11 Goldsmid does not concern himself with the student of Persian, who for his purpose requires strict interlinear accuracy, but with the general reader, and to his mind the latter would be better served by translations that are ‘in harmony with the poetic taste of the day’. Ideally, they should ‘have all the ease of original composition’. William Jones, E.H.  Palmer, and James Atkinson have all produced fine translations, he allows, but it is doubtful whether any reader would mistake them for original works of poetry. If such a misprision were to occur, it would vindicate their ­methods. But on balance, Goldsmid considers that Atkinson may have done better to clothe the Shahnameh in the English garments traditionally deemed most fitting for epic poetry—­that is, ‘wholly in even rhyme such as Pope, or in blank verse such as Lord Derby gave to the Iliad’.12 Goldsmid was a colonial official and linguist whose loyalties lay within professional orientalism. However, his wish to stimulate public interest in the declining field of Persian studies led him into a surprising sympathy with popularizers like Justin McCarthy who, as we saw in Chapter 2, rewrote the scholarly editions of Hafez and Omar Khayyam prepared by trained Persianists. While the complete edition of Hafez’s odes assembled by his protégé Henry Wilberforce Clarke was ‘practically unreadable’, Goldsmid admitted, it nonetheless furnished ‘a mass of bricks’ from which more artistic hands might craft ‘an English temple in honour of the poet of Shiráz’.13 But the erection of such shrines could, it would seem, only be entrusted to the right kind of popularizer. Though Goldsmid praises McCarthy’s ‘plain prose rendering’ of Khayyam, which he describes as ‘sound and accurate’,14 his catalogue of English translators from Persian pointedly makes no mention of either Louisa Costello’s Rose Garden, or Helen Zimmern’s Epic of Kings (based on the French of Jules Mohl). Two years later he produced a series of articles for the National Observer, ‘Pipes with the Persian Poets’, again making no 11  F.J. Goldsmid, ‘On Translations from and into Persian’, Transactions of the Ninth International Congress of Orientalists (2 vols, London: privately printed, 1893), II, 491. 12  Ibid., II, 495–6. 13  Ibid., II, 498. 14  Though he praised his Rubaiyat translation, it should be noted that Goldsmid’s opinion cooled somewhat when he came to review McCarthy’s version of Hafez the following year. See ‘The “Tongue of the Unseen” ’, National Observer, XI/267 (Dec. 1893), 169.

124  Asian Classics on the Victorian Bookshelf allusion to the two women.15 No doubt by 1892 Costello’s was an obscure name, and Goldsmid may never even have heard of her—­but that cannot account for his neglect of Zimmern. Neither can linguistic competence have been the basis for their exclusion, for McCarthy was as candid as Zimmern about his ‘beggarly’ Persian, and he even emulated her compensatory tactic, printing ‘Divan-­i-­Hafiz’ in nastaliq script diagonally across the dust jacket of his translation, from top-­ right corner to bottom-­left, in just the same manner that Zimmern’s first edition bore the phrase ‘Shahnameh-­i-­Firdausi’. It is hard not to infer therefore that the two female popularizers were overlooked, in part because of their sex, and in part because they did not satisfy Goldsmid’s ideal of translation. One of his National Observer articles, ‘An Intelligible Hafiz’, illustrates this ideal with greater nuance than the lecture of 1892, suggesting that translators might find a way of imitating the original’s metre and rhyme scheme rather than simply ‘Anglicizing the Persian text’. Costello, of course, had ignored Persian prosody in favour of English metres. But this superficially ‘domesticating’ or ‘Anglicizing’ strategy may be seen in a different light if we remind ourselves that Costello, like Francis Newman with his ballad metre and dialect words, consciously reached for forms that were popular and yet evoked an alternative sense of nationhood, tributary to and yet at odds with the mainstream tradition of ‘English’ poetry. This deviation from the norm, though its degree will depend on how central or peripheral one judges her Irish model, Thomas Moore, reveals Costello’s foreignizing ethos. In spite of the many difficulties and ambiguities Goldsmid warns of, his essay is premised on the assumption that transparency (‘an intelligible Hafiz’) is achievable, and that ‘the truthfulness of the general rendering’ ultimately prevails over niggling infelicities.16 But Costello instead dwells on the obscurity of Persian, on qualities that are ‘impossible to reach’, and this is no mere polite caveat. It was not uncommon for a translator to humbly beg pardon if his clumsy hands had marred the beauties of the original, but much more rarely did they apologize for the inadequacy of English itself, as Costello does when she suggests that the German language, with its compound words, may be better suited to expressing such Persian locutions as ‘emerald-­hue’, ‘rose-­lipped’, and ‘jasmine-­scented’.17 As Emily Apter has urged us to do in the present moment, in the 1840s Costello acknowledged untranslatability.18 It may not be irrelevant that Costello, an Irish Catholic, and Zimmern, a German Jew, both approached the translator’s task from a marginal position within the target culture. Admittedly there are other factors requiring 15  The ‘Pipe’ with Firdausi (which was to be subtitled ‘The Epic of Kings’) was never published, but Goldsmid’s detailed preparatory notes do not refer to Zimmern. See BL: Mss.Eur.F134/67 (Goldsmid papers). 16  F.J. Goldsmid, ‘Pipes with the Persian Poets: an Intelligible Hafiz’, National Observer, XIII/304 (Sept. 1894), 461. 17 Costello, Rose Garden, p. xi. 18  Emily Apter, Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability (London: Verso, 2013), pp. 3–4.

Translating  125 consideration—­after all, McCarthy too was a Catholic, albeit from a wealthy and powerful Cork family (Goldsmid calls him ‘an Englishman’).19 But their alignment vis-­à-­vis the cultural mainstream may have enabled the women to look outside the dominant register of contemporary English to find modes and idioms that might evoke the intangible foreignness of the Persian. The difference of their approach versus that of their fellow-­popularizer, McCarthy, also comes out in the way they position themselves temporally in relation to their source text. Intriguingly, Zimmern and McCarthy shared a friend in Mary A.F. Robinson, and without doubt each deepened their knowledge of Persian literature through her conversation. She helped revise the manuscript of The Epic of Kings, and its preface credits her with the metrical passages interspersed in the prose narrative, while McCarthy—­ as mentioned in Chapter 2—owed his acquaintance with Omar Khayyam to Robinson’s loan of her own copy. But whereas McCarthy’s extra­or­ din­ary preface on Khayyam figures the poet as a contemporary—­confidant or father-­ confessor, as it were, to the Irish dandy’s misspent youth—­ Zimmern stresses the extreme remoteness of Firdausi. ‘I have tried in all cases to preserve the peculiarities of Eastern imagery and allusion’, she avers. Rather than clear, contemporary idiom, she chose instead to adopt ‘the simple language of the age of Shakespeare and the English Bible’, partly ‘with a view to reproduce the naïve archaic character of the original’, and partly because she aimed, ‘by thus removing them from everyday speech, to remove them from the atmosphere of to-­day’.20 When the Lear-­like king, Feridoun, makes his fateful decision to divide his empire between his three offspring, Zimmern thus tells us how ‘his strength inclined to the grave’, and that as the father’s life waned ‘the evil passions of his sons waxed stronger.’ When the treachery of the two elder heirs makes itself apparent, Feridoun declares that he ‘knoweth what manner of men ye are’, and warns them that ‘as ye sow, so also shall ye reap’. Even so, they callously murder their younger brother, and with Feridoun’s mourning ‘the voice of lamentation was abroad’ in the kingdom.21 In this narrative, Zimmern borrows actual phrases from the Bible but also emulates the syntax and cadences, not so much perhaps of Shakespeare as of contemporary masters of Elizabethan prose. It is notable that several other non-­academic translators also cited the King James Version, not necessarily as a source of idiom but as a holistic model for how an ancient Eastern language (i.e. Hebrew) might be expressively rendered in English. During his Persian studies in 1854, Fitzgerald referred to it by way of damning the ‘elegant’ fluency of two Gulistan translations he had purchased: Certainly Eastwick is wretched in the Verse: and both he and Ross (I have both versions) seem to me on a wrong tack wholly in their Style of rendering the 19  Goldsmid, ‘The “Tongue of the Unseen” ’, 170. 21  Ibid., pp. 18–24.

20 Zimmern, Epic of Kings, pp. vi–­vii.

126  Asian Classics on the Victorian Bookshelf Prose. Because it is Elegant Persian they try to render it into Elegant English; but I think it should be translated something as the Bible is translated, preserving the Oriental Idiom. It should be kept as Oriental as possible, only using the most idiomatic Saxon words to convey the Eastern Metaphor.22

Unexpectedly, before working at Chinese or Japanese texts, Mitford likewise ‘made it a practice to read a little in the Bible, the best of all models for rendering an oriental language’. The purpose was not imitation but ‘mental schooling’, with the result that several of Buddhist sermons he published in the Cornhill Magazine prior to Tales of Old Japan were taken to be forgeries.23 If Goldsmid might have accepted this as the highest possible compliment, however, Mitford considered it an insult. Relations between cultural originators and those adept in dissemination are inherently volatile, as they generate not only the potential for mutual benefit but also for rivalry and competing claims. Pierre Bourdieu describes popularization as the ‘upward displacement’ of a cultural asset through the social hierarchy, resulting in its ownership by a larger number of people, and consequently a dim­ in­ution of its rarity and value to the older possessors: Intellectuals and artists are thus divided between their interest in cultural proselytism, that is, winning a market by widening their audience . . . and concern for cultural distinction, the only objective basis of their rarity; and their ­relationship to everything concerned with the ‘democratization of culture’ is marked by a deep ambivalence.24

An originator who is a translator—­that is, the first translator of a given text, or translator of the version considered authoritative—­is always at risk of being displaced or superseded by a newcomer, and this vulnerability can give rise to resentful countermeasures. As can be seen in Goldsmid’s lecture, usually orientalist amour propre was satisfied simply by deliberate omission, sometimes quite blatant. Arthur and Edmond Warner’s nine-­volume edition of the Shahnameh, for example, features as an appendix a list of translations in various European languages. Jones, Champion, Atkinson, Weston, and Robertson are mentioned (all of whom presented only isolated episodes from the poem), but not Zimmern.25 Other experts felt the need to issue overt rebukes. While Eastwick’s Gulistan may have been the private

22  Terhune (ed.), Letters of Edward Fitzgerald, II, 180 (italics Fitzgerald’s). 23  Brotherton: BC MS 19c Gosse (Edmund Gosse Archive), Gosse Correspondence, A.B. Freeman-­ Mitford to Gosse, 24 Oct. 1912. 24  Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgment of Taste, trans. Richard Nice (1979; repr. Abingdon: Routledge, 2013), p. 226. 25  Arthur George Warner and Edmond Warner, The Sháhnáma of Firdausí (9 vols, London: Kegan, Paul, Trench and Trübner, 1905–25), I, 87.

Translating  127 butt of Fitzgerald’s humour, Eastwick himself did not scruple to expose Costello to public ridicule. ‘I do not mention Miss Costello’s “Rose Garden of Persia”, ’ he remarks in a disingenuous footnote to his introduction, ‘which is merely a translation from the French, and exhibits about as much of the originals as Moore’s “Lalla Rookh,” that is, nothing but a certain Oriental tone and gilding.’ His spleen unabated, Eastwick in fact mentions Costello twice, returning two pages later for another acrid aside couched in praise for his publisher. ‘Indeed, but for the spirited exertions of Mr Stephen Austin’ in the field of oriental publishing, Eastwick reflects, ‘we should lie reduced to batten on such scraps of Orientalism as Miss Costello’s “Rose-­Garden,” which is about as satisfactory to the Eastern scholar as the tinkling of money, heard after off, to the destitute; or the smell of distant viands to the starving.’26 In the 1850s, Costello probably had no choice but to swallow this insult, but later we can see the neophytes begin to retaliate and issue direct challenges to academic authority. This seems to have been particularly prevalent in the area of Chinese philosophy and poetry, as these branches of literature made a rapid advance into the Western popular consciousness at the turn of the century. Dwight Goddard, an early American exponent of Zen Buddhism, wrote an extraordinary preface to his edition of the Daodejing in which he portrayed scholarship as a sort of conspiracy devised to muffle and obfuscate the shining truths of Eastern wisdom. He was especially scornful of anyone who disputed the text’s conventional attribution to Lao Tse—‘shame on scholarship when, sharing the visions of the illuminati, they deride them!’—and claimed for himself an alternative legitimacy based on his zeal and devotion to the Chinese philosopher, opening his preface with the proclamation, ‘I LOVE LAOTZU!’27 Such daring new attitudes provoked some angry exchanges, none more splenetic than that which occurred between the German sinologist Leopold Woitsch and the Expressionist poet Albert Ehrenstein. In a 1924 essay, Woitsch complained about the activities of ‘people who obviously cannot claim to have any legitimation or any understanding in the field of sinology’. Referring among other works to Pe-­lo-­thien, Ehrenstein’s versions of the Tang dynasty poet Bai Juyi, Woitsch remarks that ‘it has unfortunately become a fashion’ for such amateurs to ‘take hold of the sinological works of others and exploit them merely for business ­reasons [geschäftswecken]’. This accusation of plagiarism evidently did not go unnoticed. Several years later, Ehrenstein wrote his own essay, in which he retorted that professional sinologists ‘rape’ the texts they profess to curate.28 26 E.B.  Eastwick, The Gulistān; or, Rose-­Garden of Shekh Muṣliḥu’d-­Dīn Sâdī of Shīrāz (Hertford: Stephen Austin, 1852), pp. xix, xxi (italics Eastwick’s). 27 Dwight Goddard and Henri Borel, Laotzu’s Tao and Wu Wei (New York: Brentano, 1919), pp. 1–2. 28 Quoted and translated by Sara Landa in ‘On the Interplay between Poets’ and Philologists’ Translations of Chinese Poetry into German’, Comparative Critical Studies, XVII/2 (2020), 246.

128  Asian Classics on the Victorian Bookshelf Even fellow popularizers were not necessarily in sympathy, especially if—­as in the case of Arthur Waley and Ezra Pound—­one had a much better knowledge than the other of Chinese. In a letter to the illustrator Edmund Dulac, known for his ‘oriental’ imagery, Pound explained that his free verse approach was effective because disciplined, maintaining a ‘very strict tensity of phrase’. The opposite of this was a loose, undisciplined style that ‘hollowed’ the Chinese lines, leaving behind only a ‘scholastic jargon’ that could never claim to be ‘echt Rihaku’. Pound called it ‘Waleying’.29 It is easy enough to imagine the indignation of a scholar who witnessed trespassers stealing into his patch and purloining the fruits of his intellectual labour. The resentment of a popularizer who had their work trashed by academic re­viewers is also readily understood. But sometimes more complex dynamics can be seen to underlie the widespread backbiting of which the previous paragraph offered a few choice morsels. Notably, it is important to realize that many experts were not merely trying to safeguard their ivory tower, but were sallying out into the periodical press, onto the lecture circuit and other public venues, competing with popularizers on their own turf. Retired colonial officers sometimes took on this role, like Alexander Rogers who bombarded Blackwood’s Magazine with short translations and articles on Persian, and even wrote for the London stage.30 Herbert Giles too, we have seen already, was exemplary among academic sinologists writing for the general public, and was quick to anger when he thought his Gems of Chinese Literature had been plagiarized by a potential rival.31 A further complication is that while some popular translators embraced the mass ­readership, others conceived their audience as the traditionally literate classes, and expressed a strongly anti-­commercial bias in which orientalia is held up as a noble or refined pursuit elevated above the grubby print marketplace of the later nineteenth century. ‘In these days of sordid venal publications, such work as yours resembles, if I may say so, an oasis in the desert,’ was how F.W.  Bain complimented another amateur orientalist in 1902, at a time when his Sanskrit pseudotranslation A Digit of the Moon was about to enter the third of its fifteen editions.32 The same sentiment can be found in an amusing passage in Elihu Vedder’s autobiography, where the American artist muses if the illustrations he created for the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam (and which ultimately adorned tens of thousands of copies) had been just a bit too successful: ‘is there something wrong 29  Virginia: Mss.5288 (correspondence of Ezra Pound and Edmund Dulac, 1915–53), Pound to Dulac, c.1918. 30  Notable in Rogers’s theatrical oeuvre was The Rani of Jhansi (1895), a play about the Indian rebel queen. For his letters to Blackwood’s, see NLS: Mss.4463, 4477, 4524, 4541, and 4549 (Blackwood Papers). 31  UCLA: Collection 1506 (Giles Papers), Lionel Giles to Herbert A. Giles, 19 Nov. 1931. 32  WSRO: Blunt Mss Box 3, F.W. Bain to Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, 17 June 1902.

Translating  129 about the pictures—­something Tupperish—­that they should have been so popular? A fearful thought.’33 A third complicating factor, and one that will be treated in greater depth later in this chapter, lies in the fraught ties of patronage, resistance, and rivalry that connected European with native-­speaking translators. In the late 1860s, Mitford had galvanized himself with a few passages of the Authorized Version and, sitting down with his interlocutors in Tokyo, set out to vindicate Japanese culture in the pages of the Cornhill. At the end of his life in 1915, he sat instead alone, gazing at a statue of Buddha in the meditation garden he had created on his Cotswold estate—­a recreation, he explained, of ‘the Veluvana, the bamboo garden which was the first Vihara or monastery of Buddha and his disciples’, but also a physical manifestation of the intellectual arena in which he still felt a keen proprietary interest. ‘Oriental literature and art’, Mitford complained to an old friend, is not what it once was. To pick up a new book of this sort nowadays, he suggests, is typically to ‘come face to face with the solemn impostors like Rabindranath Tagore’ and, even worse, ‘impudent mountebanks’ like the young poet and critic Yone Noguchi. One of the last things Mitford wrote before his death was a ­critique of Noguchi, carefully drafting and redrafting in an effort to explain his technical points more clearly to ‘the general reader’ and ‘the outsider’, striving to the end to exert his authority within the public sphere.34 For his part, Noguchi was content to quote from Mitford’s version of the Chushingura in an article of the same year, and mildly correct a few common European mistakes in regard to the story.35 Tensions like these helped inflame seemingly mundane issues, like differing approaches to transliteration. In 1910, an Indian translator, Syed Abdul Majid, partnered with an Englishman, Launcelot Cranmer-­Byng, on an edition of Hafez’s quatrains (a lesser-­known part of the poet’s oeuvre) for the Wisdom of the East series. Byng’s correspondence with the book’s publisher gives the impression that he did not particularly respect his collaborator, an impression reinforced by the brusque missive with which he sent Majid the proofs (not extant) for correction, and informed him that ‘I have taken out certain matter from your MSS & allowed your remarks on Malebranche Berkeley & Leibnitz to appear at the end in the form of a short appendix.’ Although Majid was responsible for translation and Byng for editing, the Englishman further directed him to ‘please note how I want Rubáiyat spelt’.36 If the acute accent is intended to denote a long vowel, then both a’s in the

33  Elihu Vedder, The Digressions of V (London: Constable, 1911), p. 231. 34  Brotherton: BC Gosse correspondence (Mitford to Edmund Gosse, 15 Sept. 1915 and 21 Mar. 1916). 35  Yone Noguchi, ‘ “Chushingura” in England’, The Herald of Asia: A Review of Life and Progress in the Orient, I/20 (1916), 111. 36  JMA: Acc.12927/310 (Rubaiyat of Hafiz book file), Byng to Majid, 29 Apr. 1910.

130  Asian Classics on the Victorian Bookshelf word should be accented. Majid presumably knew this, which may be why the spelling finally adopted was rubá’iyát. But it seems his own preference was to avoid diacritics altogether by rendering the word rubayiyat—­an unusual formula, but one that brought him into alignment with, among others, the University of London professor Thomas Walker Arnold, whose efforts to nurture cultural affinities between Britain and her Muslim subject populations were mentioned in Chapter  2. Such rapport could only be inhibited, Arnold argued, by pedantic orthography and the failure of scholars to agree on a common system: One book after another dealing with the Muhammadan East is brought out by the Press, and the introduction explains the system of transliteration adopted, and in most cases it is an invention of the particular author himself and illustrates his individual prejudices. It is not surprising that the general reader loses patience with such discordant guidance.

Unless this problem was solved, Arnold insisted, Arabic and Persian literature would ‘fail to be received within the circle of common interests’, with the main result being ‘the bewilderment and disgust of the uninitiated reader and the re­tard­ation of the acceptance of the study of Muslim culture’.37 In pursuit of a larger objective, then, the academy could be surprisingly accommodating to non-­ specialists, and critical of colleagues who took satisfaction in giving their prose an exclusive and erudite accent. In a clubby correspondence with Richard Burton, for instance, retired army officer George Percy Badger explained how the ig­nor­ ant public would never learn how to pronounce Arabic words correctly if he used the method approved by the Royal Asiatic Society, and so he had devised his own system of hyphens, acutes, and circumflexes. Ironically citing his transliteration of the word ‘fát-­hah’ (itself an Arabic diacritic), Badger told Burton that ‘I insert the hyphen for preventing stupid readers pronouncing the word as if the syllables were fá-­ttah. It’s a clumsy contrivance, I allow, but che fare?’38 Incidentally, in writing this book I have myself avoided diacritics. Burton is a particularly useful translator for examining these seemingly opposed impulses of populism and elitism, which in him continually consorted and collided. Since he was both shameless in his plagiarism and yet ferociously territorial, he can also help us to think about proprietary rights in the translation marketplace, and the attempt to control the value—­both monetary, and in the sense of cultural cachet—­of a literary object by widening or restricting its supply. Known for his numerous books of travel and exploration, Burton also essayed various translation projects in his lifetime, including the Lusiads, Hafez, 37  SOAS: PP MS 32 (Thomas Walker Arnold papers), Box 4, draft review of Laurence Binyon’s The Poems of Nizami. 38  Beinecke: GEN MSS 1176 (Sir Richard Francis Burton collection), Box 1, Folder 14, Badger to Burton, 26 Nov. (n.y.).

Translating  131 Pilpay’s Fables, and the Indian tales describing King Vikram’s encounter with the baital, a ghoulish being that inhabits the corpses of dead men. This last is symptomatic of his opportunism: widely taken to be a translation from Sanskrit, it was in reality a standard translation exercise given to British officers for their exams in modern Hindustani. Realizing, nevertheless, that the stories remained relatively unknown in metropolitan Britain, sensing also perhaps an emerging trend in popular fiction (Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla began serialization the following year), and believing furthermore that its earlier translators were now dead, Burton rehashed the old textbook and published it in 1870 with Longmans as Vikram and the Vampire.39 The work was well received but did not solve his perpetual cashflow problems. However, in the last decade of his life, he alighted upon a scheme that would at one stroke secure him a lasting place in literature and a substantial nest-­egg: a new multi-­volume edition of the Arabian Nights, not published conventionally but instead privately printed and distributed to ­subscribers at one guinea a volume. Richard Le Gallienne called this system ‘pandering to mean passions of competition’, perceptively noticing how Burton was playing the market by creating excitement around an artificially scarce commodity.40 The book’s exorbitant price was justified by its unexpurgated content, and Burton’s voluminous linguistic, folkloric, anthropological, and sexological notes. But success was ensured by his ability to convince subscribers that they were joining an elite club of decadent cosmopolitans, the global extent of which has not properly been appreciated. His private correspondence finds him sounding out subscribers in places as distant as New Zealand and Egypt, forming a nexus that linked the cream of white settler society in Auckland with the Khedival Minister of Education, Yacoub Artin Pasha. The latter, who tellingly communicated with Burton in French rather than Arabic and assisted him with his choice of paper and cover design, complained that the Nights were now little-­read in a Cairo where the educated classes were hotfoot after Western knowledge and training: ‘dieu nous garde des théologiens, des économistes, des philantropes des financiers et surtout des gens à système, à credo et des doctrinaires! J’aime mieux le Mehdi!’41 This was Burton’s constituency: decidedly male, comprising wealthy bibliophiles and polyglot dilettante rather than scientific ‘gens à système’, and this was why he discarded the advice of his friend Badger and himself did away with diacritics, except upon a word’s first appearance. As his general preface states,

39  Tipped into Burton’s own copy of Vikram at the Huntington Library (shelfmark 634028) is a draft manuscript that clearly indicates he was working from the bilingual Hindi-­English edition prepared by Barker and Eastwick in 1855, his copy of which also survives (shelfmark 634551). On the title page of this volume, Burton has written ‘Dead’ beside both translators’ names (though in fact Eastwick was still alive in 1870). 40  Richard Le Gallienne, ‘From a Crowded Bookshelf ’, The Realm, IX/1 (11 Jan. 1895), 336. 41  Wiltshire Record Office: Papers of Sir Richard Burton, 2667/26/2/ii (T.B. Hannaford to Burton, 2 Oct. 1885 and Yacoub Artin Pasha to Burton, 14 Mar. 1885).

132  Asian Classics on the Victorian Bookshelf ‘I deliberately reject the artful and complicated system, ugly and clumsy withal, affected by scientific modern Orientalists.’42 Two things are commonly said about Burton’s Thousand Nights and a Night: (1) that it was the first English translation not to be purged of much of its erotic content; and (2) that it uses a bafflingly baroque form of English in an attempt to emulate the mingled high and low registers, the assonance and internal rhyme of the Arabic prose. Neither of these is quite true, even though the impression is certainly reinforced, in the first few pages, by sentences like ‘they ceased not from kissing and clipping, coupling and carousing till day began to wane.’43 A third misconception is that it is the product solely of Burton’s peculiar genius, whereas in fact the work was largely plagiarized from two earlier translators, Henry Torrens and John Payne—­something alleged for many years, and proved conclusively by Paulo Lemos Horta in his 2017 book Marvellous Thieves. Using documents recently acquired by the British Library, Horta shows how Burton cut up Payne’s books before literally overwriting the printed pages with his own version, and he argues convincingly from this evidence that Venuti was mistaken in classing Burton’s archaic language as a ‘foreignizing’ strategy, since it was not a practice rooted in the source language, but instead in Burton’s need to disguise the work of his predecessors. Based on a similar cribsheet that I discovered in the Beinecke Library, however, I would like to add something further to the debate. While Payne said himself, in an article of 1879, that any translator who aimed to be simultaneously ‘scientific’ and ‘popular’ would be frustrated and driven continuously to ‘inartistic expedients’, Burton retains hope of attaining both goals.44 This is how the story of Noureddin Ali of Damascus and the Damsel Sitt El-­Milah begins in Payne’s Tales from the Arabic (1884): There was once, of old days and in bygone ages and times, a merchant of the merchants of Damascus, by name Aboulhusn, who had money and riches and slaves and slave-­girls, and lands and houses and baths; but he was not blessed with a child and indeed his years waxed great, wherefore he addressed himself to supplicate God the Most High in private and in public and in his inclining and his prostration and at the season of the call to prayer, beseeching Him to vouchsafe him, before his admittance [to His mercy], a son who should inherit his wealth and possessions.

42 Richard F. Burton, The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night: a Plain and Literal Translation of the Arabian Nights Entertainments (16 vols, London: Burton Club, 1885–90), I, xviii. 43  Ibid., I, 6. Besides Payne’s erotic version, an early translation that was surprisingly explicit was that of Rev. George Lamb in 1826. William Beckford’s copy (in which he has left ecstatic marginalia), is in the Beinecke Library: Fob23 1826. 44 Horta, Marvellous Thieves, pp. 271–3, 222.

Translating  133 Burton’s annotations amend the passage to: There was once, in days of yore and in ages and times long gone before, a merchant of the merchants of Damascus, by name Abu al-­Hasan, who had money and means, slave-­ blacks and slave-­ girls, lands and gardens, houses and Hammams in that city; but he was not blessed with boon of child and indeed his age waxed great. So he addressed himself to supplicate Allah Almighty in private and in public and in his bows and his prostration and at the season of prayer-­ call, beseeching Him to vouchsafe him, before his decease, a son who should inherit his wealth and possessions.45

Rather than making Payne’s already decorated prose even more involuted and rococo, in this story at least Burton leaves it more readable and concise. He makes foreign names more parsible (Abu al-­Hasan), removes excessive ‘ands’, introduces punctuation, and eliminates pretensions like ‘his inclining’. He also uses wherever possible Arabic words that had entered English usage, substituting ‘Hammams’ for ‘baths’ and, later in the story, ‘bazars’ for ‘markets’ and ‘Shaykh’ for ‘old man’. While such flavouring is no more than a ‘generic attempt to Arabize’ the text, in Horta’s words, in their manner of flattering the assumed knowledge of its audience and pandering to their aesthetic and erotic interests, while still appearing authentic, these revisions typify Burton’s brand of elite populism. Burton, it seems, always read with a pencil in his hand, even when not meditating pla­giar­ ism, and some of the other books from his library bear out this policy. The amendments to his copies of Edwin Arnold’s Pearls of the Faith (1883) and E.J.W. Gibb’s History of the Forty Vezirs (1886) try to strike a judicious balance—­ old-­fashioned or demotic enough to be estranging, but not so much as to make the text ludicrous or deprive it of its variety of registers. He crosses out such follies in Arnold as ‘quoth’ and ‘in such wise’, while beside one of Gibb’s phrasings he has recommended, ‘trifle more archaic’.46 Burton reveals himself as fundamentally conflicted, torn between a gross snobbery and a desire for public acclaim and influence. In a letter to the novelist Ouida, he complained of ‘the Idiot Public’ and its failure to recognize great literature, and yet in the same letter he hopes she may bring his work to the London stage: ‘I  should love a play by you. I wanted Irving to adapt scenes from the Arabian Nights too.’47 What drove this conflict, though, was his desire to comprehensively 45  Beinecke: GEN MSS 1176 (Burton collection), Box 1, Folder 5. Earlier, when they were still collaborators, Burton had counselled Payne to ‘add to the Oriental taste of your version for instance always Allah never God’ (Huntington: mssRFB 1-­1386, Box 26, Folder 313, Burton to Payne, 21 Oct. 1882). 46  Huntington: 634940, Edwin Arnold, Pearls of the Faith, or Islam’s Rosary (London: Trübner, 1883), p. 148; 634816, E.J.W. Gibb, History of the Forty Vezirs (London: George Redway, 1886), p. 55. 47  BL: Add.MS.88877, Burton to Ouida, 14 June 1888.

134  Asian Classics on the Victorian Bookshelf dominate the fields into which he entered. His intention was that his Nights should not only eclipse all previous versions, but translations from Arabic in general, and so he prepared for his first volume’s arrival in 1885 by staking out and assiduously protecting his territory from potential rivals, adjusting his stance (he was, among many other things, a dazzling swordsman) to suit either the scholarly or popular trappings of his opponent. Thus, he attacked the late E.W. Lane in the Academy for not being sufficiently rigorous, demanding to know why ‘two generations of poules mouillées [weaklings]’ have reprinted his work ‘without having the simple honesty to correct a single bêvue, or to abate one blunder; while they looked upon the Arabian Nights as their own especial rotten borough.’48 On  the other flank, he took aim at Charles James Lyall for not being popular enough—­a vicious attack that left Lyall hurt and bewildered, and that scarcely correlates with the sometimes admiring notes Burton left in his own copy of Translations of Ancient Arabian Poetry.49 It seems doubtful that this raid would ever have occurred, would ever have been warranted, had Lyall been content to continue publishing his work only within the Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, rather than collating his old articles during the winter of 1884 and ‘putt­ ing [them] into shape for a popular edition’ with Williams & Norgate, a publisher known for a list strong in foreign literature.50 The feud mentioned earlier between Leopold Woitsch and Albert Ehrenstein, in which flew bitter accusations of plagiarism, commercialism, and textual ‘rape’, was uncovered by Sara Landa, who has made a general study of interactions between German-­speaking sinologists and popularizers at the turn of the century. Yet Landa encourages us to look beyond the spectacular acrimony of this exchange and recognize that the relationship between poets and philologists, as she terms them, ‘was, in fact, simultaneously cooperative and competitive’. The two groups were keenly aware of their respective positions, experienced collective tension, and yet remained ‘closely interconnected’.51 This dynamic is particularly well illustrated by a phenomenon I have elsewhere described as ‘The Race for Hafez’, some three decades of collusive and competitive jostling between trans­ lators with widely different agendas, all ambitious for theirs to be recognized as the ‘standard’ edition.52 In 1813, von Hammer brought out a complete version of Hafez’s divan in German, at a time when the name of Hafez was already well-­ 48 ‘Correspondence’, The Academy, XXXIV/852 (1 Sept. 1888), 137. 49  For Lyall’s reaction, see a letter of 4 Oct. 1885 to Whitley Stokes (Morgan: E3.085.B): ‘my book certainly does smell horribly of the lamp . . . I wish I could make it otherwise, but I can’t.’; Huntington: 634733, C.J.  Lyall, Translations of Ancient Arabian Poetry (London: Williams & Norgate, 1885), pp. xxvii, xlvii, 82. 50 Armstrong Browning Library, Baylor University: 84286-­ 00 (Lyall to Robert Browning, 13 Dec. 1884). 51  Landa, ‘Interplay’, 246. 52  For a full discussion, see Alexander Bubb, ‘The Race for Hafiz: Scholarly and Popular Translations at the Fin de Siècle’, Comparative Critical Studies, XVII/2 (2020), 225–44.

Translating  135 known to the British public, even though they could read a bare fraction of his oeuvre in their own language. For various reasons, an equivalent complete edition in English did not follow till 1891, creating a weakly policed field, devoid of authoritative figures, in which an incongruous crowd—­ranging from the most narrow-­purposed specialists to the most unabashed of dabblers—­rushed to fill the vacuum. Though they pursued a diversity of agendas, a distinct rivalry emerged between esoteric translators, who stressed the poet’s Sufi leanings and interpreted his allusions to wine and love in a strictly symbolic light, and exoteric translators who portrayed Hafez as a hedonist, and sometimes even attempted to construct biographical origins for certain lyrics. Responsible for the 1891 complete divan, Henry Wilberforce Clarke was of the former school, while several of his unsolicited coadjutors were decidedly of the latter. Goldsmid had compared Clarke’s densely annotated edition to a ‘mass of bricks’ that would be quarried and fashioned into more graceful shapes by artistic amateurs like Justin McCarthy. But when McCarthy recommended the book to another popularizer, Richard Le Gallienne, in 1891 he used a rather more vivid metaphor: ‘as to your new adventure with Hafiz:– I should think that Wilberforce Clarke’s translation . . . would be the most useful book for you. Good it is not, but you might suck good out of it.’53 This oddest of analogies, suggesting at once a process of ingestion and refinement, and alluding it seems to a recent American invention—­the paper drinking straw—­is connected with the hedonistic spirit of ‘joy’ in which Le Gallienne insisted Hafez should be read.54 What this meant in practice becomes visible if we pair an extract from Clarke’s version of Ode 49, replete with parenthetical, Sufistic glosses, alongside Le Gallienne’s treatment (original included for reference). ‫کنون که در کف گل جام باده صافست‬ ‫بصد هزار زبان بلبلش در اوصافست‬ ‫بخواه دفرت اشعار و راه صحرا گیر‬ 55‫چه وقت مدرسه و بحث کشف کشافست‬ Now that in the palm of the rose (the holy traveller), is the cup of pure wine (borrowed worldly existence), In its praise, is the bulbul (the flattering Friend) with a hundred thousand tongues. Seek the book of verse (truths and subtleties) and make way to the desert (choose solitude):

53  HRC: MS-­2412 (Richard Le Gallienne Collection), 5.14, McCarthy to Le Gallienne, 20 July 1901. 54  Richard Le Gallienne, Odes from the Divan of Hafiz, freely rendered from literal translations (London: Duckworth, 1905), p. xv. 55  H.S. Jarrett (ed.), Dīvān-­i Ḥāfiẓ (Calcutta: Urdu Guide Press, 1881), p. 18. Hand-­corrected copy at Oxford Centre for Islamic Studies. Spelling as in Jarrett’s text.

136  Asian Classics on the Victorian Bookshelf (ʼTis the time of justice.) What time is this for the College, and the argument of the Kashf-­i-­Kashshāf?56 Now that the rose-­tree in its dainty hand Lifts high its brimming cup of blood-­red wine, And green buds thicken o’er the empty land, Heart, leave these speculations deep of thine, And seek the grassy wilderness with me. Who cares for problems, human or divine! The dew of morning glitters like a sea, And hearken how yon happy nightingale Tells with his hundred thousand new-­found tongues Over again the old attractive tale. Yea, close thy books; let schools and schoolmen be; Only a little lazy book of songs Snatch up, and take the long green road with me.57

In this passage, Le Gallienne’s use of the imagery supplied him by Clarke’s footnotes actually cuts directly against the latter’s own symbolic exposition. ‘Yon happy nightingale’ that beckons the scholar to shut up his Kashf-­i-­Kashshāf (a Quranic commentary) and glory in the first blooms of spring represents, Clarke explains, the flattering voice of the material world. The joy it gives to the senses is not the antidote to lifeless scholastic dispute. Rather, both things distract the poet from his proper sphere of solitary contemplation. Le Gallienne’s more simple materialist reading reflects his exoteric bias, and demonstrates the kind of translation tactic that secured him a fervent following at the turn of the century—­ particularly in the United States where the tall, striking, long-­haired poet gave readings to packed theatres and lecture halls.58 Such auditors were clearly drawn by the performative dimension to Le Gallienne’s translation, a practice rooted in the notion of Hafez as bard established earlier in the century by Costello, but amplified by the self-­referential, even self-­satirical manner in which Le Gallienne confused his own personality and libertine reputation with Hafez’s life-­story. Referring to his earlier version of Omar Khayyam in a letter to his publisher, Le Gallienne described this novel approach as ‘a Kaleidoscopic combination’ of poet and translator.59 Nevertheless, in spite of his popularity, Le Gallienne’s was only one of at least eleven English translations that appeared between 1875 (Herman Bicknell) and 1910 (Majid and Byng). If Richard Burton had sought to link his

56 H.  Wilberforce Clarke, The Dīvān, written in the fourteenth century, by Khwāja Shamsu-­d-­dīn Muḥammad-­i-­Hạ̄ fiz-­i-­Shīrāzī (2 vols; Calcutta: Government of India Central Printing Office, 1891), I, 126. 57  Le Gallienne, Odes, p. 35. 58  ‘Talk on Omar Khayyam’, St Paul Globe, 23 Jan. 1901. 59  LRO: 920 LEG/124/1 (Le Gallienne to Grant Richards, 13 Nov. 1896).

Translating  137 name permanently with the Arabian Nights, and succeeded to some measure, no one could expect to corner the market in Hafez translations. Instead, his contending and cannibalistic interpreters presented readers with a multiplicity of choices, presenting a poet discrepant, erratic and elusive, but also enabling his influence to be felt in twentieth-­century poetry untrammelled by the impress (as became the case with Omar Khayyam) of one dominant translator. Self-­styled Omarians have all labored in the shadow of Fitzgerald, and were less likely to produce creative, hybrid responses like the ‘Overdrafts’ of Basil Bunting, or Elizabeth Bridges’s Sonnets from Hafiz (1921). The relationship between scholar and popularizer can therefore be understood as a process of indirect rivalry and unwitting collaboration, with some instances of direct rivalry and, occasionally, of direct collaboration—­one thinks here of Max Müller correcting Moncure Conway’s errors during work on the Sacred Anthology. What these examples ultimately suggest is that the ‘deep ambivalence’ observed by Bourdieu is most profound when it occurs not in the overt sceptics, but rather in the conflicted behaviour of those who, like Müller, fully comprehended what they stood to gain both personally and institutionally through popu­lar­iza­tion. The Oxford professor’s numerous public lectures were spurred in large part by his apprehension of declining public interest in philological discoveries from India, and his fear for its future as an academic discipline. Yet Richard Fynes has demonstrated how Müller harboured ‘a proprietary attitude’ towards the text in which he had invested much of his career, the Rig Veda, and how he wished ‘in apparent contradiction’ of his public aims, ‘to confine its study to the cognoscenti’. The reason why Müller’s edition of selections from the Rig Veda chiefly samples the hymns to the Maruts, the Vedic storm gods, is not because they are the most intrinsically beautiful or interesting but because they are neither. In his own words, the Sanskritist thereby ‘hoped they would prove attractive to serious students only, and frighten away the casual reader who has done so much harm by meddling with Vedic antiquities’.60

Liberty and Constraint of the Female Translator Venuti contrasts the practices that have become dominant in the English-­ speaking world with the German translation tradition running back to Goethe, Schleiermacher, and ultimately Herder, whose theory of language stressed the radical differences between cultures. While the fluency and transparency valued in the former necessitate the invisibility of translators and their work, the f­ oreignizing strategies favoured by the latter have had the opposite effect of magnifying the 60  Richard Fynes, ‘Sacred Books of the East’, in France and Haynes (eds), Oxford History of Literary Translation in English: Volume 4, p. 460.

138  Asian Classics on the Victorian Bookshelf work of translation and, furthermore, portraying it as heroic masculine labour. Padma Rangarajan points to a disturbing passage where Herder speaks of the pristine maidenhood of untranslated languages. ‘No longer a mere copyist’, she writes, in his imagination the translator is aggrandized into a deflowerer of virgin texts, ‘a dangerously virile arbiter of culture’.61 It is consistent with this tendency that several of the most successful popular oriental translations from the later nineteenth century present themselves as the product of a decisive, sometimes overbearing male intervention. Le Gallienne is a case in point, though still more apt is Edwin Arnold, since he combined a similarly assertive, performative authorial presence with methods that we might recognize—­ though this is debatable—­as foreignizing. When translating from Sanskrit he made it a habit to incorporate, with metrical consistency, Sanskrit phrases into his English verses—­a persistent acknowledgement of the source-­language with challenging consequences for anyone who tried to recite his poems aloud. Such interlingual feats enabled him to further enhance his position as privileged mediator of multiple Asian literatures, a role celebrated by Arnold himself in one of his later books, With Sa’di in the Garden, a poetic dialogue based on the third chapter of Sadi’s Bustan, and yet another popular work begotten—­though in this case the debt is acknowledged—­by the Persian scholarship of Henry Wilberforce Clarke. The volume opens with a ‘proeme’ in which Arnold maps out his entire career, alluding first to The Light of Asia, and then to his various translations from the Gita Govinda, the Mahabharata, the Quran, the Katha Upanishad, and the Bhagavad Gita. Sweet Friends! who love the Music of the Sun, And listened—­glad and gracious—­many an one, While, on a light-­strung lyre, I sought to tell Indian Siddartha’s wisdom; and the spell Of Jayadev’s deep verse; and proud deeds wrought By Pandu Princes; and how gems are fraught With meanings; and to count each golden bead Of Allah’s names of Beauty; and to read High tender lessons Upanishads teach— “Secret of Death,” and subtle soul of speech In holy OM; and to con—­line by line— The lofty glory of the “Lay Divine”— Arjuna’s speech with Krishna:—once more come, And listen to the Vina and the Drum!62

61 Rangarajan, Imperial Babel, p. 4. 62 Arnold, With Sa’di in the Garden, or, The Book of Love (Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1888), p. ix.

Translating  139 Amusingly, Le Gallienne himself resented and mocked Arnold both for his technique (one review compares Sanskrit words incorporated into his English verses to the eruptions of a skin disease) and his pursuit of celebrity: ‘like certain popular actors, he cannot resist the temptation of limelight and the invitation to look sublime.’63 Yet both men might be faulted for eclipsing their source-­texts with their own assiduously cultivated public personae. Though he was noted for personal reserve, generally refusing to be photographed or to discuss his private life with journalists, Arnold’s narcissism emerged in other ways, including a blithe (and misplaced) assumption that he would become Poet Laureate upon Tennyson’s death, and—­more significantly for us—­the claims he made for his Asian texts.64 Stressing the novelty or primacy of his translations, he described Indian Idylls in a vaguely libidinous manner as ‘the first unveiling to Britons of Sanskrit epical verse’, and insisted to an American publisher that his Gita Govinda ‘must become the standard version’.65 His remarks invariably emphasize his own agency in first importing these texts and then establishing their status within English literary culture, to the extent that his backlist itself constitutes a kind of Eastern canon: thus the Bustan is in his words ‘an Oriental classic’, while he groups Light of Asia, Pearls of the Faith, and the Gita Govinda as his ‘Oriental Trilogy’, because they concern the three great religions of South Asia.66 All this bravado naturally raises the question of how female translators addressed themselves to the same texts, and to their public, not least because Arnold’s approach may sometimes have occluded or diminished female presence. Catherine Robinson, for example, has highlighted how deference to the sexual mores of his readership led him into an absurd portrayal of Radha, ‘casting [her] in the role of Kṛishṇa’s redeemer in a manner reminiscent of Victorian romance, where the love of a good woman transforms her wayward lover’.67 Women have not featured greatly either in histories or critiques of orientalism, largely owing to the assumption that it was a male preserve. However, this was not at all true of popular translation: seventy-­one translators (including collaborators) are represented in AVaTAR, and of those fifteen were women, among them Costello, Zimmern, Jessie Cadell, Elizabeth Alden Curtis, Gertrude Bell, Geraldine Hodgson, Clara  A.  Walsh, E.M.  Wilmot-­ Buxton, Frederika Richardson, and Evelyn

63 Richard Le Gallienne, ‘Sir Edwin Arnold’s Poems’, Daily Chronicle (15 Mar. 1892), p. 3 and ‘Books and Bookmen’, The Star (20 Aug. 1891), p. 2. 64  ‘The death of Robert Browning makes it certain that, at Lord Tennyson’s departure, the Prime Minister w. offer the Poet Laureateship to me.’ HRC: MS-­0126 (Sir Edwin Arnold Collection), 1.4, Arnold to ‘Hardy’, 28 Jan. 1890. 65  FSL: C.a.10, f.10, Edwin Arnold to C.M. Ingleby, 16 Oct. 1883; University of Chicago, Special Collections, Miscellaneous Manuscripts Collection: ALS from Edwin Arnold to an American publisher (probably Roberts Brothers), 24 May 1885. 66 Arnold, With Sa’di, p. viii; Arnold, Pearls of the Faith, p. viii. 67  Catherine Robinson, ‘ “O our India!”: Towards a Reassessment of Sir Edwin Arnold’, Religions of South Asia, III/2 (2009), 207.

140  Asian Classics on the Victorian Bookshelf Underhill. If we subtract books from Wisdom of the East—­a series edited by two men that seldom employed female translators—­the proportion rises to 24 per cent. Some of them sought the patronage of eminent male orientalists, as Costello did with H.H.  Wilson, while others acted wholly independently, making entrepreneurial decisions about what texts were suitable for translation and had commercial promise, before opening negotiations with publishers. Suzanne Stark has observed the latter traits in two translators from German, Sarah Austin and Catherine Winkworth, and highlights the seeming contradiction in their activity. Translation in the nineteenth century was seen as ‘subsidiary’ work, reproductive rather than creative, self-­denying and discrete; and yet it was in practice an inherently assertive activity, whereby strong and sustained influence could be exercised over the reception of key foreign texts upon their first translation into English. It was also in this period an increasingly organized and competitive business that obliged even women who professed amateurism to be, in reality, consummate ­professionals.68 Moreover, if the work of the translator, like that of the nurse or midwife, was sometimes gendered as feminine, Yopie Prins has suggested that popularization—­ specifically, the popularization of classics—­may also have been perceived as ‘women’s work’, and may have offered still more potent means of shaping taste and laying claim to objects of cultural prestige. Several of the writers named above resembled the ‘Woman of Greek Letters’ described by Prins, ‘a generic figure mediating between classical literature and its popular reception, between the professionalization of philology and the popularization of classics, between classical literacy and the common reader.’69 Such women played an active role in the wide circulation of classical learning, partly because they were able to exercise creative licence, disrupting received canons of translation in a way that was supported, indulged, tolerated, or simply overlooked by male critics and reviewers, who did not recognize them as a threat. Like ‘Ladies’ Greek’, I have found that Ladies’ Persian, Ladies’ Sanskrit, Ladies’ Hindi, Arabic, and Chinese are also powered by alternating currents of liberty and constraint. If sometimes poor in needful resources like dictionaries, time, and peer review, their practitioners could adopt roles or cultivate relationships—­including relationships to native-­speaking informants and collaborators—­not so readily amenable to their male counterparts. Whether female translators aligned with or deviated from the practices we have identified with Edwin Arnold is not an abstract question. It is a question of direct literary influence, because as the most successful popular orientalist of his day Arnold offered an unavoidable example of how (or how not) to approach their task. One unobserved piece of evidence that might help us here are four

68 Suzanne Stark, ‘Women and Translation in the Nineteenth Century’, New Comparison, 15 (Spring 1993), 35, 44. 69  Yopie Prins, Ladies’ Greek: Victorian Translations of Tragedy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017), p. xi.

Translating  141 of his books (all, as it happens, translations that Arnold alludes to in the ­aforementioned ‘proeme’) that once belonged to Richard and Isabel Burton. Three books have been inscribed by the author himself, to ‘Mr Burton’ as the Huntington Library catalogue records—­but the cataloguer missed an almost imperceptible ‘s’.70 Arnold presented these books to ‘Mrs Burton’, two of them in January 1884 and the other probably in 1885, the year of publication for the first volume of Burton’s Nights. They arrived therefore during the preparation of his most im­port­ant work of translation, something Arnold was well aware of since it appears Burton submitted part of the manuscript to him for comment.71 Yet Arnold chose Isabel as the recipient of his gifts—­perhaps as a back-­channel to Burton, or perhaps for her own sake. It may have been that Isabel herself solicited these gifts, or Arnold may have suspected she would be a more appreciative reader. Certainly the annotations left by husband and wife bespeak quite different attitudes. The copies of Indian Idylls and Pearls of the Faith (mentioned in the previous section) are filled with characteristic Burtonian marginalia, mainly corrections to Arnold’s translation and orthography, supplemented with occasional terse comments in his minute handwriting. The Secret of Death and The Song Celestial, however, seem to have been Isabel’s books principally, in which she has highlighted passages of interest with asterisks, or long, often wavy marginal lines, tripled or even quadrupled where she has found something especially noteworthy. The annotations are densest in Chapters 6, 8, and 9 of the Song Celestial (that is, the Bhagavad Gita), and here we find also ‘q’ and ‘opp q’—their meaning is unclear, but they tend to mark areas where Isabel, an orthodox Catholic, is likely to have found harmony or discord with Christian doctrine.72 In short, her annotations suggest engagement and enthusiasm for the work of Edwin Arnold, something eminently relevant to two of her own final publication projects: Lady Burton’s Edition of her Husband’s Arabian Nights and, following Richard’s death, a uniform edition of his works that she described in private letters as being ‘for the people’, or ‘the Standard people’s edition’.73 The extent of her designs, and the audience she envisaged, is stated in an extraordinary frontispiece dedication to the first of these two: To The Women of England I dedicate this Edition 70  Furthermore, it is very unlikely that Arnold would have used ‘Mr’ in neglect of Burton’s proper title. He would have written ‘Captain Burton’ or (after 1886) ‘Sir Richard’. 71  ‘My dear Arnold, Many thanks for the perusal’ (Huntington: mssRFB 1-­1386, Box 24, Folder 268, Burton to Arnold, 16 Sept. 1883). 72  Huntington: 634540, Edwin Arnold, The Song Celestial (London: Trübner, 1885), pp. 56, 58, 71, 79, 145. 73  Boston Athenaeum: Mss.L168 (Isabel Burton to A.W. Thayer, 5 June 1893); Huntington: mssRFB 1-­1386, Box 24, Folder 213 (Isabel Burton to W.F. Kirby, 25 July 1894).

142  Asian Classics on the Victorian Bookshelf of The Arabian Nights Believing that the majority can appreciate fine language, exquisite poetry, and romantic Eastern life, just as well as the thousand students & scholars who secured the original thousand copies.74 Her redaction of coarse words, and sexually explicit and scatological content, enabled Isabel Burton to publish her ‘Household Edition’ openly in Britain, for the sole purpose of securing copyright on her husband’s work and safeguarding it from piracy. That, at least, is the explanation given in her published memoirs. But to take this account at face value, as scholars have generally done, is to discount her own ambitions for popular success, which persisted or possibly grew stronger in the mid-­1880s even as Richard Burton rejected commercial publishing and cultivated his international, cosmopolitan coterie. Though she does not consider how husband and wife were divided on the question of readership, Jill Matus has written eloquently of how Isabel outwardly performed the role of helpmeet but privately pushed her own agenda, pursuing a ‘silent dialogue’ or ‘power struggle’ with her husband that is now visible only in manuscript drafts, where her pen has excised or amended, and Richard has either acquiesced or responded with an obstinate ‘Stet’.75 Some of Isabel Burton’s mixture of self-­assertion and self-­effacement is visible in the correspondence of an American writer, Frances Jenkins Olcott, during preparation of her 1917 volume Tales of the Persian Genii. ‘As the book does not belong to literature,’ she told her publisher, ‘I am taking all the liberty I want, recasting the plots, adding incident and detail, of course always in Oriental spirit.’76 The meaning of these brisk, businesslike remarks is ambiguous. Was Olcott suggesting that her two Persian sources (the Bagh o Bahar and Mahbub al-­Kalub) lay outside the Western canon, and could therefore be mangled and manipulated at will, or did she mean that her own work—­as a woman writing for children—­ was not serious ‘literature’, and therefore should not be held to scholarly standards? The publisher could draw either inference, and Olcott thus gave herself the option of using her sex to evade censure—­a potentially useful strategy, but also one that exposed her to the allegations female translators often had to face of slipshod or non-­scientific research, the undisciplined pursuit of personal whim and fancy, and simple impudence. Olcott was unmarried, and if her motives

74  Isabel Burton and Justin  H.  McCarthy, Lady Burton’s Edition of her husband’s Arabian Nights (6 vols, London: Waterlow, 1886–7), I, iii. 75  Jill Matus, ‘Collaboration and Collusion: Two Victorian Writing Couples and their Orientalist Texts’, in Marjorie Stone and Judith Thompson (eds), Literary Couplings: Writing Couples, Collaborators and the Construction of Authorship (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2006), p. 188. 76  Houghton: MS Am 1925 (Houghton Mifflin company correspondence), Series 1, Folder 1334, Olcott to Houghton Mifflin, 17 Apr. 1916.

Translating  143 were commercial we must appreciate that for many women royalties signified independence and work of their own choice. Vernon Lee, who benefited from her mother’s financial support, gave a sympathetic portrait of Helen Zimmern in June 1881, after meeting her during a boating excursion on the Thames: ‘a pleasant, intelligent little black woman, quite capable of doing good work but who has to do hack reviewing to support her people.’77 By that point Zimmern had carved for herself a viable if vulnerable niche in literary London. Her letters to Richard Garnett from the previous decade show how she had gradually built up her professional networks, with guidance from the courteous librarian. ‘When next I come to the Museum I shall gladly avail myself of your kind permission to ask your advice in literary matters,’ she wrote in 1873. ‘It happens I am just now much in need of some.’ It may have been with Garnett’s help that she got her first work reviewing German books for the Examiner, and he expanded her horizons, discussing with her Buddhism, Renan’s Vie de Jesus, and—­as already mentioned—­Persian literature, beginning with Sadi’s maxim, ‘O square thyself for use! A stone that is fit for the wall is not left in the way.’ ‘What a charming Persian proverb that is’, she responded. ‘Would that I may prove a fitting stone, then I shall not despair of being left on the ground.’78 Garnett also probably introduced her to Edmund Gosse, who eventually wrote two poems for her—­the first, ‘Firdausi in Exile’, published as dedicatory verses to the Epic of Kings, and the second addressed to her privately and existing, to my knowledge, only in manuscript. The poem opens by comparing Zimmern to an eighteenth-­century woman of letters and resident of Constantinople, Mary Wortley Montagu, casting himself in the role of Montagu’s spurned suitor, Alexander Pope, and her as the contemporary poet Anne Finch, Countess of Winchilsea. If this were Spence’s classic parlour, The epoch seventeen twenty-­three, If I were Pope, that little snarler, And you were courtliest Winchilsea, With brilliant points my verse I’d vary, I’d magnify your Persian feast, And vow that vapid Lady Mary Had merely travestied the East. Her visions thro’ half-­open portals, Her bulbuls singing in the vine, Were but the common-­place of mortals, While yours were gleams of the divine;

77  Amanda Gagel (ed.), Selected Letters of Vernon Lee, 1856–1935 (2 vols, Abingdon: Routledge, 2016–20), I, 296. 78  HRC: MS-­1545 (Richard Garnett Collection), 64.7 (Zimmern to Garnett, 21 June–24 July 1873).

144  Asian Classics on the Victorian Bookshelf That all the heroes of her travels Were vulgar many living clods, While your sublimer speech unravels The battles or the loves of gods.

Quaintly conjuring a prior era of British orientalism—­one captivated with the Arabian Nights in its first novelty—­Gosse suggests that Zimmern’s Shahnameh might initiate a new craze, and rectify the clichés and ‘travesty’ of past representations. By associating her with two aristocratic predecessors, he also disguises her own considerably more straitened circumstances and her debt to him as patron. There is a touch of gallantry here which does not altogether do Zimmern justice, especially when Gosse goes on to warn of how her bluestocking dilettantism (‘wits’, ‘arts’, and ‘lettered graces’) may fail to please a modern tribe of male, scholarly pedants who will pounce upon any mistake in her research. His assumption, it seems, is that her work is indeed likely to contain such trifling, feminine errors. It were an easy labour, Helen, To prove you brightest of your sex, And swear that men turn pale in telling, The provinces your wits annex. But arts like these are out of fashion, And critics, whom may God preserve, Might fly into a dreadful passion, And firk us as we well deserve. Might find an x or z repeated In some romantic hero’s name,— A chaste Arabian adverb cheated Of half its dot,—and cry you shame! With lexicons and rueful faces They might pursue an erring word, Nor more regard your lettered graces Than cats respect a singing-­bird. I will not tempt these bearded wonders By any public praise of mine, Lest they should launch their secret thunders, And slay us without call or sign. Your work is done; the antique poet Beneath his rose-­tree cries you thanks, And pride—­the winter flood-­waves show it— Swells old Euphrates’ storied banks.

Translating  145 Till time destroys our motley story, And drowns our century’s shame and fame, This volume will sustain your glory, And with FIRDUSI’s link your name.79

One rather touching aspect of Gosse’s tribute is its implied promise that any blame The Epic of Kings should meet with will be borne jointly (‘firk us’, ‘slay us’), but that any praise will be Zimmern’s alone. But the indulgent contrast with Edwin Arnold’s masculine ‘proeme’ is undeniable. Though she may ‘annex’ whole provinces of knowledge, Zimmern’s task is a subsidiary one in service of her antique source. Gosse does not call her work a translation—­the manuscript is headed, correctly enough, ‘To Helen Zimmern, on receiving her paraphrase of “The Epic of Kings”.’ And rather than commending the book to its contemporary audience, as Arnold does with bardic gusto, the clear-­sighted Gosse foresees that it must first avoid shipwreck on the rocks of criticism before finding a safe ­harbour in posterity. Unfortunately, Zimmern did not even have the right to hope for a lasting name, since when the work was reprinted in 1926, by Macmillan, her preface was removed and replaced with that of Wilfred Jones, the young American who—­according to the title page—­had ‘rediscovered’ the text. As it happened, The Epic of Kings was favourably received by the critics, though none observed the way in which the text was inflected by Zimmern’s concern for the labour and leadership of women. In Chapter 1, I argued that Patten Wilson based a series of drawings inspired by the Shahnameh not on Matthew Arnold’s poem Sohrab and Rustum, as has commonly been supposed, but on Zimmern’s book. Besides the evidence given earlier, my conviction is based on Wilson’s depiction of Sohrab taking leave of his mother Tahmineh, a character who in Arnold’s poem is only referred to in passing (Figure 5.1). The drawing shows an erect, robed woman frowning at her son as she fastens upon his arm the clasp that, she hopes, will identify him to his father should they meet in battle. In the only other English translation Wilson might have read, that of James Atkinson, Tahmineh weeps and wails when her son demands to know his true lineage, and proposes to sally forth and prove his valour, whereas Zimmern’s princess, who feigns reluctance at Sohrab’s departure while inwardly rejoicing at his appetite for war, resembles more closely the haughty and regal figure Wilson has delineated. In the original, Tahmineh’s inner feelings during her exchange with Sohrab are not actually described, but Zimmern’s portrayal of a woman who, upon hearing the eventual news of her son’s demise, slices off his horse’s tail and sets fire to his palace, better reflects the original than Atkinson’s matron, who rather than burning Sohrab’s possessions clutches them ‘with melancholy joy, In sad remembrance of 79  Bristol: DM 851 (Papers of Jane Cobden Unwin), Box 1.

146  Asian Classics on the Victorian Bookshelf

Figure 5.1  Patten Wilson, ‘Sohrab Taking Leave of His Mother’ (courtesy of Yellow Nineties 2.0)

her darling-­boy’ and sinks into a ‘trance’ of grief.80 Another female character who takes on greater stature in Zimmern’s text is Gordafrid, the warrior maiden whose cheeks, in the Persian, are said to turn black with rage when she witnesses the humiliation of her lord Hojir at the hands of Sohrab:

80 Atkinson, Sháh Námeh, pp. 182, 603; Zimmern, Epic of Kings, pp. 136, 171.

Translating  147 So she took forth burnished mail and clad herself therein, and she hid her tresses under a helmet of Roum, and she mounted a steed of battle and came forth before the walls like to a warrior. And she uttered a cry of thunder, and flung it amid the ranks of Turan, and she defied the champions to come forth to single combat.81

Disguised as a boy, Gordafrid engages and temporarily checks the advancing Sohrab, Zimmern devoting more lines to their single combat than to any other in the epic, save that of Sohrab’s final encounter with the warrior who, unbeknownst to him, is really his father Rustem. In her treatment, Zimmern did not depart in the slightest from the literal French translation at her elbow—­she merely rendered the story in full. The liberty she took was to condense other episodes to highlight Gordafrid, a character whom Arnold completely elides, and who in Atkinson is made the basis of a donnish footnote speculating whether Firdausi might have poached the figure of the ‘warrior dame’ from Homer or Herodotus.82 Other female translators took more strident liberties with their text, but in pursuit of their own civil liberties. 1913 was the most dramatic and violent year in the British campaign for women’s suffrage. Emily Davison was killed at the Epsom Derby in June, and when George Russell reviewed Helen Waddell’s Lyrics from the Chinese several months later, he perceived at once that it could be read as a suffragist text. ‘Who after this book can say that the feminist movement is new or that it is a temporary phase? Had we not better give the vote and settle a grievance that now appears is considerably older than two thousand years old?’83 Russell was referring to the book’s varied and distinctive voices: fourteen of its thirty-­six poems, all from the Shijing, have female speakers. The voices speak of solitude, the tedium of propriety, the enforced chastity of widows, a scandalous marquis and the mistreatment of his wife and concubine. There are male voices too, singing drinking songs and, in Lyric VI, collectively raising a sacrificial pyre, the intention being clearly to juxtapose female confinement with male participation in society and ritual. Lyrics XXI and XXII are pendants: in the first a woman ‘had a plan that would save the state’, but is barred from interrupting a conclave of statesman; its companion is a diatribe against meddling women (‘What does she in affairs of State? / Her place is in the inner room. / Her wisdom doth least hurt in this, / To mind the silkworm and the loom’).84 The volume is bookended with poems spoken by women who are waiting, interminably—­one beside a ford and the other watching a road—­for the arrival of a man. Waddell was born in 1889 in Tokyo and spent much of her childhood in Japan. Her father was a Presbyterian missionary of prodigious scholarship, but when he 81 Zimmern, Epic of Kings, p. 139. 82 Atkinson, Sháh Námeh, p. 560. 83  George Russell, ‘Ancient and Modern Humanity’, Irish Homestead, 27 Dec. 1913, p. 1078. 84  Helen Waddell, Lyrics from the Chinese (London: Constable, 1913), pp. 25–6.

148  Asian Classics on the Victorian Bookshelf died prematurely in 1901—leaving behind him a massive, incoherent manuscript titled The Interpretation of the Trinity to the Chinese Mind—­his family and his books returned to Belfast, where his daughter subsequently read English at Queen’s University. Upon graduation in 1911, Waddell was, by her own account, ‘extravagantly ambitious’—extravagant because her sex, slender finances, and obligation to care for an invalid stepmother posed barriers to an academic career so severe that to contemplate them was an ‘experience of utter frustration’.85 Nonetheless, she secured a small research fellowship (worth £9), and began work on a monograph about ‘the development of feminine interest in drama’, later switching her topic to ‘the discovery of love as a dramatic subject’.86 Studying Le Roman de la Rose, she was one day so infuriated by the misogynistic lines Jean de Meun had added to the thirteenth-­century allegorical poem that she appears to have flipped over her notebook and, writing from the back, embarked on something completely different. An undated letter to her sister describes what had happened: Do you remember the old shelf of “Chinese Classics” by James Legge, D.D.? . . . Well, it happened on Tuesday. I had sickened my very soul over Jean de Meun and yearned for anything, by way of dry disinfectant. And I reached out to the familiar shelf, and something guided my hand to one of the volumes I  had never opened before. It opened itself at “The gourd has still its bitter leaves”. My breath came thick, my head swam round—­for I know buried treasure when I see it, and not even the Reverend James Legge’s awful and literal prose could hide the freshness of it . . . the cry of a woman who has turned her back on marriage for the sake of love.87

Waddell acknowledged Legge as an indispensable aid: ‘these stones are from his quarry’, her preface would remark, in a telling variation on the familiar, excavatory metaphor.88 Unlike many earlier popularizers, her method was not to convert prose into conventional English verse forms (thus polishing rough ‘gems’) but instead to chisel and sculpt Legge’s dense, discursive, heavily annotated text into an austere, imagistic style, in which the odes are largely shorn of their symbolic content, and the pathos of individual speakers—­two of them historical women—­stands forth against a largely blank page. As we can see from the poem that she alludes to in her account, the result was both visually and lyrically arresting (Figures 5.2 and 5.3). ‘The Gourd Has Still Its Bitter Leaves’ has been radically compressed to a handful of stark images, whose enigmatic melancholy takes pre­ 85 D.  Felicitas Corrigan, Helen Waddell: A Biography (London: Victor Gollancz, 1986), p. 51; ‘Retrospect’, Broadsheet: The Bulletin of “World Books” (July 1950), p. 2. 86 Corrigan, Helen Waddell, p. 102. 87  Ibid., p. 103. 88 Waddell, Lyrics from the Chinese, p. xi.

Translating  149

Figure 5.2  James Legge, The Chinese Classics, with a Translation, Critical and Exegetical Notes, Prolegomena, and Copious Indexes: Volume 4, Part 1, p. 53 (author photograph)

ce­dence over Legge’s exposition (acknowledged doubtfully in the epigraph) that the poem should be read as a satire against the licentiousness of the court of Wei during the eighth century bce Such a wilful departure from her source was not necessarily a misrepresentation of the text. As Bernhard Karlgren has pointed out, Legge was led by classical commentators such as Zhu Xi into regarding all

150  Asian Classics on the Victorian Bookshelf

Figure 5.3  Helen Waddell, Lyrics from the Chinese, p. 1 (author photograph, copyright permission granted by Louise Anson)

love songs as political allegories.89 In a similar way, Waddell sometimes ironizes voices, perceiving rancour where Legge sees only conventional pieties. Less defensible, perhaps, was her method of excerpting short passages from longer poems in order to produce a desired effect. The aforementioned pendant owes its 89  Hung, ‘Chinese Poetry’, p. 224.

Translating  151 impact to the way that Waddell construes her misogynist diatribe only from the third and fourth stanzas of a lengthy ode, itself part of an eleven-­ode collection written to warn King Li about the consequences of his misrule. The poem is not specifically about women: their insubordination is merely one of several omens that Li’s kingdom is in decline. Nevertheless, the pendant makes a convincing case against shutting women out from the halls of government, and Waddell’s addition of a biblical epigraph left no doubt as to its contemporary target.90 Such pointed allusions to the Asquith government may well have contributed to the volume’s remarkable but short-­lived popularity. It sold more than 900 copies in its first three months of publication, and had not war broken out later that year, it is likely the book would be better known today.91 Immediately following the end of paper shortages in 1918, Lyrics was eclipsed by a new anthology—­Arthur Waley’s A Hundred and Seventy Chinese Poems—­that in a cruel irony was issued by her own publisher, Constable. By drawing on male clout or learning, female orientalists were often drawn into inextricable relationships of debt with husbands (Burton), fathers (Waddell), teachers, and patrons (Zimmern). One final, brief example will demonstrate how vital it is to determine with accuracy who performed the work of translation, while also suggesting the wider networks a woman might establish behind and beyond that single, dominant relationship. Reviews of The Celebrated Romance of the Stealing of the Mare (1892) and The Seven Golden Odes of Pagan Arabia (1903) barely mentioned Lady Anne Blunt, even though it was she who actually supplied the literal renditions from Arabic that her husband, the poet Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, then put into English verse. Though by no means ignorant of the language, he was never as proficient or diligent as his wife. ‘I wish I could read Arabic like you do’, he confided many years later, after the two had separated, in one of his final letters to her.92 Much of the work was carried out while living at Sheykh Obeyd, the Blunts’ horse stud on the outskirts of Cairo. Here Anne could consult her neighbour Hamoudeh Abdu, take daily lessons with her ‘ustad’ (master) Abdallah Effendi, and when Wilfrid was present (often he was not) entertain British visitors who shared their antipathy to the colonial administration. A diary made during E.G. Browne’s visit in March 1903 richly evokes the social environment she cultivated in Egypt: . . . at 10 had my reading with Abdallah Eff:. We did not get quite through the moallaka chosen for today which was El Harith’s. He left at 12.30. We were obliged to have luncheon in the dining room on acct. of the gale. Sheykh Mohd.

90  ‘Is there any thing whereof it may be said, See, this is new? it hath been already of old time, which was before us’ (Ecclesiastes 1:10). 91  Helen Waddell Archive, Kilmacrew House, Co. Down: Box 11, Folder 3. 92  WSRO: Blunt Mss Box 64, W.S. Blunt to Anne Blunt, 28 Apr. 1917.

152  Asian Classics on the Victorian Bookshelf Abdu came as agreed sometime after 2. He was accompanied by a poet named Hafiz & by Sheykh Rashid, editor of the Manara a weekly newspaper, a Syrian from Tárâblus. Talk abt poetry & measures & translations & traditions. They staid till 4 when we all walked together to the gate.93

Ingrained in this lifestyle was a respect for local over European knowledge, an attitude that prompted her characteristic response when Zimmern’s publisher, T. Fisher Unwin, questioned her as to what form a projected history of Arabic literature should take (instead of giving her own opinion, she offered to ask the sheikhs of Al-­Azhar University). It also informed her stated ambition to create a translation that was ‘really poetry and not the usual ridiculous sort of rendering’— referring presumably to the work of Arabists like Charles James Lyall. ‘You see’, she explained, ‘I present materials in a different aspect from the usual, learned though they be, orientalists.’94 Anne’s respect for indigenous Egyptian scholarship offers a useful counterpoint to my final case-­study, in which the mingled rivalry and collaboration of popularizers with scholars can be seen to intersect with colonial appropriation, and the reclaiming of texts by native-­speaking translators.

Heteroglossic Ramayanas When did the word Ramayana, and the understanding that it names an ancient Indian epic poem, become part of the common stock of Western knowledge? In 1861, Punch published some anti-­Darwin doggerel titled ‘Monkeyana’, spoken in the character of a zoo gorilla. A reader who had heard of the epic, and was aware that it treats of relations between men and apes, may have found this lampoon faintly more amusing—­but such knowledge wasn’t a prerequisite. Leap forward a decade, and visitors to the Paris Salon of 1873 gazed upon ‘Sita’ by Fernand-­Anne Cormon, the painter returning two years later—­and carrying off the prix du salon—­with ‘La Mort de Ravana’.95 Pass over another ten years, and in the United States the title carried a certain cachet. We find that the members of one of Chicago’s two Theosophical Society branches chose ‘Ramayana’ for the name of their lodge. ‘The name taken is a good one’, remarked the Path for October 1887, ‘and calls before the mind an era of vast spiritual and material knowledge’.96 Curious outsiders, one supposes, were expected to recognize the word and perhaps

93  BL: Add MS 54011 (Diaries of Lady Anne Blunt). 94  Berg: Anne Blunt to T. Fisher Unwin, 25 Oct. 1896; BL: Add MS 54129 (Anne Blunt to ‘dearest Conny’, 15 Aug. 1903). 95 Shalon Parker, Painting the Prehistoric Body in Late Nineteenth-­ Century France (Newark: University of Delaware Press), pp. 41, 58. The Ramayana is also mentioned in a novel published at Paris three months before the Salon opened, Around the World in Eighty Days. 96  ‘Theosophical Activities’, The Path, II/7 (Oct. 1887), 223.

Translating  153 be drawn into joining the Society. When audiences six-­thousand-­strong crowded into the Empress Theatre in London eight years later for the 1895 ex­trava­ganza, ‘India’, and saw the chief characters of the epic parade onto the stage, spiritual thoughts were likely not uppermost. But imperial spectacles of this kind also played their role in creating the associations (names, places, symbols, costumes, key characters, plot points) that in course of time built up around the mere word, ‘Ramayana’.97 This is all anecdotal, but it suggests that whatever change took place was gradual and not triggered by any single translation—­certainly not Carey and Marshman’s original, pioneering effort of 1810, which only compassed a portion of the epic and was printed on a missionary press (with most copies being ­subsequently lost in a shipwreck). Like Vishnu, the divine poem has had instead a number of worldly avatars who have jointly embodied it as an English text. Among them were two multi-­volume scholarly translations, issued over a span of years by the Principal of Benares College, R.T.H. Griffith (1870–4), and Manmatha Nath Dutt (1889–94). These had their counterparts in French and Italian, prod­uced respectively by Hippolyte Fauche and Gaspare Gorresio. But English ­readers were also entertained by a small host of single-­volume abridgements, beginning with Griffith’s own early experiment, Scenes from the Ramayan (1868). This was followed by Frederika Richardson’s Iliad of the East, published by Macmillan in 1870, Talboys Wheeler’s synopsis with historical commentary (1881), J.C.  Oman’s Struggles in the Dawn (1893, reprinted as The Great Indian Epics), Romesh Chunder Dutt’s The Epic of Rama, Prince of India, Condensed into English Verse (1899), and an adaptation of the latter for children by Geraldine Hodgson, Rama and the Monkeys (1903)—not to mention numerous periodical articles offering select episodes from the great poem.98 As we have seen in other examples, these popular versions enjoyed the advantages of being cheap, printed in greater numbers and—­ crucially—­ reprinted. A case in point: in 1886, Richardson’s Iliad was re­issued for the American market, at a time when Griffith’s first and second volumes were already out of print (the following year they were advertised for sale in Bernard Quaritch’s shop at an extravagant £2 10s.).99 The opportunity was thus the popularizers’ to shape Western perceptions of the epic according to their particular agendas and biases, and the reader’s boon (or burden) to weigh the merits of books that visibly co-­existed for several decades, cohering and dissenting, imitating, reinforcing, or reacting against one another. This chapter will close by reacquainting Richardson’s version with Dutt’s, since they were 97  Anna Nalini Gwynne, ‘India in the English Musical Imagination, 1890–1940’, PhD dissertation, University of California, Berkeley (2003), p. 26. 98  The story of Yajnadatta’s accidental killing by Dasaratha was probably the single most-­translated episode. 99  Catalogue of Works in the Oriental Languages together with Polynesian & African (London: Quaritch, 1887), p. 3363.

154  Asian Classics on the Victorian Bookshelf arguably the most influential, and because they present the most dramatic ­contrast in style and approach. On the face of it Dutt (1848–1909), a civil servant, economic historian and liberal Indian nationalist, who learned Sanskrit late in life and rendered the epic in English verse couplets, would appear much the superior translator to Richardson (1845–1923), who knew no Sanskrit and derived her prose version chiefly from the French of Fauche. Moreover, in the long run, Dutt would outsell all his peers, particularly after his Ramayana and Mahabharata, originally published as separate items in the Temple Classics series, were combined into a single volume for Everyman’s Library—­according to one estimate, 42,500 copies of this had sold worldwide by the middle of the twentieth century.100 But his was not necessarily the better translation, nor the more ac­cur­ate. Faced with the difficult task of abridgement, both translators made highly subjective choices as to what to include and what to omit. They flung their spotlight in separate quarters of the populous, multifarious epic, throwing some areas into high relief while leaving others in tactful obscurity. Put simply, a con­tem­por­ary who read both would have been rewarded with starkly dissimilar impressions of the poem, and this may not have been a bad thing. To understand their discrepancy, we need to know a little more about this highly complex work. Firstly, the Ramayana is well known for its exceptional length, but a great challenge for the abridger is its convoluted and digressive structure. The central story tells of Rama, Prince of Ayodhya, and his wife Sita; of their wrongful banishment by Rama’s father, Dasaratha, their wanderings in the jungle for fourteen years, and Sita’s kidnap by the demon-­king Ravana. With the help of Sugriva, monarch of the apes, and his kinsman Hanuman, Rama crosses the sea to Lanka, conquers his enemies, liberates Sita, and returns home to claim his throne. Along the way, however, the protagonists meet a variety of hermits, animals, and magical creatures who tell their own, nested stories, among them several of significance in Hindu cosmogony, such as the origin of the River Ganges. Moreover, this extended family of myths is enclosed by a frame narrative, in which two young disciples of the poem’s author, Valmiki, recite the entire Ramayana to its protagonist, King Rama, many years after the events described in the poem. They explain how those events were first set in motion by the gods, who in order to rid the world of Ravana urged Vishnu to incarnate himself as a man, and this brings us to one of the epic’s unique aspects: Rama is divine, but he does not know it. The modern Indologist David Shulman makes the point ­powerfully in his essay, ‘Fire and Flood’: The Rāmāyaņa is the portrait of a consciousness hidden from itself; or, one might say, of an identity obscured, and only occasionally, in brilliant and

100 Seymour, Printing History of Everyman, p. 208.

Translating  155 poignant flashes, revealed to its owner . . . the divine hero who fails to remember that he is a god, comes to know himself, at least for brief moments, through hearing (always from others) his own story.101

As Frederika Richardson remarks in her preface, the fact that Rama suffers as a man, and ‘passes through his many struggles and afflictions’ in ignorance of his divine nature is a source of deep pathos.102 It has also been a source of disquiet and perplexity because of the hero’s inconsistent, even capricious behaviour. Rama is presented as the model of righteous Hindu kingship, ruling over (after his return to Ayodhya) a utopian society. Yet his character is marred by several questionable actions. Ravana’s abduction of Sita, for example, is not unprovoked. It is a retaliation for his sister Surpanakha’s treatment at the hands of Rama and his brother Lakshman: when the amorous demoness attempts to seduce Rama, the two princes insult and mutilate her by slicing off her nose and ears. Then there are Rama’s misadventures in the monkey-­kingdom, where he gains a powerful ally in Sugriva but only by helping the latter dethrone his brother Vali, whom Rama shoots in the back while he is wrestling with his rival. And finally there is the hero’s attitude to Sita after their reunion. Suspicious that his wife has lain with her captor in Lanka, Rama first obliges her to undergo a trial by fire, and when even this unimpeachable test of purity fails to subdue the gossip of the multitude, sends her into exile. After listening to the recitation of the poem by Valmiki’s disciples (who are in fact Rama’s estranged sons), he attempts a reconciliation but is rebuffed by Sita, who appeals to her mother the Earth to take her back. The woman who was magically born from the soil thus returns to it before her husband’s astonished eyes. Given the enormous symbolic importance of Rama to ideas of justice and settled government, not to mention Brahminical orthodoxy and the caste system, it is unsurprising that in the course of the work’s approximately 2,500-­year history a variety of commentators and authors of alternate versions have sought to mitigate or disguise these shortcomings of the divine hero. Faced with this challenging and problematic text, popularizers evolved a var­ iety of coping strategies, and one of the reasons they were at liberty to do so was that philologists had generally been much more interested in translating the Vedas—­the earliest Sanskrit texts and the bedrock of Brahminical Hinduism—­at the expense of the later and popular tradition of itihasa (history), to which the Ramayana and Mahabharata belong. In reaction, Indian pandits seeking to resist and contest European orientalism also focussed on the Vedas, using translation

101 David Shulman, ‘Fire and Flood: The Testing of Sītā in Kamban’s Iramāvatāram’, in Paula Richman (ed.), Many Rāmāyaņas: The Diversity of a Narrative Tradition in South Asia (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1994), p. 93. 102  Frederika Richardson, The Iliad of the East: A Selection of Legends Drawn from Valmīki’s Sanskrit Poem, the Rāmāyana (London and New York: Macmillan, 1870), p. v.

156  Asian Classics on the Victorian Bookshelf ‘to forge their own competing visions of Indian society’.103 Translators associated with the reformist organization, the Arya Samaj, rejected European understandings of modern, scientific civilization and articulated an alternative, anti-­colonial modernity founded on Hindu national identity. Romesh Chunder Dutt’s goals were not dissimilar—­indeed, he had earlier translated the Rig Veda into Bengali so that it could be understood by contemporaries unlettered in classical Sanskrit. But at the turn of the century his attention turned instead to the two epics, and this decision was undoubtedly connected with how he chose to position himself—­ both politically, and physically—­at this time. In the winter of 1898 Dutt had established himself at 33 Warrington Crescent, Maida Vale, where he remained for almost two years. Having recently retired from the Indian Civil Service, he was now free to openly affiliate himself with the Liberal Party, campaigning for their candidate at a by-­election in January, and to criticize British policy in India. In a series of lectures at his alma mater UCL, he demonstrated how Britain had made India a captive market for its manufactures, eroding its industries and triggering famines.104 Without this public context we cannot properly understand Dutt’s translation activities, to which he devoted the few spare hours left him, and which he targeted at two separate audiences: the English-­educated Indian ­readership, in whom he sought to inspire a zeal for cultural revival; and the British public, amongst whom he aimed to vindicate Indian civilization while recruiting support for (limited) colonial self-­government. Dutt’s editorial notes repeatedly remind this second readership that the Ramayana is not a dead classic, but ‘a living tradition and a living faith’, a source of ‘moral instruction’, and an integral part of popular life. Thus, a correlation is being drawn between the poem’s installation in the global canon, and the advent of India as a modern nation. In fact, this implicit politics is visible immediately, in Dutt’s opening couplet: Rich in royal worth and valour, rich in holy Vedic lore Dasa-­ratha ruled his empire in the happy days of yore.105

‘Kingdom’ would surely have scanned better, but Dutt would rather portray Dasaratha as a sovereign Indian monarch overseeing a confederation of tributary states. Such an ‘empire’ perhaps better approximated the relationship he envisaged in October 1900, when Dutt explained his commitment to translation in a lecture on the Ramayana delivered to the Royal Society of Literature. ‘It is necessary that there should be not only community of interests’ between India and Britain, he remarked, ‘but community of thought and feeling.’106 103  Michael S. Dodson, ‘Contesting Translations: Orientalism and the Interpretation of the Vedas’, Modern Intellectual History, IV/1 (2007), 44. 104 J.N. Gupta, Life and Work of Romesh Chunder Dutt C.I.E. (London: J.M. Dent, 1911), pp. 229–31. 105 Dutt, Ramayana, pp. 190, 2. 106 Romesh Chunder Dutt, Open Letters To Lord Curzon And Speeches And Papers (Calcutta: R.P. Mitra, 1904), p. 213.

Translating  157 Sebastian Lecourt describes Dutt’s goal as a public demonstration that Sanskrit epic could ‘hold its own’ beside Homer and Virgil. He actually went somewhat further when addressing Indian audiences, telling readers of the Wednesday Review (Trichinopoly) in 1905 that Vyasa was a greater poet than Homer, and Milton no more than ‘a Puritan preacher’, adding ‘we may truly say that epic poetry belongs to the East.’107 Nevertheless, to establish the Ramayana and Mahabharata within a Western comparative framework, he found it necessary to resculpt the epics into texts ‘equivalent in contour to Homer or Milton’—the most striking consequence of this policy being Dutt’s renumbering of the seven-­book Ramayana into twelve cantos (akin to the Aeneid) with Sanskrit titles of his own invention.108 Given the frequent analogies his editorial notes draw with the European classical tradition, it initially seems strange that he makes no mention of Richardson’s self-­styled Iliad. Since he dutifully acknowledges Griffith, Fauche, Gorresio, and other scholars of the poem, this omission was perhaps not accidental. Indeed, Dutt may even be delivering a veiled rebuke to Richardson’s paraphrase when he explains how his method was to select short, key passages, translate them closely, and fill in the intervening gaps in the narrative with short explanatory notes: thus the story is told authentically, he claims, by ‘the ancient poet of India’ himself, and ‘not by the translator in his own way’.109 The possibility that he had never heard of the Iliad of the East seems unlikely. Not only was it the chief popular version then available, but it had also been much enjoyed by his cousin, the poet Toru Dutt. ‘I am sure you will like it,’ she told her English friend Mary Martin in 1876, ‘as it will give you a good idea of the heroes and heroines of our mythology.’110 The daughter of an East India Company surgeon, at the time of writing Richardson had probably never set foot in India, though she later spent several years in the country with her husband John Macdonald, a journalist for the Daily News, and befriended Lockwood Kipling, who would ultimately prod­ uce a remarkable set of illustrations for the Iliad when it was reissued by the ‘aesthetic’ publisher John Lane in 1908.111 Casting her mind back forty years, she told Lane that ‘the wildly romantic & fantastic story’ had captivated her as a young woman, whereas it was the poem’s philosophical content that held her attention in mature years.112 In fact, Richardson’s two publishers offer useful indications of how general interest in Sanskrit literature developed and deepened during her  career. Lane seems to have been mindful of the fast-­growing interest in Hindu philosophy in 1908, whereas in 1870, Macmillan’s reader John Morley 107 Gupta, Life and Work, pp. 385–7. 108  Sebastian Lecourt, ‘ “Greek to Me”: Two Versions of Modern Epic in Victorian Bengal’, ELH, LXXXVIII/4 (2022), 941. 109 Dutt, Ramayana, p. 190. 110  Harihar Das (ed.), Life and Letters of Toru Dutt (London: Oxford University Press, 1921), p. 142. 111  See http://www.victorianresearch.org/atcl/show_author.php?aid=943 (accessed 28 Feb. 2022). 112  HRC: TXRC00-­A11 (John Lane Company Records), 30.1, Frederika Macdonald to John Lane, 26 Nov. 1907.

158  Asian Classics on the Victorian Bookshelf recommended it purely on the basis of narrative. The legends are ‘very beautiful & attractive’, Morley remarked, ‘full of imagery and invention, and ought to be popular’—not with ‘the promiscuous public’, he hastened to add, but at least ‘every­body with a decent taste for imaginative work’.113 The Macmillans agreed and bought the copyright from Richardson, a highly unusual response to a work of translation by an untried author. Dutt’s publisher J.M. Dent, on the other hand, was focussed on establishing the globally canonical status of Sanskrit epic, series editor Israel Gollancz citing ‘the comprehensive character’ of the Temple Classics as his motive for its inclusion.114 If Dutt disliked Richardson’s book, he had good reason. She is guilty of factual errors, describing Hanuman and Sugriva as orangutans (which are not even native to India), and occasionally uses her narratorial voice to deliver facetious asides on aspects of the poem she finds absurd, such as the sage Vasistha’s ­bel­li­ger­ent attachment to a favourite cow (‘inestimable Quadruped’!). Her characters, anachronistic and unbecoming in their Victorian speech and sentiments, may also have irked him, as they irked the precocious sixteen-­year-­old and future literary critic, Edmund Wilson. In 1911, he received the Iliad as a Christmas present from his Aunt Laura and found it ‘inexcusable’ that Richardson should have allowed herself such creative licence in the death-­scene she devised for Ravana’s queen, Mandodari. ‘All pure invention’, he wrote in his margin, ‘and quite out of keeping. It is a pity to make the Rakshasa woman talk and behave like a character in a modern novel.’115 Such defects are stark reminders that Richardson appropriated the Ramayana for her own ends, and that her enthusiasm was not untainted by the prejudices of establishment orientalists: notably, a marked strain of anti-­ Brahminism connects her version with Talboys Wheeler’s and Oman’s. Dutt’s resentment will have been fully justified, and yet to stop there would be to ignore the fact that the Iliad, revisited today, constantly surprises and proves the benefits of attending to supposedly obsolete translations. Ironically, it may have been Richardson’s qualities, more than her shortcomings, that made her version un­accept­able to Dutt. The two rival publications (Richardson actually insists her work should not be termed translation) diverge at the very first page. There is a longstanding scholarly consensus that the Ramayana’s first and last books were not composed by Valmiki but by a later poet or poets, and consequently nearly all nineteenth-­ century translators (including Richardson’s source, Fauche) chose to open their narrative with a description of Ayodhya and the court of Dasaratha. Richardson alone renders the text as it actually begins, with a scene remarkable in the history

113  BL: Add MS 55931 (Macmillan Archive), f.133, reader’s report on Iliad of the East. 114  Romesh Dutt, Mahabharata: the Epic of Ancient India (London: J.M. Dent, 1898), p. 189. 115  HRC: MIN 11476, Frederika Macdonald, The Iliad of the East (London and New York: John Lane, 1908), pp. 291, 311.

Translating  159 of epic poetry. Valmiki himself, bathing near his jungle hermitage, watches two cranes mating. Suddenly one falls dead, shot through by a hunter’s arrow. So moved is the poet by this brutal act that he pronounces a curse against the culprit, and as the words leave his mouth he spontaneously invents the sloka metre in which both the Ramayana and the Mahabharata are composed. ‘Thus did Valmīki, in whose heart dwelt the love of universal nature, receive the divine gift of Poesy, in exchange for tears of pity!’116 It is a strange irony that by making himself (temporarily) invisible, Dutt claims to voice the ancient poet, yet it is Richardson who actually tells us how Valmiki found his voice. Rather than an instrument of divine will, Valmiki interests her as a character in his own right, a melancholic figure who paces the woods ‘pondering on disunion, and cruelty, and sin’.117 By omitting this episode, meanwhile, and devoting his opening canto to the fair city, in place of the jungle where most of the action actually takes place, Dutt is explicitly foregrounding the themes of ethical conduct, benign governance, and social harmony that he wishes to emphasize—­and to which Richardson is largely indifferent. When Valmiki appears in Dutt’s narrative, he appears at the end (and, briefly, in the middle) when he brings his two disciples to recite the poem before Rama, and thus what is properly the Ramayana’s beginning becomes its ending. In his lecture to the Royal Society of Literature, Dutt explained the need for a ‘handy and readable’ translation fit for ‘the average reader and the busy man of work’. This convenience called not only for radical abridgement (Max Müller compared Dutt’s version to a photographic ‘snap-­shot’ of the poem), but also a strictly linear structure.118 There was no space for digressions like Valmiki’s invention of the sloka. But more disturbingly, Dutt reveals his antipathy to the poem’s branching narratives, which he laments as ‘oddities’ and ‘repetitions’. He blames the ‘fatal facility’ of the sloka itself for the way in which both Sanskrit epics have mushroomed over the cen­tur­ies, such that ‘the crystal rill of the epic itself is almost lost in a sea-­like delta of religious and didactic episodes, legends, and myths, tales and traditions.’ To scrape away this accrued ‘foreign matter’, Dutt remarks, is akin to releasing a Greek marble statue from the dirt and rubble in which it was buried, before pla­cing it in a modern museum—­an extraordinary analogy that combines ­deference to European classical antiquity with the familiar notion of oriental translation-­as-­excavation.119 The story of Rishyasringa, the adventures of Visvamitra, and the Descent of Ganga are all sacrificed in this single-­minded pursuit of textual purity (the last in a double sense, owing to its erotic content). All, however, were retained by Richardson, who also made room for minor episodes that intrigued her, such as the tragic fate of the god Indra’s mortal brides. As an expression of the epic’s meandering structure, her fragmentary arrangement is 116 Richardson, Iliad (1870), p. 11. 117  Ibid., p. 3. 118 Dutt, Open Letters, p. 214; Gupta, Life and Work, p. 265. 119 Dutt, Ramayana, p. 183; Dutt, Open Letters, p. 188.

160  Asian Classics on the Victorian Bookshelf far from ideal: for anyone who had not read carefully the plot summary contained in its preface, the Iliad’s first five chapters will have been rather confusing. Toru Dutt, however, seems to have appreciated its catholicity. ‘The short legends at the commencement of F.  Richardson’s Iliad of the East’ do indeed form part of the Ramayana, she told Mary Martin, even if they have no bearing on the poem’s ‘chief subject’.120 Dutt’s preoccupation with textual integrity stems from his twin desires to modernize the epic, for the benefit of modern India, and to carve it to a contour more recognizable to his Western readers. These also gave rise to his fixation on realism. Sugriva and his army, for example, are not really monkeys but rather the dark-­skinned aborigines of southern India. Valmiki—­whom Dutt considers an ‘Aryan’—only refers to them as apes to express his contempt, he claims, ‘but the modern reader sees through these strange epithets’.121 For related reasons, Dutt tones down improbable numbers (thousands of demons slain single-­handed, a bow so heavy it takes five hundred men to lift). He also scrupulously maps Rama and Sita’s journey across the subcontinent, and insists that the two dynasties from which they sprung (the Kosalas and the Videhas) existed in fact. Ironically, this effort to establish a plausible historical basis for the epic is the area where Dutt’s mindset most closely mirrors that of colonial orientalists like Oman, whose book actually illustrates the battlefield of Kurukshetra (from the Mahabharata) with a modern photograph.122 Richardson’s style, here deviating from her orientalist informants, might instead be termed a sort of magical realism. If Hanuman ­occasionally speaks like Raffles or the Scarlet Pimpernel as he dodges danger (‘now, here’s an awkward thing!’), he is every bit the fantastic creature of Indian trad­ition, leaping across the sea at a single bound, shrinking himself to minuscule size to slip through the teeth of the serpent Surasa, and carrying an entire mountain from the Himalayas to Lanka because he has forgotten which medicinal herb he was instructed to pluck from its slopes. The chapter of his adventures is the longest in Richardson’s book, the second-­shortest in Dutt’s, who omits or occludes most of his miraculous feats. The actual attack on Ravana’s capital interests her little (‘stories of slaughter’, she remarks, ‘are monotonous as well as unattractive’), but for Dutt it offers indispensable thematic affinities with the siege of Troy.123 He sets the scene with gusto in the opening lines of his tenth canto, ‘Yuddha’ (War). Dust arose like clouds of summer from each thunder-­ sounding car, From the hoofs of charging coursers, from the elephants of war,

120  Das (ed.), Life and Letters, p. 182. 121 Dutt, Ramayana, p. 104. 122  John Campbell Oman, The Great Indian Epics (London: Routledge, 1894), p. 200. 123 Richardson, Iliad, p. xiv.

Translating  161 Streams of red blood warm and bubbling issued from the countless slain, Flooded battle’s dark arena like the floods of summer rain, Sound of trumpet and of bugle, drum and horn and echoing shell, And the neigh of charging coursers and the tuskers’ dying wail, And the yell of wounded Rakshas and the Vanars’ fierce delight, Shook the earth and sounding welkin, waked the echoes of the night!124

The common translation of ‘Raksha’ as ‘demon’ has led to a misconception that Ravana and his minions are wholly evil, whereas in fact they are courageous, intelligent, and capable of fidelity and honour. Ravana himself is a tragically flawed figure whom Richardson overtly models after Milton’s Satan. But still they are not quite the Trojans that Dutt would make them. Ravana has ten heads, for instance, while his brother Kumbhakarna is a giant who sleeps for months on end, awakening when hungry to gorge himself on men and beasts alike. Skirting over their monstrous physiognomy, Dutt emphasizes their noble nature. An American owner of one of my AVaTAR copies, Katherine Paton, responded with special enthusiasm to the speech in which the giant tries unsuccessfully to dissuade Ravana from his disastrous course. ‘One cannot help but admire Kumbhakarna’s loyalty’, she wrote on the rear endpaper, ‘& his determination to fight for his brother even after upbraiding him for his wrong.’125 This portrayal is by no means inaccurate, but it leaves out other sides to the character, such as the scene of grotesque comedy when Ravana’s Lilliputian courtiers have to tug his moustaches and blow trumpets in his ears to awaken the sleeping colossus: The Rākshasa flung up his large arms; a yawn, strenuous as the heaving of some submarine volcano, distorted his cavernous mouth; then with a mighty sigh that shook the walls’ foundations, his eyes rolled back their lids, and he lay staring round him in stupid amaze.126

Richardson takes evident delight in this episode, before showing us Kumbhakarna’s unexpectedly valiant and generous nature. Curiously, Richardson and Oman both attribute primacy to the Ramayana because it is thought to be older than the Mahabharata, but for Dutt it takes second place because it chiefly treats of ‘the softer emotions’. Rather than public

124 Dutt, Ramayana, p. 139. 125 AVaTAR Sk.S.5c: Romesh Dutt, Ramayana: The Epic of Rama, Prince of India (London: J.M. Dent, 1902). 126 Richardson, Iliad, p. 274.

162  Asian Classics on the Victorian Bookshelf and martial virtues, it exemplifies personal or ‘domestic’ qualities like piety, faith and conjugal devotion. Its moral authority within India lies in its glorification of Rama and Sita as the ‘Perfect Man’ and ‘Perfect Woman’ (though Rama is also the ideal of kingship).127 Consequently, it is not only in keeping with Dutt’s aversion to the supernatural that no mention is made of Rama’s divinity, but also crucial to the moral message he wishes to convey. For Dutt to present his hero as the best of men, it is necessary that he be a man only.128 Since she was focussed solely on a British audience, however, whom she wished to acquaint with Hindu spirituality, Richardson makes it clear that Rama is really Vishnu. Geraldine Hodgson likewise supplies this information on her very first page, even though Rama and the Monkeys is sup­ posed­ly based on Dutt’s translation: its value as a schoolbook for British children, she remarks, lies partly in its religious significance to ‘our fellow subjects’ in India, but mostly in the ‘wonderful stories’ and ‘extravagance of view’ that so embarrass him.129 As regards Rama’s misdeeds, no such clear distinction can be drawn, because both Dutt and Richardson shield their hero, and expose him, in different ways. Dutt does not shy from Rama’s rejection of Sita, or his cruelty to Surpanakha, while Richardson baulks at this ungallant behaviour towards women. She attributes the latter crime to Lakshman only, while she deals with the former by discarding the true ending (in this she follows her source, Fauche) and compressing events so that the dead Dasaratha descends from heaven at the instant Sita emerges from the flames. His divine benediction brings her narrative to its abrupt terminus. Richardson covers her tracks by assuring us that the Ramayana’s seventh book (the Uttara Kanda) is inauthentic, the same argument used by Dutt to dispense with the first book.130 While Dutt’s version of these two events is much closer to Valmiki’s, dishonour in battle triggers his own inner censor. In Dutt, Rama shoots Vali only to prevent the rampaging ape from dealing a death-­blow to Sugriva, and he is also spared his dying victim’s reproaches. But while she, too, excuses the killing as a necessary evil, Richardson renders Vali’s famous speech with considerable power: Rāma the Dasarathide, thou who wast known in the three worlds as the Friend of living creatures, why hast thou soiled thy soul? Had I fallen by thy hand in open warfare, I had met death, as it was promised me,—at a Hero’s hand . . . But now has this needless cruelty dethroned thee from thy nobility.131

The two translators’ choices as to inclusion or omission of various episodes also tell upon their portrayal of Sita. While the exiles are dwelling on the hill of 127 Its battle scenes are also ‘poor and commonplace’, compared to the Mahabharata (Dutt, Ramayana, pp. 184–5). 128  The only allusion to Rama’s divinity in the text itself is when Mandodari watches him fighting, and speculates that he may be a god in disguise (ibid., p. 159). 129 Hodgson, Rama and the Monkeys, p. v. 130 Richardson, Iliad, pp. 114, 309, xi. 131  Ibid., p. 176.

Translating  163 Chitrakuta, Rama receives emissaries urging him to return to Ayodhya, but he refuses, protesting that to cut short his father’s sentence of banishment would be a breach of filial duty. He delivers a lecture on kingship, and debates with the cyn­ic­al sophist Jabali—­both passages freighted with significance for Dutt, though not necessarily convincing to his English readers (‘Jabali’s reasoning is far better than Rama’s’, wrote the Hertfordshire landowner Henry Bushby in his copy).132 As a consequence of emphasizing these dialogues, comparatively little space remains for the subsequent encounter with the anchorite Anasuya, to whom Sita tells the story of her life. But with Richardson, the balance is tilted in the opposite direction: Rama’s meeting with the emissaries is more or less elided, and most of her Chitrakuta chapter goes instead to the conversation between the two women. As Saswati Sengupta has remarked, while Valmiki’s Ramayana abounds in demonstrations of brotherly love and filial loyalty, ‘the epic represents no investment in female bonds’. Indeed women who support one another, like the conspiring Queen Kaikeyi and her maidservant Manthara, are anathematized by Valmiki—­ but not by all Ramayana poets. Sengupta cites the sixteenth-­century female poets Chandrabati and Molla, who translated the epic into Bengali and Telugu, as contributors to a feminist tradition that has sought to rediscover female agency in the ancient story.133 Superficially, Richardson’s rather flighty and pettish Sita is a poor heir to this lineage, and contrasts unfavourably with the morally courageous woman delineated by Dutt. But the forking paths taken by the translators at Chitrakuta cannot but alert us to the fact that the latter’s Sita is an ideal rather than a personality, who by this point in his narrative has not uttered a single word—­in fact she does not do so till page 92, halfway through the poem, and then it is only to insult Lakshman with her ‘poison-­dealing’ woman’s tongue. When the party leaves Chitrakuta, it is her silence—­not her words—­that befit what Dutt praises in his notes as ‘a wife’s noble self-­abnegation’. And the princes tall and stately marched where Panchavati lay, Soft-­eyed Sita followed meekly where her Rama led the way.134

Moreover, Richardson’s approach is again vindicated by Toru Dutt: ‘you ought indeed to read [the Iliad of the East],’ she told her friend, ‘to get an idea of the nobleness of my country’s heroines.’ A feminist Ramayana was by no means inconceivable to Toru. In fact, her poem ‘Lakshman’, published in London among her Ancient Ballads and Legends of Hindustan (1882), describes the same slandering of the hero by his sister-­in-­law to which I have just alluded. But whereas Valmiki’s

132  Mompesson House (National Trust), B/MHS/MISC/498/D28 (Bushby bequest). 133  Saswati Sengupta, ‘Speaking from the Margins: The Demonisation of Kaikeyi and Surpanakha’, Caravan, XIII/11 (Nov. 2021), 48. 134 Dutt, Ramayana, pp. 172, 83.

164  Asian Classics on the Victorian Bookshelf Lakshman ‘cannot refrain’, remarked Toru’s first biographer, from reproaching Sita with ‘the cynical remark: “Women are by nature crooked, fickle, sowers of strife” ’, the Lakshman of Toru’s ballad makes ‘no such unchivalrous utterance’.135 To return to where this chapter began, with Goethe’s disapproval of Sanskrit translations that ‘flatter the Northern ear’, we might notice how Dutt’s and Richardson’s priorities lead them to coax and cater to, yet also to tax their readers in different ways. Dutt’s goal of serving two constituencies simultaneously may account for the way his translation is at once accommodating and estranging to the English audience, a successful blend exemplified by his choice of metre. In place of the heroic couplets used by Griffith thirty years earlier (Lafcadio Hearn, for one, found them ‘Popish’ and ‘exceedingly tiresome’), Dutt chose to adopt the measures of Locksley Hall in an attempt to convey the cadence of a Sanskrit ­sloka.136 Ironically, Dutt seems not to have realized that this ‘English’ metre was really an attempt by Tennyson to imitate Arabic prosody, but this is why his choice was so felicitous, for the octameter lines were ‘familiar to the English ear’ and yet at the same time decidedly odd.137 Richardson’s choice of prose allowed her instead to present the epic in the shape of a novel, or rather romance, and gave her the latitude to interpolate information that only English readers would require: thus Valmiki is said (inaccurately) to have lived ‘eighteen hundred years before the Christian era’, while a hundred yojanas is equivalent to ‘rather more than a hundred of our miles’.138 In this way she signals directly to her intended, British audience, whereas Dutt keeps up a subtle interplay between ‘flattery’ and its opposite. He confronts his English readers with a challenging variety of Sanskrit terms, for instance (though a glossary was provided in his second edition), but in other respects appeases their expectations. Hence the bizarre moment where Valmiki unveils his masterpiece and, in obedience to the metre, mispronounces its title: ‘Sing the lay of Ramayana from the first unto the end’ (the word should be said ‘Rar-­MY-­a-­na’, with emphasis on the second syllable, and not ‘Ra-­ma-­YAR-­na’, as is the Western habit).139 Thus Dutt claims to voice Valmiki, and yet Valmiki speaks like an Englishman. Significantly, he dispenses with diacritics while Richardson includes them, in a show of authenticity that extends also to isolated literalisms: notably, she retains the various repetitive epithets (‘bull among men’, ‘Elephant among Kings’) that characterize the original. Many of these strategies lead back to the analogies both translators draw with Homer, and their mutual eagerness to prove that the Sanskrit epics were not merely equivalent but potentially superior to the Iliad. But whereas Dutt stresses affinity

135  Das (ed.), Life and Letters, pp. 145, 333. 136  Columbia: MS#1194 (E.C. Stedman papers), Hearn to George Gould, n.d., 1887. 137 Dutt, Mahabharata, p. 179; Raja Lahiani, ‘Unlocking the Secret of “Locksley Hall” ’, Comparative Critical Studies, XVII/1 (2020), 27. 138 Richardson, Iliad, pp. 1, 124. 139 Dutt, Ramayana, p. 174.

Translating  165 and comparability, Richardson proposes superiority by difference: in spite of her choice of title, she remarks in her preface, one cannot help but deplore the ‘bloodthirstiness’ of heroes like Agamemnon, Ajax, and Achilles, in contrast to the ‘generous forbearance’ with which wounded adversaries are treated in the battle for Lanka.140 The Ramayana was a world text long before English was a global language. In his celebrated essay ‘Three Hundred Ramayanas’, A.K. Ramanujan noted that for centuries alternative ‘tellings’ of the Rama story have existed in dozens of Asian languages, ranging from Thai to Tibetan. He prefers the word ‘telling’, because ‘variant’ posits Valmiki’s poem as the original or ur-­text, whereas some heterodox tellings consciously ‘refute’ the sage’s account.141 Marginal and outcaste groups in India even tell Ramayanas in which Sita is unfaithful to Rama, or in which Ravana is the hero. Each telling brings ‘a different texture and emphasis’ to the story, and this discordant pair of Victorian Ramayanas are part, too, of that fissiparous trad­ ition. They light up different facets of the poem: Dutt ethical and political, Richardson philosophical (despite the need for brevity, she includes Sumantra’s metaphysical preamble to his nested story);142 Dutt martial, Richardson pic­ar­ esque; Dutt geographically precise, Richardson fugacious, her scene flitting from Lanka to Himalaya, from earth to heaven. There is no clear-­cut ‘good’ foreignizer here, no ‘bad’ domesticator. Dutt purges, distils, and disciplines the Ramayana as part of a nationalist drive for cultural standardization that carries on to this day. By working within a Western comparative framework, he ends up echoing orientalist discourse about the epic, as well as betraying his own discomfort and dissatisfaction with it. But he also introduced the work to English readers in a way that honoured it, whereas Richardson not infrequently marred it with irreverent quips and dubious creative mistranslations. These unwitting collaborators together popularized the poem in the West, and when heard together they hum with the hetreoglossic murmurs of the Victorian oriental bookshelf. But, as the next chapter will show, such an assemblage could never have come about—and is unlikely to recur in future—­without a sympathetic publishing profession motivated by a shifting combination of idealism and profit.

140 Richardson, Iliad, p. xiv. 141 A.K.  Ramanujan, ‘Three Hundred Ramayanas: Five Examples and Three Thoughts on Translation’, in Richman (ed.), Many Rāmāyaņas, pp. 22, 37, 46. 142 Richardson, Iliad, p. 12.

6

Publishing William Alexander Clouston was a figure whom I once imagined, in the early stages of research, would be central to this book. Born in Orkney in 1843, the self-­taught polymath supported himself as an insurance clerk and later by journalism, but carried out the real labour of his life in the halls of Glasgow’s Mitchell Library. Here he produced a series of works tracing Western folklore and fable to their Eastern origins—­a passion first kindled, apparently, by a reading of the Hitopadesha in the 1870s.1 He also collaborated with the amateur orientalist Samuel Robinson, editing his Persian Poetry for English Readers (1883), and borrowing its attractive title for his own Arabian Poetry for English Readers. But Clouston never achieved commercial success, repeatedly failing to place his books with major publishers. Instead, they were generally issued by a series of small Glaswegian presses, and purchased mainly by public libraries and wealthy orientophiles like Lord Houghton, whose patronage Clouston was obliged to curry assiduously. In 1894, he wrote to Richard Garnett at the British Museum, cataloguing his woes and requesting help to secure a Civil List pension: The publishing fraternity are not generally noted for their liberality towards poor authors, but the publisher of my latest work, for downright “hardness”, beats any that I have had transactions with. I could screw out of him a ridiculously inadequate sum in “cash down”, and get him to agree to allow me a royalty on the copies sold. And before leaving Glasgow to come here for my health—­for I had been overworking myself during several months “to keep my mutton twirling at the fire”, & suffered much from weak eyesight and the demon of insomnia—­he flatly refused to make me an advance of a modest ten pound note, which placed me in a very awkward & even humiliating position . . . I venture to think I have done good and permanent work in the literary vineyard during the last 20 years, especially in Eastern literature and folk-­lore. And I daresay you have a shrewd suspicion that few of my books have brought me fair re­mu­ner­ ation. Indeed, my contributions to the Chaucer Society “Originals & Analogues” etc and to the Early English Text Society, as also to the Academy, Athenaeum, & Notes and Queries brought me nothing at all. My privately-­printed books in Eastern literature, “Arabian Poetry for English Readers”, “The Bakhtyar Nāma” 1 Gareth Whittaker, ‘William Alexander Clouston (1843–96), Folklorist: Introduction and Bibliography’, Folklore 115 (Dec. 2004), 349.

Asian Classics on the Victorian Bookshelf: Flights of Translation. Alexander Bubb, Oxford University Press. © Alexander Bubb 2023. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198866275.003.0006

Publishing  167 “The Book of Sindibād,” “A Group of Eastern Romances,” though necessarily limited impressions, were patronised by some of the foremost scholars of our time. My 2 vols. “Popular Tales and Fictions, their Migrations and Transformations,” “The Book of Noodles, or Fools and their Follies,” “Flowers from a Persian Garden and other Papers” are, I am told, regarded as authoritative by folk-­lorists & students of kindred subjects. Yet after so much painstaking & conscientious work, I am at 51 poor indeed.2

In his bitterness, Clouston could not help but reflect that the fifteenth-­century historian Mirkhvand had written his Garden of Purity while living comfortably in a retreat that his patron, Ali-­Shir Nava’i, had founded in Herat for men of literary distinction. The best that Clouston could boast of his Arabian Poetry anthology, just a few hundred copies of which were issued in 1881, was that Gladstone had been a subscriber. This was unfortunate, as few translators so determinedly invoked the language of popularization as Clouston. Blending idealism with commercial gumption, he habitually approached publishers with ‘interesting’ and ‘amusing’ material well suited to publication ‘in some cheap popular form’, and flattered potential re­viewers by appealing to their reputation as educators: ‘you are known to be warmly interested in the diffusion of culture’.3 In a lengthy correspondence with the house of Blackwood over his Popular Tales and Fictions (1887), Clouston constantly dangled before the publisher the enticing prospect of an untapped audience: ‘there is a rapidly growing circle of readers interested in the genealogy of popular European tales & fictions’; ‘it has also been my aim to render it a pleasing storybook for the omnivorous class called, for want of a better term, “general readers” ’; ‘enough is said to excite the interest or curiosity of “the intelligent general reader” ’, and so on.4 When the work eventually appeared, favourable re­viewers echoed his own language. ‘It cannot fail to give a decided impetus to the further popularising of the study with which it deals’, was the Spectator’s opinion, while the French journal Mélusine praised him for writing ‘sans pédantisme et de façon à intéresser le grand public’.5 Yet none of this availed in the marketplace, a sad outcome which raises a vital question: why did some translations enjoy widespread appreciation, or even runaway success, where others faltered and fell out of the race? As might be supposed from the preceding chapter, the blame lay in part with Clouston himself, for his 2  HRC: MS-­1545 (Richard Garnett Collection), 14.2 (W.A. Clouston to Garnett, 19 June 1894). 3  Reading: MS 1640/301/243 (George Bell & Sons Archive), W.A. Clouston to Messrs Bell, 1 July 1878; National Library of Scotland: Ms.9401 (J.H. Burton Papers), W.A. Clouston to John Hill Burton, 20 Feb. 1880. 4  NLS: MS.4482 (Blackwood Papers), W.A. Clouston to Blackwood’s, 21 Jan. 1886, 10 Feb. 1886, and 20 Oct. 1886. 5  Spectator, 21 Jan. 1888, p. 24; H.  Gaidoz, ‘Bibliographie’, Mélusine: Recueil de Mythologie, III (1887), 432.

168  Asian Classics on the Victorian Bookshelf books were not truly as accessible as he made them out to be. Though free of anthropological ‘theorising’ (as the Spectator noted appreciatively), they are often lengthy and of uneven quality. They do not offer original translations, but collate extant texts. Clouston also seems to have ignored popular favourites in preference for ‘undiscovered’ material, in the mistaken assumption that anything novel would attract notice (his Book of Sindibad, for example, has nothing to do with ‘our old friend the Sailor’, as Richard Burton observed ruefully after cutting open his review copy in 1884).6 But understandably, Clouston preferred to find fault with the companies who produced his books—­and not without justice. His letter to Garnett illustrates the disadvantageous bargains translators were often obliged to make with publishers, who were reluctant to advance cash or offer a straightforward royalty to unproven authors. As Margaret Lesser has shown, when success was in doubt it was customary for firms to issue translations under the half-­profits system, whereby authors would net 50 per cent of proceeds, but only after the book had recouped its production costs.7 These were the terms, for instance, under which Longman had printed Costello’s Rose Garden of Persia in 1845. In the case of Popular Tales, Clouston urged Blackwood’s to buy the copyright of the book for a lump sum, receiving in reply an ungenerous offer of four shillings and ninepence on each copy after the first five hundred copies were sold. After much wrangling, author and publisher eventually came to terms, but Blackwood’s never published another book of Clouston’s, who was left with the lingering grievance that success had eluded him thanks to the small minds and tight fists of ‘the publishing fraternity’. With more attractive book design and a marketing budget, he probably felt, he may have succeeded; whereas, instead, he finished his career a marginalized amateur in a period when, as Drury has remarked, the business of translation was growing increasingly professionalized, with publishers commissioning work from paid translators rather than accepting unsolicited proposals.8 Whether in complaints to his friends, or his tortured correspondence with Blackwood’s (only Clouston’s side of the argument has survived), the agency of publishers is overpowering and yet scarcely visible in its actual workings. For Clouston, the relationship that counted was that of translator and reader, or translator and patron, with the mediation of the publishing industry conceived of as at best a necessary evil, and at worst an obstacle to meaningful forms of exchange. In practice, no such straight line could be drawn between the point of production and that of reception, and yet in effect that is the premise under which much 6  Huntington: mssRFB 1-­1386 (Sir Richard Francis Burton papers), Box 26, Folder 313, Burton to John Payne, 12 Aug. 1884. 7  Margaret Lesser, ‘Professionals’, in France and Haynes (eds), Oxford History of Literary Translation in English: Volume 4, p. 87. 8  Annmarie Drury, ‘Translation’, in Dino Felluga, Pamela K. Gilbert, and Linda K. Hughes (eds), The Encyclopaedia of Victorian Literature (4 vols, Chichester: Wiley Blackwell, 2015), IV, 1628.

Publishing  169 academic study of translation has been carried out. But while writers of translation remain much more studied than ‘agents of translation’, as Milton and Bandia—­ following Juan Sager—­term members of the publishing industry, their role in cultural change is now much better understood.9 Indeed, following Helène Buzelin it has become common to regard translations as emerging from a process of selection, negotiation, and revision unfolding across a network of personal relationships, from which it is ultimately illogical to try to extricate individual actors.10 Nevertheless, so that we may better understand the interlocking of various interests at work in these collaborative enterprises, this chapter will view the process from the ‘business end’, identifying several publishers and their independent agendas, then zooming in closely to see how one major firm selected titles for publication, before investigating how two prestigious series of oriental translations were shaped by their tenacious editors.

Tending the Literary Vineyard While metaphors of exchange and brokerage have often been used to describe the activity of translation, as Anne O’Connor points out the nineteenth-­century ‘translation trade’ was also a literal field of commercial activity, in which emerged for the first time publishers who specialized chiefly or wholly in translated texts, such as James Duffy, Henry George Bohn, and Henry Vizetelly.11 Of these, the career of Bohn—­who inaugurated his family of cheap series, or ‘libraries’, of foreign literature (the Standard Library, Classical Library, Antiquarian Library, etc.) in 1846—offers the most useful point of comparison. Launching his venture the year after Costello’s anthology appeared, Bohn was the first British publisher to package French, German, Greek, and Latin texts alongside English classic authors in a uniform format for the mass market, and with conspicuous success: it is estimated that annual sales of his volumes, priced at three shillings and sixpence, sometimes exceeded one hundred thousand. The Standard Library’s prospectus spoke of rendering ‘accessible to all’ selected works ‘of a deservedly established character’, and referred to ‘the many able arguments adduced by some of the most powerful minds of the age in favour of extended literature’. There are obvious lacunae, with risqué modern French writing excluded, and fiction in general passed over in favour of ‘useful’ genres like history and memoir. But nonetheless, Bohn’s publications attained domestic ubiquity, spanned generations and crossed 9  John Milton and Paul Bandia, ‘Introduction’, in Milton and Bandia (eds), Agents of Translation (Amsterdam and Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins Publishing, 2009), p. 1. 10 Helène Buzelin, ‘Unexpected Allies: How Latour’s Network Theory Could Complement Bourdieusian Analyses in Translation Studies’, The Translator XI/2 (2005), 208. 11  Anne O’Connor, Translation and Language in Nineteenth-­Century Ireland: A European Perspective (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), p. 39.

170  Asian Classics on the Victorian Bookshelf the Atlantic, garnering various celebrity endorsements—­notably from Emerson who suggested, using just the sort of metaphor stressed by O’Connor, that they had ‘done for literature what railroads have done for internal intercourse’.12 Kenneth Haynes credits Bohn with influencing, to a greater extent than any other publisher of his day, ‘the formation of a canon of world literature in translation’.13 However, this cosmopolitan family of texts did not embrace literature from outside Europe. The only Asian entries were J.C. Oman’s summary of the Ramayana and Mahabharata, and Lane’s Arabian Nights—­neither of which appeared within the publisher’s lifetime, moreover, but only after his backlist had been sold to George Bell & Sons. Nevertheless, the combination of economic and cultural motives that shaped Bohn’s policy gives us a model by which to better discern the decision-­ making of more Eastern-­ oriented publishers. Until the Berne Convention of 1887, it was unclear whether British law considered un­author­ized translation a breach of copyright, and in any case many of Bohn’s authors were long dead—­leaving him with only the translator to pay and a compelling financial incentive for his programme.14 At the same time, Bohn was emotionally invested in the propagation of European literature, particularly that of his father’s native Germany. He even contributed his own translations of Schiller to the Standard Library. We saw earlier in Chapter  4 how reprint series often cut costs still further by using translations whose copyright had expired—­a practice, they may have felt, that was more acceptable to the public when applied to Asian than to European texts. Similarly, it was probably not expected that the self-­ imposed standards Bohn claimed for his books, which were advertised as ‘without abridgement’ and (even if actual practice sometimes deviated) ‘literally translated’, would be as rigorously adhered to with Asian texts, which were frequently abridged and often imaginatively reworked. The field therefore certainly offered temptations to the parsimonious. One notable effect of the preference for expired copyrights was the circulation of superseded translations well beyond their expected shelf life. In 1860s New England, where Transcendentalism had stirred interest in Hindu philosophy, the Yale Sanskritist William Dwight Whitney fulminated against the repackaging of old wine in new bottles. ‘The reprinting of Wilkins’s old version of the Bhagavad-­ gita seems to me about as stupid and senseless an undertaking as could well be devised. It is only a vicious bibliomaniacal taste that could make a call for such a book, and I sincerely hope that the man who panders to it will lose a good sum of money by the operation.’15 The sustained impact and widespread permeation of 12  Carol O’Sullivan, ‘Translation within the Margin: The “Libraries” of Henry Bohn’, in Milton and Bandia (eds), Agents of Translation, pp. 111–12 (italics mine). 13  Kenneth Haynes, ‘Translation and British Literary Culture’, in France and Haynes (eds), Oxford History of Literary Translation in English: Volume 4, p. 8. 14  Bassnett and France, ‘Translation, Politics and the Law’, pp. 55–6. 15  Houghton: MS Am 1088 (Charles Eliot Norton papers), f.8077, Whitney to Norton, 16 Mar. 1867.

Publishing  171 such texts tended to beget further reprints, however, as in 1909 when George Bernard Shaw apparently induced J.M.  Dent & Co—­ in an uncharacteristic lapse—­to reissue Rodwell’s Koran in Everyman’s Library.16 In spite of the broadening market in Quranic translation that I explored in Chapter 1, and more tolerant attitudes towards Islam, both his and Sale’s versions continued to circulate well into the twentieth century, enjoying a kind of suspended obsolescence. In an ironic twist, the bigoted Rodwell’s ‘flagrant mistakes’ would emerge as a bone of contention two decades later when Shaw engaged the Islamic scholar Maulana Abdul Aleem Siddiqui in a remarkable debate (later published) at Mombasa.17 In my view, the otherwise marked tendency of publishers like Dent, as well as the editors of the two series discussed later in this chapter, to actively seek out fresh translators (who were in large part professional linguists and academics, like Arthur Ryder, Lionel Giles, and Ku Hung Ming) at the turn of the century may be attributed at least in part to a reaction against conspicuous reprinting. Eventually, commissioned translations became the norm, though in some cases it took years for these underlying shifts in the tectonics of publishing to be felt in the cultural landscape. When in 1922 Bertrand Russell published The Problem of China, a series of lectures delivered at the University of Peking, Lionel Giles took him to task for ‘his lack of appreciation for Confucius’. To his shock, he found that Russell had read nothing apart from the works of James Legge, published more than sixty years earlier.18 It remains an open question, moreover, whether the canonical position eventually assumed by Fitzgerald’s first, 1859 Rubaiyat is due to its inherent superiority, or because under the post-­Berne dispensation it entered the public domain in 1901, ahead of its counterparts. A partisan of the fourth edition, Peyton Boswell, was convinced that the favour shown by E.P. Dutton & Company to the ‘old’ Rubaiyat was a calculated legal manoeuvre: ‘This is an outrage to the memory of Edward Fitzgerald, who spent long years perfecting the text’, he wrote angrily from his desk at the International Studio magazine.19 The ramifications of copyright for the popularity of some translations over others, then, were and continue to be far-­reaching. But just as Bohn was motivated not solely by financial imperatives, so pub­ lishers like J.M. Dent and Nicholas Trübner were plainly willing to sacrifice profit margins to their cultural goals. The latter’s ledgers reveal him often paying for stereoplates that he must have known would press no more than two hundred and fifty pages in their lifespan, and sometimes taking ten years or more merely to recover the costs on niche works like Wilson’s Hindu Theatre (1871). 16 UNC: J.M.  Dent Records, Folder 5201 (History Files: Everyman’s Library), ‘The Story of “Everyman’s Library” ’, typescript account by Hugh R. Dent, p. 28. 17 ‘A Shavian Meets a Theologian’, Genuine Islam: Organ of the All-­Malaya Muslim Missionary Society, I/1 (1936), 23. 18  JMA: Acc.13328/13 (Wisdom of the East, general series file), Giles to L.C. Byng, 8 Dec. 1922. 19  Syracuse: E.P. Dutton & Company, Inc. Records, Box 52, Boswell to Dutton, 28 Sept. 1923.

172  Asian Classics on the Victorian Bookshelf Evidently books like this were subsidized by his dictionaries, the works of Edwin Arnold, and a small number of other profit-­making publications.20 Unfortunately, no evidence survives of Trübner’s selection policy, but the correspondence of Dent and his editor Ernest Rhys show both men eager to include more Indian texts in Everyman’s Library, during a time of dramatic political change and turmoil for the country. In 1908, Rhys advised Dent to select ‘a good book about India: as I see it, there will be Trouble there next year, & the stories of its former troubles will be in Everyman’s mouth.’ Later, following the climax of Gandhi’s Non-­ Cooperation campaign, Dent sought (ultimately without success) to include Ryder’s translation of the Panchatantra, in spite of the prospect of it barely covering its costs in the difficult post-­war publishing environment. ‘I am very keen indeed to extend the knowledge of India here in England, and even in India it will be valuable to the natives to read in English as well as our own people.’21 Among publishers who kept a weather-­eye on shifting imperial politics, among the most innovative (and understudied) were Stephen Austin and his descendants, who from their press in Hertford produced textbooks for the nearby East India Company College at Haileybury, and T. Fisher Unwin who founded his eponym­ ous house in 1882. In spite of no prior experience in the field, from 1810 onwards the Austin family rapidly achieved a near-­monopoly of oriental typesets, allowing them to print in dozens of Indian languages ranging from Pali to Pushto (none of which their compositors could understand). According to the firm’s historian, during the first half of the century Company commissions accounted for three-­ quarters of Stephen Austin II’s revenue, leaving his son’s business dangerously exposed when the college, followed in short order by the Company itself, was wound up in 1857.22 As his partially preserved diaries show, Stephen Austin III’s response to this crisis was to energetically network, as he rushed about on trains meeting with Trübner, Bernard Quaritch, David Nutt, E.B. Cowell, Indian educationalists like Sir Syed Ahmed Khan, missionary societies, and anyone else who might bring him new oriental printing commissions. He also forged links with John Murray, convincing the mainstream publisher that books requiring Austin’s specialist printing skills (like Prinsep’s Indian Antiquities) were viable propositions for the general public. But most significantly, he became an independent publisher himself, not of Asian texts in the original, but of translations.23 Picking up on popular trends, Austin conceived ‘lavishly produced English translations of Oriental works, which were aimed at a wider public than Oriental

20  University College London: ROUTLEDGE/A/102-­111 (Routledge & Kegan Paul Ltd Archives). 21  UNC: J.M. Dent Records, Folder 2229 (Dent to Rhys, 26 July 1908), and Folder 4303 (J.M. Dent to Arthur Ryder, 29 Mar. 1922 and 24 July 1922). 22  James Moran, Stephen Austin of Hertford: Two Hundred Years of Print (Hertford: Stephen Austin, 1968), p. 23. 23 Hertfordshire Archives: D/EX334 F1 (extracts from the diary of Stephen Austin, 1850–90), 26 Feb. 1858 and passim.

Publishing  173 scholars’, and it was these books that were to bring him ‘special fame’.24 Two productions in particular stand out: Edward Eastwick’s 1852 version of the Gulistan, and Sakuntala translated from the Sanskrit by Monier-­Williams. The first was illustrated with four-­colour reproductions of Persian manuscripts held by the Royal Asiatic Society. These lithographs were outsourced to another firm, but Austin himself oversaw the text, ‘each page of which was contained in a border printed in red. The book was attractively bound in red leather, lettered and dec­or­ated in gold, and with gilt edges.’ At the time, such artisanship was very rarely lavished on a work of orientalism, while the effects Austin demanded for Sakuntala were practically unheard of: The borders surrounding the text were in four colours. The decorations were copied from manuscripts in the British Museum by T. Sulman, Jnr and engraved by George Meason . . . The binding matched the richness of the interior. It consisted of an elaborate Oriental design blocked in gold on leather and one edition was remarkable as being one of the few commercial editions issued with goffered edges—­not merely gilded but decorated with the impression of heated tools.25

Austin’s was the first truly popular edition of the play to appear in English, in the sense that its design and advertisement (and not, arguably, its textual content) was unambiguously devised to appeal to the non-­expert reader. And though the goffered edges were only for the enjoyment of the wealthiest customers (such as Queen Victoria, who admired the presentation copies the publisher personally delivered to Windsor), Austin also foresaw the benefits of tiered pricing. Thus a cheaper edition had simple gilded edges, while a cheaper still was available without borders or illustrations. Such entrepreneurialism suggests a businessman not merely identifying a new audience to compensate for the decline of an old one, but—­in an ultimate exercise of publisher’s agency—­creating his own market. Like his mid-­century predecessor, T.  Fisher Unwin used the craft of book design to respond to unfolding geopolitical events, and to turn an imperial crisis into an opportunity—­though unlike Austin, Unwin’s goal was to make his own discreet political interventions. As Anderson and Rose describe him, Unwin represented ‘a new generation of publishers who took on young writers at the start of their careers’, among them Helen Zimmern.26 Her Epic of Kings was among the very first books issued by the new firm, a gorgeous subscription item 24 Moran, Stephen Austin, p. 29. 25  Ibid., p. 32. Both the Gulistan and Sakuntala were published while the East India Company still existed, but Moran considers that Austin would have foreseen its eclipse by 1855 at the latest. 26  Patricia  J.  Anderson and Jonathan Rose (eds), Dictionary of Literary Biography, Volume 106: British Literary Publishing Houses, 1820–1880 (Detroit, MI and London: Gale Research International, 1991), pp. 304–7.

174  Asian Classics on the Victorian Bookshelf (supplemented, as in Austin’s experiment, with cheaper shop editions) featuring two illustrations by Lawrence Alma-­Tadema and a finely tooled cover emblazoned with ‘Shahnameh-­i-­Firdausi’ in Persian characters—­in short, ‘one of the handsomest books that ever tickled the susceptibilities of a bibliophile’, as Edmund Gosse wrote appreciatively to the publisher.27 The choice of text reflected what seems to have been Unwin’s longstanding interest in Persia and in beautifully produced books about the country and its literature (he kept a copy of Costello’s Rose Garden, as well as three different translations of the Rubaiyat, at his house in Sussex).28 But it is also an early token of Unwin’s internationalist agenda, his anti-­colonial politics and interest in the persecution of indigenous minorities, a commitment he shared with his wife Jane Cobden and which was expressed most boldly in the tracts he published by Wilfrid Scawen Blunt, the poet and Arabist who wrote forcefully in support of the Egyptian nationalists led by Orabi Pasha. Their revolt had been finally crushed by the British just three months before the appearance of Zimmern’s abridgement, a substantial part of which describes Kai Khosrau’s war with the unrighteous ruler Afrasiyab. If Unwin at this stage attempted no more than an oblique comment on British policy in Egypt by way of ancient Persia, his politics emerged more explicitly in the following decade, when he began a lengthy correspondence with Edward Granville Browne. Having published Jusserand’s Literary History of the English People in 1894, Unwin decided to inaugurate a series of national histories on the same pattern, covering Scotland, Ireland, France, Arabia, India, and Persia—­the last to be authored by Britain’s most distinguished Persianist. As an academic commissioned to write a popular book, Browne proved an exasperating client. He insisted on interpreting literary history ‘in its widest sense’, protesting that while most scholars had studied Persian belles-­lettres in isolation, an integrated portrait of the Persians’ achievements in poetry, science and diplomacy was necessary for a true appreciation of ‘their thought & intellectual influence’ upon the world. Consequently, midway through the project, Browne announced that he would need not a single volume, but two, to do his subject justice. The first would deal only with the period before 900 ce, he proposed, altogether baffling Unwin’s reader W.H. Dircks who pointed out that it would thus feature none of the famous poetic names—­or as he put it, ‘what is ordinarily regarded as Persian literature’.29 Nevertheless, Unwin consented not only to two volumes, but ultimately to three, at least in part because as the project advanced he and Browne were keen ob­ser­ vers of unfolding events in Iran. In the constitutional revolution that began in 1905, a majlis or parliament was convened to challenge the absolute authority of the Shah, but this development was not welcomed by the European powers, 27  Bristol: DM 851 (Papers of Jane Cobden Unwin), Box 1, Gosse to Fisher Unwin, 8 Nov. 1882. 28  Bristol: DM 734 (Catalogue of the Cobden and T. Fisher Unwin books at Oatscroft). 29  Berg: E.G. Browne to T. Fisher Unwin, 12 May 1901, and W.H. Dircks to Unwin, 3 Dec. 1901.

Publishing  175 Britain and Russia, who had their eyes on Persia’s newly discovered oil reserves. In November 1908, the Manchester Guardian carried a photograph of Unwin hosting a reception at his home for the exiled parliamentarians Hassan Taqizadeh, Mu’azid al-­Saltanah, and Mirza Mohammad Ali Khan, at which Browne acted as interpreter, and later the two men became leading figures in the Persia Society, an ostensibly non-­political organization whose effective goal was, through its cultural activities, to recruit British public sympathy to the constitutionalists’ cause.30 The political edge to this form of cultural advocacy came out sharply in Browne’s preface to the second volume, where he lamented the rapid disappearance of ‘independent Muslim States’ from the world map: To the unreflecting Western mind the extinction of these States causes no regret, but only exhilarating thoughts of more “openings” for their children and their capital; but those few who know and love the East and its peoples, and realise how deeply we are indebted to it for most of the great spiritual ideas which give meaning and value to life, will feel . . . that with the subsidence of every such State something is lost to the world which can never be replaced.31

For several years Browne became an academic activist, even going so far as to distribute postcard portraits of Persian leaders who had ‘died for the cause’ to opinion-­makers like Lady Ottoline Morrell.32 And in a speech of 1912, the Persia Society’s most outspoken member, Irish MP John Dillon, credited Browne’s passionate writing with awakening him to the Iranian crisis.33 Dillon’s tribute was well-­deserved, but it inadvertently obscured the publisher’s role in these events, for the Literary History of Persia was Unwin’s brainchild, and he approached and persuaded an initially hesitant Browne to undertake it. Austin and Unwin thus both offer examples of publishers exercising their cultural agency, successfully straddling academic and commercial zones of activity, and pro­du­cing works of translation that owed their success as much, if not more, to their publisher than to their author. Language moreover, so instrumental for Dillon, did not emanate solely from the personality named on the title page. Publishers, too, had their opinions, though they were not always heeded. In 1905, Grant Richards was negotiating to reprint John Payne’s translations from the Arabian Nights, and ventured some emendations. ‘There is one constantly recurring word which it seems to me you might replace by another—“saloon” ’, was among his mild suggestions. ‘It has it seems to me’, Richards delicately hinted to the elderly poet, ‘so different a 30  Mansour Bonakdarian, Britain and the Iranian Constitutional Revolution of 1906–1911: Foreign Policy, Imperialism, and Dissent (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2006), pp. 144, 245. 31 Edward  G.  Browne, A Literary History of Persia: From Firdawsí to Sa‘dí (London: T.  Fisher Unwin, 1906), pp. x–­xi. 32  HRC: TXRC98-­A17 (Ottoline Morrell Collection), 2.6, E.G. Browne to Morrell, 17 Jan. 1912. 33 Bonakdarian, Britain and the Iranian Constitutional Revolution, p. 362.

176  Asian Classics on the Victorian Bookshelf connotation in England today than that in which you use it.’ Payne was outraged, venting his indignation at once on an unfortunate go-­between: ‘The overweening of these mere tradesmen is extraordinary! He evidently considers himself an authority on style etc. What is his “game”?’34 Through their decisions as to size, type of paper, font, margin, ornamentation and, contingent on all these, price, publishers could shape a translation’s reception, or like Unwin, strategically insert it within the cultural field to achieve some larger goal. This extends also of course to graphic art, a huge topic which cannot be addressed fully here, beyond pointing out that styles of illustration were as  diverse as discussion of it in publishers’ archives is animated.35 Other than Japanese texts, which were usually treated by Japanese artists (a norm established by Mitford’s Tales of Old Japan), Asian commissions were nearly always handed to Western illustrators. But there is no convenient ‘oriental’ formula under which their work can be grouped. Looking solely at texts from India, we can observe wildly different approaches, ranging from the stately robed figures John Lockwood Kipling drew for The Iliad of the East, to the mechanical intricacy devised by Heath Robinson for the scene of Hanuman’s army constructing their bridge to Lanka in Rama and the Monkeys, to the grotesque imagery and absurd humour Ernest Griset brought to Burton’s Vikram and the Vampire (1870). In each case, the artist’s work complements and reinforces the emphasis given by the translator, an emphasis visible, too, in the cover design and title. A menagerie of sinister Indian creatures perch on or hang suspended from the horizontal lines drawn on Vikram’s lurid red and black cover. The words ‘vampire’ and ‘tales of Hindu devilry’ send us signals that are amplified by the creeping font in which they are rendered: we are to understand the Baital Pachisi, they tell us, as a species of gothic fiction (Figure 6.1).36 By contrast, the classical aesthetic in which readers are encouraged to view Richardson’s ‘Iliad’ is reinforced by the lotus motifs adorning its cover, and the elegant temple column that forms the ‘I’ of the title (atop which crouches just one animal, the monkey-­god Hanuman wielding his mace in warrior posture). As with all other aspects of the translation process, expectations of publisher and contributor were not always aligned. In 1906, Hodder & Stoughton issued a collection of Arabian Nights tales rewritten by Laurence Housman and illustrated by Edmund Dulac. It was a production for which the illustrator claimed star fees 34  Buckinghamshire Studies Centre: D161/100 (Grant Richards to John Payne, 13 Sept. 1905) and D161/52 (John Payne to Thomas Wright, 17 Sept. 1905). 35  A major contribution to scholarship in this area is William H. Martin and Sandra Mason, The Art of Omar Khayyam: Illustrating Fitzgerald’s Rubaiyat (London: I.B. Tauris, 2007). 36  At least one contemporary review attests to the success of this Gothic branding, remarking that Vikram offers ‘a great deal of capital horror of the Monk Lewis and Der Freischütz school’. ‘Their chief excellence,’ the reviewer adds, ‘is in the description of lonely cemeteries and incantation-­scenes, which latter are quite equal to that where the Wild Huntsman of the Hartz Mountains makes his appearance’: Athenaeum, 2210 (5 Mar. 1870), 324.

Publishing  177

Figure 6.1  Ernest Griset’s cover design for Vikram and the Vampire (1870) (courtesy of Hathitrust)

178  Asian Classics on the Victorian Bookshelf (Dulac was paid £315, fully three times as much as Housman for his copyright), and the publishers were very particular about what they wanted: We shall be glad if you will impress upon Mr Dulac that we feel sure the more detailed the drawings are the better they will please. We greatly prefer the drawing of the “Open Sesame” and of “The Roc’s Egg” to the other pictures, which seem to us to be rather lacking in interesting detail. Mr Dulac can do such fine work in detail that we think he should make his pictures as full as possible. There is no question that this has greatly helped Mr Rackham’s success.37

In the publisher’s imagination, it seems, the Orient should be visualized as teeming with profuse detail in the manner of Arthur Rackham. But, ironically, Rackham himself did not recognize this trait and considered Dulac’s approach unsuited to the text. As he told Housman, he found his colleague’s luxuriant style and droll touches altogether de trop for the Arabian Nights: ‘now & again the French, with all their fine taste, offend in such matters . . . for I find little or no buffoonery in the facts, nor burlesque in the telling, of the Tales.’38 In a significant reversal, then, here it is the Western (albeit French) interpreter who is found guilty of aesthetic excess, rather than the Eastern narrative. When studying the transmission of foreign literature, book design, illustration, and ornament are as deserving of consideration as the textual and paratextual matter within. The modern-­day publishing industry and its often clichéd marketing of world literature has attracted considerable attention in this regard, but what makes nineteenth-­century examples instructive is the manner in which reading and looking are, in the minds of the more ambitious popularizers, subsumed into a single experience and governed by an overarching metaphor of penetrative vision.39 Edwin Arnold repeatedly stressed the visuality of his writing. One art­ icle, for example, ‘will supply subjects enough for a whole gallery full of pictures!’ he told the illustrator Robert Blum, whom he entertained at his home in Tokyo, while an American magazine was offered a new poem which he claimed ‘would lend itself delightfully to illustration’.40 With Sadi in the Garden was conceived as a feast for the eyes, ‘with little Persian marginal pictures to the delicious text’, and I have already quoted his boast for Indian Idylls, that it would be ‘the first

37  LMA: CLC/B/119/MS16373 (Hodder & Stoughton Limited), Hodder & Stoughton to Messrs Ernest Brown & Phillips, 12 Dec. 1906. 38  Bryn Mawr College: Sydney Adelman Manuscript Collection, Box LH 2, Arthur Rackham to Laurence Housman, 18 Dec. 1908. 39 Graham Huggan, The Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins (London and New York: Routledge, 2001), pp. 53, 168; Gesine Müller, How Is World Literature Made?: The Global Circulations of Latin American Literatures (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2021), pp. 81–2. 40  NYPL: MssCol 132 (Sir Edwin Arnold papers), Arnold to Robert Blum, 17 July 1890; Morgan: MA 7379, Edwin Arnold to anon., 27 Dec. 1898.

Publishing  179 unveiling to Britons of Sanskrit epical verse’.41 Ultimately, few of Arnold’s works were illustrated, an apparent shortcoming that actually lends greater weight to his words. We may better understand what both authors and publishers of accessible translations were attempting to do if we notice how often they thought of their task as helping readers to visualize the East—­even when their books did not feature actual pictures.

Solicitation and Selection: The Houghton Mifflin Company Records Though scholarly consensus would point to the emergence of a closely managed translation industry in the latter decades of the nineteenth century, and professionalization of translation itself, there may be a risk of exaggerating the demise of the amateur linguist who made independent overtures to trade publishers. With the rapid increase in multilingualism throughout the population, Lesser remarks, late nineteenth-­century publishers were ‘beset’ with unsolicited manuscripts.42 To test this supposition, I made a survey of proposals to a major firm of relatively conservative tastes over a fifteen-­year period, and the ensuing readers’ reports.43 Between 1899 and 1914, the Boston house of Houghton Mifflin received 178 submissions translated into English from twenty-­three different languages. French (39) and German (33) together accounted for nearly half of these pro­posals, with sizeable contingents from Italian (17), Latin (16), Spanish, and Swedish, and single or double contributions from languages like Czech, Provencal, Hungarian, and Old English. Non-­European representation, comprising items from Hebrew, Persian, Sanskrit, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean, numbered thirteen—­or, if we include one of the French items (James Darmesteter’s The Beginning of Persian Poetry)—fourteen, making up 8 per cent of the total, with Japanese (5) the major contributor to this cohort and the tenth most-­translated language overall.44 The vast majority of applicants were without professional standing, either as linguists or as authors known to the literary world. Two new versions of the Rubaiyat were offered, and both rejected, and furthermore (though of course I did not add these to my Persian tally), a curious illustration of literary fashion at the

41  FSL: C.a.10 (Letters to C.M. Ingleby), f.10, Edwin Arnold to Ingleby, 16 Oct. 1883. 42  Lesser, ‘Professionals’, p. 87. 43  I deliberately chose a publisher not at the cutting-­edge. See Ellen Ballou, The Building of the House: Houghton Mifflin’s Formative Years (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1970), p. 550, for details of the firm’s various readers at the turn of the century, including Herbert Gibbs and Susan Francis, and their old-­fashioned tastes. 44  Houghton: MS Am 2516 (Houghton Mifflin Company reader reports), ff.7770–A9510 passim. One of the Chinese items was translated indirectly, from an Italian version. For four proposals, I was unable to determine the source-­language.

180  Asian Classics on the Victorian Bookshelf time is that three of the other texts proposed—­the Odyssey, Book of Ecclesiastes and, bizarrely, Dante’s Inferno—­were rendered in Omarian quatrains. Overall, the readers’ attitude would seem to bear out the common notion that publishers were leery of little-­known foreign texts. One report may even be alluding to company policy when it judges a Russian novel ‘not of such transcendent merit as to tempt us to depart from our custom as to translation’, and in the final tally, less than 10 per cent of manuscripts were ultimately accepted for publication.45 What factors, then, may have made a publisher sceptical or supportive of a translation proposal? The reasons given for dubiety are various. The Story of Flamenca, a medieval romance, was rejected because too smutty. Mirtala, a Polish novel by Eliza Orzeszkowa (1901), was sent back because the reader had heard that someone else was doing it for Scribner’s. A translation of Sophocles’s Philoctetes was badly wanted, remarked one reader, but the manuscript under review was not good enough and the applicant not sufficiently well-­known. Some Latin plays of Seneca were actually accepted, but their poor sales doomed a putative second volume, and for an edition of Theophrastus the report simply reads, ‘it is hard to believe that we could sell this book’. Although my statistical sample is too small to draw definitive conclusions, it is noteworthy that nearly a third of the Asian texts were taken on, compared with a 1:17 acceptance ratio for European literature. This discrepancy might lead us to suppose that Houghton Mifflin were enticed by the fresh and undiscovered offerings of the amateur orientalists, but the reports do not bear this out. Most of the texts proposed already existed in other English versions, and neither was novelty uppermost in the reviewers’ minds. When a version of Pilpay’s fables (as the Panchatantra has historically been known in Europe) arrived in the post in 1907, the readers were perfectly aware that its author, Maude Barrows Dutton, was ploughing an old furrow. Nevertheless, ‘the interest in good fables is unfailing’ and they felt confident that her children’s edition, once taken up by schoolteachers, would secure a ready market. Similarly, the Liaozhai Zhiyi by the eighteenth-­century writer Pu Songling was not new to English, but his Chinese supernatural tales were seen as a natural fit for the firm, which already had Lafcadio Hearn’s Kwaidan on its list. The retail price would have to be kept to $1 however, adds the reader, to ensure the book’s success. On the other hand, ‘there seems to be no occasion’ for taking on a new translation of another well-­worn text, the Nala and Damayanti episode from the Mahabharata. The word of dismissal is vague yet telling: this rejected manuscript lacks an ‘occasion’. There is no niche, no definable audience for it, no fortuitous timing or circumstance that might speed it in the marketplace.46 When we turn to items of undoubted novelty, moreover, it seems that newness was not of paramount concern. At the other end of the spectrum, one of the most unusual texts submitted 45  Ibid., f.8771. 46  The author was Amy H.W. Bullock, one of America’s first female graduates in Sanskrit.

Publishing  181 to the firm in this period, a Korean-­authored and Korean-­translated novel titled Komokhura, was rejected on the basis of its linguistic and narrative shortcomings (‘the English is amusing but would hardly do, and the story itself is not strong enough to interest Occidental readers’), while a version of the Daodejing, with text and commentary arranged on facing pages, had the opposite problem, attracting criticism for being too academic. As with other forms of literature, then, the readers evaluated these proposals on the basis of their intrinsic merits and commercial prospects, but their views were coloured by various preconceptions about the kind of text to which the American public would be amen­able, and how that text should be presented for their consumption. These subtle biases are revealed most clearly in the Japanese reports, which pertain to five texts distinct in genre and style. Two of them, Young Heroes of Old Japan (1905) and Warriors of Old Japan (1909), comprised stories of heroism and chivalry. The first, originally from the pen of the celebrated children’s author Sazanami Iwaya, included ‘fairytale’ elements and was targeted at young readers, while the incidents in the second collection were of a more realistic or historical character and apparently intended for the adult market. The second was accepted for publication, encouraging the translator Yei Theodora Ozaki to return a year later with a quite different set of stories, this time folklore featuring magic beings and talking animals. The sale of Warriors, however (940 copies in its first year) was considered disappointing, and on that basis this second volume was declined. The fourth and fifth manuscripts arrived in 1913 and enacted ‘modern’ Japan, though in very different guises. Representative Tales of Japan, translated by Asataro Miyamori, was subtitled ‘Little Masterpieces from Present Day Japanese Writers’. As its report notes, with a hint of regret, ‘these tales are all of the new Japan & not of the days of the samurai’. The other text was a collection of trad­ition­al poetry composed by the late Emperor Meiji, the only one of the five not to be a work of fiction. Neither was accepted for publication.47 Let us turn first to the book that met with approval, Warriors. It was seen by two readers, both of whom praised it as a work exemplary of its kind: ‘the stories are of the usual Japanese sort, very well told,’ writes one, while the other remarks, ‘of course the warrior stories are of the usual order, of brave samurai, loyal & faithful to death, yet even these have some gentler touches . . . I like best the tales of the princess of the bowl, of White Chrysanthemum, & of the fallen nobleman, who burned his precious dwarf trees that his guest might not be cold.’ Variations on familiar themes met here with approval, then. By contrast, the three unsuccessful manuscripts (I exclude Ozaki’s second book since the report is concerned only with her earlier sales) are all said to inspire ‘curiosity’, a word used without irony but characteristic of the queer, quaint, and exquisite lexicon that Grace 47  The file numbers of these Japanese reports (within MS Am 2516) are A1890, A4715, A5698, A8522, and A8774.

182  Asian Classics on the Victorian Bookshelf Lavery finds ingrained in Western aesthetic judgements of Japanese artefacts.48 The clash of old and new had long been intrinsic to the Western apprehension of Japan. Mitford’s Tales (1871), for example, often enfold multiple envelopes of time within their narrative structure, whereby events taking place primarily in the early eighteenth century will accommodate sudden digressions into medieval history (Mitford explains the origins of a certain temple integral to the plot of a love story), and sometimes into the immediate past (Mitford recounts an attack on the foreign settlement at Kobe during the Meiji Revolution).49 This characteristic dichotomy seems to leave Houghton Mifflin’s readers uncertain of what they really want. They seem to be drawn at once to novelty and yet also to cliché, a contradiction awakened most acutely by Representative Tales. ‘These represent the mixed condition today with considerable vividness,’ remarks one reviewer, unconsciously echoing the title: ‘remains of old beliefs, superstitions, & modes of thought, overlaid, more or less, by western ideas’. ‘To our feeling they are rather grim’, the report goes on, ‘but the sadness in them is more impressive than the incidents in lighter vein, & there is sometimes real pathos.’ The reader appears disorientated by a situation in which the ‘romantic’ Japan of samurai and shogun is familiar, and yet may appear inauthentic when set beside the ‘vivid’ strangeness of the country in its challenging ‘mixed’ or ‘western’ incarnation. Their dilemma is resolved only by recourse to the charge of narrowness: ‘I believe they have a distinct value . . . but I doubt their appeal to our general reader.’ Significantly, the same inconsistencies manifest in the readers’ preoccupation with language, and their ethnocentric bias for fluent transparency. The stories in Warriors ‘are told in the simple, direct speech, befitting the subject, & in graceful, easy English’, whereas the translator of Young Heroes, Masao Yoshida, ‘must have learned his English under a German teacher’. What is being criticized here is unclear. Is the reviewer describing faults (fussy syntax? pretentious diction? speculative abstraction?) apparently associated with German prose, or are Germans a proxy? Is he or she resisting a ‘foreignizing’ attempt to bend English to an unfamiliar shape in service of the source-­text, or even voicing a more existential complaint about the mutation of autochthonous English into an international pidgin? In any case, transparency is valued and Ozaki praised for writing—­literally, since her handwriting is as impeccable as her style—­like a ‘native’ English-­speaker. When it comes to the two contemporary texts, however, an opposite set of aesthetic criteria are applied. Miyamori’s translation in Representative Tales ‘reads easily & naturally’, yet ‘too colloquially’. ‘We are used to having Japanese stories retold in a more stately speech, & somehow feel that that reproduces better the originals.’ The ‘somehow’ half-­admits the arbitrary nature of this preference, and yet the bias is upheld, and 48 Grace  E.  Lavery, Quaint, Exquisite: Victorian Aesthetics and the Idea of Japan (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019), p. x. 49  A.B. Freeman-­Mitford, Tales of Old Japan (2 vols, London: Macmillan, 1871), I, 41, 210.

Publishing  183 decides the fate, too, of Poems by Emperor Meiji. The translator in this case was a white American, Beatrice Lane Suzuki, married to a Japanese intellectual, and yet her native command of English availed her not. ‘The pieces read like good translations’, the report admits, ‘but have no Japanese flavour.’ Perhaps the readers’ discomfort lies ultimately not with the texts at all, but with the cosmopolitan identity of the translators. The Houghton Mifflin files bear out Lesser’s remarks, presenting both a compelling picture of the volume and diversity of non-­professional translation taking place at the turn of the century, and the (relatively) standoffish attitude taken towards it by a firm that—­ironically—­was still reaping handsome profits from its many editions of the work of an amateur Persianist, Edward Fitzgerald. The reports also underscore something axiomatic in successful publishing, namely the projected audience. Always to the fore in a publisher’s mind will be the question ‘who will buy this book?’ Company archives yield many examples of authors projecting an imminent explosion of interest in literature from Asia. Writing to the firm in 1886, Lafcadio Hearn observed that ‘there is a growing interest in Oriental literature,— in Boston especially’, and hinted that they should publish his translations (as they duly did) ‘with a view to meet a growing demand’.50 Before rushing to find out what was afoot in Boston in 1886, we should observe that such predictions are actually made constantly throughout the period, as we may see in Clouston’s correspondence with Blackwood’s, or earlier in some letters to the same firm by a young Edwin Arnold, who in 1860 used a startling turn of phrase to talk up the potential of his Book of Good Counsels: ‘from its extremely entertaining character, as well as its wonderful oriental colour, & high antiquity, the publication would probably have a double public of scholars & story-­readers.’51 While a promise like this—­so characteristic of Victorian popularization—­was in principle exactly what publishers liked to hear, in practice they wanted a more definite picture of the coalition of readers to whom they might promote a given translation. Thus Houghton Mifflin became Helen Waddell’s American publisher for Lyrics from the Chinese only after its reviewers identified ‘lovers of Lafcadio Hearn’, ‘students of Chinese life’, and ‘readers of poetry’ in general as the constituency for her ‘small but very piquant collection’.52 In other cases publishers and authors, even when they were broadly in sympathy, seem to have entertained quite different understandings of the intended audience. The American Tibetologist, William Woodville Rockhill, professed to greatly dislike writing ‘for the magazine reading public’, and evidently did not regard himself as a popularizer. Yet even Trübner’s 50  Houghton: MS Am 1925 (Houghton Mifflin company correspondence), Series 1, Folder 823, Hearn to Houghton Mifflin, 19 May 1886. 51  NLS: Ms.4145 (Blackwood Papers), Edwin Arnold to Messrs Blackwood, 11 Dec. 1860. The translation was declined, but subsequently published by Smith, Elder & Co. Italics mine. 52  Houghton: MS Am 2516, f.A8901.

184  Asian Classics on the Victorian Bookshelf venerable Oriental Series was not immune from such considerations, and the publisher had to persistently coax him into broadening his appeal. ‘But you must give it a better title’, Trübner insisted in 1883 of Rockhill’s second book for the firm, ‘something like the “History of Buddha, his family, contemporaries etc” from Tibetan Sources etc.’ Rockhill complied, but when the manuscript was ready Trübner had to counsel patience: ‘we do not like publishing books in July August or Sept as people are thinking about nothing else but their holidays. In October the new season begins & that is a much better time.’ And further, with sales lagging three years later the author was asked to solicit yet another audience by stirring up demand in China.53 The same dynamic unfolded, in reverse, with J.M. Rodwell and his publisher Bernard Quaritch. Though he had sold his copyright to Quaritch and thus had no financial stake in the enterprise, the clergyman nonetheless looked on with chagrin as the publisher decided, ‘very injudiciously’ in his view, to reprint the Quran in an expensive edition priced at twelve shillings and sixpence. ‘The first Edn which was a small 8vo, sold rapidly and well’, Rodwell complained to a friend, ‘especially to my great surprise in America, where it seems to have been of use to the missionaries in their dealings with the Mohammedans.’54 By contrast, the new Quran was a large octavo attired in green boards (the colour of Islam) and ornamented with arabesque gilding on the spine. Design, as we have seen, can do much to shape a book’s destiny, and this is a volume that shows its best face shelf-­outwards. Probably Quaritch was thinking of the kind of people who patronized his Piccadilly shop—­gentlemen with well-­appointed and commodious libraries—­and not of readers whose lifestyle necessitated a more compact or portable volume. The fact that Quaritch purchased the copyright at all, at a time when copyright lasted only seven years after the author’s death, and the fact, too, that upon the expiration of Quaritch’s rights in 1907 the translation was promptly reprinted for Everyman’s, underscores the surprising influence of Rodwell. In what was supposedly an age of literary professionalization, this highly eccentric, clerical amateur devoted most of his time neither to translating nor to promoting his translations, but to boosting midday church attendance amongst the clerks and bankers of the City of London.

Editors’ Notes: A Tale of Two Series So far, my discussion has somewhat blurred the roles of publisher and editor—­ not always an easy distinction to make in the case of a small firm with a very hands-­on boss, like Nicholas Trübner. The distinction is crucial, however, in regard to two landmark undertakings in the closing decades of the nineteenth 53  Houghton: MS Am 2121 (William Woodville Rockhill papers), ff.2085, 2635, 2639, and 2640. 54  CUL: MS Add.7603/64 (Rodwell to Mrs Cecil Bendall, 8 Aug. 1890).

Publishing  185 century, Max Müller’s Sacred Books of the East, published by Oxford University Press, and the Wisdom of the East series edited by Launcelot Cranmer-­Byng and S.A. Kapadia, and published by John Murray. It can be said positively that the driving force behind these enterprises were the editors, who conceived their series, selected their texts, commissioned their translators, and lobbied their pub­lishers. Chapter 1 touched on the general preface Müller wrote for his fifty-­volume series, which was originally projected to appear over an eight-­year period beginning in 1879, but ultimately took until 1910. In this remarkable piece of writing, he inveighs against popularizers who have given a false impression of Eastern scriptures by extracting the ‘gems’ of wisdom and discarding the ‘tedious’ or ‘commonplace’ rubble in which they lie encased. Müller did not expect a wide sale, yet at the same time he was determined his books should be serviceable to the educated lay reader. ‘We must have what is tedious and bad as well as what is interesting and good,’ he told James Legge in 1876, reiterating his conviction that translations must be in full with no abridgement permitted. But in the same letter he reminds Legge not to exceed four hundred and fifty pages in the Chinese volumes he was preparing for the series, instructing him to include only such explanatory notes ‘as are absolutely necessary to enable an educated man to understand the translation’.55 In his monograph on the subject, Arie Molendijk finds the same contradictory impulses affecting the Sacred Books throughout its conception and execution, while Rimi B. Chatterjee shows how the series was further compromised when Müller’s editorial agenda clashed with the prerogatives of his publisher. One might well imagine it a foregone conclusion that the Oxford professor would lay his scheme in the first instance before the directors, or ‘Delegates’, of the university press. Not so. ‘One of the most publicly visible intellectuals of his day’, as Molendijk calls him, who wrote regularly for the monthlies and gave lecture tours that were covered by the international media, originally entertained the hope of contracting with Longman’s.56 He shared these plans with his friend Moncure Conway, whose Sacred Anthology seems to have been a major influence. Müller was right to be chary of the Delegates: they warmed to the project only after he had secured a subvention from the India Office, and then pressed on him as co-­ editor a legal scholar who introduced works of jurisprudence. Fundamentally, they did not share his vision for a mixed audience of academics and dilettanti, a  difference of opinion epitomized, for Chatterjee, in the decision to print the translations with uncut pages. By the turn of the century most hardback books were issued with sheets already cut, saving readers much labour with their paper knives. The uncut book was ‘an antiquarian throwback’, appreciated only by a particular kind of reader (or often enough, non-­reader), the book collector, and at 55  SOAS: CWM/LMS/China/Personal (James Legge Papers), Box 10, Müller to Legge, 10 Mar. 1876. 56 Arie  L.  Molendijk, Friedrich Max Müller and the Sacred Books of the East (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), pp. 29, 45.

186  Asian Classics on the Victorian Bookshelf some point the Delegates seem to have decided that here lay their most de­pend­ able market. Asked to comment on the decision some years later, OUP’s general manager Humphrey Milford said ruefully that when the press had weighed general convenience against collectors’ demand for pristine volumes, the ‘anguish of scholars . . . kicked the beam’.57 So set were the Delegates on this course that Milford could not even persuade them to print cheap editions of selected volumes with mass appeal, like E.H. Palmer’s The Qur’ân (another publishing-­related reason for the extended lifetime of Sale’s and Rodwell’s translations). Eventually, the only course open was to export these titles to the Oxford World’s Classics series that appeared from 1905. As a series of ‘popular canonical works in a cheap and convenient format’, Chatterjee remarks that the World’s Classics were ‘closer in spirit’ to the original intentions of Max Müller, who had died in 1900 embittered with his half-­finished project. He had envisaged the readers of his series as the same laypeople who flocked to his lectures, but instead it became the hobbyhorse of rich collectors and (with the introduction of the law books) a work of reference for colonial administrators.58 Molendijk and Chatterjee have skilfully untangled this complex history, but surprisingly little has been written about the series that was launched just as the final Sacred Books were departing the university presses, and which enjoyed an audience as wide and diverse as its predecessor’s was narrow. More than one hundred titles would appear under the Wisdom of the East imprint, extending into the early 1960s, but the series originated in 1904 when Byng joined with his friend Allen Upward to found the Orient Press in London, and issued a series of 12cm x 17cm books approximately seventy pages in length—‘small, cheap, and well adapted for the pocket’, as one newspaper described them.59 They included a volume of Confucian aphorisms, some extracts from the Daodejing, and a selection of Quranic surahs—­the last of which was actually reprinted from Palmer’s Sacred Books translation, and thus formed a missing link between the estranged parent series and its wayward child. One can scarcely imagine Müller approving of these books, since they epitomized the gem-­collecting style of editorship he had derided. The editors, too, were an unlikely pair. Byng at this time seems to have been known partly as a minor Decadent poet (responsible for Poems of Paganism, 1895), partly as a society prankster and author of literary hoaxes. His co-­editor was not Upward, who soon took a back seat, but a Parsi doctor and lecturer in Gujarati at UCL, Shapurji Aspaniarji Kapadia.60 Nonetheless, both men 57 Rimi B. Chatterjee, Empires of the Mind: A History of the Oxford University Press in India under the Raj (Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 184. 58  Ibid., pp. 191–3. 59  Glasgow Herald, quoted in S.A.  Kapadia, The Teachings of Zoroaster (London: John Murray, 1905), p. 107. 60  Born in Bombay in 1857, Kapadia moved to Britain in 1881 and practised as Senior Clinical Assistant at the Royal Ophthalmic Hospital, Westminster. See C. Hayavadana Rao (ed.), The Indian Biographical Dictionary, 1915 (Madras: Pillar & Co, 1915), p. 218.

Publishing  187 proved energetic and capable, effecting within a year the transfer of the imprint to John Murray and—­in the United States—­to E.P. Dutton, two established publishers with the plant and capital to issue his books in large numbers.61 Moreover, Byng’s mischievous and somewhat irreligious attitude was not unconnected with his editorial policy. In the Sacred Books, scripture had been compiled for the purpose of scholarly comparison. While by no means strictly secular, the ‘wisdom’ of the new series instead meant philosophy, ethics, mysticism, and some devotional writings, rather than religious doctrine. A sense of purpose is clear even in the Orient Press period, with an early preface contending that ‘the great literatures of the world have been too much in the hands of mere scholars’, who have valued only the ‘letter’ not the ‘spirit’ of them.62 Also, each book carried on its dust jacket a general preface: This series has a definite object. It is planned, by means of the best Oriental literature—­its wisdom, philosophy, poetry, and ideals—­to bring together West and East in a spirit of mutual sympathy, goodwill, and understanding. From India, China, Japan, Persia, Arabia, Palestine, and Egypt these words of wisdom have been gathered.63

After the first four volumes had been issued, this rhetoric was amplified. A new, extended preface was introduced, in which the hope is expressed that ‘these books shall be the ambassadors of good-­will and understanding’ between East and West, which are now designated ‘the old world of Thought, and the new of Action’. The focus, then, is now on individual books, instead of the entire corpus of texts. The Sacred Books were positioned in relation to one another, whereas each Wisdom book has an independent function as an emissary between cultures separated not only in space but also in time, and is positioned to make an intervention at a crit­ ic­al moment in history. As it reaches its ecumenical apogee, the preface takes on an unexpectedly pious tone, anticipating ‘a revival of that true spirit of Charity which neither despises nor fears the nations of another creed and colour’, a mission in which, the editors add in a possible homage to Müller, ‘they are but followers of the highest example in the land’. Perhaps most importantly, the impersonal tone of the first preface has given way to language that constantly foregrounds the agency of Byng and Kapadia. Thus, the series no longer has a ‘definite object’—instead, the object has become ‘very definite’, and it belongs not to the series but to ‘the editors’ themselves.

61 Kapadia seems to have done most of the face-­to-­face negotiation with Murray. See JMA: MS.41945 (Letter Book P29, Feb.–May 1905). 62  L. Cranmer-­Byng, Odes of Confucius (London: Orient Press, 1904), p. 13. 63  Ibid., dust jacket.

188  Asian Classics on the Victorian Bookshelf The series’ underlying politics calls for some contextual nuance. Before adopting the name Orient Press, Upward and Byng had originally touted themselves as the Primrose Press—­presumably alluding to the Primrose League, a Tory or­gan­iza­ tion whose members vowed to uphold ‘the Imperial Ascendancy of the British Empire’.64 In some volumes, moreover, the editors’ preface is signed ‘L. Cranmer-­ Byng / S.A. Kapadia / Northbrook Society, 21 Cromwell Road, Kensington, S.W.’ Founded by Liberals a few years before the Primrose League, the Northbrook was a club for Indians and Anglo-­Indians visiting London, but student radicals of the 1910s and 1920s shunned its loyalist ambience. Picking up on these subtle pol­it­ ical gestures, we should see the Wisdom series and its preface as participating in the same strand of imperial cosmopolitanism explored in Chapter 2. Under this dispensation, cultures co-­exist in difference, which is why the preface does not anticipate a melding of East and West, but reinforces their fundamental division while offering translation as compensation for the ruptures and anachronism wrought by empire. This has an important bearing on reception. When readers were left jaded or irritable by the preface’s high-­minded language, as the set designer Edward Gordon Craig was by talk of the true spirit of Charity (‘that’s a sop anyhow’, he wrote in his margin), it may well have been because they detected in it a form of imperial apologetics, or perhaps a covert admission of Christian discourse.65 Yet, even as we temper our understanding of the editors’ progressive agenda, we must also observe that it is Byng’s very conservatism that permits him to see Eastern—­specifically Chinese—­philosophy not as something to be absorbed and assimilated by the anglophone system, but as a corrective to misguided Western thought. A member of the Liberty & Property Defence League, he was an enemy of socialism and state intervention, and saw Confucian virtue ethics as a philosophy that emphasized the free moral action of the individual in the maintenance of social harmony. That he seems to have shared these views with John Murray undoubtedly benefited the fledgling series. ‘[Y]ou would be in accord with much of the teaching contained therein’, he told the publisher after receiving Ku Hung Ming’s translation of the Zhongyong (Doctrine of the Mean) in 1907, a year after Britain’s dramatic leftward swing in the 1906 General Election. ‘It is really educational in the best sense of the word & forms an argument against the political materialism of today which no thinking man can afford to despise.’66 Ku Hung Ming was originally recommended by the British consul at Canton, who approached the Scottish-­ educated translator and told him bluntly that

64  Allen Upward, Some Personalities (London: John Murray, 1921), p. 210; Hugh Cunningham, The Challenge of Democracy: Britain, 1832–1918 (Abingdon: Routledge, 2014), p. 137. 65  HRC: PL 2997 Y3 CRE, Anton Forke, Yang Chu’s Garden of Pleasure (London: John Murray, 1912), p. 65. 66  JMA: MS.40181 (Letters to John Murray), Byng to Murray, 22 Feb. 1907. Though Byng does not use the word socialism, it would seem to be his implied target in this letter, following Engels’s def­in­ ition of ‘the materialist conception of history’ in Socialism: Scientific and Utopian (1880).

Publishing  189 ‘the average foreigner out here is not the type of man who wants to know anything about the Chinese or their Classics.’ Rather than allow his work to languish in China, therefore, he should try Europe, ‘where the book, if advertised among the right class of people, would quite likely have a considerable sale’. The virtue of Ku’s translations, he told Byng, are simply that ‘they can be read’. Unlike Legge’s familiar chunky volumes, ‘they do not require to be attacked hammer-­and-­tongs fashion, with the aid of Chinese dictionary, teacher, and books of reference.’67 Examining the same translations today, with their ‘lively flair, suggestive scholarly comparisons, and seemingly flawless idiomatic English’, Lauren Pfister sees Ku as both the natural heir of that ‘consummate popularizer’, Herbert Giles, and a forerunner of the ethnically Chinese translators who would arise in the next gen­er­ation; and while his work did not escape Byng’s ministrations—­the editor eliminated his accompanying Chinese text, Englished his Chinese title, and demanded up-­to-­ date allusions to current events—­it exemplified in style as well as in content what he wanted for Wisdom.68 We might usefully pair with these remarks some trenchant criticisms made of translators who did not fulfil their briefs, in a general report prepared for Murray by Byng four years after the series’ debut. As Professor of Sanskrit at UCL, L.D. Barnett’s credentials were not in question, but ‘he is rather apt to assume too much knowledge on the part of his reader’, Byng regretted. Herbert Baynes, author of The Way of the Buddha (1906), ‘seemed more anxious to write about Buddhism than to translate the Buddhist books.’ ‘His mind appears to be more occupied with questions of ritual than with essentials’, Byng added, while his closing remarks are both ‘injudicious and irrelevant’. The Hebrew expert Edwin Collins, meanwhile, was hampered by a com­bin­ation of scholarly myopia and pretentiousness. Though undoubtedly ‘profound’ in learning, he was ‘too fond of using long words with Latin roots’, which gave him an excessively ‘involved’ style: ‘Mr Collins M.S. is a despair from an editor’s and printer’s point of view.’ Byng evidently regarded the vetting of translators as one of his main responsibilities, having already decided on a policy of commissioning new translations whenever possible (claiming that this not only made for a better book, but a better sale too).69 Moreover, his judgement was decisive: neither Baynes nor Collins worked for Wisdom again. The influence he and Kapadia were able to exert may be reckoned using a rule of thumb drawn by the bibliographer Maura Ives, who compared the same novels when they appeared in limited or fine press editions, and when they were reissued in ‘trade’ formats. In expensive forms of publication, Ives found, the author’s priorities took precedence over those of other stakeholders. Often his or her ‘identity and authority’ were expressed

67  Ibid. (the recommendation from the consul, H.I. Harding, is enclosed in Byng’s letter to Murray). 68  Lauren Pfister, ‘Chinese’, in France and Haynes (eds), Oxford History of Literary Translation in English: Volume 4, p. 360. 69  JMA: Acc.13328/13 (Wisdom of the East, general series file).

190  Asian Classics on the Victorian Bookshelf not  merely in the text, but were also stamped in the book’s physical form and presentation. On the other hand, ‘the cheaper the form of publication, the greater the emphasis placed upon the goals of the publisher, and the needs of the reader.’70 Ives does not consider other sources of professional input, but if one were to substitute ‘editor’ for ‘publisher’ then her formulation would certainly hold true for the Wisdom series. To be clear, Wisdom books were not promiscuously cheap—­not compared with the sixpenny paperbound novels that were typical of their day. As Eliot and Freebury note, by the turn of the century ‘the real mass market competition lay in prices under a shilling’, which is a realm into which oriental translators never willingly entered.71 Sales were nevertheless considerable, sustained over the course of years and, what is more important, fairly consistent across the series. Two thousand was the standard initial print run and most titles were reprinted within a few years of publication. The Diwan of Abu’l Ala was a popular title, selling over three thousand four hundred copies in its first seven years. A Lute of Jade sold more than five thousand in that time (netting a profit of £150), while ‘the best seller in the Series’ during the first twenty years of its existence was The Sayings of Confucius. A comparative failure, like Edwin Collins’s despair-­inducing Wisdom of Israel, still sold a hundred copies a year on average and covered its costs, and very few titles actually recorded a loss.72 These figures, moreover, do not include Dutton’s American sales. The books’ ubiquity manifested in various unexpected and sometimes profitable ways, not least the frequent requests Murray received to set selected passages to music. They became more heavily used, more worn-­and-­torn objects than the prestigious Sacred Books had been, and also more friable. Lines were extracted and plagiarized, requiring constant vigilance: in 1913, a hoaxer successfully placed some fraudulent letters purporting to be by a Chinese lady in the Pall Mall Magazine, which turned out to be laced with quotations from various Wisdom books, and in 1921 the series’ ori­gin­al proprietor Allen Upward was amazed to see several similar gobbets ‘thrown upon the screen in a kinetic melodrama’.73 Copies were shared, given away, lost, and repurchased. In his fictionalized memoir of the Western Front, lexicographer Eric Partridge describes how two soldiers read The Rubaiyat of Hafiz (1910) together before throwing it away during a wearisome march. Having found it so enjoyable,

70 Maura Ives, ‘A Bibliographical Approach to Victorian Publishing’, in John  O.  Jordan and Robert  L.  Patten (eds), Literature in the Marketplace: Nineteenth-­Century British Publishing and Reading Practices (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 282. 71  Simon Eliot and Richard Freebury, ‘A Year in Publishing, 1891’, in David McKitterick (ed.), The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain: Volume VI, 1830–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009), p. 692. 72  JMA: MS.42739-­42 (copy ledgers) and Acc.12927/132 (Byng to Farquharson, 30 July 1924). 73  JMA: Acc.12927/228 (A Lute of Jade book file); Upward, Some Personalities, p. 212.

Publishing  191 however, they simply had a replacement copy sent to them.74 Byng considered this a high compliment, and claimed it actually boosted sales of that title in the year Partridge’s account appeared. The Wisdom of the East could thus be said to have finally achieved the cultural commodification of Asian literature as foreseen a generation earlier by Lubbock, because its readers were successfully persuaded that Eastern ‘wisdom’ was not only a readily attainable and transferrable good, but also a divisible and disposable one. Some texts are simply unsuited to general audiences. Widespread interest in Confucian philosophy underpinned his series’ success, Byng was convinced. But even so, certain parts of the canon, like the Liji (Book of Rites), were just too ‘dry & difficult to understand’.75 In other cases, an inept translator might be re­spon­ sible for a poor sale. But often enough, it is within the publication process that we can find answers to the question of why a given translation did not get its due, or why it never materialized at all from out of the ‘nebulous vastness’, as Robert Darnton terms it, ‘of the literature-­that-­might-­have-­been’.76 Peter France regrets that Seven Golden Odes of Pagan Arabia (1903), a creative and satisfying version of the Muallaqat by Anne and Wilfrid Blunt, ‘failed to ignite the same public enthusiasm’ as the Rubaiyat of Fitzgerald, whose free approach they emulated.77 But he overlooks the fact that the Blunts printed their work privately, in a limited edition, under the Arts and Crafts imprint of the Chiswick Press. Within thirty years the book had become a precious rarity. ‘I have one copy’, joked Rudyard Kipling with a friend in 1935, ‘which, if you can’t get another, you are at liberty to see under armed guard’.78 By contrast, even when a Wisdom translation was neither innovative or satisfying, its sale was helped by its light weight, small size, low price, attractive cover, and—­not least—­generous allowance of blank page. As we will see in the next chapter, these little-­regarded books yield particularly strong evidence of reception by contemporary readers, because people did not hesitate to write in them.

74  Eric Partridge, Frank Honywood, Private: A Personal Record of the 1914–1918 War (Carlton, VIC: Melbourne University Press, 1987), p. 65. 75  JMA: MS.40181, Byng to Murray, 31 July 1905. 76  Robert Darnton, ‘The Forgotten Middlemen of Literature’, in The Kiss of Lamourette: Reflections in Cultural History (London: Faber, 1990), p. 138. 77  France (ed.), Oxford Guide to Literature in English Translation, p. 146. 78  Pinney (ed.), Letters of Rudyard Kipling, VI, 411 (Kipling to Michael Mason, 14 Dec. 1935). ‘It has some beautiful lines about rain in the desert’, Kipling added: ‘Down from their lair it driveth hot-­foot the ibexes’.

7 Reading A translation achieves little, or nothing, until somebody reads it. Its impact occurs at that moment when it touches an individual, drawing them into an alternative cultural frame through which new possibilities and directions in their life become visible. Such an effect often owes as much to the reader’s circumstances and emotional state as the text itself, and those three elements—the right time, the right place, and the right book—came together in February 1869 when John Addington Symonds made a visit to Sutton Court, his brother-in-law’s house in Somerset. Aged twenty-eight, Symonds had reached a point of crisis in his life. His career as a classicist at Oxford had been dogged by scandal. He had yet to write the studies of Renaissance art that would secure his legacy, and he had been diagnosed with tuberculosis in the left lung. ‘I lived in a whirlpool of work and emotion’, he wrote in the famously candid memoirs that were sealed by his executor, and kept from public gaze until the 1950s. At Sutton Court he spent the winter days polishing up a series of lectures on Greek, when a chance discovery caused him to sidestep into a different language. ‘I stumbled on an old English translation of the Gulistan’, he recalled, looking retrospectively over his own journal entries from 1869. ‘The book upon love and friendship took hold of my fancy, and I copied out this bit: February 11.  “The herbage of his cheeks drinks the waters of life; everyone that eateth sweets, stareth at his lips.” ’1 By this point Symonds had already decided—though with only ‘half my will’, he  concedes—to ‘break the thread’ of his friendship with Norman Moor, a ­seventeen-year-old at Clifton College who had come to him for private tuition. Their unconsummated romance would actually continue for three more years, at the end of which Symonds wrote a letter to Algernon Swinburne in which he apologized for his ignorance of an ‘Indian book’ the poet wished to discuss.2 ‘I do not know much about Oriental literature, though Sâdy in French & English is often in my hands.’ Symonds was being modest, or perhaps guarded, about his partiality for Persian over other Eastern literatures. The depth of his knowledge is 1 Amber K. Regis, The Memoirs of John Addington Symonds: A Critical Edition (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), pp. 383–4. 2  Jerome McGann surmises that Swinburne’s ‘Indian book’ was either the Katha, Mandukya, or Khandogya Upanishad. See ‘Swinburne, “Hertha,” and the Voice of Language’, Victorian Literature and Culture, XXXVI/2 (2008), 287.

Asian Classics on the Victorian Bookshelf: Flights of Translation. Alexander Bubb, Oxford University Press. © Alexander Bubb 2023. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198866275.003.0007

Reading  193 apparent in a subsequent letter of 1876, in which he sent a different friend some shrewd criticisms of Herman Bicknell’s translations from Hafez—observations by a man who clearly knew something of the poetry of Persia.3 The unspoken reason for this attachment was that Persian literature had become a touchstone in Symonds’s lifelong struggle with his sexuality. Leafed over in a Somerset library, here was proof that the homoerotic relationships that are discussed so openly in Phaedrus or the Symposium, and yet which his contemporaries disparaged or conveniently overlooked, were not an aberration. They had existed and had been valued in other cultures—still were valued, perhaps, even in the later nineteenth century. More than this, the particular story that ‘took hold’ of him (the tenth episode in the Gulistan’s fifth chapter, ‘On Love and Youth’) must have had a ­special poignancy. Like many of the hekayat, or stories, that make up the work, it is told in the first person, and thus allows for the sense of affiliation, or identification, with the long-dead author that seems to have been a compelling draw for many Victorian readers of Persian literature. Indeed, its tone could even be described as confessional. Sadi recollects his early love for another youth, whose downy cheeks he pictures in the lines that Symonds extracted for his journal. In a moment of pique, he sends his beloved away and refuses to have anything more to do with him—a break that Symonds, his jealousy aroused by the discovery that Moor was in love with another boy at the college, was now himself meditating. The narrator immediately regrets his choice, but the words cannot be unsaid. Some years later the beloved returns and attempts to renew their friendship, but his face, now coated with a thick beard, has lost its boyish charm, and both men have cause to rue the transience of youth. ‘The history of reading’, Robert Darnton wrote in a seminal essay, ‘will have to take account of the ways that texts constrain readers as well as the ways that ­readers take liberties with texts.’4 Symonds’s experience is exemplary of this dual process shaping a person’s encounter with the translated literature of an unknown language. His discovery liberated him, but in a manner that was very particular to the volume he opened. Whether the Gulistan’s fifth chapter was the unprecedented epiphany Symonds remembered twenty years after the event is far from certain. In line with the patterns of dissemination I described earlier, whereby the commonplace of Asiatic letters was dispersed through everyday sights and conversations, some Victorian readers already had an inkling of what they would find in this particular text. W.B. Yeats, for example, picked up his one-shilling Camelot Classics Gulistan probably in the 1890s and only bothered to cut the pages of one

3  Herbert M. Schueller and Robert L. Peters (eds), The Letters of John Addington Symonds (3 vols, Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 1967–9), II, 256 (Symonds to Swinburne, 27 Dec. 1872) and II, 414 (Symonds to H.G. Dakyns, 16 May 1876). 4  Robert Darnton, ‘What Is the History of Books?’, in The Kiss of Lamourette, p. 132.

194  Asian Classics on the Victorian Bookshelf chapter—Chapter V.5 But the translation that came to hand that day in Somerset was crucial. A catalogue of Symonds’s books, which went to auction after his death in 1893, shows he kept a copy of Edward Eastwick’s version at his home in Davos, Switzerland.6 But ‘the herbage of his cheeks’ is not a passage one can find in Eastwick. One will not find Symonds’s story there at all, in fact. Along with a  number of others, ‘more suited to Oriental than European taste’, as Eastwick coyly puts it, the tale has been deliberately omitted. ‘On Love and Youth’ should ­comprise twenty-one hekayat-ha. In Eastwick’s productions—both the original Persian text he edited in 1850, and the translation that followed in 1852—they number only eleven.7 Ironically, a non-expert reader like Symonds was in many ways better served by Eastwick, the last in a lineage of East India Company Gulistan translators. As Pegah Shahbaz has pointed out, he was the first to promote the work on the basis of its aesthetic qualities and literary value, rather than as a tool for learning Persian epistolary style or as a source of information on Eastern mores. To earlier scholars, Sadi had been only the great ‘moralist’—less thought was spared for his wit and humour, use of allusions and metaphors, and interplay of prose with verse. Eastwick appreciated these qualities, and he was also the first to render the poetic sections of the text in verse. This is important, because as it happens the phrase that Symonds recorded is a beyt, one of several hundred couplets that are interspersed in Sadi’s prose narratives, but which previous translators tended to simply ignore.8 There is much to admire in Eastwick, and all connected with the  circumstances of publication discussed in the last chapter. Knowing the Company’s days to be numbered, either he or his publisher Stephen Austin decided to abandon their traditional market, and to craft instead a ‘de luxe’ book for sale in London to wealthy bibliophiles. But it was also at least in part, I would suggest, for the benefit of this metropolitan audience that the translator had decided on the necessity of substantial expurgation. His predecessors Francis Gladwin and James Ross had been content merely to excise a line here and there, or substitute male persons for female (in fact Ross and Gladwin actually met, in Calcutta, and discussed this very dilemma). But Eastwick eliminated stories wholesale. Only one of the four Company translators bowlderized not a whit: James Dumoulin, who preceded them all with his 1807 version. And it was this book, never reprinted, that Symonds plucked from the shelf in 1869. Confusingly, the phrase that found its way into the Memoirs does not cor­res­ pond exactly to any English translation that existed at the time. But a comparison 5 NLI: YL 1832 (Yeats Library), James Ross, Sadi: Gulistan or Flower-Garden (London: Walter Scott, 1890). 6  The auction catalogues have been compiled into a database by Johns Hopkins University: https:// exhibits.library.jhu.edu/omeka-s/s/symonds-library/item/1605 (accessed 17 Aug. 2020). 7 E.B.  Eastwick, The Gulistán (Rose-Garden) of Shekh Sâdí of Shíráz (Hertford: Stephen Austin, 1850), pp. iv, 10. 8  Pegah Shahbaz, ‘Persian Monshi, Persian Jones: English Translations of Saʿdi’s Golestān from the Late Eighteenth to the Mid-Nineteenth Centuries’, Iranian Studies, LII/5–6, 752.

Reading  195 of Eastwick, Gladwin, Ross, and Dumoulin leaves me with little doubt that the words that ‘took hold’ at Sutton Court were the latter’s. In this respect Symonds was fortunate in his in-laws. He was in the home of Edward Strachey, a man with three brothers in the Bengal service. The book had probably belonged to their father, who had served with Clive. ‘In regard to the down of his cheeks,’ reads the phrase in Dumoulin’s text, ‘it absorbs the water of life: every person that eats sweets, stares at his lips.’ Symonds must have decided to ornament this plain prose when he transferred it to his journal, substituting ‘eateth’ and ‘stareth’. As well as archaicizing the sentence, he took the words at their face value: Dumoulin’s footnotes indicate that ‫ ميخورد‬literally means not absorbs but ‘drinks’; and ‫ ﻧﺒﺎﺕ‬is literally ‘herb’, but used figuratively may describe a wispy adolescent chin.9 Dumoulin renders it simply as ‘down’, whereas Symonds writes ‘herbage of his cheeks’. The translator thus elided a metaphor which his reader restored. Glancing over his mementoes years later, Symonds had presumably forgotten that what he had written down were not the words that he had originally read, and that he had taken liberties with the text which had liberated him. But in a further twist, Symonds’s experience of the narrative had been shaped by textual conditions in a way he probably never realized. Most translators capture some of the humour in this story. When the beloved returns and the narrator remarks with horror on the thickness of his beard, there is a spirit of raillery between the two old friends that tempers their melancholy. Dumoulin, it seems, either abridged the text or was working from a variant in which this rib-poking is significantly abbreviated. Indeed, it would be hard for the newcomer to understand why the story concludes with the beloved laughing aloud. In Dumoulin’s version, the story becomes harsher, somewhat forlorn, and—to a reader so predisposed—may appear to ­culminate in the sting of regret.

Evidence of Reading In reconstructing this moment I have, I must admit, speculated considerably. Symonds’s original journal has not survived. He published hardly anything about Persian literature.10 But we know enough about this episode to determine that an important interaction took place between reader and translator, in which the ­former repurposed the text to serve a use for which it was never intended. The episode highlights the importance of the translator—who in this case, counterintuively, could not have been a popularizer (if Symonds had been born twenty years later, he may instead have come across Edwin Arnold’s popular abridgement, 9  ‫آنكه نبات عارضش آب حيات ميخورد در شکرش نگه کند هر كه نبات ميخورد‬. James Dumoulin, The Goolistan: with an English Translation (Calcutta: printed for the translator by P. Crichton, 1807), p. 139 (italics in original). 10  Sadi later received a brief, but significant acknowledgement when Symonds wrote (but did not publish) his 1873 defence of ‘masculine love’, A Problem in Greek Ethics (London: privately printed, 1901), p. 7.

196  Asian Classics on the Victorian Bookshelf which abolishes ‘On Love and Youth’ altogether). But it also illustrates the vital place of the reader in any proper understanding of the history of translated literature in English, and it is animated by all the complex dynamics—interpretation, appropriation, misprision, acceptance (or resistance), comparison, forgetting, and remembering—that are not expressed by the inadequate word ‘reception’, and which it is the object of this chapter to explore. It also highlights something that must be foregrounded in any investigation of this kind, the problem of evidence. The difficulty of discerning the true nature of private experiences has been a longstanding challenge for historians of reading. Long before such a discipline existed, Edmund Gosse complained to a friend that ‘the whole question of who reads what, and of what becomes of printed volumes, is involved in mystery.’11 The occasion for this remark was Coventry Patmore: Gosse simply refused to believe that the poet of ‘The Angel in the House’ was really as popular, in 1905, as the reported sales of his books would suggest. It is now considerably easier to identify what people in Gosse’s day were really giving their attention to, which was often not (and this is particularly true of Asian texts) what would be generally considered the major publications of the time. But how people read, and how their relationship to the text was shaped by the circumstances of the text’s production and dissemination, is a fast-growing area of study. My own method is broadly aligned with an approach John Picker has described recently as the ‘New Receptionism’.12 I begin with the text, studying the multiple agents who acted upon it and the process by which it came, intentionally or not, into the hands of certain readers—this has been the purport of the last two chapters—before exploring the reader’s intervention through well-established forms of evidence: letters, autobiographies, commonplace books, and marginalia. But whereas the emphasis in such research rested formerly on ‘canonical’ authors within the national sphere, scholars have now recognized the need to follow texts in their global incarnations, and to speak, not of the life of a book, but of the many lives it may lead in different times and places. There are pitfalls on this road that one must guard against. I have written frequently of the ‘general reader’ and ‘common reader’ to reflect the existence of this category in the minds of nineteenth-century translators and publishers. But in reality there was no general reader, and any scrupulous scholar must begin by respecting the subjective and unique standpoint of each individual. One must consider the factors that produced that standpoint, situating the reader within their society. And at the same time, we must not be over-reliant on individuals. It is easy to exaggerate the significance of anecdotal evidence related to a single person, when so much reading is non-transformational. Only a small portion of 11  HRC: MS-1545 (Richard Garnett Collection), 32.4, Edmund Gosse to Garnett, 15 Apr. 1905. 12  John Picker, ‘Current Thinking: On Transatlantic Victorianism’, Victorian Literature and Culture, XXXIX/2 (2011), 602.

Reading  197 what we read leaves a lasting impression on us. Much is ephemeral, and many books receive only a cursory inspection. Some of the most creative and convincing responses to these dilemmas have emerged from projects that embed historical individuals within what Brian Baer calls ‘interpretive communities’.13 Christine Pawley has done this within the confined geography of Midwestern towns, tessellating an array of information— library borrowing records, census returns, local church membership—to arrange readers in a diagram of interlocking groups, and infer how certain texts migrated across these groups through mutual lending and recommendation.14 Individual evidence, such as a commonplace book, can become much more valuable when brought into dialogue with consonant material created by others. Through this process a multitude of anecdotal details may become a dataset. In an allied manner I have drawn together clusters of readers, not focussed on a physical location—which would be very hard indeed—but based around mutual experiences and practices. Andrew Stauffer has recently made a similar study of three contemporaries responding to Felicia Hemans’s poetry, ‘aggregating’ their reading notes and identifying modes of sentiment and empathy common to her worldwide audience.15 Readers of Asian classic literature were often quite aware that they, too, shared interests, if not with immediate acquaintances then with more far-flung, unseen affiliates. Some of them will have been connected through formal organizations, such as the Theosophical Society or Freemasonry, both of which appealed to religious nonconformists, others through more putative fellowships such as the worldwide population of ‘Omarians’; and while not communities in the traditional sense, and certainly not to be envisaged without taking note of the other relationships—regional, class, and sexual—that defined their members, they may be used to register patterns in the responses that a number of disparate individuals evince to a certain text or aspect of translation. In this chapter, I will compare readers along several axes of this kind, connecting them in the next section through their readerly practices, then through what they gained by their reading (specifically, experiences of an eye-opening and emancipating nature), and finally through a particular dynamic whereby the reader can be seen to develop an animus against the translator. But first I will detail the two main forms of evidence on which I have relied: commonplace books and marginalia. Commonplace books, in which individuals wrote out summaries or, more usually, quotations from works that caught their interest, have survived in significant numbers from the nineteenth century. Along with official surveys, diaries, 13  Brian James Baer, ‘Translated Literature and the Role of the Reader’, in Bermann and Porter (eds), A Companion to Translation Studies, p. 336. 14  Christine Pawley, ‘Seeking “Significance”: Actual Readers, Specific Reading Communities’, Book History, V (2002), 157. 15 Andrew Stauffer, ‘An Image in Lava: Annotation, Sentiment, and the Traces of NineteenthCentury Reading’, PMLA, CXXXIV/1 (2019), 88.

198  Asian Classics on the Victorian Bookshelf auto­biog­raph­ies, and marginal annotations, they were one of the major sources that historians of reading began exploiting in the 1990s, and because the same works or quotations may recur across multiple books in a sample, they offer a prime site on which to build up a structure of aggregated evidence. In a survey of one hundred commonplace book-keepers, active between the years 1845 and 1915, I found thirty-nine to have incorporated at least one quotation (either in the ori­gin­al or in translation) drawn from Asian literature, philosophy, scripture, or proverb, or, in some cases, a précis of an Asian work. Furthermore, the frequency of occurrence rises noticeably across the period. The books were consulted in sixteen research libraries in four countries (see Appendix), and represent one hundred individual readers with no professional or other obvious investment in Asia and its languages. Their occupations included priest, grocer, journalist, actress, governess, lawyer, clockmaker, schoolboy and schoolmaster, Southern civil rights worker, an immigrant in the Australian goldfields, and one prime minister.16 The highest proportion of positive returns was in Britain (23 out of 53 books), and by far the most frequently occurring text was the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam (8), followed by the Quran (4). There was a wide range of reading evidenced, with thirty-two Asian sources represented in total, of which Persian and Sanskrit account for a quarter each (not counting the fourteen proverbs for which no def­in­ite source is given, or Arnold’s ubiquitous Light of Asia). Notably, only a single living author was quoted, Rabindranath Tagore. Thirty-nine per cent is a significant proportion, but what of the contents and their arrangement? Stephen Colclough has observed the interesting mixture of quotations one often discovers in Victorian commonplace books. They are revealing of the ‘diversity of reading strategies’ that can be employed by one individual for ‘diverse genres’ of literature, and this ability will have been helpful for students of a niche (or not so niche) area like Asian classics.17 He does not go into the issue, however, of whether readers deliberately assemble texts on the facing pages of their albums for the purpose of comparison—a supposition which it is nearly always impossible to prove, but which it may be useful to bear in mind when examining readers with multilingual interests. Incongruous juxtapositions certainly abound in my sources, but others appear more deliberate, suggesting analogies that note-keepers were drawing between texts far apart in time or place of origin. In the middle of the century the French governess Amélina Petit de Billier (1798–1876) wrote out part of the Spider Surah from ‘Le Koran’, which urges the faithful not to quarrel with their fellow monotheists the Jews and Christians. 16 Books by country were as follows: Britain, 51; Ireland, 18; United States, 11; Australia, 18. Medical or legal commonplace books and suchlike were not included, but only books primarily dedicated to literature. I counted the Talmud as ‘Asian literature’ but not the Bible, unless (as in one instance) a reader was engaging with the Hebrew books in the original. 17  Stephen Colclough, ‘Recovering the Reader: Commonplace Books and Diaries as Sources of Reading Experience’, Publishing History, XLIV (1998), 7, 12.

Reading  199 The Almighty, it reveals, will erase our sectarian differences on the last day and judge us according to our good or ill deeds (‘tous les hommes retournent à Dieu’). In the same spirit of humility, she chose on her journal’s facing page to copy Southey’s ‘Imitated from the Persian’, a paraphrase of a twelfth-century epigram by Suzani Samarqandi in which the poet, ‘a child of dust’, offers to God his nothingness, his sins, and his contrition.18 Petit de Billier was a pious woman who spent most of her life in the household of an English aristocratic family. Of nat­ur­ al­ly quite a different temper from hers were the commonplaces of William O’Brien (1881–1968), Irish labour activist and associate of the Easter rebel, James Connolly. His four books are filled with extracts from Das Kapital and Prince Kropotkin, but also a cutting rebuke (possibly apocryphal) from the Talmud, ‘I labour & you get the pearl’, as well as an oft-quoted hadith, ‘Paradise is under the shadow of swords’. To use a cruder English equivalent, this hadith may be understood as ‘you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs’, and O’Brien has transcribed it twice, in two separate books, on both occasions ascribing the words to ‘Mahomet’. But despite his revolutionary links, O’Brien was a democratic socialist who refused to endorse Connolly’s militancy, and this may be why on both occasions he has also paired the hadith with a quotation from Emerson, which would seem to suggest that its sharpness is not to be taken literally: ‘your goodness must have some edge to it—else it is none.’ Elsewhere in the volumes, a ruba‘i of Omar Khayyam and a ‘Chinese’ saying both allude with some rancour to men who value only worldly riches, and profit through their idleness. But another side-by-side pairing in the fourth book, evidently later in date, is more forbearing. Here we find a passage containing the following: ‘He who knows not, and knows he knows not. He is simple; teach him. He who knows, and knows not he knows. He is asleep; wake him.’ O’Brien has transcribed this ‘Arabic Proverb’ (possibly taken from The Life of Sir Richard Burton, by Lady Burton) alongside a maxim from Montaigne: ‘The ignorance that knows itself, that judges and condemns itself, is not total ignorance.’19 Perhaps there is, then, redemption for the conscientious bourgeois. As Colclough points out, a significant drawback of commonplace books is that they do not provide an index of everything their keepers read, but only the choice ‘beauties’ that they took the trouble to transcribe.20 Autobiographies, likewise, often furnish us with dazzling but piecemeal evidence. Shades of the Prison House is a remarkable memoir by a petty thief, born in 1885, who prior to his criminal career spent many hours in the public library of High Wycombe in Buckinghamshire. At the outset of his cautionary narrative, Stuart Wood remarks: 18  Bodleian: MS. WHF Talbot 123 (Amélina Petit de Billier, commonplace book). The attribution to Suzani is made by Hasan Javadi, Persian Literary Influence on English Literature (1987; repr. Costa Mesa, CA: Mazda, 2005), p. 79. 19  NLI: MSS 15664-7 (commonplace books of William O’Brien). 20  Colclough, ‘Recovering the Reader’, 13.

200  Asian Classics on the Victorian Bookshelf I have read somewhere in the Koran, ‘The fate of every man have we bound about his neck’. That about sums up life for many of us; life is largely what we make it and if we have made a hash of it, it is no use whining or trying to shift the blame upon other shoulders.21

Wood has taken this lesson to heart, and he even reads it aright—Allah, at least according to most interpretations, is proclaiming man’s free will in this passage, not his predestination. Yet it is but a single ayah (verse) among thousands that Wood did not cite, did not perhaps remember, that he may never have even read. Returning to the shortcomings of commonplace books, their contents could tend to represent literature that was borrowed, rather than books—possibly important ones—that were purchased and later annotated, obviating the need for note-taking.22 Indeed, this may account for the comparative rarity of the Arabian Nights in my survey (it appears in just two commonplace books), given its ubiquity in Englishspeaking households. But a separate source of evidence that enables us to see readers interacting with texts that they owned, and usually across the whole breadth of the volume, is marginalia. Marked-up books, sometimes featuring verbal notes, sometimes merely underlining or hand-drawn ‘fists’ directing the reader’s attention to passages of interest, have not found favour with all historians. One major issue is that the annotated books now preserved in archives typically belonged to high-status, ‘erudite’ individuals (or, at the very least, those who could afford books).23 These are volumes that were often bequeathed to an institution on their owner’s death—or, if the library was dispersed, they have been painstakingly recovered by modern collectors (sadly, John Addington Symonds’s auctioned Gulistan has never come to light). But two technological developments have changed this situation. Firstly, by trawling booksellers’ catalogues online it is now a relatively simple task to acquire volumes that have been scribbled in by their Victorian owners; and secondly, digitized census returns and other genealogical tools have made it much easier to trace these ‘ordinary’ individuals. My own collection, AVaTAR, was gathered with these tools, as I hunted books by keyword from wherever they may have ended up in the world, before searching public records and local newspapers for the person who left their autograph on the flyleaf—a satisfying activity I call ‘grassroots bibliography’.24 As with commonplace books, the value of annotated books increases when they are aggregated. If we compare multiple copies of the same text, we may

21  Stuart Wood, Shades of the Prison House: A Personal Memoir (London: Williams & Norgate, 1932), p. 44. The verse quoted is Surah Al-Isra, 17:13, in Sale’s translation. The author’s name is a pseudonym. 22 J.T. Hackett, My Commonplace Book (1916; 4th edn, London: Macmillan, 1923), p. xiv. 23  Anthony Grafton, ‘Is the History of Reading a Marginal Enterprise?’, 140. 24  Andrew Stauffer’s digital database, Book Traces, also attests to the recoverability and value of ‘ordinary’ readers’ marginalia (https://booktraces-public.lib.virginia.edu/).

Reading  201 observe common practices or points of interest, and thus generalizations can be drawn even from books enriched with merely a handful of ‘!’, ‘?’, or some occasional underlining. ‘Negligible in isolation,’ remarks Heather Jackson of the copies she collated of Boswell’s Life of Johnson, ‘they are collectively exciting.’25 Self-described Omarians afford us one of the best examples of just such a ‘marginal’ community. Justin McCarthy, among the most prominent members of this unofficial fraternity in the 1890s, was probably thinking of his own amateur Persian study when he praised the handsome edition of Fitzgerald’s translation brought out by Houghton Mifflin in Boston, ‘charmingly printed on one side of each page only, leaving the other blank, and seeming to invite some adventurous calligraphist to inscribe the Persian text thereon.’26 Wide margins and blank space were evidently valued by Rubaiyat enthusiasts, and I have seen dozens of pencilled copies—some of which do feature hesitant Perso-Arabic jottings. Thirteen of these may be placed in a distinct class, as they feature a unique form of interlinear notation in which the owner has registered alternate wordings of certain quatrains as they were rendered by Khayyam’s various translators. A teenaged Gertrude Stein annotated Fitzgerald’s verse with McCarthy’s prose in her 1890 copy, while the anonymous owner of a copy at the Harry Ransom Centre has supplemented the printed text of Edward Heron-Allen with versions by a littleknown American translator, Eben Francis Thompson. Sometimes a specific purpose can be discerned in this practice. The Shakespearian scholar H.H. Furness bound together Fitzgerald’s 1868 and 1872 versions in order to compare them, adding his own assessment of each variant: ‘better’, ‘much better’, ‘worse, worse’ and, on several occasions, ‘ugh’!27 Moreover, it appears that until late in the century it could still be quite difficult for American readers, in particular, to obtain copies of Fitzgerald’s original 1859 version, forcing them to rely on handwritten paratexts transcribed by themselves or by friends.28 In the case of Winnifred Carruthers, a schoolteacher who mingled variants from all four Fitzgerald editions in her copy using different colours of ink, and who added detailed explanatory notes that she culled from prefaces or periodical articles (including a curious cross-reference to a verse in Exodus), it appears this was simply a way of improving and ornamenting a much-valued book that had been a Christmas gift from her future husband.29 25 Jackson, Marginalia, p. 16. 26 McCarthy, Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, p. xliv. 27  Beinecke: Za St34 Zz890P, Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1890), pp. 79–81; HRC: PK 6511 E5 H4 Copy 1, Edward Heron-Allen, The Ruba’iyat of Omar Khayyām (London: H.S. Nichols, 1898), pp. 118, 237; Bryn Mawr College: PK6513.A1 1868, Edward Fitzgerald, The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám (London: Quaritch, 1868), pp. 7–13. 28  Huntington: FI 1146 (James T. Fields Collection), Nathan Haskell Dole to Annie Adams Fields, 17 Oct. 1895. ‘I have in my hands a copy of the Quaritch [i.e. Fitzgerald] 3rd edition with the first edition written in violet ink and the second in black ink, by Levi Thaxter. But I find quite serious variations in the reprints and in Mr Thaxter’s interlineations.’ 29  AVaTAR Ps.S.5d: Fitzgerald, Rubáiyát, passim.

202  Asian Classics on the Victorian Bookshelf Carruthers also enriched her book by copying out short biographies of Khayyam and Fitzgerald. For many readers, such an effort was unnecessary, because they owned editions in which this information was already supplied— but the marginalia left in these sections of the book can be revealing, as they often show the reader’s interest tilted either towards the man who originally composed the quatrains, or towards the nineteenth-century translator who was sometimes credited with their authorship. Walt Whitman appears to have felt a greater affinity for the former: the densest underlining in his copy clusters in the ­historical introduction, where he seems to have been particularly struck by the news that the Persian poet went unappreciated in his own time and country (his ‘audacity of thought and speech’ causing him to be ‘regarded askance’). From the Fitzgerald camp, meanwhile, comes an intriguing, if ambiguous, comment in the form of what appears to be a four-leafed clover tucked into the final page of the bio­graph­ic­al notes on Fitzgerald. This is to be found in a copy autographed in 1908 by one Kate E. McCan, and might possibly be taken as a token of pride in the accomplishments of Irish genius.30 Other devotees of ‘Fitz’ augmented their volumes with news clippings about the reclusive translator, photographs of his cottage in Suffolk, and poems of reminiscence like Lowell’s ‘In a Copy of Omar Khayyám’, and ‘At Fitzgerald’s Grave’ by Mary O’Reilly. In fact, long-treasured personal copies can be a trove of ephemera connected with the cult of the Rubaiyat.31 The lines, ticks, crosses, and asterisks left at the page margin give a good idea of which parts of the poem were particularly appreciated by readers, though there are no surprises here—they are generally the same quatrains that have remained best-known down to the present day (such as those, in Fitzgerald’s translation, beginning ‘Why, all the Saints and Sages who discuss’d’, and ‘Into this Universe, and Why not knowing’). In many cases, though, popular choices can also be seen to accord with personal preferences. An unusual and exciting copy is a 1909 reprint of Le Gallienne’s version presented by the author himself to Jack London (1876–1916) and his second wife, Charmian (1871–1955). The copy has been used by both owners and is a palimpsest of their annotations, though a comparison with other books from the London homestead enables us to distinguish the diagonal strokes and square brackets of Charmian from the marks left by Jack. Both readers enjoyed the bohemian razzle of Le Gallienne’s rendition, and responded to those qualities in the original that he had fixed upon and exaggerated. Jack repeatedly approved the gestures of defiance to God and heroic vindication of man’s divinity, while Charmian highlighted descriptions of nature, and the 30 HRC: PK 6513 A1 1872, Copy 5, Edward Fitzgerald, Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám (London: Quaritch, 1872), pp. xi–xiii, and PK 6513 A1 1898, Edward Fitzgerald, Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám (2 vols, Boston, MA: L.C. Page, 1898), I, lx. 31  A particularly striking example is Lilly Library, University of Indiana, LMC 1334: a copy formerly owned by the Victorian artist and war correspondent William Simpson.

Reading  203 curious, gender-switching stanzas that Le Gallienne interpolated, on separate pages, between passages of translation. These quatrains, beginning ‘How sad to be a woman’ and ‘Were I a woman’ act as a sort of commentary from the female point of view on the sexual love celebrated in the adjoining pages.32 A handwritten inscription from Le Gallienne refers to Charmian quoting verses from memory to their author, and to Jack originally enjoying the translation a decade earlier during his adventures as a Klondike gold prospector. Therefore, at least one of the couple was certainly familiar with the work already, and possibly the goal of their annotation was to mark favourite passages for one another. Jack has also added at one point his own imitation of a Khayyam quatrain, showcasing another practice common among Omarians. These extensions of the text often take the form of tributes, occasionally lampoons, and sometimes quizzical addresses to the Persian poet with whom so many readers imagined themselves to be in conversation. James Weldon Johnson (1871–1938), the African American activist and National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) leader, bought a ten-cent pamphlet Rubaiyat issued by the Truth-Seeker Company of New York in his late twenties. Johnson has autographed the cover, which features a crude lithograph of the Sphinx, highlighted some two dozen quatrains, and left on the flyleaf the following stanza: Old Omar jolly fellow, it may be, That after all you found the magic key To life and all its mystery, and I Must own you have almost persuaded me.33

Withholding his judgement for the time being, Johnson allows himself to be only ‘almost’ persuaded. Not all devotees of Khayyam looked upon their idol as infallible, but the copy in which they had first read him was an object to retain. Through engagements like these, we can see readers’ responses being shaped by personal inclinations, but expressed within established customs and methods for reading Khayyam. As with other evidence of historical reading, marginalia reflects the fact that much of what we read tends to reinforce rather than challenge our world view.34 Irate exclamation marks and cries of ‘rubbish!’ are exceptions to the norm. This is particularly the case with poetry or imaginative literature, notes Jackson. Her core argument is that readers attain self-definition by grappling with and 32  Huntington: 339668, Richard Le Gallienne, Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám (New York: John Lane, 1909), pp. 55, 69, 46. 33  Beinecke: JWJ Zan J632 Zz898R, Edward Fitzgerald, Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám (New York: Truth-Seeker, 1898). 34  Matthew Bradley and Juliet John, ‘Introduction’, in Bradley and John (eds), Reading and the Victorians (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2015), p. 8.

204  Asian Classics on the Victorian Bookshelf differentiating themselves from the assumptions and world view presented to them on the page, and consequently the majority of her examples are drawn from history, philosophy, and other non-fictional genres.35 But reading translated literature is not the same as reading books produced in a familiar context, and with Asian works the cultural gap was especially pronounced. The high probability that ­readers would discover surprising information, or challenging discrepancies in ethics or aesthetics, and the consequent difficulties they may have experienced in finding corroboration for the former, or analogies to assimilate the latter, are something we must keep continually in mind when tracing their reactions, as are the special practices and strategies that such readers—just as we find with the Omarians—were apt to develop.

Reading Practices Certain readerly practices developed around certain specific texts, like the Rubaiyat, whereas others were applied across the whole of the Victorian Asiatic canon. A common form of marginalia is the explanatory gloss. With readers confronted by so many unfamiliar terms (Ramzan, Muezzin, Dervish, Saki, Alif, Jamshyd, and ‘Parwin and Mushtari’ in place of the Pleiads and Jupiter, to give a few Persian examples), it is unsurprising that many created their own glosses, either with reference to the footnotes and prefatory material already provided in their edition, or by using outside sources. A copy of Romesh Chunder Dutt’s abridged Mahabharata autographed by Californian mathematics professor R.W.  Mantz, but more likely to have been annotated by his daughter Ruth (1896–1978), features both simple facts (Vyasa = ‘author’) and a host of more detailed notes demonstrating knowledge perhaps of other translations, or of related anthropological and archaeological literature. Next to a list of weapons wielded on the field of Kurukshetra—‘Pikes and axes, clubs and maces’—Mantz has written ‘discus, too’. Draupadi’s marriage to all five Pandava brothers is glossed as ‘polyandry’, while another note explains why Arjuna’s decision to ‘violate custom’ by charging the enemy when the sun has already begun to set is permitted, in his case, by a vow he has taken to avenge his son before nightfall. Karna’s sudden recovery from the blow of Yudhishthira’s arrow is ‘unusual’ for the epic, it is noted, while elsewhere the word ‘simile?’ marks a point where the translator has failed to clarify whether fire really flames on Bhima’s forehead, or if this is merely a hyperbolic description of his anger.36

35 Jackson, Marginalia, pp. 42, 77. 36  HRC: PK 3653 A2 D8 1911, Romesh C. Dutt, The Ramayana and the Mahabharata (London and Toronto: J.M.  Dent, 1911), pp. 298, 327, 336, 244. Ruth Mantz was later Katherine Mansfield’s first biographer.

Reading  205 Readers, surprisingly, were seldom mistaken in their glosses, though they were not always confident in their knowledge.37 An American contemporary of Ruth Mantz’s, Elizabeth Wright (1896–1967), read not the Mahabharata but one section of it, the Bhagavad Gita, and was drawn to a passage in the preface that explains how Brahma gave birth to the universe by recognizing his self. ‘When you realize Truth you become all that you are not’, is how she paraphrases this concept. ‘The One becomes the Many: the Many the One.’ But she brackets her note with question marks, as though to ask herself ‘have I formulated this correctly?’ Her provisional glossing may well be a practice particularly habitual to students of Asian poetry and philosophy—even though like the Mantz Mahabharata, it would seem this book was approached with some prior know­ ledge of Hinduism. In Roman transliteration, the Sanskrit ण is rendered as ‘ṇ’. Wright uses it in her spelling of the word ‘atman’, but her spelling is not correct. The ‘n’ in atman is not a retroflex consonant, and in any case the symbol ‘ṇ’ is not used at all in the Temple Classics edition she was annotating. It appears likely therefore that Wright had either made a basic study of Sanskrit, or seen the character printed in a theosophical or perhaps Vedanta Society publication. Readers also imported information or quotation from outside the text in order to ‘illustrate’ it, to use the word in its original meaning. Corporal Palmer’s Rubaiyat is, of course, an outstanding example of this practice, summoning as it does Fun’ya no Yasuhide, Abu’l-Fazl, and Kabir to a pan-Asian summit on loss and tolerance—with Omar Khayyam in the chair, and the remaining seats at the round table occupied by Joaquin Miller and Rudyard Kipling (a less than honest broker, perhaps). The most significant aspect of his method is not that Palmer has behaved so very much like the idealized ‘common reader’ of Virginia Woolf ’s essay, ‘guided by an instinct to create for himself . . . some kind of whole’—for as we can see, so many readers did not arrive at Persian or Japanese literature in this individual, autodidact manner—but that the bulk and nucleus of his whole lies well east of Suez.38 Abdelfatteh Kilito points out that even the most imaginative leaps of comparativism undertaken in the period tended to refer back to Europe. Adam Mez, the great German Arabist, highlighted affinities between the political and religious polemic of al-Jahiz and that of Voltaire, but it would not have occurred to Mez to reverse the equation and compare the Frenchman to the Arab. Voltaire is the point of reference, even though he was born more than nine hundred years later.39 Frequently, the quotations imported and transcribed to ‘illustrate’ Asian texts reproduced this set of cultural priorities, and may be thought of as distinguishing that majority of readers from a remarkable minority, for whom 37 AVaTAR Sk.S.3a: Lionel  D.  Barnett, Bhagavad-Gītā, or the Lord’s Song (London: J.M.  Dent, 1905), pp. 7, 13. Elizabeth Wright, later Hubbard, was a noted New York homeopath. 38 Woolf, Common Reader, p. 11. 39  Abdelfattah Kilito, Thou Shalt Not Speak My Language, trans. Waïl S.  Hassan (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2008), p. 14.

206  Asian Classics on the Victorian Bookshelf the fulcrum of comparison stood outside their zone of familiarity. The former assimilated what they read, and ranked it, at a greater or less remove, from European models. The latter reversed this hierarchy—implicitly in Palmer’s case, explicitly with a reader like A.R. Orage, whose prolonged study of Sanskrit epic was touched on briefly in Chapter 4. Most art, wrote Orage, is derivative. But the Mahabharata is original, ‘a first-hand experience’. ‘[It] is the greatest single effort of literary creation of any culture in human history . . . It contains every literary form and device known to all the literary schools, every story ever enacted or narrated, every human type or circumstance ever created or encountered.’40 To exaggerate their numbers and influence would be bad history, but nonetheless it is to these readers that we may turn today for an example and for a method, as we seek to redress the imbalances wrought by colonial rule and global capitalism. In most of the examples I have recounted, reading has been a private pursuit, whereas in many instances it will have been mediated by unseen interpersonal networks. But the social aspects of reading—and reading itself as a social activity—become visible in other forms of evidence, like the minutes of local book clubs. The XII Book Club was a Quaker group which met at 7 Sidmouth Street, Reading. In 1898, they held an Omar Khayyam evening, which featured not only readings of Fitzgerald’s translation, but also a ‘Song from Omar by Mr Goadby’ (probably he performed Victor Harris’s recent musical setting of the poem). Mrs Smith delivered a paper on the poet’s life in eleventh-century Persia while another participant, Alfred Rawlings, spoke on Le Gallienne’s translation. In March 1917, it was Rawlings again who introduced the club to the pseudo-translations of F.W. Bain. ‘It is impossible for one, not steeped in Indian mythology & with no knowledge of Indian life, to do justice to these extraordinary books’, wrote the secretary. Admittedly, some readers may find them ‘rather overscented’, but ­others ‘will feel that a new star has entered their literary constellation’.41 In Chapter 2, we were briefly introduced to the remarkable Ladies’ Reading Club of Houston, who were first drawn to the East by tidings of General Gordon’s demise at Khartoum. Meeting fortnightly from October to May, they concentrated on one country per year, progressing from Egypt in 1885–6 to Japan in 1896–7, and taking in Japan again—along with China—in 1904. This seems to have coincided with an Asian vogue within the club, for they devoted the following year to ‘Oriental Literature’ in general, reading or listening to lectures on texts as diverse as the Upanishads, the Vedic hymns, the Hitopadesha, the Zend Avesta, Hafez and Sadi, the Quran, the Romance of Antar, the Tale of Genji, Japanese ghost stories reworked by Lafcadio Hearn, and the Egyptian Book of the Dead. They also made use of

40 A.R. Orage, The Art of Reading (New York: Farrer & Rinehart, 1930), p. 335. 41  XII Book Club Minute Book, I, 30 and II, 26–7. Accessed through the Reading Experience database: https://www.open.ac.uk/Arts/reading/UK/record_details.php?id=27095 (accessed 27 ­ Aug. 2020).

Reading  207 anthologies like Alger’s Poetry of the Orient, Warner’s Library of the World’s Best Literature, and The Universal Anthology. Of particular note is the chronological approach they adopted with each country, coming right down to the present day. Thus, rather than relegating Asia to the past, in the customary ‘orientalist’ fashion, they discussed modern education in Japan, and even some nineteenth-century authors like the Bengali poet Toru Dutt. The club yearbook for 1905–6 bears this charming motto on its title page: ‘To learn,’ said Confucius, ‘and then to practice opportunely what one has learned—does not this bring with it a sense of satisfaction? To have associates in study coming to one from distant parts—does not this mean also pleasure in store?’42

The Houston Ladies represented the cream of Texas society, but theirs was a lowkey gathering compared to groups like the Philobiblon Society founded by Lord Houghton, the Grolier Club in New York, or the Odd Volumes of London—who in 1884 hosted a night of Chinese scrolls and calligraphy attended by Bernard Quaritch, Herbert Giles, and the Chargé d’Affaires from the Qing legation.43 These exclusive coteries prided themselves on acquiring the most expensive and erudite oriental publications, and certainly helped shape elite tastes. But ul­tim­ ate­ly of much wider significance were the local clubs, few records of which survive, but whose stamps one will sometimes come across in the popular translations and cheap editions they favoured. The same ‘Sir John Lubbock’s Hundred Books’ edition of Confucius that I found at the Working Men’s College came into my hands again a little later, a refugee from the Swan Hill Literary Society’s lending library in Shrewsbury.44 Some books are purchased, some borrowed, some inherited, and many are given—though not always read. The practice of presenting and inscribing is especially relevant to the dissemination of translated literature, since the object is often to share with someone the novelty and rarity of a foreign text, to show off one’s own erudition, or to induct the beneficiary into a select community of ­aficionados. Moreover, the desire to ‘improve’ someone—often a child—with a worthy tome fastened upon Asian literature in this period as readily as it did upon Greeks, Romans, and the English classics. In some cases, the giver was an Asian reader introducing a Western friend or colleague to ‘their’ literature. Alfred Lambert Thompson, a bank employee in colonial Hong Kong, received a 42  Houston Metropolitan Research Centre: RG.E.0026 (Ladies’ Reading Club Collection), Box 7, Volume 1, Yearbook 1905–6. 43 Bodleian: MSS Eng.misc.f.566/5 (Bernard Quaritch Papers), Ye Seconde Boke of Ye Odd Volumes, p. 52. 44 AVaTAR Ch.S.1b: William Jennings, The Confucian Analects (London and New York: Routledge, 1895).

208  Asian Classics on the Victorian Bookshelf copy of the Chushingura inscribed ‘from / His friend / Mr Percy Chu / of / The Chekiang Industrial Bank’—significantly, this was not the English version of Dickins or Mitford, but a new one produced by Japanese translators in 1911.45 Other books have been gifted and re-gifted. Willoughby Connor (1855–1938), a merchant in Hobart, Tasmania and president for thirty years of the local Metaphysical Society, inscribed a copy of Tagore’s One Hundred Poems of Kabir in 1917 to a fellow Freemason, William  M.  Gibson. Thirty-six years later, Gibson passed it on to another mason, Basil Rees of Adelaide. The gift was enriched with annotations highlighting the deist and ecumenical ethos of the fifteenth-century Hindi poet. ‘God is not confined / God is omnipresent’, ‘The Kingdom of heaven is within’, ‘In God I live move and have my being’, as well as an acerbic note about ‘Modern Christianity’ are among almost thirty theological glosses inserted by at least two masonic hands.46 Another AVaTAR book, a copy of the Hitopadesha, has been through four libraries: a note by the genre painter John Seymour Lucas indicates that it was a gift from Princess Louise, fourth daughter of Queen Victoria. She had been presented with it by the barrister Herbert Ormerod (1831–1911), who had originally received it from the translator himself, Edwin Arnold, in June 1861. ‘Let the light treble of my Indian lute / Break Sorrow’s monotone’, wrote Arnold in some dedicatory verses to Ormerod, who had lost his wife Sarah in April.47 Books like this are not just tokens of affection but communicators of affect, and have supported not just one friendship but a chain of affiliation. As for the Rubaiyat, it was not only one of the most-read poems of the nineteenth century, but undoubtedly one of the most gifted. It was presented at birthdays, bar-mitzvahs, graduations, and anniversaries. Justin McCarthy, as we have already seen, was inspired to produce his translation after Mary A.F. Robinson lent him her copy, and the diligent annotator Winnifred Carruthers received hers from her future husband, Ernest John Chave. That book bears the half-torn stamp of a shop in Vancouver, where Chave spent six years in the Baptist ministry, and from where he presumably posted the book back to the couple’s home district in Ontario (it contains both a Christmas gift inscription on the flyleaf, dated 1913, and a subsequent greetings card pressed between its pages, ‘Thinking of You this Easter’).48 By this point in time, hundreds if not thousands of initiates were passing on the torch of Omar every year—indeed, Corporal Palmer’s pocket copy is printed with a series advertisement, recommending it as something ‘to send to a Friend’ for ‘Birthday, Christmas, or other gift’, which suggests the interesting possibility that he could have assembled his Eastern illustrations for someone else. By doing so he would, like his fellow Australians Connor and Gibson, or like Jack 45  HRC: PL 794.6 K3 E5 1911, Takeda Izumo, Miyoshi Shoraku and Namiki Senryu, Chushingura: or the Treasury of Loyal Retainers (Tokyo: Nakanishi-ya, 1911). 46  AVaTAR Hi.S.1a: Tagore, Kabir’s Poems, pp. 1, 3, 51, 69. 47  AVaTAR Sk.S.13a: Edwin Arnold, The Book of Good Counsels (London: Smith, Elder, 1861), p. i. 48  AVaTAR Ps.S.5d, tipped-in card.

Reading  209 and Charmian London, have been participating in a custom that had been widely established since at least the eighteenth century—if only among elite readers. In Leah Price’s words, ‘common appreciation of literary texts had long been im­agined as a social cement’, and reading mediated by a forerunner’s annotations was a practice central to the flourishing of literary communities. On the other hand, it is also easy enough to find instances where readers have taken up the eraser, purging a volume of its prehistory and carving out space in its margins for their own interpretation.49 By no means would all these people have been receptive of their gifts, and a fallacy risked by historians of reading is to inadvertently contrive a methodology that functions to produce only the ‘transformational and celebratory narratives’ they hope to uncover. Contemporary researchers who interview living readers and book club members have become wary of the tendency, highlighted by Fuller and Sedo, to start with the assumption that reading is good for people, and is one of the best possible ways in which their subjects could be spending their leisure hours. Instead, many such surveys yield reactions of boredom and frustration at least as much as pleasure.50 This does not diminish the epiphanies afforded to some—in fact, the two phenomena are related, for several of the experiences that will be described in the next subsection came about through readers’ resistance to the text. Indeed, sometimes this friction resulted in readers superseding the literary apparatus with which they had been equipped—which might even be taken to signal the popularizer’s ultimate victory. But often enough the outcome was merely annoyance and disgust, and popularizers who would have their readers understand and sympathise with foreign cultures, like the Wisdom of the East ­editors, sometimes achieved the opposite of success. The translation of Sadi they issued in 1906 was acquired in that year by James Gemmell Knight Jnr., a Liverpool commercial printer who, bridling at a misogynistic maxim, interjected precisely the kind of overt contradiction that Heather Jackson finds normally absent in volumes of poetry and fiction: ‘? / WRONG! Here evidently thinking of his own wives’. Knight adds ‘cf introduction’, in reference to a corroborating passage he had marked earlier.51 Urging readers to be tolerant may thus in some cases have only reinforced their prejudices. The Light of Asia was one of the most popular poems of the latter nineteenth century, and of the five copies I have collected most contain appreciative marginal notes and memoranda. Except one, purchased possibly by a ­holiday-maker at J.H.B. Arrowsmith’s shop on the island of Jersey, whose sticker it bears, and which yields instead a harvest of cross-grained and irritable commentary. 49 Price, How to Do Things with Books, p. 259. 50 Danielle Fuller and DeNel Rehberg Sedo, ‘ “Boring, Frustrating, Impossible”: Tracing the Negative Affects of Reading from Interviews to Story Circles’, Participations: Journal of Audience & Reception Studies, XVI/1 (2019), 625–6. 51 AVaTAR Ws.S.5a: Arthur  N.  Wollaston, Sadi’s Scroll of Wisdom (London: John Murray, 1906), p. 53.

210  Asian Classics on the Victorian Bookshelf The anonymous reader was evidently a Christian who worked their way through the poem with mounting alarm at its cultural relativism. With increasing frequency, a scornful pen jumps upon implied analogies between Buddhism and Christianity, or suspected apologies for backward Indian practices like sati. A sarcastic reference is made to Bishop Colenso, who ‘went out to convert the Kaffirs’ and was instead ‘converted by them’. In fairness to the reader, though, the Buddhist doctrine of renunciation, and the ultimate submersion of one’s self in the whole, is not a message that always consoles, and one cannot help but laugh aloud to arrive at the final page and find Edwin Arnold’s serene gospel turned on its head in a facetious handwritten spoof: To Buddha and his friends of ‘yellow robe’,   With ‘Noble Eightfold Path’ out of the Fall, We say, like poor afflicted patient Job,   ‘Miserable comforters are ye all.’52

The enlarged perspective I have tried to give on Victorian literary habits embraces a diverse host of texts and knowledge-seekers, but it cannot be complete without the uneasy readers who remained unconvinced. One last habit which we cannot afford to ignore is the practice of not reading. An article appeared in the Edinburgh Review in 1881 comparing the existing translations of the Quran by Sale, Rodwell, and Palmer. But the reviewer complains of the tedious way in which everybody one meets nowadays seems to have an opinion on Muslim scripture, yet hardly anyone has actually read it. Length is ‘no excuse’ for not giving one’s time to the Quran, we are told, which is shorter than the Sunday edition of the New York Herald!53 Yet even the opinionated ig­nor­ance of polite Edinburgh society cannot be so readily discounted, for their pretence demonstrates the growing volume of conversation about Islam. Moreover, even those who purchased copies of the Quran (like the lawyer William J. Curtis in Chapter 4) and left the pages uncut, were buying into a notion of liberal education that included other religions, and if it remained untouched, it nonetheless bestowed cultural capital on the person who could display it on their bookshelf. In this respect, books functioned much like the jewellery and brassware that Rudyard Kipling rather sneeringly imagined a punter taking home from the Indo-Colonial Exhibition of 1886. ‘The exhibits, he will say, are quaint. Very curious indeed. He must get some little Indian things for his drawing room. Everybody will get “little Indian things” for their drawing rooms.’ The resulting mantelpiece would testify both to the relentless commodification of colonial 52  AVaTAR Misc.S.7a: Edwin Arnold, The Light of Asia (London: Trübner, 1886), pp. 135, 157, 188, 208, 211, 240. 53  ‘The Korān’, Edinburgh Review, CLIV/316 (Oct. 1881), 356–7.

Reading  211 artefacts, and yet also to the Victorian desire for cultural alternatives, for even Kipling cannot overlook the fact that exhibition-goers are seeking knowledge as well as knick-knacks: ‘He will attend several lectures, because India is the fashion; and he desires, moreover, to pronounce those queer names correctly.’54 As with Kipling’s irritation at Justin McCarthy and his ‘cheap orientalism’, there is indignation here at the compression of a rich culture into the ephemera of a popular urban spec­tacle. But there is also denial that worthwhile engagement with India could come about through the agency of anyone but a qualified mediator like himself. Surely the attempt to learn the correct pronunciation of those ‘queer names’ signified some commitment to truth, in place of hearsay and stereotype?

Reading Experiences Readers can be mentally liberated by their literary explorations, like J.A. Symonds or the members of the XII Book Club. We have seen how the translated text may also constrain their thinking, as can the physical and social circumstances of reading, and the habituated practices that have grown up around a given text. Earlier, I outlined a second dichotomy, between a majority who found Asian texts a valuable but subsidiary department of literature, ultimately reducible to European ways of knowing, and those like A.R. Orage for whom they triggered— or offered an opportunity for—the wholesale inversion of cultural hierarchy. Carl T. Jackson originally drew this distinction thirty-five years ago, in a study of the influence of Asian philosophy and religion upon American thought. All the thinkers he examined were receptive to the texts in question, but he differentiated between readers who demonstrated ‘interest and qualified appreciation (usually of those elements most similar to one’s own ideas)’, and those who were willing to allow what they read to challenge their pre-existing outlook, displaying ‘acceptance and even assimilation of parts of the Asian traditions’.55 The experiences described in this section may be considered in relation to these two dynamics— liberty versus constraint, and what I term accommodation of cultural difference versus the revolution of one’s outlook by an encounter with alterity. To bring these dynamics into sharper focus, it is helpful to train our lens on readers who developed a meaningful relationship with a text that for them ­signified a kind of freedom—sexual freedom, political freedom, and lastly, for soldiers of the Great War and the loved ones they left behind, liberation from fear and grief. What makes these experiences particularly interesting, though it

54 Rudyard Kipling, ‘The Opening of the Indo-Colonial Exhibition’, Civil & Military Gazette (Lahore), 6 May 1886. Reprinted in Kipling Journal 373 (May 2018), 57. 55 Carl  T.  Jackson, ‘The Influence of Asia Upon American Thought: A Bibliographical Essay’, American Studies International XXII/1 (1984), 9–10.

212  Asian Classics on the Victorian Bookshelf complicates our understanding of them, is that there is no necessary correlation between the emancipation of the reader and the release of the text from ­subordination to European systems of thought. William O’Brien and A.R. Orage both advocated radical politics, but in the former’s commonplace books Asia tends to supply the clear-cut, gemlike maxim or aphorism which is tempered or m ­ oderated by the Western coeval (Montaigne, Emerson) with whom it is juxtaposed. For Orage, meanwhile, the greatness of the Mahabharata threw into relief the relative failure of modern European culture, and the need for wholesale renewal. As he gradually turned away from conventional socialist politics after the First World War, dividing his attention between the emerging social credit movement and the mystic philosophy of George Gurdjieff, he complained that the West had ceased to pursue ‘impossible aims’, and that the best way to recover this impetus was through engagement with Sanskrit literature.56 For O’Brien, hadiths, the Talmud, Omar Khayyam, and sermons of the Buddha paraphrased in The Light of Asia were all accommodated to a cultural conversation in which the discursive agenda was set by the West. For Orage, the radically different world view apparent in Hindu epic overturned inherited modes of thought, and enabled a new kind of politics. For some, this will no doubt beg the question of whether Asian literature merely acted as a spur to activism and reform, or if political actors actually took guidance in statecraft and governance from Asian political philosophy. To that question I would answer: yes, as the example of S.B. Terry showed in Chapter  4, though to give more examples now would lead us away from our present focus.57 Throughout the second half of the nineteenth century, non-Western literature supplied an imaginative frame, and an alternative vocabulary, in which female readers could visualize and articulate their aspirations. In some cases, it even supplied a corrective to the limitations of a wholly European library. During the childhood of Barbara Bodichon, later a women’s rights activist and member of the  Langham Place group, the Arabian Nights offered role-models that few English texts would have: That story of Perizade, the Princess who did not mind the black stones when she was bent on getting the living water, the talking bird and the singing tree, has made an impression on my whole life. Wasn’t I glad she got to the top of the hill! Wasn’t I glad she could do it though her brothers failed!58

56  Paul Beekman Taylor, Gurdjieff and Orage: Brothers in Elysium (York Beach, ME: Weiser Books, 2001), p. 97. 57  See https://avatar-books.com/ for details of AVaTAR Ps.S.5c: a translation of the ‘Salāmān and Absāl’ episode from Jami’s Haft Awrang, which was kept and annotated by the Radical statesman John Bright during the Irish Land War. 58  Hester Burton, Barbara Bodichon 1827–1891 (London: John Murray, 1949), p. 8.

Reading  213 For Kate Flint, in her study of Victorian women’s reading, this passage demonstrates that ‘if direct feminist writing could be an inspiration, so, too, could myth.’59 But only, it must be said, when it is organized and treated as myth. Bodichon had the benefit of a family friend, a Swedenborgian, who read the stories to her and explained their meaning, regarding them as ‘parables’ in the same sense as the biblical stories he also told her. The text in this anecdote is undergoing a complex transformation: already projected into the English nursery as children’s literature, by virtue of the fancy and amusement it offered (and not for the social and moral lessons it encodes), it was now being given the deep and serious attention it deserved—but only through collation with the teachings of Jesus. What is certain, however, is that through their mediation for women, or in­ter­pret­ation by women, texts could become unmoored from male-imperial traditions of reading and restored to something closer to their valencies in the source culture. We can see this process unfolding with a female reader of Tagore’s translations of the lyrics of Kabir: the American poet Alice Corbin Henderson (1881–1949), who read the slim volume at Lake Bluff, north of Chicago, in 1915 or 1916. The extensive marks that Henderson left in her copy demonstrate a very different attitude to the authorial personality from what we see with male readers whose notions had been shaped by ‘A Song of Kabir’ and related works by Kipling. The Kabir that Corporal Palmer knew, for instance, was evidently the poet of Kipling’s imagination, a wandering beggar-minstrel who gave up settled comfort for the life of the bairagi or mendicant: Now the white road to Delhi is mat for his feet. The sal and the kikar must guard him from heat. His home is the camp, and the waste, and the crowd— He is seeking the Way as bairagi avowed!60

The ideal of the footloose pilgrim who can roam freely across the hidden boundary-lines of Indian society was a figure deeply rooted in Kipling’s imperial fantasy, and his ‘Kabiresque’ poems in this vein did rather more than Tagore, perhaps, to shape Western perceptions of the Hindi poet at the turn of the century (so much so, perhaps, that Tagore’s original title One Hundred Poems of Kabir was changed for its American reprint to Songs of Kabir). Henderson’s fellow-writer in 1910s Chicago, Edgar Lee Masters, owned a copy of the very same Macmillan edition as her, which arrived with a gift inscription that makes joking reference to one of his own poems, while simultaneously evoking his Indian forebear: ‘To wish “Fiddler Jones” some happy tramping days / M.B.N.’ But in the meantime, 59 Flint, The Woman Reader, p. 235. 60  Thomas Pinney (ed.), The Cambridge Edition of the Poems of Rudyard Kipling (3 vols, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013), p. 684.

214  Asian Classics on the Victorian Bookshelf having attended closely to the volume’s introduction—written by Tagore’s female collaborator Evelyn Underhill—his contemporary Henderson was repeatedly underlining sections emphasizing that the vagabond Kabir never existed. According to most historical sources, Underhill points out, Kabir was a weaver and a t­ ownsman, who supported a wife and children, and ‘never adopted the life of the professional ascetic’ (even though ‘Hindu legends of the monastic type’ seek to conceal this). It may well ‘contradict’, she admits, ‘many current ideas concerning [him]’, but to deny this would have flown in the face of his own teachings, for Kabir pours scorn on the professional yogi, ‘extols the life of home’, and celebrates ‘the value and reality of diurnal existence’. His bhakti or devotional poetry was intended for the householder, not the monk. The result of this interaction between female editor and female reader was that Kabir was restored to his proper context, while Henderson, perhaps, gained a different instrument with which to think through the dilemmas of being a married woman, a mother, and a poet.61 To explore the two dichotomies through one final ‘community’ of examples, the First World War affords many dramatic instances of reading intersecting with everyday lived experience—both at the Front and at home—in which the reading experience offered a liberation from fear and sorrow. The war is important for other reasons. It intensified the evolving phenomena of globalization relevant to our topic: that is, the distribution of men and women around the imperial network and their introduction to Asian cultures, the mass printing of cheap reading matter and portable classics, the sense of the inadequacy of contemporary Western culture to address the crises of modernity—indeed, for some a sense of its utter bankruptcy—and a consequent reaching out for alternative world views. It also coincided with a threshold beyond which the old modes of Victorian popu­lar­iza­tion began to give way to new ones. More generally, a vast quantity of literature was consumed during the long periods of tedium endured by most ­people during the war, and much research has already been done not only to illuminate this generation-defining moment of reading, but also to dispel some of the myth and hearsay surrounding it. In a recent essay, Edmund King confronts the claim, often made but seldom substantiated, that the Rubaiyat was ubiquitous among men at the Front.62 One of the earliest appearances of this melancholy and picturesque image is in a lecture delivered to the Sheffield Literary Club in 1933, during which Dr  W.A.  Kirkby claimed that, barring the Bible, ‘no book was so widely read by our soldiers in the trenches as Omar Khayyam’.63 Taken literally, this cannot be true. All the evidence suggests that the most avidly consumed texts 61  HRC: PK 2095 K3 E5 1915 MAS, Rabindranath Tagore, Songs of Kabir (New York: Macmillan, 1915), p. iii; and PK 2095 K3 E5 HND, Rabindranath Tagore, Songs of Kabir (New York: Macmillan, 1915), pp. 12–14, 46, 91 (italics mine). 62  The claim is made, for example, in Alan Wilkinson, The Church of England and the First World War (Cambridge: Lutterworth Press, 2014), p. 162. More recently it was repeated in Episode 2 of the BBC documentary The Art of Persia (2020). 63  ‘What Soldiers Read’, Daily Independent (Sheffield), 27 Oct. 1933, p. 7.

Reading  215 among troops were periodicals and cheap novels. The Rubaiyat may well have been one of the most widely-read poems, but even so, King argues, claims like Kirkby’s owe less to fact than to various ideological motives for celebrating the ‘soldier-reader’. These included the need of those who managed military library services to attract patronage and book donations, and the propaganda drive to portray British Tommies as cultured and humane in contrast to their brutal adversary, ‘the Hun’. As it happened, Kirkby’s bluff was called two days later in the pages of the Sheffield Daily Independent, by an army veteran who ‘did not at any time see a copy of Omar Khayyam being read by a soldier’ between September 1914 and March 1919 (the only Bibles, he added, were those he saw the chaplains holding during Sunday service).64 Kirkby’s account certainly has a ‘mythic’ quality, but the fact that the Rubaiyat could play this ideological role—alongside Shakespeare, Carlyle, and Thomas Hardy—bears eloquent testimony to the level of prestige it had accrued by this point in time. Nor should we doubt the poem’s dedicated following. Corporal Palmer’s rain-damaged copy bespeaks the poem’s significance for him, as do the annotations in another soldier’s Rubaiyat, that of M.J.  Jones of the 19th Rifle Brigade, now held by the Harry Ransom Centre.65 But King’s findings should alert us to the fact that not all soldier-readers would have studied it in the spirit of earnest and stoic melancholy that their champions on the home front seem to have desired from them. The experiences preserved in Private David Jude’s scrapbook in the State Library of Victoria are of jollity and camaraderie: here he has assembled photographs of fellow-soldiers and officers, and of the historical sights of Egypt where he was stationed between late 1914 and early 1915. There is soldiers’ doggerel copied out in Jude’s hand, and some sentimental poems cut from magazines (‘Patchwork Quilt’ by Valerie B. Evenden, ‘When One Lamp Burns’, by Jane Anthony). Here and there other men have added their autographs and contributions, including, on one page, an idyllic photograph of sunset on the Nile, with a grove of palm trees reflected in the water, and below it these lines evidently transcribed from memory: A Book of Verses underneath the Bough A Loaf of Bread a Jug of Wine & Thou Beside me: singing in the Wilderness Oh Wilderness were Paradise enow G.E. Surman / Cardigan / Ballarat / 28-2-15.66 64  Edmund G.C. King, ‘From Common Reader to Canon: Memorialising the Shakespeare-Reading British Soldier during the First World War’, in Edmund G.C. King and Monika Smialkowska (eds), Memorialising Shakespeare: Commemoration and Collective Identity, 1916–2016 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022), p. 49. 65  HRC: PK 6513 A1 1910z MIN, Edward Fitzgerald, The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam (publisher unknown). 66  SLV: MS 11238 (Private D.H. Jude, Scrapbook of poems, postcards, and photographs, 1914–1915).

216  Asian Classics on the Victorian Bookshelf For Jude and his friends, the Rubaiyat was redolent of their leisure time, a token in their communal exchange and rituals of memorialization, and a source of humour. It may also have encoded a particular intimacy with Surman, a fellowrecruit from his home district but eleven years his senior, and possibly the man who brought the scrapbook back to Australia. Shortly after this was written, Jude’s battalion embarked for Gallipoli, where he was killed in early May. Both items just mentioned point to Egypt as an important nexus, at which military strategy and the international movement of troops precipitated in­di­vid­ uals into new cultural and literary contexts. M.J. Jones bought his Rubaiyat (like Palmer’s, a miniature edition) from the bookseller Kassem Meawad of Cairo for five piastres, and the absence of any publisher’s imprint in the tiny volume suggests it may also have been printed in Egypt. Jude’s experience was common to ANZAC troops, the majority of whom passed through the Suez Canal en route to the European theatres of war. Many spent months awaiting deployment from Egypt, prompting the Australian Comforts Fund to enclose Arabic dictionaries in the packages they prepared for outbound soldiers.67 One such was the infantryman Thomas Clair Whiteside, who made use of the YMCA’s library at Zeitoun Camp near Cairo, and in February 1916 heard there a lecture given on Islam by an American missionary. Shortly afterwards he sent two copies of the Quran back to his father, a Presbyterian minister, which he must have purchased locally: ‘Have just finished reading the Koran and will post it to you. Remember you stating that the Mohammedans accepted a great deal of the Old Testament. Found it interesting reading.’ Intrigued by this doctrinal affinity, Whiteside begins to close the gap between himself and the Egyptians he observes around him. ‘Their treatment of women can well be understood when reading the laws set down by their guide and authority’, he goes on to remark, however, inserting them once more into an implied hierarchy of advanced and backward nations.68 An altogether bigoted response to Egypt appears in the letters of another Australian, for whom ‘oriental’ literature became paradoxically a refuge from oriental life. A prosperous farmer from Claremont near Perth, Donald Drummond Clarkson exhibited bookish tendencies from a young age and owned several volumes by the Anglo-Indian poet Laurence Hope. He also enjoyed an anthology of aphorisms and wise sayings given to him one Christmas, A Little Book of Eastern Wisdom (1910). One such familiar epigram came to mind as he strove to reconcile a naturally ‘strong feeling which draws me toward religion’ with the tepid Christianity proffered to him in barracks.

67  Amanda Laugesen, ‘Boredom is the Enemy’: The Intellectual and Imaginative Lives of Australian Soldiers in the Great War and Beyond (Abingdon: Routledge, 2012), p. 146. 68 Elizabeth Whiteside (ed.), A Valley in France: First World War Letters (privately printed: Beaconsfield, Victoria, 1999), pp. 15–17.

Reading  217 All the sermons we hear here are the same old thing and one cannot learn anything from them. As old Omar says you can go and hear them talk: About it and about; but evermore / Came out by the same door as in I went.69

The strength of his youthful enthusiasm was equalled by the strength of his revulsion from Egypt. ‘I have often read of the romance of the Orient’, he wrote to his wife Helen, ‘but have altered my opinions considerably and am satisfied we never know until we come to some of these places the glorious heritage that was given us when we were born white.’70 Clarkson died in France in October 1918, and the books he had treasured as a young man were preserved by his family. Within wartime Britain, the prevailing tone of patriotism and sacrifice imposed its own constraints on readers, and some sought in foreign literature a way of evading or inverting such patterns of thought. As the conflict dragged on, Roger Fry began printing books at the Omega Workshops to promote pacifism, and Grace Brockington reveals that one of these was Arthur Waley’s A Hundred and Seventy Chinese Poems.71 Fry was alarmed by the bloodthirsty and militaristic language he heard around him, incited by an ‘ignoble’ newspaper industry, ‘so irrational that it has become a real danger’. As he wrote to the French playwright Charles Vildrac, ‘I can foresee the growth of a barbarism welcomed by the ­people—there has always been a tendency to reject the things of the spirit here and now it seems people are glad to get rid of them altogether. I’ve written to Waley asking him to send you his Chinese poems. I am sure you will find them altogether admirable.’ Fry did not regard Waley’s lyrics as mere curiosities, but as embodiments of values diametrically opposed to those he sensed were uppermost in contemporary Britain: ‘those old Chinese bureaucrats of the Han and T’ang period were truly civilized. They would be denounced today as sentimental humanitarians.’72 Paper shortages and other obstacles prevented Fry publishing the translations, but when they eventually came out with Constable in 1918, one appreciative reader was Siegfried Sassoon, who was by now thoroughly disenchanted with the war. Sassoon filled two commonplace books from this time with extracts on fighting and rehabilitation, among them three poems rendered by Waley from the Shijing. The warriors are all dead: they lie on the moor-field, They issued but shall not enter: they went but shall not return.

69  Gresley Clarkson (ed.), A Very Man, His Last Journey: The Wartime Letters and Poems of Donald Drummond Clarkson, 1880–1918 (Bassendean, WA: Access Press, 2005), pp. 2, 43. 70  Ibid., p. 28. 71 Grace Brockington, ‘Translating Peace: Pacifist Publishing and the Transmission of Foreign Texts’, in Mary Hammond and Shafquat Towheed (eds), Publishing in the First World War: Essays in Book History (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), p. 52. 72  Sutton (ed.), Letters of Roger Fry, II, 418 (to Rose Vildrac, 8 Nov. 1917).

218  Asian Classics on the Victorian Bookshelf The plains are flat & wide: the way home is long. Their swords lie beside them: their black bows in their hand. Though their limbs were torn, their hearts could not be repressed. They were more than brave: they were inspired with the spirit of Wu. Steadfast to the end, they could not be daunted. Their bodies were stricken, but their souls have taken Immortality— Captains among the ghosts, heroes among the dead. (Chinese. 332–295 B.C.)73

This ode shares its page with ‘How still this quiet corn-field is tonight’ by John Masefield, a poem about a stretch of country that may once have been a battlefield. On the facing page Sassoon has transcribed a passage on ‘The Military Life’ from Tolstoy’s Resurrection, and on the other side of the leaf is an extract from ‘Taoping’, a Chinese-themed poem by James Elroy Flecker, also about battle. The densely packed album shows Sassoon searching multiple literatures and languages for just idioms to express what he had seen and experienced, a phenomenon that can be witnessed in the notebooks of various wartime writers.74 The need for an intellectual, or spiritual, alternative was felt most keenly perhaps by the young men waiting to be called up, like seventeen-year-old Christmas Humphreys who was preparing for the Sandhurst entrance exam in 1918, when he bought Ananda Coomaraswamy’s Gospel of Buddhism from a shop in Great Russell Street. Humphreys, who went on to a career at the Bar, remembered that he was actually making pencil notes on the flyleaf of this book when news suddenly arrived of the Armistice.75 And at about the same time, perhaps the very same day, two shillings were handed over in return for what is undoubtedly the most remarkable wartime testament to have come into my hands—a sort of bre­vi­ary and doctrinal vademecum issued in the Wisdom of the East series in  1906, titled The Way of the Buddha. It is autographed by its former owner Duncan L. Tovey, dated August 1918, to which was later added the name-sticker of his daughter Diana. As I discovered with the aid of a family history website, Duncan Lorimer Pattison Tovey was born at Worplesdon in Surrey in July 1903. He was, therefore, just a little over fifteen years old when he purchased, or was given, this book, and that event followed just three months after his father, ‘­broken in the war’, had passed away at their Worplesdon home.76 In the Buddha’s first sermon (given in Pali), the words dukk‘â, dukk‘asamujadam and dukk‘anirôd‘am 73  CUL: MS Add.9852/4/2 (commonplace book of Siegfried Sassoon). 74  See, for example, HRC: MS-2412 (Richard Le Gallienne Collection), 2.2, a notebook of 1919 containing extracts from Arabic, Sanskrit, and ancient Egyptian. 75  Christmas Humphreys, Both Sides of the Circle (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1978), p. 32. 76  ‘Duncan Tovey’, London Scottish Regimental Gazette (June 1918), p. 90. For further details, see https://www.toveytree.co.uk/.

Reading  219

Figure 7.1  Way of the Buddha (1906) annotated by Duncan Lorimer Tovey (author photograph)

are marked and glossed as ‘suffering’, ‘cause of suffering’, and ‘cessation of suffering’. Tucked into the endpapers is a ragged picture of Avalokitesvara, and a piece of paper bearing the words टास चरणयो ताथस्य (Figure 7.1).77 There is even a sharp comment in the introduction where the editor, Herbert Baynes, suggested the Buddha abjured prayer: that only applies, Tovey wrote, to ‘prayer as we understand it’. But in spite of what has survived of Duncan Tovey’s reading, ul­tim­ate­ly whatever solace or wisdom he may have gained from this small book will, very probably, never be known to another person.78

Reader Versus Translator The historiography of reading has, to date, traversed but little of the vast territory occupied by foreign literature in English. This is understandable—evidence can be hard to come by, and literary studies still largely cleave to the various national 77  This may be a corruption of a quotation from the Sanskrit Gaṇḍavyūhasūtra, meaning ‘having bowed to the feet of the Buddha’. Thanks to Camillo Formigatti for this suggestion. 78 AVaTAR Ws.S.6a: Herbert Baynes, The Way of the Buddha (London: John Murray, 1906), pp. 16, 97.

220  Asian Classics on the Victorian Bookshelf canons—and yet it is also surprising, because much of the marginalia we value arises from frustration and dissent. And nothing frustrates like translation. The particular form of dissatisfaction it engenders stems from the reader’s inability to extract what he or she desires from the text. Some misprision, some obscurity or complexity (remembering, always, that the failure to render the foreign transparent is not necessarily a bad thing), or occasionally some deliberate omission or refashioning, intervenes and baffles the conjunction of the textual experience with the reader’s own background, interests, or anxieties that is necessary to create a memorable impression. The reader, sensing that the text holds something of use to her but unable to fully see or grasp it, is torn: does she discard the text (deciding, perhaps, in her disgust, that all such Sanskrit or all such Chinese literature is tedious and puerile), or does she blame the mediator? In a celebrated passage in his essay ‘Reading as Poaching’, Michel de Certeau compares authors to landholders and readers to travellers. The former have built up their great estates, their fields, wells, and granaries, which they expect the latter to inhabit as tenantcultivators, ‘working on the soil of language’ and eating the grain of the pro­pri­ etor. In real-world terms, readers are to be passive consumers whose choices are made for them by the Church, educators, literati or, in the modern world, by publishing and media conglomerates. But what if the peasants refuse their cultural labour, and stroll off with a bundle of stolen victuals, ‘like nomads poaching their way across fields they did not write’?79 In this parable, the translator, too, would be a kind of builder—a road-builder, who lays the turnpike across lands he does not own, but levies a toll to bring another’s goods to market. Cross-country readers, however, are apt to follow their own road. Their trespass is the subject of this final section, in which I will return to the text with which I opened—the Gulistan—and rather than present a number of examples discretely, I will bring several voices into conversation with a single evidence-rich reader whose copy of Sadi, unlike J.A. Symonds’s, fortunately has survived. We have already seen a little of Leigh Hunt’s diverse tastes as a reader—his interest in Chinese literature, and his proposal in 1857 that someone should create an anthology of ‘all the best stories . . . from the Persian and Hindoo poets’.80 This hunger for narrative no doubt whetted his appetite for the Gulistan, which is full of the anecdotage of Sadi’s varied life and travels, and which he began reading around 1852, when he was in his mid-sixties. This conjecture is based on Hunt’s own dating of one of his annotations, though he may well have purchased and even browsed his copy much earlier. Like Symonds, he was reading an old East India Company translation—that of James Ross (1823)—and the fact that he was still consulting this old book when Eastwick’s much more user-friendly version 79  Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), p. 174. 80  Hunt (ed.), Correspondence of Leigh Hunt, II, 286.

Reading  221 had been published is itself interesting. Hunt is exemplary, as I say, for our purposes in part because of his use of this antiquated Company edition: in him we may observe an enthusiastic layman, with some knowledge of the East, using a book manifestly not intended for his sort of reader, and yet discovering through it an author who would form part of his personal canon. Annie Fields, who befriended Hunt in the final decade of his life and later came into possession of his library, named five works that she judged ‘were all evidently favourite reading’ of his: Plato’s Republic, Carlyle’s French Revolution, Laurence Sterne, Emerson’s English Traits (in which the American writer foresaw ‘an irresistible taste for orientalism’ arising in Britain), and finally a poet whom Emerson himself had done much to popularize, Sadi.81 It is significant that Fields writes ‘Sadi’ and not ‘the Gulistan’. Possibly Hunt had a copy of the Bustan too, which he equally valued, and thus ‘Sadi’, like ‘Sterne’, could denote more than one work. But this also highlights once again the degree to which both popular translators and general readers were invested in the historical existence and life stories of Eastern authors. A consultation of more than ten copies of any given text will prove (if they are annotated copies), that the often lengthy biographical prefaces referred to in Chapter 5 really were patiently consulted by readers. Indeed, they are among the most frequently and most densely pencilled sections of most translations. A member of the Swan Hill Literary Society who borrowed its copy of the Analects (or possibly some subsequent owner) attended closely to the descriptions of Confucius’s physical presence and manners in Books VII and X. The Master’s disciples described him as having the ‘somewhat plain and simple appearance’ of one who ‘looked unlike a man who possessed ability of speech’; the ‘bright, shiny garments’ of linen he wore when observing his fasts, and the plain rice and ‘hashed meats’ that were his preferred diet; a gentle teacher, yet who ‘could be severe’, who had ‘an overawing presence, yet was not violent; was deferential, yet easy’. Neat uniform ticks have been left next to all these passages.82 Of course, there were those, like the Omar Khayyam Club members discussed in Chapter 2, who affected to honour the translator and disregard the author. But it is much more common to see readers indulging in the mildly egoistic illusion of communing with the dead, and Hunt is no exception. He is fascinated by the passages in Book 1 in which the poet dwells on loss and mortality (‘yes! my two eyes, you must bid adieu to my head: yes! palm of my hand, wrist, and arm, all of you say farewell’), scoring, underlining, and writing ‘Alas!’ in the margin. The old Romantic, who had known Keats and Byron in their prime and outlived nearly all his famous contemporaries, is touched by Ross’s commentary on these passages: 81  Mrs James T. Fields, A Shelf of Old Books (New York: Scribner, 1894), p. 65. Her husband purchased Hunt’s library after his death. 82  AVaTAR Ch.S.1b: Jennings, Confucian Analects, pp. 87, 96, 112, 116–17.

222  Asian Classics on the Victorian Bookshelf Early or late we must all go; and the heartiest, and most sanguine of us, is as much dead to that part of his life that is gone as that friend then was; and must soon be to what remains of it.

Hunt has strongly marked these lines, and left a date: New Year’s Eve, 1852. The brief note suggests an evening of sad reflection, though not all Hunt’s remarks are in this vein. It has been suggested, Ross notes elsewhere, that Sadi travelled to Kashgar, in modern-day China, in 641 ah and there met the young Amir Khusro (later Delhi’s most celebrated poet). Ross supposes that Sadi would have been in ‘his 70th year!’ at that point, prompting a defensive retort from Hunt: ‘I, the reader, am still a traveller in my seventieth year, though I seldom stir from home, except for a walk.’83 The humour, pathos, and intimacy of such marginalia makes it easier to understand how Edwin Arnold could later choose for one of his books such a droll title as With Sadi in the Garden (1888), conjuring up an image of genial and untrammelled exchange with a poet who lived more than a century before Chaucer. Identification with the author takes on greater significance when it provides a lever with which to dislodge the translator from his central mediating position. In the case of the Gulistan, one way of reading against the translator was to laugh at Sadi’s jokes. Most prefaces to nineteenth-century English editions tended to stress the work’s serious-minded moral purpose, and deprecated the sometimes ribald humour with which Sadi leavens his didacticism. Ross, for instance, regrets a mischievous joke told by Sadi against his supposedly gluttonous fellow-poet, Nizari Quhistani: ‘Swift, Sterne, and other wits of our last and the preceding age, could relish indecency and nastiness; and it is creditable perhaps to the present generation, that it has no taste for such grossnesses.’ Apparently turning a blind eye to this comment (no doubt for Sterne’s sake as much as for Sadi’s), Hunt has left a merry tick beside the joke. Elsewhere, he has supplemented the text with his own mild bawdy. In the seventeenth story of Chapter II, ‘The Morals of Dervishes’, a holy man is invited to dine with a king, and so that he may appear feeble and therefore holier, Sadi tells us, the cunning abid resolves to ‘take a medicine, that shall weaken me’. Next to this, Hunt has written ‘George IV when he made love’.84 Such annotations are in keeping with the inclinations of other Gulistan readers, like the Australian journalist Gottlieb Schuler (1853–1926), who cared less perhaps for the racier anecdotes, but who certainly enjoyed the witty retorts, zesty insults, pungent apothegms, and buffoonery of the pious in which the work

83 Huntington: 472553, James Ross, The Gulistān, or, Flower-garden, of Shaikh Sadī of Shiraz (London: J.M. Richardson, 1823), pp. 19, 48–9, 131, 207. 84  Ibid., pp. 36, 207.

Reading  223 abounds (incidentally, a subsequent owner has erased all Schuler’s pencil-marks, though they remain faintly visible).85 Hunt’s notes are also indicative of a general attitude of scepticism which can be observed in other readers. Appreciative of Ross’s scholarship, he has nonetheless in several places left amused marginalia in response to the translator’s credulous or over-literal interpretation, such as his support for the belief that Sadi travelled the breadth of Asia and made the Hajj fourteen times (‘May this not be metaphorical!’), or his reproach of the poet’s ‘misanthropy’ in the Bustan (ii, 7), where Sadi recommends that men eat, drink, and spend their money in enjoyment, without worrying about what inheritance they might leave their sons. ‘But these things are said with a smile’, jots Hunt, apparently amused rather than displeased by Ross’s comparison of the cynical Persian to his old friend Byron.86 Broadly speaking, the tendency to disregard or contradict a translator in this way cor­rel­ ates with how well-read an individual is—both generally, and in the specific field—and if this led a reader like Leigh Hunt to have some fun at the expense of a professional orientalist, the consequences would be more far-reaching for the popularizers who, at the turn of the century, were beginning to leave more advanced readers less than satisfied. We saw how unwilling even a sixteen-yearold Edmund Wilson was to be imposed upon by Frederika Richardson and her ‘inexcusable’ ventriloquism in 1911. Without being able to offer conclusive proof, it is certainly my impression that such incidents of impatience with the artistic licence enjoyed by translators earlier in the period grew more frequent as time advanced, and that this was connected to the greater availability and accessibility of publications. Wilson was, of course, a precocious and highly educated adolescent, but he may still be taken as indicative of early twentieth-century trends. To give another example, James Stephens, the Irish playwright who was born the son of a van driver in 1880, had none of his advantages. But he did form his religious outlook at a time when Theosophical networks were at their most developed, and by the 1930s had built up his own considerable library of books on Indian religion, including translations from the Vedas, Upanishads, and various Buddhist texts. Thus equipped, Stephens was able to check and compare different sources of knowledge, and we can see this apparatus going into action when the amateur translator William Gemmell avers that the Diamond Sutra is so called for the gemlike brilliancy of its wisdom. ‘This is wrong’, writes Stephens, nonplussed. ‘The title of this Sutra is “The Diamond Cutter” i.e. that which cuts even the diamond.’ More significantly, by the time he read this 1912 translation (which would later find popularity with the Beat Generation), Stephens had already formed

85  AVaTAR Ps.S.3a: James Ross, Sadi’s Gulistan (London: Walter Scott, 1890), pp. 109, 141, 143, 172, 205, 207, 252. 86  Huntington: 472553, pp. 13, 17.

224  Asian Classics on the Victorian Bookshelf certain prejudices. He was drawn to Advaitan philosophy, which divides Truth into three kinds: the Absolute, which it equates to Sleep, the Imaginary, which it compares to dreaming, and Relativism, which is the state of waking. Stephens’s insistence on relative truth leads him to butt his head repeatedly against Gemmell, who followed Victorian convention by drawing analogies between Buddhism and Christianity. This necessitated that Buddhism be presented as an organized, prescriptive religion, and thus we get the retort, ‘No. There is no Law’, where Gemmell attempts to explain dharma; and again, later, ‘There is “no law” because it can be done Any Way—and must be done by whatever way you can do it.’ Likewise, Buddha is not the messianic ‘One’ in whom all laws become intelligible. Rather, Stephens points out, he refers to himself as ‘Tathagatha’: the one who neither comes, nor goes. In fact, in Stephens’s view there is no ‘being’ at all. There is only ‘suchness’, he scribbles irritably in the margin, ‘or “thatness” or (perhaps) “isness”, not being, but “beness”. Alas, me!’87 This does not mean that Stephens’s interpretation is correct, or true to the original in any simple sense, for his quarrel is with text as well as translator. He admired Buddhism in its ‘pure’ form, before it was hampered with the paraphernalia of religion—such as the vows novices take upon entry into a monastery, and which he has rather presumptuously scratched out on page 19 of his Diamond Sutra. The early Buddhism he envisages is also a distinctly Indian formation, whereas the doctrines to which he objects relate to the Mahayana (Greater Vehicle) school and its later developments in East Asia. Unsurprisingly, Gemmell was working from a Chinese manuscript of the sutra, citing Chinese commentators, whereas Max Müller had used a Sanskrit source for his earlier translation (which he titled The Diamond-Cutter). Stephens’s displeasure was thus inevitable. Leigh Hunt, too, brought prejudices and preconceptions to his book, and in him we see—though without approaching anything near the same level of erudition— a perhaps even more pronounced oscillation between agreement, ambivalence, and rejection. If Hunt leaves ticks at some points, at others he inserts double exclamation marks. In Chapter VII, he seems amazed by Sadi’s startlingly modern assertion that most theft can be adduced to poverty. Whether or not he agrees, the text soon pulls him in the other direction, yielding a decidedly non-modern maxim to the effect that a man who has his foe at his mercy, and spares him, is his own worst enemy. In the same chapter, the Englishman is also pained to learn that Sadi considers the dog ‘vilest of animals’. These marks are fascinating, because ambiguous: was Hunt disgusted, or surprised into agreement? The reaction of the moment may not reflect the next day’s rumination. But elsewhere the response is 87 TCD2: OLS B-7–386, William Gemmell, The Diamond Sutra (Chin-Kang-Ching), or PrajnaParamita (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co, 1912), pp. vii, xxv, 16, 72, 100. Stephens’s in­clin­ation to relative truth can also be seen in his letters: ‘observe that in the Vedas every statement that can possibly be made is qualified by the words “as it were” ’. Richard J. Finneran (ed.), Letters of James Stephens (London: Macmillan, 1974), p. 350: Stephens to James MacKenna, [1927?].

Reading  225 less equivocal. A line is crossed when Hunt reads the fortieth story of the first chapter: he labels ‘hideous and unworthy’ this episode in which a Chinese girl is drugged and debauched. Either Sadi should not have written it, Hunt avers, or should have given it ‘a very great “moral” ’.88 At other points again, Hunt is facetious about Sadi’s wisdom. In one story, he underlines a Prince’s counsel to stand in awe of him who stands in awe of thee—‘a wise injunction; but not well applied in this instance.’ In another, responding to the suggestion that one must always take the right path when one’s foe recommends the left, he has queried, ‘but suppose he shew you the right path on purpose to make you think it the wrong?’ And when it comes to getting rid of people who are bothering you (if they are poor, lend them money; if rich, ask them for a loan), he judges the adage ‘true, but not always true, nor indeed without a multitude of exceptions.’ In all three cases, the advice is not contradicted as wrong, but because it is marked by an ingenuousness or naiveté that might be thought of as characteristically ‘oriental’ (though Hunt does not say so), it must be tempered by Victorian commonsense, and this implied comparison with European standards is present too in the many references made to Western literature. In Chapter II, the thirty-third hekayat, Hunt has written ‘Sir Philip Sidney’ next to the line, ‘the tapering finger of the lovely, and her soul-deluding ear-lobe, are decoration enough without a turkois-ring or ear-jewel.’ He may have been thinking of the Elizabethan poet’s erotic lyric ‘What tongue can her perfections tell?’ Similarly, in the second hekayat, Hunt has compared to ‘Shakespeare in Hamlet’ the dervish who lays his head against the Kaaba, and requests God to ‘do unto me what is worthy of thyself; but deal not with me, as I myself have deserved’. The analogies are most frequent in Chapter I, which deals with the vagaries of monarchs. ‘Ariosto’ evidently echoes some advice to ministers about always agreeing with your king, even when he declares day to be night, while on the other hand the fate of a certain vizier, who should have feared God as he feared his king, is reminiscent of ‘Wolsey’.89 Again, though, there is an element of ambiguity: was Sadi the primitive archetype for these later, European masters? Or is he, for Hunt, the ur-poet who enfolds all their wisdom into one text? Ever drawing near and ever retreating, Hunt is at once a close and a distant reader. The interplay of transcultural sympathy and alienation—this strange combination we see in Hunt of gratification and understanding with shock and puzzlement—is in some ways an obvious paradigm. But it is also the one which can be most universally applied to our cohort of readers. The two dichotomies with which I began the last section are useful for thinking about the examples that have been described here, but the individuals concerned cannot be neatly allocated to one or the other category. Emancipating encounters are sometimes enabled by texts, 88  Huntington: 472553, pp. 404, 443, 463, 185. 89  Ibid., pp. 130, 425, 237, 233, 188, 173, 171.

226  Asian Classics on the Victorian Bookshelf yet also channelled and constrained by them. They can come about through the adoption of the Other’s perspective, but they may also depend on the unequal appropriation or abrupt decontextualization of Asian ideas. Even advanced reading like that of Stephens, who constructed from the quarried stone of translations that had accumulated by the early twentieth century his personal philosophical library, is sustained by essentialist thinking (and by a not inconsiderable measure of proprietorial arrogance). In closing, though, it is worth pointing out that in his extensive annotations Hunt never ascribes, even implicitly, that which is unfamiliar in Sadi to his essential character as an Oriental, a Persian, or a Muslim. Instead, there is the regret that he can only apprehend the poet through imperfect instruments. The Gulistan is part poetry, part prose, Ross explains, but because much of the former merely recapitulates the sentiments of the latter, he saw fit to leave it out of his translation. His reader saw things differently: ‘But surely there was a difference; and this omission is a pity.’ Later, Ross says that he has attempted to bring out the ‘manner’ of Sadi, who mixes in his precepts ‘a simplicity and tenderness of heart . . . with a sort of sententious and epigrammic [sic] turn’. In order to bring out ‘this manner’, the translator apologizes if he is sometimes guilty of ‘making my author appear more sententious, than he really is’. Next to this Hunt has written, enigmatically, ‘mistake’.90 Sadi is more than just one kind of poet, and so for Hunt, in some way, difference counts: the difference between Persian and English, and the difference between different Sadis. Whether later renditions (or even the anthology he demanded of ‘all the best stories’) would have satisfied him is impossible to say. Reading slowly at the end of his life, but on the cusp of the mass-translation era, Hunt regrets the untranslated. Perhaps sixty years later, with publishers projecting the total conversion of what we now commonly term World Literature into English, he would have regretted the untranslatable. I have tried to concentrate on the more influential kind of experience, in which the reader obtained some special insight or lasting impression. But in closing, it is  worth acknowledging the ordinary background against which these extra­or­ din­ary encounters took place—a background of spare moments and brisk, halfattentive perusals, in which some unexpected jarring of the textual space with the reader’s world aroused a fleeting relevance. To locate such intersections today is remarkably easy, for though European orientalism was fundamentally a project of ordering, categorizing, and re-encoding knowledge of Asia, most readers were far from digesting its offerings in a spirit of scientific objectivity. In fact, they are particularly easy to observe in a multifaceted text like the Gulistan, which has something for every temperament. Leigh Hunt was moved by its reflections on mortality in the twilight of his long life, while Herman Melville, who acquired Gladwin’s translation in 1868, was drawn instead to the muqaddimah or introduction in which Sadi gives a stylized account of why he undertook the work. 90  Ibid., pp. 54, 58.

Reading  227 ‘Whosoever stretcheth out his neck claiming consequence, is beset by en­emies from all quarters’, the poet warns. Thus he thought it advisable to withdraw from society and, secure in his faith, complete his labour, for ‘why should he dread the waves of the sea who hath Noah for his pilot?’ Always fond of naval metaphors, and now retired to rural Massachusetts following the public scorn of his own masterpiece, Moby-Dick, Melville has triply or sometimes even quad­ruply scored these passages, and left a large # beside the place where Sadi explains one final precaution he took before laying his book at the mercy of the critics: ‘I abridged the work, that it might not be thought tedious.’91 The American novelist’s reading of the Gulistan was not consequential, at least not in respect to the muqaddimah, for the lessons he rehearsed here were ones he had already learned the hard way. The profit of his reading was, at most, a vindication of his own sentiments. Encounters like his are significant, but perhaps their greatest significance lies in their temporary resonance, their ordinariness, their quotidian, even casual quality, and in the sheer volume of analogous examples that can be retrieved from mid-century onwards. We need to learn that it was normal, not exceptional, in Melville’s time to gaze desultorily on one’s own life in a Persian looking-glass. 91 Beinecke: BEIN Za M497 Zz822s, Francis Gladwin, The Gûlistân, or, Rose-garden (London: Kingsbury, Parbury, and Allen, 1822), pp. xiii, xx, xxii.

  Epilogue Flights of Translation

. . . apart from specialists, no European could name an Arab poet today.1 —Abdelfattah Kilito (2008) What happened to the Victorian oriental canon? In 1928, members of a mail order book club, the Literary Guild of America, were offered An Anthology of World Poetry, edited by Mark Van Doren. Outside the United States the volume was distributed by Cassell & Company, a firm long associated with self-­education, and in England it was also selected for another book club run by the Times newspaper. In his short preface, Van Doren, professor at Columbia and a chief promoter of the Great Books movement, reserved his most grateful acknowledgements for the publisher and creator of the Modern Library, Albert Boni. ‘This book was his idea long ago; with it in mind he had collected an extensive library which was put entirely at my disposal.’2 The preface closes with this brief glimpse into the painstakingly assembled world library, now dispersed but presumably once housed in Boni’s Greenwich Village apartment. Van Doren invites us to imagine him sitting within it, compiling an anthology that, in its target audience and internal logic, might be regarded as the culmination of several of the major trends I have charted in this book. The preface opens with Van Doren announcing that he will print no prose, but only verse translations possessing poetic merit in their own right (­or which are written at least in ‘readable English’). As a consequence, he largely avoided translations produced within an academic milieu. Of the 205 items drawn from Asian languages, holders of university posts were responsible for only twenty-­nine, scattered individually amid bulk contributions from the likes of Edwin Arnold, Edward Fitzgerald, Richard Le Gallienne, Anne and Wilfrid Blunt, Helen Waddell, Powys Mathers, Launcelot Cranmer-­Byng, Gertrude Bell, and Arthur Waley—­all Victorians, active for the most part after 1875. Well aware of the space already occupied on the Western cultural horizon by Hafez, Omar Khayyam, and Kalidasa, Van Doren prioritized less well-­known authors, such as Imru’ al-­Qais, Abu’l Ala and eleven other Arabic poets. In an impressive gesture of deference, he ordered Chinese poetry first in his volume, followed by Japanese, Sanskrit, Arabic, Persian, Hebrew, and ancient 1 Kilito, Thou Shalt Not Speak My Language, p. 83. With permission of Syracuse University Press. 2  Mark Van Doren (ed.), An Anthology of World Poetry (London: Cassell and Company, 1928).

Asian Classics on the Victorian Bookshelf: Flights of Translation. Alexander Bubb, Oxford University Press. © Alexander Bubb 2023. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780198866275.003.0008

Epilogue: Flights of Translation  229 Egyptian. This is also a reminder, however, that the Orient belongs to antiquity—­ there is no place for living Asians here, not even Rabindranath Tagore (Nobel Laureate in 1913) or Muhammad Iqbal (first translation 1920); no place for Konstantin Cavafy for that matter either, or any other modern Greek writer. The book’s westward arc (ushering us, like the line of statues atop the Brooklyn Museum, towards modernity) subsequently takes in classical Greek and Latin, the modern European languages, and finally English, Irish, and American writers. Texts from Asia account, in total, for 218 out of the book’s 1,222 pages. That was in 1928, and yet only eighty years later Abdelfattah Kilito ruefully observed that a normal British or American conversation, in which any Arabic literature predating 1950 (excepting of course the Quran) cropped up, would be an extraordinary occurrence. The reason is that while Van Doren’s collection sold widely in its day, after the Second World War publishing interest in Asia (as well as Africa and Latin America) turned decisively in favour of contemporary writers, of fiction in particular. Readers of classical genres (composed in any language) grew to be vastly outnumbered by readers of modern novels. The poetic canon that inhabited Albert Boni’s shelves lost its cultural resonance and, on his death, physically dissolved. This makes the Anthology seem like a Victorian throwback, the final flourish of the era of Matthew Arnold and Sir John Lubbock. But in reality the Anthology was a harbinger of the new order, under which the most damaging trends within nineteenth-­century orientalism would be perpetuated, and some of its saving graces lost. Unlike earlier anthologies like the Rose Garden of Persia, Van Doren was not attempting to ‘represent’ a single literature through contextualized examples—­in fact, he corresponded with Ezra Pound during the project, and was strongly influenced by Pound’s dislike of Victorian anthologies and their ‘multitudinous detail’.3 This is what underlies the odd remark he makes later in the preface: ‘nothing is deadlier than a compilation designed with reference to the originals alone.’ If the frame of reference within which the poems are ordered and juxtaposed does not owe its precepts to the source culture, then it must derive from the target culture. Therefore, the links implicitly being drawn between one text and its neighbour will be understood only in the receiving situation; the internal conversations that may be seen to animate them will, as it were, be spoken only in the target language. In other words, this is really an anthology of the best English poetry that has claimed a basis (sometimes rather loose) in a foreign text, complemented with a selection of native English poets (ranging from Chaucer to Edna St Vincent Millay). In spite of the individual translators excerpted by Van Doren—­many of whom found creative ways of bending their English to accommodate alterity—­ the overall inclination of the volume is toward an Anglocentric world view, in which English may come last but also comes out top, having enriched itself by 3  Harris Feinsod, ‘World Poetry: Commonplaces of an Idea’, Modern Language Quarterly, LXXX/4 (2019), 437.

230  Asian Classics on the Victorian Bookshelf absorbing the literatures of the past. Thus, the volume assumes and abets the dominance of English as the global lingua franca, a dominance which in the present day is even more complete, with far more texts being yearly translated into English than are translated out of it. The difference today is that Western reading interests have turned decisively in favour of living writers over dead ones, and fiction over poetry. Texts continue to labour under the burden of imaging and epitomizing their countries of origin to the West, are still used as a form of knowledge-­gathering, as native informants (those that cannot fulfil this role are not selected for translation by the publishing industry). But at least Asian literature is now perceived as a living and evolving entity, not a repository of historical information. Bearing this in mind, I do not suspect that Kilito would have me make too many special claims for the cosmopolitanism of nineteenth-­century literary culture. Very, very few Victorians would have managed to recall the name of a single Arabic poet either, even those who had dipped into the Blunts’ translations of classical poetry, or who had come across Welbore St Clair Baddeley’s verse drama The Death of Antar (1881). A not insignificant number, to be sure, would have known the Muallaqat, the canonical compilation in which the odes of Antar and other poets is gathered, and on which Baddeley’s play was loosely based. But even then, their knowledge would have been solely of pre-­Islamic poetry, and the medieval narratives of the 1001 Nights. Influenced by the prevailing notion that imaginative writing in Arabic was marginalized and fell into decadence after the rise of Islam, it would probably never have occurred to them to peruse an author coeval with the European Renaissance, let alone contemporary with themselves—­as many modern readers have done when, for example, they have bought the novels of Naguib Mahfouz in translation. Those who did would have needed a very independent judgement to resist what became an intellectual reflex in the nineteenth century: to bring the text into a subordinate comparison with a Western ‘inspiration’. Kilito draws attention to the habit of Charles Pellat, the Algerian-­born orientalist, of comparing the poets of medieval Basra to European authors, like Montaigne or Voltaire, who postdated them by four or five centuries. This deference to a foreign canon of value, Kilito laments, is not only habitual in Europe but has been in­tern­al­ized by Arabs themselves: ‘we read Hayy ibn Yaqzan and our minds wander to Robinson Crusoe; we read al-­Mutannabi and think of Nietzsche.’4 So why should we bother to re-­open the archive of nineteenth-­century popular translation? Because sensitive study of this period may yet restore to us things once known, now forgotten. Today’s Anglocentric monoculture may have grown from seeds sown in the nineteenth century, but bedded in that ground are other seeds that never germinated, strains that might still be coaxed into life. If we want a more balanced translation ecosystem, why not divert some of our attention to 4 Kilito, Thou Shalt Not, pp. 14–19.

Epilogue: Flights of Translation  231 the popular translators, even the abridgers and anthologists of Asian literature, rather than the specialists who sometimes expressed—­with a candour that astonishes the modern reader—­a profound contempt for the works they studied? In his general introduction to the Sacred Books, Max Müller wrote that ‘the religions of antiquity, must always be approached in a loving spirit’, and the translator who is but ‘a dry and cold-­blooded scholar’ is likely to do ‘mischief ’ to the text. ‘He whose heart cannot quiver with the first quivering rays of human thought and human faith, as revealed in those ancient documents, is . . . unfit for these studies.’5 That loving spirit was not in Charles Pellat. Having laboured for years on Le milieu basrien et la formation de Jâhiz, in its preface he confessed that, ‘in general, Arabic books produce a sense of boredom, whatever their topic.’ ‘There is something tragic and pitiful’, remarks Kilito, in the career of a scholar who ‘devoted his life to studying texts he did not appreciate and that did not move him.’6 The ‘devoted love’ of which Müller speaks was not apparent either in 1895, during Edmund Gosse’s tenure as commissioning editor for the Heinemann series, Short Histories of the Literatures of the World. When Gosse wrote to Basil Hall Chamberlain at the Tokyo Imperial University, requesting him to produce a volume on Japan, the professor declined by remarking that his adoptive country could boast no authors ‘worthy to be placed even in the second rank of European writers and thinkers’, though it had produced ‘several gifted with charming qual­ities of the “pretty-­pretty” sort’. He recommended in his place another distinguished Japanologist, W.G.  Aston, who accepted the invitation grudgingly, warning Gosse that he held ‘no very exalted opinion of Japanese literature’. One cannot help but compare the behaviour of these men with the solicitous attitude of Herbert Giles who, rather than waiting to be sounded out, instead wrote directly to Gosse demanding to know whether he planned to include a Chinese volume in his series.7 To give one last egregious example, this is how Edward Eastwick, the East India Company translator, introduced his readers to the ‘beauties’ of the Anvar-­i Suhayli in 1854: It is impossible not to perceive that those very characteristics of style, which form its chiefest beauties in the eye of Persian taste, will appear to the European reader as ridiculous blemishes. The undeviating equipoise of bi-­propositional sentences, and oftentimes their length and intricacy; and hyperbole and sameness of metaphor and the rudeness and unskillfulness of the plots of some of the stories, cannot but be wearisome and repulsive to the better and simpler judgment of the West.8 5  Müller, ‘Preface to the Sacred Books of the East’, p. xi. 6 Kilito, Thou Shalt Not, pp. 10–13. 7  Brotherton: BC MS 19c Gosse (Edmund Gosse Archive), Gosse Correspondence, ‘Short Histories of Literature’ folder. 8 Edward  B.  Eastwick, The Anvár-­i Suhailí; or, The Lights of Canopus (Hertford: Stephen Austin, 1854), p. ix.

232  Asian Classics on the Victorian Bookshelf Perhaps I am overstating my case. If ‘love’ sounds naïve, let us say at least that there is no emotional register in Eastwick’s narrow discourse, whereas the prose of his contemporary Louisa Costello (whom as we saw in Chapter 5, he treated with contumely), is magnified and enriched by its affective dimensions. ‘Poetry’, she writes, is ‘held in the greatest veneration in the East’, where ‘respect and esteem’ attend budding authors. Encounters between English readers and Persian poets have hitherto been perplexed, all too often she admits, by imperfect sympathies. But by implicitly emulating this Persian literary etiquette, Costello hopes to broker a more cordial introduction, in which the former may ‘be gratified to meet at once, without trouble, with many of the treasures he has so long slighted’. ‘So great has been my own delight and enthusiasm on the subject for many years,’ she reflects, ‘that I cannot help hoping that others may feel equally interested with myself, and happy to have found a new source of admiration of the graceful and beautiful.’9 To this appointment the foreign poet will evidently travel—­or rather be conveyed, by her agency—­across a considerably greater distance than his armchair counterpart in nineteenth-­century Britain. But because she recognizes the potential for misunderstanding, and acknowledges what is untranslatable, Costello resorts to a social analogy, rather than the visual metaphors often used by the advocates of transparent, fluent translation. Such is Eastwick, who admits some expressions will have ‘suffered’ in translation, but cannot concede any text­ ual subtlety to which his expertise was not adequate. The defects of the Anvar-­i Suhayli are intrinsic and ‘impossible not to perceive’, he declares. ‘It will be seen’ that its stories are largely derivative, inferior imitations of Sanskrit originals, but he hopes ‘that they will be indulgently viewed’. It is the humility of Costello and others like her, their awareness of their own language’s expressive limitations, that sets them apart from more arrogant translators in their own time, as well as modern-­day expounders of Hafez and Rumi who seldom bother to listen for—­ however imperfectly—­the prosody of the original, or to understand what their poems signify to native speakers. Let us then spare some attention for the ‘sciolists’, as Müller called them—­ translators, and readers too, moving in the doubtful margin of Victorian orientalism. Let us track their flights of escape from its deadly gravity. I can return now to where I began, with a row of Persian poets lined up along a bookcase in the mind’s eye of Richard Gottheil. Those books were not stationary objects: ‘they have won their way into the book-­stalls and stand upon our shelves’. My chapters have aimed to show how we might retrieve, from the experience of Victorian and Edwardian readers, alternative protocols for meeting, welcoming, and responding to the Other, and I finish with the prospect of how—­with much pleasurable and collective labour—­we might fully reconstruct Gottheil’s bookshelf, on the site of

9 Costello, Rose Garden, pp. ii–­iv, x.

Epilogue: Flights of Translation  233 Macaulay’s library. Once a physical reality in thousands of dwellings and institutions, its phantom presence may yet be recalled to visible knowledge. In 1855, Henry Thoreau found an oak timber wedged in the rocks of the Concord River. He tied it to his boat and paddled home, he confided to his journal, ‘as I shall want some shelves to put my Oriental books on’.10 Algernon Blackwood (b. 1869) also spoke affectionately of ‘my Eastern books’, including the Bhagavad Gita and the Yoga Aphorisms of Patanjali, as one of the few luxuries he permitted himself in his lean twenties, when he reported on crime for the New York Evening Sun, and spent gloomy days in the police courts downtown at the Tombs. ‘Bronx Park, Shelley, the violin, the free library, organ recitals in churches, my Eastern books, and meetings of the Theosophical Society, provided meanwhile the few beauty hours to which I turned by way of relief and relaxation.’11 Christmas Humphreys, the young man who was annotating Coomaraswamy’s Gospel of Buddhism when news of the Armistice arrived in 1918, later purchased every volume in the Wisdom of the East series until he had one hundred lined up on the wall.12 And then there are the two libraries of Lafcadio Hearn—­the one he left behind in America, later auctioned, and the one he rebuilt in Japan, preserved today—­both dazzling hoards of translation (in English and French) from across the world.13 The last word, however, will go to E.V. Kenealy, barrister, raconteur, plagiarizing translator, counsel for the Tichborne Claimant, and amateur orientalist, who in 1864 published these verses about a sleepless night at his home in Portslade, under the South Downs. Forth from my Eastern books, in whose deep page Is shrined a beauty, wisdom, and perception Of God—­the Future and immortal Truth,— Such as no others offer to the mind, (For Plato seems a child employed in toys, Playing with sea-­shells by the shores of Time, When with the Orient sages read or weighed), I steal into the covert dark of night, And breathe its cool refreshing air, and pace, With thoughtful footstep, by the lone sea-­beach That stretches out before me.14

10  Bradford Torrey and Francis H. Allen (eds), Journal of Henry D. Thoreau (14 vols, Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1949), VIII, 18. 11  Algernon Blackwood, Episodes Before Thirty (London: Cassell, 1923), p. 107. 12 Humphreys, Both Sides of the Circle, p. 162. 13 The Library of Congress holds a basic catalogue of Hearn’s first library (George  M.  Gould, Collection of Hearniana, Box 5). The books he owned at his death are at Toyama University. 14 Edward Vaughan Kenealy, ‘Night’, in Poems and Translations (London: Reeves and Turner, 1864), p. 235.

234  Asian Classics on the Victorian Bookshelf Privileging Asian over European interlocutors, the poem’s scene then shifts to Egypt, where verses are suddenly interpolated from a Nile river-­song (source unknown), and the story told of Harun al-­R ashid’s excavation of the Great Pyramid in 832, as related, a footnote tells us, ‘by Ibn Abd Alkohn, an Arabian author in his Discourse of the Wonders of Egypt’.15 Kenealy, then, could at least name an Arab historian, if not a poet, and unlike Boni’s library his books are not lost: they survive, uncatalogued, in the stacks of Trinity College Dublin. They still await their opportunity to show how Asian literature occupied spaces in the Victorian world, inhabiting homes, shops, clubs and libraries, hotels, ships, waiting rooms, and army camps; how it had a practical, not a theoretical existence, and how each individual accommodative volume opened to its reader new spiritual and imaginative habitations. We may expect that each passing year will yield such archives, new tools for discovering and describing them, and fresh op­por­tun­ities for fostering a more ambitious and interconnected cultural history. 15  Ibid., pp. 238, 240.

Appendix This is the full list of one hundred commonplace books which were the basis for the ­quantitative survey referred to in Chapter 7. Items are listed by institution, shelfmark and creator.

State Library of New South Wales (AUS) A642 (Robert Russell) A6904, Item 2 (Havelock Ellis) MLMSS 1959/Box 11/5a (Dorothea Mackellar) MLMSS 3632 (Eliza Foreman Scott) MLMSS 5147 ADD-­ON 2085/25X, Series 03 Part 01 (Margaret Coen) MLMSS 7101/1/1 (A.H. Garnsey) MLMSS 7306, Item 1b (Adelaide Higgins)

State Library of Victoria (AUS) MS7703 (Fanny M Rowland) MSS7704-­05 (Mary Humphreys) MS9166 (James Rusden) MS9351 (Eric “Jock” Bosher) MS10620/1493/1-­4 (Tristan N.M. Buesst) MS11238 (Private D.H. Jude) MS12134, Box 2681 (Ada Norcott) MS12408 (R. Fitzgerald) MS13174 (Mrs Leonard Seeley) MS13648 (Annie Mathews Dixon) MS13731 (inscribed to “Molloy”)

National Library of Ireland (IRE) MS4494 (John Locke of Dublin) MSS15664-­7 (William O’Brien) MS25295 (Ball family) MS27970 (Ellen Sophia O’Hara) MSS32704, 32712 (W. Smith O’Brien) MS40438 (Eliza Tyndall Pope) MS42475/1-­2 (Augusta Mary Stanhope) MS49155/8/1-­2 (Charles Hamilton)

236 Appendix

Trinity College Dublin (IRE) TCD MS 3028-­31, 3033 (Edward Dowden) TCD MS 3534 (John Kells Ingram) TCD MS 4405, 4410-­12, 4392-­3 (J.M. Synge) TCD MS 4485 (Rosa Jacobs) TCD MS 4504 (Estella Solomons) TCD MS 4569 (anon.) TCD MS 6450 (James Owen Hannay) TCD MS 11255, 11276 (Dulcie Childers) TCD MS 11338 (anon.) TCD MS 11371/2/1 (Robert S.L. Dames)

Bodleian Library (UK) MS Bonham Carter 503-­4 (Violet Bonham Carter) MSS. Eng. d. 2095, 2300 (Emma Haden) MS. Eng. d. 3064 (Ella Bickersteth) MSS. Eng. d. 3304-­5 (Margot Asquith) MS. Eng. d. 4157 (Patricia Maclagan) MS. Eng. e. 2133 (Leonard Green) MSS. Eng. misc. d.788-­9 (T.E. Lawrence) MSS. Eng. misc. e. 1401-­44 (C.E. de Michele) MS. Mabel FitzGerald 83 (Sarah FitzGerald) MS. Talbot e. 17 (Mary Louisa Talbot) MS. WHF Talbot 117 (Rosamond & Matilda Talbot) MS. WHF Talbot 123 (Amélina P. de Billier) MS. Wilkinson dep. d. 120, e.79-­80 (Sir John Gardner Wilkinson) Dep. Hughenden 203/1 (Benjamin Disraeli)

British Library (UK) Add MS 45351 A-­C (Jane Morris) Add MSS 56490-­526 (Charlotte Shaw) Add MS 58802 (Augusta Leigh) Add MSS 60358-­9 (William Ayrton) Add MSS 62687-­8 (Sir John Lubbock) Add MSS 62694-­5 (Joseph Knight) Add MS 63118 (Edward Henry Blakeney) Add MS 71920 A-­B (Harley Granville-­Barker) Add MS 77968 (Charles Robert Spencer) Add MS 81618 (Thomas Featherstone) Add MS 85415 (Harriet Yonge) Add MS 85449 (Sarah Susanna Bunbury) Add MS 85452 (Humphrey William Freeland) Add MS 85456 (anon.)

Appendix  237 Add MS 85460 (Cardine Isabelle Edwards) Add MS 85470 (Lucinda Cowan Macy) Add MS 88937/2/8-­9 (C.W. Shirley Brooks) Add MS 88957/5/1 (Gordon Bottomley) RP 1892 (Christopher Isherwood)

Cadbury Library, Birmingham (UK) KWH/A/68 (Harriet Brooke) KWH/A/111 (James Silver) KWH/A/117 (anon.) KWH/A/146 (anon.) KWH/A/159 (anon.) MS91 (Henry Carder) MS92/1 (E. Dukes) MS408/1 (Mrs Patrick Campbell) MS495 (Pauline Mary Strangways) MS749 (George Herbert Cowper)

Cambridge University Library (UK) MS Add.9852/4 (Siegfried Sassoon)

King’s College, Cambridge (UK) King's/PP/EJD/3/2/1 (Edward Joseph Dent)

Trinity College, Cambridge (UK) Richard Monckton Milnes papers

London Metropolitan Archives (UK) ACC/0611/007 (Miss Wolley) F/ALL (Lizzie Alldridge) F/RMY/45-­49 (Robert Ramsey)

Oxfordshire History Centre (UK) F3/1/J/2 (H.K. Cornish) NQ3/5/X1/3 (Thackwell Smith)

238 Appendix

Women’s Library, LSE (UK) 7/MGF/B/09 (Millicent Garrett Fawcett & Agnes Garrett) 7MHE/1/1-­2 (Margaret Heitland)

Beinecke Library, Yale (US) GEN MSS VOL 653 (Henry Edward Fane)

Harvard University (US) HUC 8878.315 (George Lyman Kittredge) HUG 1866.5 (Jones Very) MS ENG 569.74 (Radclyffe Hall)

University of Illinois (US) Carl Sandburg papers, 441-­1 (Carl Sandburg)

Morgan Library (US) ARC 2235-­6 (Jane Norton Morgan)

Manuscripts & Archives Division, NYPL (US) MssCol 827 (William Bodham Donne) MssCol 1975 (Mary E. Merwin)

Wilson Library, Chapel Hill (US) 03352, Folder 5 (Anne Freeman Gales Root) 03931, Folder 9 (George Loyall Gordon) 03756 (Richard F. Little)

List of Authors and Texts Represented in the Commonplace Books Omar Khayyam (x8) Quran (x4) Firdausi (x3, one misattribution) Bhagavad Gita (x3) Rabindranath Tagore (x3) Confucius (x2)

Appendix  239 Talmud (x2) Arabian Nights (x2) Vedas (x2) Upanishads (x2) Rumi (x2) Sadi (x2) Hafez Mantiq-­ut-­Tayr Amir Khusro Suzani Samarqandi Al-­Hedaya Abd al-­Latif al-­Baghdadi Dhammapada Mahabharata Ramayana Gita Govinda Kural Haider Ali Shijing Obata, Works of Li Po Waley, Chinese Poems Kakuzo, The Book of Tea Mitford, Tales of Old Japan Zend Avesta Zoroaster, Chaldean Oracles Egyptian inscriptions from Rawlinson’s History of Ancient Egpyt (1881) Arnold, The Light of Asia Various Proverbs

Index For the benefit of digital users, indexed terms that span two pages (e.g., 52–53) may, on occasion, appear on only one of those pages. abridgement  1–2, 16–17, 21–2, 26–9, 37–8, 43–4, 85–6, 99, 103–4, 108–9, 111, 118, 153–4, 158–60, 170, 173–4, 184–5, 194–6, 226–7, 230–1 Addison, Joseph, see The Vision of Mirza Afghanistan 84–5 Akbar (Mughal emperor)  xxiii–xxiv Akkadian 87 Aladdin, story of  2–3 Al-Baghdadi, Abd al-Latif  39–40 Alexander, G.G.  35–6 Alger, William Rounseville  26–7, 206–7 Algeria  xxxii–xxxiii, 31–2, 230 Al-Ghazzali, Abu Hamid Muhammad  42–3, 78 Al-Hakam, Ibn Abd  234 Al-Hedaya 90 Aliph Cheem (Major Walter Yeldham)  84–5 Al-Jahiz  205–6, 230–1 Allen, Clement Francis Romilly  84–5 allusion 63–7 to the Arabian Nights 64–6 as showing off  66 Alma-Tadema, Lawrence  21–2, 25n.79, 173–4 Al-Maududi, Syed Abul A’la  190–1, 228–9 Al-Qais, Imru’  228–9 alterity  42, 96–7, 103–4, 118–20, 192, 203–6, 211, 224–6, 229 amateurism  xxvii, 22, 29–30, 36–7, 41, 53, 56n.74, 80–1, 91, 128–9, 134–5, 139–40, 166–8, 179–81, 183–4, 200–1, 232–3 Amazon (corporation)  29–30 Andrews, Charles William  39–41 Anglocentrism 229–31 Anquetil-Duperron, Abraham  6 Antar  81–2, 230 Romance of  5–6, 206–7 anthologies  9, 26–7, 30, 80–1, 95–6, 101–2, 108–9, 115–16, 148–51, 167, 216, 228–9 for comparing religions  26–7, 185–6, 206–7 of ‘gems’  28–30, 67 The Rose Garden of Persia 7–16 specimen books  5–6

anthropology  xii, 72, 115–16, 130–2, 167–8, 204 Anvar-i-Suhayli  20–1, 231–2 aphorisms  53–4, 69–72, 186–7, 211–12, 216, 232–3 Arabic  xxx–xxxi, 1–3, 5–6, 23, 29–30, 33, 37–8, 57, 60–1, 63–4, 67, 69–70, 80–2, 84–5, 87, 95–6, 101–2, 130–4, 139–40, 151–2, 198–9, 205–6, 218n.74, 228–31 anthologies  26–7, 80–1, 101–2 dictionaries  83–4, 216 evolution of  46–8 loan-words to English  133 slang 31 Arabian Nights  xxxii–xxxiii, 4–5, 29–30, 37–8, 57n.76, 61–4, 71–4, 83–4, 86–7, 90n.4, 100, 114, 118–19, 133–4, 136–7, 140–1, 144, 170, 175–6, 200, 230 and disillusionment  38–9 and eroticism  66, 130–2 and feminism  211–13 and nostalgia  52 as an English classic  2–3 as a Victorian text  xxx–xxxi as children’s literature  107–8, 213 as escapism  65 as inspiration for travel  43 bowlderization of  21–2, 103–4, 132, 142 casual allusions to  64–6 illustrations of  176–8 included in Lubbock’s list of one hundred best books  91–2, 95–6 see also Aladdin Arberry, A.J.  22–4 archaeology  83–4, 115–16, 204 architecture  73, 76–8, 95–6 Ariosto 225 Armenian  81–2, 101–2 Arnold, Sir Edwin  16–17, 29–30, 32, 43–4, 138–9 admired by Lafcadio Hearn  46 apologist for Japanese imperialism  23–4 as consultant  74

242 Index Arnold, Sir Edwin (cont.) Indian Idylls 16–17 Light of Asia  29–30, 43–4, 80, 84–5, 96–7, 138–9, 197–8, 209–12 Song Celestial  29–30, 43–4, 80–3, 138, 140–1 translation of Gulistan  87, 195–6 Arnold, Matthew  46, 58, 90–1, 115–16, 229 debates translation with Newman  120–1 interest in Bhagavad Gita 46 on popularization  22, 120 Sohrab and Rustum  xi–xii, 21–2, 25, 145–6 Arnold, Thomas Walker  42–3, 129–30 Arya Samaj  155–6 Aryanism  96–7, 160 Asakawa, Kan’ichi  100–1 Asiatic Society (Calcutta)  1–2, 6–7, 133–4 Asiatic Society (London)  13–15, 130, 172–3 Asquith, Herbert Henry  67, 148–51 Aston, William George  230–1 Atkinson, James  10, 16–17, 21–2, 100, 107–8, 113–14, 123, 126–7, 145–7 Attar  9–11, 67 Australia  xxi–xxii, 58–9, 70–1, 80–1, 83–4, 86–7, 107–8, 215–17, 222–3 Tasmania 207–9 autodidacticism  xxvii–xxviii, 6n.20, 55–6, 68–9, 90–3, 117, 166, 205–6 AVaTAR (Archive of Victorian Translations from Asia and their Readerships)  139–40, 200, 207–9 Avicenna 78 Babur (Mughal emperor)  83–4 Badarayana 78 Baddeley, Welbore St Clair  230 Bagehot, Walter  2–3 Bagh o Bahar 142–3 Bahar-i-Danish 3–5 Bai Juyi  68–9, 127–8 Bain, Francis William  60–1, 128–9, 206–7 Baital Pachisi  82–3, 130–2 Ballantyne (publisher)  3–5 Bantock, Granville  75 Barnett, Lionel D.  188–90 Baynes, Herbert  188–90, 218–19 Beardsley, Aubrey  25 Beat Generation  223–4 Beckford, William  132n.43 Bell, Gertrude  139–40, 228–9 Bengali  81–2, 155–6, 162–3 Besant, Annie  111–12 Bhagavad Gita  xiv–xv, 46, 85–6, 100, 170–1, 205, 232–3 as Christmas book  80–1

as a Victorian text  xxx–xxxi Edwin Arnold’s translation  29–30, 43–4, 138, 140–1 first English translation  1–2 read by Gandhi  43–4 read by Emerson and Thoreau  27–8, 40–1 see also Mahabharata Bharavi 100n.33 Bible  22–3, 35–6, 51n.59, 75–7, 111n.64, 148–51, 198n.16, 213–15 compared with Quran  110 Lubbock omits from list of best books  91–4 model for oriental translation  124–6 Bibliothèque Sainte-Geneviève  76–7 Bicknell, Herman  136–7, 192–3 Blackwood (publisher)  167–9, 183–4 Blackwood’s Magazine 128–9 Blackwood, Algernon  232–3 Blake, James Vila  35–7 Blatchford, Robert  56–7 Blochmann, Heinrich  xxiii–xxiv Blunt, Lady Anne  151–2, 191, 228–30 Blunt, Wilfred Scawen  151, 173–4, 191, 228–30 Bodichon, Barbara  212–13 Bohn, Henry G.  13–15, 81–2, 99, 169–72 Bonham Carter, Violet  67 Boni, Albert  228–9, 234 books  xiii–xiv, 232–4 as gifts  107, 207–9 bookplates 108–9 cheap  26, 30–2, 37–8, 42, 54–5, 80–1, 99, 103–4, 153–4, 188–90, 214–15 design of  13–15, 27–8, 50–1, 53–5, 130–2, 167–8, 172–4, 176, 188–90, 200–1 expensive  28–30, 80, 92–3, 98–9, 130–2 price  81–3, 119–20, 176 secondhand 82–3 book clubs  xxvii–xxviii, 44–5, 206–7, 211, 221, 228–9 bookshelf  99, 165, 210–11 as antithesis of universal library  10 as both metric and metonym  xv personal collections of Asian books  103–4, 232–4 bookshops  17–18, 36–7, 78–85, 89–90, 153–4, 183–4, 207–10, 216, 218–19 in Japan  38–9 oriental specialists  80–1 Borden, Miriam  xiii–xiv Boston  50, 80, 179–80, 183–4, 200–1 Boston Public Library  76–7 Bourdieu, Pierre  126 Brentano (publisher)  54–5 Bright, John  xii, 212n.57

Index  243 British Empire  xxxi, 23–4, 40–1, 75–6, 92, 108–9, 156 fears of decline  45–6 Primrose League  188 see also imperialism British Museum  22, 33–4, 110, 142–3, 166, 173 Broadway  53–4, 73–4 Brontë, Charlotte  65 Brooklyn Musuem  76–80, 228–9 Browne, Edward Granville  46–8, 151 early interest in Middle East  89–90 support for Persian constitutionalists  23–4, 174–5 Browning, Elizabeth Barrett Arabian Nights and courtship with Robert  66 Browning, Robert  10–11, 49, 58 use of Hebrew in Ferishtah’s Fancies xxx–xxxi Buddha  26, 29–30, 34–5, 76–8, 92, 129, 183–4, 210–12, 223–4 The Way of the Buddha  37–8, 188–90, 218–19 Buddhism  26, 29–30, 34–8, 84–5, 91–2, 98–101, 108–9, 126, 142–3, 188–90, 218–19, 232–3 analogies with Christianity  209–10 Chinese versus Indian versions of  223–5 Zen 127–8 bunraku (Japanese drama)  73–4 Bunting, Basil  136–7 Burmese  69–70, 84–5, 87 Burton, Lady Isabel  23, 198–9 Lady Burton’s Edition of Her Husband’s Arabian Nights 140–2 Burton, Sir Richard Francis  xxxii–xxxiii, 29–30, 36–7, 61–5, 72, 115–16, 133–4, 136–7, 151, 167–8, 198–9 and Arabian Nights  29–30, 130–4 and Edwin Arnold  140–1 anger at reviewers  28–9 his plagiarism  130–3 interest in popularization  23, 130–2 Kâsidah of Hâjî Abdu el-Yezdî  60–1, 84–5 reading of Quran  30–1, 110 Vikram and the Vampire  82–3, 130–2, 176 wants Government of India to support Arabic studies 23 Byron, George Gordon, Lord  1, 17–18, 71, 221, 223–4 Cadell, Jessie  86–7, 139–40 Caine, Thomas Henry Hall  110n.62 caizi jiaren (Chinese fictional genre)  3–4, 15–16 Calcutta (Kolkata)  xi–xii, 1, 20–1, 75–6, 103–4, 194 Asiatic Society  1–2, 6–7

Canada  xiii–xiv, 80–1, 207–9 canon  91–6, 98–9, 102–3, 105–9, 116–17, 230 and anthologies  9 Asian and European literature of equal worth  x–xi, 78, 112 Chinese  4, 97–8 concept of Oriental Canon  xii–xiii, xxviii–xxix, 88, 92–3, 100–1, 114–15, 139, 228 discrepancy between European and indigenous understandings of  4–5, 97–8 expressed architecturally  76–8, 103–4 formation of  xxix–xxx global  100–1, 155–6, 170 imperial 95–6 in colonial Indian schools  111 national  ix–x, 12–13, 95–6, 111, 116–17, 121, 196 Persian  x–xi, 9 readers form their own  114–15, 220–1 Victorian preference for antiquity  4–5, 60–1 western  102–3, 142–3 see also classic Canton (Guangzhou)  3–5, 188–90 Carey, William and Marshman, Joshua  153–4 Carlyle, Joseph Dacre  5–6 Carlyle, Thomas  3–4, 42, 49, 215, 220–1 praises Mohammed  110 Carnegie, Andrew  83–4 Carruthers, Winnifred  xiii–xiv, 200–2, 207–9 Casement, Sir Roger  67–8 Cassell & Co (publisher)  228–9 Cavafy, Konstantin  228–9 Chamberlain, Basil Hall  xxvi, 45–6, 230–1 Champion, Joseph  1–2, 126–7 Chatto & Windus (publisher)  23 Chicago  152–3, 213 Chicago Public Library  108–9 China  3–4, 15–16, 44–8, 75–7, 83–4, 91–2, 97–8, 100–1, 170–1, 183–4, 187–90, 206–7, 222 and despotism  105–7 intellectual centres  4–5 Chinese language  ix–x, xiv–xv, xxviii–xxix, 3–4, 7n.22, 27n.83, 68–71, 73–7, 81–2, 84–5, 87, 95–6, 100–1, 114–15, 126, 147, 179–80, 183–4, 188–90, 198–9, 207, 217, 224–5, 228–31 and Ezra Pound  116–17, 127–8 anthologies  xxxii–xxxiii, 28–9, 91–2, 101–4, 128–9 classical canon  4–5, 91–2, 97–8 dictionaries 188–90 division between classical and popular literature  4, 97–8

244 Index Chinese language (cont.) early translations made in India  15–16 learners 4 phrasebooks  36–7, 84–5 Tang Dynasty poetry  15–16, 68–9, 115–16, 127–8 Chiswick Press  191 Chodźko, Aleksander  75 Christianity  xxii–xxiii, 30–1, 35–6, 97–8, 164–5, 188, 198–9, 213, 216 bigoted  35–6, 209–10 compared with Buddhism  223–4 compared with Islam  110 compared with Hinduism  140–1 rejection of  xxiv, 36–7, 207–9 see also evangelicalism Chushingura  73–4, 129, 207–9 cinema  64–5, 190–1 Clarion (newspaper)  56 Clarke, Henry Wilberforce  123–4, 134–8 Clarkson, Donald Drummond  216–17 classic  ix–xi, xxi–xxii, xxvii–xxix, xxxi, 4–5, 15–16, 19–20, 60–2, 76–7, 80–1, 84–5, 90–4, 96–7, 112, 115–17, 188–90, 197–9 ‘classics’ reprint series  98–108, 112 defined by Sainte-Beuve  93–5 jing as classic  4–5, 91–2, 97–8 ‘oriental classics’  xii–xiii, xxvii, 114–15, 139 see also canon Clive, Robert  194–5 Clouston, William Alexander  26–7, 70–1, 166–9, 183–4 Arabian Poetry for English Readers  26–7, 166 Cobbe, Frances Power  6, 27–8 Cobden, Jane  15, 173–4 Colenso, John, Bishop of Natal  209–10 Collings, Jesse  56 Collins, Edwin  188–90 commodification  ix–x, 73, 102–3, 190–1, 210–11 commonplace books  xxii–xxiii, 39–40, 67, 69–71, 114–15, 196–200, 211–12, 217 comparative religion  xii, xxiv, 27–8, 110, 223–4 Comte, Auguste  93–4 Confucius (Kong Fuzi)  26, 35–6, 69–71, 76–8, 80, 86–7, 170–1, 190–1, 207 Analects  15–16, 91–2, 98, 104–5, 112 and British conservatives  188 and Sainte-Beuve  93–6 and US politics  104–7 ethic of reciprocity  35–6, 104–5 his physical appearance  221 included in Lubbock’s list of one hundred best books 91–2 on the ‘superior man’  104–5, 112

Connolly, James  198–9 Connor, Willoughby  xiii–xiv, 207–9 conservatism 188 Constable (publisher)  148–51, 217 Constantinople  36–8, 71, 88, 142–3 Conway, Moncure Daniel  xxxii–xxxiii, 26–9, 35–6 friendship with Max Müller  27–9, 137, 185–6 Coomaraswamy, Ananda  218–19, 232–3 Cooper, Irving Steiger  111n.66 Cooper, Thomas  2–3 copyright  119–20, 167–8 expiration of  3–4, 30, 100–1, 103–4, 170–1 Cornhill Magazine  16–17, 126, 129 cosmopolitanism  xi–xii, xxxi, 44–5, 91, 101–2, 108–9, 112, 170, 230 and empire  42–3, 188 and social elites  117, 130–2, 142 and translators  181–3 limits of  57–62 Costello, Louisa Stuart  6–22, 26–30, 40–3, 67–8, 136–7, 139–40, 167–70, 173–4, 229, 232 admiration for William Jones  12–13 criticized 126–7 errors 12–13 her contribution undervalued  24, 123–4 influenced by Thomas Moore  12 on the inadequacy of English  123–4 preference for lyric poetry  10, 95–6 Cowell, Edward Byles  17–19, 28–9, 89–90, 172 reviews the Rose Garden of Persia  9–10, 12–13 Craig, Edward Gordon  188 Cranmer-Byng, Launcelot  129–30, 136–7, 184–91, 228–9 Crosby, Caresse  115n.76 cultural capital  61–2, 126, 210–11 cultural relativism  31, 110, 209–10 Curtis, Elizabeth Alden  139–40 Curzon, George Nathaniel  75–6 Dabistan 102–3 Daily Mirror 55–6 Damrosch, David  xii Daodejing  127–8, 180–1, 186–7 Darmesteter, James  179–80 Darnton, Robert  191, 193–4 Darwin, Charles  63 Dasatir 27–8 Davidson, John  71–2 Davis, John Francis  3–4 decadence  12–13, 45–8, 55–6, 130–2, 186–7, 230 The Yellow Book 25 De Certeau, Michel  219–20

Index  245 De Lesseps, Ferdinand  71–2 De Michele, Charles Eastland  69–70 Dent, Joseph Malaby  99–100, 157–8, 170–2 vision for Everyman’s Library 100–1 De Sacy, Silvestre  10–11, 39–40 De Tassy, Garcin  8 Deutsch, Emanuel  33–5, 41, 48, 97–8 Dhammapada 26–8 diacritics  ixn.2, 129–32, 164–5 Diamond Sutra 223–5 Dibdin, Thomas Frognall  xxii Dickens, Charles  83–4, 99, 121 Dickins, Frederick Victor  15–17, 73–4 dictionary  1, 67, 71, 83–5, 139–40, 171–2, 188–90, 216 Dillon, John  175–6 disenchantment 45–6 D’Israeli, Isaac  17–18, 100 Disraeli, Benjamin  63 Dobson, Austin  49 Don Quixote  xii, xxxi–xxxii Dow, Alexander  3–4 dramatization  21–2, 53–4, 73–5, 110n.62 of Arabian Nights  2–3, 73–4, 133–4 of the Chushingura 73–4 see also Kiralfy, Imre Dream of the Red Chamber 4 Drury, Annmarie  xi–xii, xv, xxx–xxxii, 18n.56, 28–9, 42–5, 167–8 on cultural commodification  102–3 Dryden, John  121–2 Dublin  6, 36–7, 68–9, 75–6, 80–1, 86–7 Trinity College  xv, 234 Duffy, Sir Charles Gavan  70–1 Duffy, James  169–70 Du Fu  15–16 Dulac, Edmund  127–8, 176–8 Dumoulin, James  194–5 Dutt, Manmatha Nath  153–4 Dutt, Romesh Chunder  37–8, 43–4, 108–9 as economic historian  155–6 Ramayana and Mahabharata translations  100, 103–4, 152–65, 204 Ramayana translation adapted for children 107–8 translates Rig Veda into Bengali  155–6 Dutt, Toru  84–5, 157–60, 163–4, 206–7 Eames, Wilberforce  84–5 East India Company  1–8, 12–13, 15–16, 21–2, 100–1, 172, 194, 220–1, 231 translation priorities  5–6 Eastwick, Edward Backhouse  125–7, 131n.39, 172–3, 193–5, 220–1, 231–2

ecumenicalism  xv, xxiv–xxv, 26–7, 32–7, 44–5, 58–9, 187 in Kabir  207–9 Edinburgh Review  17–18, 31, 210–11 education, see schools Edwards, Amelia  57–8 Egypt  xxi–xxii, 39–40, 43–5, 63–4, 71–2, 130–2, 151–2, 173–4, 216, 228–9 ancient language of  218n.74, 228–9 Egyptian Book of the Dead  101–2, 206–7 Egyptology 80–1 Ehrenstein, Albert  127–8, 134–5 Eliot, George  34–5, 103–4 Emerson, Ralph Waldo  xxi, 27–8, 46, 49, 169–70, 198–9, 211–12 interest in Gulistan  1–2, 220–1 predicts growing ‘taste for orientalism’ in Britain  40–1, 43–4 E.P. Dutton (publisher)  170–1, 186–7, 190–1 epic poetry  6–7, 10, 16–17, 21–2, 29–30, 37–8, 91–2, 95–7, 116–17, 120, 123, 139, 152–60 erotica  15–16, 21–2, 25, 29–30, 60–1, 66, 132–3, 158–60, 192–3, 202–3, 225 ethics  102–7, 158–60, 186–8, 203–4 reciprocity  35–6, 104–5 evangelicalism 34–5 Faizi 12–13 Fauche, Hippolyte  153–4, 157–60 Fazl, Abu’l  205–6 Fenollosa, Ernest  115–16 Ferdusi, see Firdausi Fiction  xii, 39–40, 64–5, 74, 83–6, 89–90, 108–9, 118, 130–2, 166–7, 169–70, 181, 209, 229 Chinese  3–4, 15–16, 97–8 Gothic 176 popularity of orientalist fiction greater than that of translations  xxxii–xxxiii Field, Claud  67 fin de siècle  x–xi, xxxi, 29–30, 46–50 Firdausi, Abu’l Qasim  ix, 1–2, 5–7, 17, 21–2, 25, 102–3, 107–8, 115n.76, 119, 123–5, 147, 173–4 admitted to Sainte-Beuve’s Temple of Taste 93–7 Gosse’s poem about his exile  21–2, 142–3 in Rose Garden of Persia 8–10 misattribution of lines  71 name carved on buildings  76–7 see also Shahnameh Firdusi, see Firdausi First World War  xxvi–xxvi, 30, 58–9, 148–51, 190–1, 214–19 Omar Khayyam read by soldiers  xxi–xxii, xxv

246 Index Fitzgerald, Edward  xxi, 17–20, 49, 51–4, 58, 80, 89–90 arrangement of Khayyam’s quatrains into a continuous poem  18–19, 54–5 ideas about translation  18–19, 125–6 spirit of amateurism  22 suggestion that he invented Khayyam  59–60 talent for abridgement  19–20 translation of Aeschylus  18–19 translation of Mantiq-ut-Tayr 67 wearied of Persian clichés  17–18 see also Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam Flecker, James Elroy  218 folklore  20–2, 28n.90, 84–5, 97–8, 130–2, 166, 181 Foulis, T.N. (publisher)  13–15 France  xi–xii, 83–4, 93–7, 174–5, 217 Franklin, Benjamin  70–1, 105–7 Fraser’s Magazine  6–8, 12–13, 87 Freeman-Mitford, Algernon Bertram  15–17, 38–9, 64–5, 73–4, 82–3, 176, 181–3, 207–9 dislike of Noguchi  129 translation method  126 Freemasonry  xiii–xiv, 197, 207–9 French, Daniel Chester  76–80 French language  xxxi–xxxii, 5–11, 15–16, 19–22, 31–2, 39–40, 53–4, 58–9, 71–2, 81–5, 96–9, 121–4, 126–7, 130–2, 147, 153–4, 169–70, 179–80, 192–3, 232–3 Freese, John Henry  15 freethought movement  36–7 Fry, Roger  68–9, 217 Fun’ya no, Yasuhide  xxvi, 205–6 Furness, Horace Howard  200–1 Galland, Antoine  2–3, 63–4, 118–19 Gandhi, Mohandas Karamchand  43–4, 171–2 Ganguli, Kisari Mohan  16–17, 98–9, 103–4 Garnett, Constance  xii Garnett, Richard  102–4, 142–3, 166–8 meets Helen Zimmern  22 Gaskell, Elizabeth  64–5 Gemmell, William  223–5 genealogical research  200 George V, King of England  37–8 George Bell (publisher)  13–15, 170 German language  xxxi–xxxii, 2, 5–6, 8–9, 12, 19–20, 28–9, 81–2, 119, 134–5, 137–40, 142–3, 169–70, 179–83 Costello suggests it is better than English for translating Persian  123–4 Germany  xi–xii, 78–80, 83–4, 170 Gibb, Elias John Wilkinson  23–4, 134–5 Gibbon, Edward  71

Giles, Herbert Allen  28–9, 97–8, 103–4, 116–17, 207, 230–1 anger at plagiarism  128–9 ‘consummate popularizer’  188–90 his translations set to music  75 source for Ezra Pound  115–16 Giles, Lionel  170–1 Gilgamesh, Epic of  xxx–xxxi Gita Govinda 138 Gladstone, William Ewart  63, 90, 167 Gladwin, Francis  1–2, 5–6, 8, 194–5, 226–7 globalization  ix–x, 42, 45–6, 214–15 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von  ix–x, 121, 137–8, 164–5 his theory of translation  119 on the weltmarkt 102–3 West-östlicher Divan  2, 118 Gogarty, Oliver St John  68–9 Goldie, George Taubman  43 Goldsmid, Sir Frederic  123–6, 134–5 Gopal, Ram  xiii–xiv Gordon, Charles George, General  44–5 Gorresio, Gaspare  153–4, 157–8 Gosse, Edmund  59–61, 142–5, 173–4, 196 as editor of Heinemann’s International Library  102–4, 230–1 suggests an imitation may be better than a translation 60–1 writes prefatory poem for The Epic of Kings  21–2, 142–3 Gottheil, Richard  x–xi, 232–3 Grant Duff, Mountstuart Elphinstone  43, 66–7, 94 grassroots bibliography  200 Great Books movement  114, 228–9 Greek (ancient language)  6, 9, 12, 50n.58, 73–4, 92–4, 96–8, 108–9, 120–1, 139–40, 169–70, 192, 228–9 Griffith, Ralph Thomas Hotchkin  16–17, 98–9, 153–4, 157–8 use of heroic couplets  164–5 Griset, Ernest  176 Grolier Club  80n.48, 82n.54, 83n.58, 207 Gulistan  xxix–xxx, 1–2, 37–8, 66–7, 114–15 Arnold’s translation  87, 195–6 Eastwick’s translation  125–7, 172–3, 193–4 homoeroticism 192–6 multiple translations of  30–1 not chosen by Lubbock as one of hundred best books 96–7 read by J.A. Symonds  192–5, 200 read by Leigh Hunt  219–27 Ross’s translation  5–6, 100, 103–4 streets named for  75–6, 86–7 Gurdjieff, George  211–12

Index  247 Hafez  ix–xi, xxxii–xxxiii, 4–7, 12–13, 15, 17–18, 30–1, 46–8, 56, 59–60, 82–3, 115n.76, 130–2, 192–3, 206–7, 228–9, 232 and Goethe  2, 118 Clarke’s translation  123–4 his quatrains  129–30 in Rose Garden of Persia 8–10 multiple translations of  30–1 ‘race for Hafez’  134–5, 137 translated by Jones  1–2 Le Gallienne’s translation  59–60, 134–7 McCarthy’s translation  54–5 Hafiz, see Hafez Hamilton, Alexander  105–7 Hamilton, Terrick  5–6, 46–8 von Hammer-Purgstall, Joseph  2, 8, 12, 119, 134–5 Hardy, Thomas  51–2, 215 Harmsworth (publisher)  113–14 Harrison, Frederic  93–4 Hasegawa, Takejiro  xxvi Hatefi 12–13 Havelock, Henry  75–6 Healy, Tim  68–9 Hearn, Lafcadio  45–6, 84–5, 164–5, 180–1, 183–4, 206–7 heroization of translators  46 his library  232–3 popularization projects  31–2 reading of Quran  31–2 Heath Robinson, William  107–8, 176 Hebrew  xxx–xxxi, 81–2, 101–2, 110, 125, 179–80, 188–90, 198n.16, 228–9 Heinemann (publisher)  102–4, 230–1 Hemans, Felicia  71, 197 Henderson, Alice Corbin  213–14 Henty, George Alfred  xii Herder, Johann Gottfried  137–8 Heron-Allen, Edward  18–19, 71, 200–1 Hichens, Robert  xxxii–xxxiii Hillel 78 Hindi  xxiv, xxviii–xxix, 30n.94, 130–2, 139–40, 207–9, 213–14 Hindley, John  4–6, 97–8 Hinduism  xxiii–xxiv, 1, 41, 43–4, 75–7, 80, 83–4, 101–2, 108–9, 111, 154, 157–8, 161–2, 176, 205, 213–14, 223–4 brahminsim  116–17, 155–6 compared with Christianity  140–1 Transcendentalist interest in  170–1 Hitopadesha  xiii–xiv, 96–7, 166, 206–9 Hodder & Stoughton  176–8 Hodgson, Geraldine  102–3, 139–40, 153–4, 161–2

Homer  50, 94–7, 123, 147, 157–8, 164–5 debate about how to translate him  120–1 Firdausi compared to  9–10 Homeopathy 205n.37 Hong Kong  3–4, 15–16, 98, 207–9 Hope, Laurence  84–5 Hopkins, Gerard Manley  6–7 Horace  52, 121–2 Houghton, Richard Monckton Milnes, 1st Baron  166, 207 Houghton Mifflin  50–1, 80, 179–84, 200–1 Housman, Laurence  176–8 Houston  44–5, 206–7 Hubbard, Elbert  55–6 Hubbard, Elizabeth (née Wright)  205 Humphreys, Christmas  218–19, 232–3 Hunt, Leigh  1, 3–6, 26–7, 220–7 idea for an ‘Eastern Story Teller’  1 Huxley, Thomas Henry  63 Hyder Ali  69–70 Ibsen, Henrik  60–1 Iddesleigh, Stafford Northcote, 1st Earl of  91–2 illustration (pictorial)  xxix–xxx, 15–17, 25, 74–5, 80, 107–8, 127–8, 157–8, 160, 172–4, 176, 178–9 Imagism  xxvi, 115–16, 148–51 imperialism  33, 40–6, 51–2, 61–2, 71–2, 75–6, 92–3, 100–1, 108–9, 114, 205–6, 213–14 and cosmopolitanism  42–3 buttressed by cultural affinities  41–2, 130, 156, 188 Japanese 23–4 India  ix–x, 4–7, 16–18, 20–1, 28–9, 30n.94, 34–5, 36–7, 40–1, 43, 46–8, 57, 58–9, 66–7, 69–70, 73–4, 76–7, 82–6, 88, 90–2, 96–101, 111, 116–17, 130–2, 137, 139, 152–3, 157–8, 160–2, 165, 171–2, 174–6, 185–8, 209–10, 213–14, 216, 223–4 1857 Rebellion  1, 24, 128n.30 cultural nationalism  43–4, 155–6 Empire of India Exhibition (1895)  74n.36 Indo-Colonial Exhibition (1886)  210–11 Linguistic Survey of  23 market for British publishers  102–3 movement for self-rule  111, 153–6, 171–2 Muslim population of  42 schools 111–12 visit by George V and Queen Mary  37–8 intellectual property  25–6 Iqbal, Muhammad  229

248 Index Iran  46–8, 66–7, 75–7, 85–6, 95–6, 187, 192–3, 206–7, 214n.62 constitutional revolution (1905)  174–5 Ireland  6, 10–11, 36–7, 67–9, 75–6, 80–1, 147–8, 174–5, 198–9, 198n.16, 223–4 Irving, Henry  133–4 Irving, Washington  38–9 Islam  xxii–xxiii, 1–2, 23, 27n.84, 29–34, 42–3, 46–8, 57, 76–7, 83–4, 88, 97–8, 170–1, 183–4, 210–11, 216, 230 and British Empire  42 compared with Christianity  110 jurisprudence 90 Victorian converts to  36–7 Iwaya, Sazanami  181 Jami  ix–xi, 9, 85–6, 212n.57 Japan  xxvi, 15–17, 44–6, 64–5, 76–7, 83–5, 100–2, 113, 129, 147–8, 187, 206–7, 230–3 Confucianism in  113 drama 73–4 imperial ambitions of  23–4 Meiji Revolution  181–3 shunga erotica  25 stereotypes of  74, 181–3 tourists in  20–1, 38–9 Japanese language  xxv–xxvi, xxviii–xxix, 15–17, 29–30, 84–5, 87, 108–9, 116–17, 126, 176, 179–83, 205–6, 228–9 anthologies  xxvi, 16–17 native-speaking translators  xxvi, 207–9 Jardine Matheson  16–17 Jataka 81–2 Jefferson, Thomas  70–1 Jennings, William  112–14 Jews  x–xi, 24, 33–4, 71, 78–80, 88, 96–7, 124–5, 198–9 anti-semitism xxii John Murray (publisher)  xxvi, 30, 42–3, 80, 113–14, 172, 184–91 Johnson, James Weldon  203 Jones, William  xi–xii, 1–2, 6–10, 9n.30, 12–13, 17–18, 22–3, 28–9, 83–4, 89–90, 100–1, 123, 126–7, 142n.75 Persian Grammar  8, 71 Journey to the West 15–16 Jowett, Benjamin  26–7 Kabir  xxvii–xxviii, 24, 80–1, 205–6 imitated by Kipling  xxiv–xxv, 61–2 Tagore and Underhill’s translation  207–9, 213–14 kabuki  15–16, 73–4

Kalevala 75 Kalidasa  76–82, 100, 118, 228–9 Bridal of Uma 100n.33 Megha Duta 118 see also Sakuntala Kapadia, Shapurji Aspaniarji  184–90 Kashefi 12–13 Kashmir  xxiii–xxiv, 60–1 Kenealy, Edward Vaughan  15, 232–4 Kenney, Annie  56 Khan, Sir Syed Ahmed  172 Khayyam, Omar  ix–xi, xxiv, xxi, xxiv, xxvii–xxviii, 12, 18–19, 41, 67–9, 76–7, 114, 115n.76, 123–5, 200–3, 205–7, 211–12, 228–9 ‘cult’ of  48–57 debate as to whether he was a Sufi  xxiv, 58–9 fin-de-siècle interest in  45–6 Le Gallienne’s translation  45–6, 202–3, 206–7 McCarthy’s translation  52–5 multiple translators  136–7 Omar Khayyam Club  59–61, 221 people named after  50–1 see also Rubaiyat Khusro, Amir  222 Kilito, Abdelfatteh  205–6, 228–31 Kinglake, Alexander William  63 Kipling, John Lockwood  157–8, 176 Kipling, Rudyard  xii, 45–6, 191, 205–6, 210–11 imitations of Kabir  xxiv–xxv, 61–2, 213 on ‘cheap orientalism’  61–2 Kiralfy, Imre  xii, 74n.36, 152–3 Knight, Charles  89 Knight, James Gemmell  xiii–xiv, 209 Koran, see Quran Korea  23–4, 179–81 Kropotkin, Prince Peter  198–9 Ku Hung Ming  170–1, 188–90 Kural 35–6 Labour Party (UK)  56 Ladies’ Reading Club of Houston  44–5, 206–7 Lahore 4–5 Landor, Walter Savage  1, 5–6 Lane, Edward William  31n.96, 61, 71–2, 83–4, 86n.68, 133–4, 170 Lane, John  157–8 Lang, Andrew  51–4 Lao Tse  26, 76–8 Lasner, Mark Samuels  xiv–xv Latin  2n.5, 6, 9, 19–20, 30–1, 92–7, 107n.51, 121, 169–70, 179–81, 188–90, 228–9 Layard, Austen Henry  83–4 Layla and Majnun  10, 17–18, 100

Index  249 Le Fanu, Sheridan  130–2 Leaf, Walter  59n.82 Lee, Vernon  142–3 Leeds Library  xxxii–xxxiii legal texts  6, 34, 36–7, 102–3, 185–6 Le Gallienne, Richard  18–19, 45–6, 48–51, 59–60, 71–2, 138, 228–9 break with Omar Khayyam Club  61 criticizes Burton  130–2 dislike of Edwin Arnold  139 translation of Hafez  134–7 translation of Omar Khayyam  45–6, 202–3, 206–7 Legge, James  15–17, 26–7, 80, 97–8, 113–14, 170–1, 184–5, 188–90 nephew in Australia  86–7 source for Waddell  148–51 libraries acquisition policies  84–6 borrowing records  xxxii–xxxiii, 86–7 circulating 80–3 public  xxxii–xxxiii, 26–7, 78, 83–7 statuary and ornamentation  76–8, 103–4 Library of Congress  77–8, 233n.13 Linguistic Survey of India  23 Li Po  15–16 Lippincott (publisher)  80, 86–7 literacy  90–3, 100, 121 literary marketplace  26, 30–1, 61–2, 102–3, 118–19, 167–8, 180–1 Locke, John  70–1 Locker-Lampson, Frederick  49 London, Jack and Charmian  202–3, 207–9 Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth  70–1, 75 Longman (publisher)  6–7, 87, 130–2, 185–6 and Rose Garden of Persia  13–15, 167–8 Los Angeles Public Library  78 Louise, Duchess of Argyll (Princess Louise) 207–9 Lowell, Amy  81–2 Lowell, James Russell  66, 202 Lubbock, Sir John  90–101, 103–4, 112–17, 190–1, 229 as biologist  91, 95–6 defends his choice of Asian texts  92 one hundred best books  90–4, 207 preference for epic  95–7 Lucas, John Seymour  207–9 Luzac & Co  80–1, 84–5 Lyall, Charles James  46–8, 57–8, 152 attacked by Burton  133–4 Mabinogion 96–7 Macaulay, Thomas Babington  9, 232–3

Macdonald, Frederika (née Richardson)  16–17, 139–40, 152–65, 223–4 Macmillan (publisher)  16–17, 31–2, 38–9, 59n.82, 145, 153–4, 157–8, 213–14 Macneill, Sir John  66–7 Mahabharata  16–17, 27–8, 37–8, 98–100, 107, 115–16, 138, 170 abridged by Annie Besant  111–12 admired by A.R. Orage  103–4, 205–6, 211–12 included in Lubbock’s list of one hundred best books 91–4 Nala and Damayanti episode  180–1 translated by Dutt for Everyman  100, 103–4, 153–62, 204 see also Bhagavad Gita Mahfouz, Naguib  230 Mahmud of Ghazni  10 Malacca 4–5 Malay language  69–70, 101–2 Mantz, Ruth  204–5 Manu  6, 76–7 Marcus Aurelius  91–2 Marginalia  xxii–xxvi, 30–1, 35–6, 53–4, 104–7, 109–10, 114–15, 140–1, 188, 191, 200–4, 209–10, 213, 215, 218–19, 220–7 as a way of comparing variant translations  200–1 as glossing  204–5, 207–9 as illustration  xxii, 205–6 as indexing  90 Margoliouth, George  109–10 Marsh’s Library  6 Martineau, Harriet  33, 39–40, 65n.7, 91–2 Masefield, John  73–4, 218 Masters, Edgar Lee  213–14 Maynard, Constance  34–5 maxims  xiv–xv, 66–7, 69–72, 142–3, 198–9, 209, 211–12, 224–5 McCarthy, Justin Huntly  18–19, 41, 56–7, 200–1, 207–11 ‘beggarly’ knowledge of Persian  53–4 criticized by Kipling  61–2 Goldsmid’s opinion of  123–5 recommends Clarke’s translation of Hafez 134–5 translation of Khayyam  52–5, 58 Melbourne  xxvi, 58–9, 70–1, 107–8 Melbourne Public Library  83–5 melodrama  xii, 74, 190–1 Melville, Herman  226–7 Mencius (Mengzi)  76–7, 104–5 Meredith, George  60–1 Mez, Adam  205–6 Mikado, The 73–4

250 Index Milford, Humphrey  185–6 Mill, James  83–4, 90 Mill, John Stuart  6–7 attack on purveyors of ‘superficial knowledge’ 25 Miller, Joaquin  xxiv–xxv, 205–6 Mills, Charles De Berard  26–7 Milton, John  161 miniature editions  xiv–xv, 21, 216 Mirkhvand 167 misattribution  70–1, 76–7 missionaries  xi–xii, xxvii, 15–16, 35–6, 147–8, 153–4, 172, 183–4, 216 London Missionary Society  20–1, 84–5 Mitchell, Hortense  38–9 Mitchell Library (Glasgow)  84–5, 166 Moallakat, see Muallaqat Modernism 116–17 modernity  45–6, 63–5, 72, 130–2, 155–6, 181, 206–7, 214–15, 228–9 Mohammed  30–1, 46–8, 63, 71–2, 75–8, 110 hadiths  69–72, 90, 198–9, 211–12 play by Hall Caine  110n.62 praised by Carlyle  110 public portraits of  77–8 Mohl, Jules  21–2, 123–4 Mompesson House  xiv–xv, 162–3 Monier-Williams, Monier  34–5, 41, 53, 73–4, 172–3 popularization of Sakuntala  42, 113–14 Montaigne, Michel de  198–9, 211–12, 230 Montesquieu 105–7 Moore, Thomas  6, 12, 17–18, 123–4 a genuine scholar  5–6 as Costello’s patron  13–15 Irish Melodies 10–11 Lalla Rookh  1, 3–4, 12–13, 17–18, 88, 126–7 Morrell, Lady Ottoline  175 Morris, William  63, 91, 96–7 Morshead, Edmund Doidge Anderson  18–19 Moses 78 Mosher, Thomas Bird  50–2, 56 Muallaqat  1–2, 46–8, 191, 230 translated by Jones  2 Mudie, Charles  82–3 Mufti, Aamir  xii–xiii Muir, Sir William  96–7, 111n.64 Müller, Friedrich Max  6–7, 28–30, 158–60, 224–5, 230–3 assists Moncure Conway  27–8, 137 editorship of Sacred Books of the East 28, 31–2, 184–7 music  22–3, 75, 90, 138, 190–1, 206–7 Mutiny, see India, 1857 Rebellion

Napoleon III  94–5 National Observer 123–4 nationalism  46–8, 100, 165, 173–4 Indian  43–4, 111, 153–4 Nehru, Motilal  43–4 New Orleans Carnival  75–6 New York  50, 50n.58, 53–4, 74, 78–80, 102–4, 108–9, 203, 205n.37, 207, 210–11, 232–3 New York Public Library  84–5 Newman, Francis  120–4 Newman, John Henry  70–1 Nicholson, Reynold Alleyne  42–3 Nicolas, Jean Baptiste  53–4, 58–9 Nietzsche, Friedrich  22, 230 Nimat Allah Al-Harawi  84–5 Nineteenth Century, The 87 Nizami Ganjavi  5–6, 9, 46–8, 130n.37 Noguchi, Yone  xxvi, 85–6, 129 noh (Japanese drama)  73–4 Northbrook Society  188 Norton, Charles Eliot  50 Nutt, David  54–5, 84–5, 172 O’Brien, William  198–9, 211–12 O’Casey, Sean  68–9 Okakura, Kakuzo  xxxiii Olcott, Frances Jenkins  142–3 Oman, John Campbell  85–6, 153–4, 158, 170 Orabi, Ahmed  xxxii–xxxiii, 173–4 Orage, Alfred Richard  103–4, 205–6, 211–12 Orient Press  186–8 Oriental Translation Fund  16–17, 85–6 orientalism  ix, xxiii–xxiv, 8, 23, 40–1, 61–2, 89–90, 100–1, 120, 123–4, 126–7, 137, 139–40, 144, 155–6, 165, 172–3, 226–7, 232–3 and colonial administration  1–2, 5–6, 24 and East India Company  1–7, 12–13, 15–16, 21–2, 100–1, 172 and William Jones  xi–xii and women  139–40 appeals for public funding  23 as defined by Said  x, 9–10 ‘cheap’  61–2, 210–11 French  xxii, xxiv, 2, 10–11, 39–40, 53–4, 84–5, 123–4, 153–4, 232–3 German  2, 12, 127–8, 134–5, 205–6 International Congress of  123 Italian  2, 153–4 origin of world literature  x, 229 public indifference to  xi–xii Ormerod, Herbert  xiii–xiv, 207–9 Ossian 96–7 otherness, see alterity

Index  251 Ottoman Empire  23–4, 42, 89–90 Crimean War  36–7 Mehmet the Conqueror  71 Ouida (Maria Louise Ramé)  133–4 Ouseley, William  9 Oxford  6–7, 18–19, 26–7, 49, 57, 91, 97–8, 120, 137, 185–6, 192 Oxford University Press  28, 42, 184–6 Ozaki, Yei Theodora  181–3 pacifism 217 Palgrave, Francis  27–8 Pali  35–6, 81–2, 172, 218–19 Pall Mall Gazette  61, 91–2 Pall Mall Magazine 190–1 Palmer, Edward Henry  31, 123, 185–6, 210–11 Palmer, Thomas Ambrose  39–40, 61–2, 205–6, 207–9, 213, 215–16 Panchatantra 171–2 as Pilpay’s Fables  76–7, 100, 130–2, 180–1 pantomime 2–3 Patanjali, see yoga Patmore, Coventry  196 Payne, John  61, 85–6, 175–6 plagiarized by Burton  132–3 Pearse, James  36–7 Pearse, Patrick  36–7 Pellat, Charles  230–1 Penny Cyclopaedia 89–90 Penny Magazine 87n.70 periodicals  xxviii, xxx–xxxi, 6–7, 25, 33–6, 45–6, 65, 70–1, 80–1, 87, 101–2, 119, 128–9, 153–4, 200–1, 214–15 Persia, see Iran Persian language  xiii–xiv, xxi, 1–3, 29–30, 60–1, 67, 70–1, 81–4, 87, 91–2, 97–8, 101–2, 108–9, 114–15, 123–30, 138–40, 142–3, 145–6, 166, 173–4, 179–80, 193–4, 197–9, 204–6, 226–9, 231–2 anthologies  6–15, 26–7, 30, 101–2 clichés  17–18, 65, 68–9 dictionaries 83–4 fables 107 first Asian literature to gain widespread European recognition  1–2 homoeroticism  1–2, 103–4, 192–4 in British India  1–2, 84–5 in Mughal India  3–5 learners  39–40, 123, 183, 200–1 more poets than any other language  8 nastaliq script  54–5, 123–4 poetic canon  x–xi, 9, 220–1 popularity in Romantic period  xxxi supposed decadence of its literature  12–13, 25, 46–8

Pétis de la Croix, François  4–5 Petit de Billier, Amélina  198–9 Philobiblon Society  207 photography  139, 158–60, 174–5, 202, 215 Pickthall, Marmaduke  36–7 piracy (literary)  50, 56–7, 142 plagiarism  15, 68, 127–35, 190–1, 232–3 Plato  27n.84, 220–1, 233 Pocock, Ebenezer  9 Pope, Alexander  1–2, 10, 70–1, 123, 142–3, 164–5 popularization  15–25, 29–32, 43–4, 56–7, 61–2, 66–7, 80–1, 97–8, 100–1, 120, 122–4, 133–5, 137, 148–51, 153–6, 165, 167, 178–9, 183–4, 188–90, 195–6, 214–15, 220–1 as dispersal of cultural capital  61–2, 126 as ‘women’s work’  139–40 collaboration between scholars and popularizers  28, 134–5, 152 definition of popular translator  20–1 differences in treatment of Asian and European texts  xxxi–xxxii disputes between scholars and popularizers 126–9 highbrow/lowbrow divide  xii opposition to  24–6, 115–16, 126, 184–5 specialist knowledge at reduced price  26–7 stealing a march on scholars  16–17 understudied xxxi–xxxii unsuccessful  209, 223–4 Post, Guy Bates  53–4 Pound, Ezra  115–17, 120, 229 Powys Mathers, Edward  15–16, 60–1, 228–9 Pre-Raphaelitism  xxxn.20, 49 prices, see books primitivism 46–8 Probsthain, Arthur  80–1 pronunciation  74, 130, 164–5, 210–11 prosody  10–12, 58, 120–1, 123–4, 164–5, 232 as expression of national identity  xxx–xxxi proverbs  10–11, 69–72, 84–5, 142–3, 197–9 pseudotranslation  5–6, 60–1, 84–5, 128–9 psychical research  52 Pu Songling  97–8, 180–1 publishing  166–91, 194, 229 and profit  56–7, 100–1, 165, 169–70 cost of paper  3–4 for subscribers  29–30, 130–2, 167 half-profits system  167–8 in USA  50–2, 54–6, 80 reprinting after expiration of copyright  3–4, 100–1, 103–4 typical print runs  103–4, 190–1 unsolicited ‘pitches’  xxvii–xxviii, 23, 167 Punch 152–3

252 Index Quaritch, Bernard  17–18, 52, 80–2, 84–5, 87, 154, 172, 201n.28, 207 purchases copyright of Rodwell’s Koran 183–4 Quarterly Review 33–4 Queen Mary (Mary of Teck)  37–8, 40–1 Quhistani, Nizari  222–3 Quiller-Couch, Arthur  49, 57, 63–4 Quilliam, Abdullah  36–7 Quran  15–16, 28, 33–4, 46–8, 76–8, 97–8, 112, 136–8, 197–9, 206–7, 216, 229 as prize book  110–11 bestseller 103–4 Chinvat Bridge  63–4 compared with Bible  110 first cheap edition  80–1, 100, 103–4 first English translation  2–3 included in Lubbock’s list of one hundred best books  91–2, 95–7 in public libraries  33, 86–8, 199–200 multiple translations of  30–2, 170–1, 210–11 Palmer’s translation  31, 185–7 read by freethinkers  36–7 Rodwell’s translation  30–1, 108–10, 170–1, 185–6 Sale’s translation  2–3, 30–3, 36–7, 86–7, 100, 170–1, 185–6, 200n.21 village named after  75–6 racism  xi–xii, 209–10, 217 Rackham, Arthur  178 radif (verse form)  12 Ramanujan, Attipate Krishnaswami  165 Ramayana  xiv–xv, xxix–xxx, 7–8, 16–17, 27–8, 30–1, 115–16, 152–65, 170 adapted for children  100, 107–8, 153–4 feminist versions of  162–3 history of its translation  153–4 included in Lubbock’s list of one hundred best books 91–2 multiple translations of  30–1 read in private girls’ schools  108–9 translated by Dutt for Everyman  100, 103–4, 107–8 Rangarajan, Padma  xi–xii Rationalist Press Association  56 reading  ix–x, xii–xiii, xv, xxii, xxviii–xxix, 2–4, 25–7, 32, 37–8, 51–2, 56–7, 67, 88–9, 94–5, 151–2, 166, 183–4, 192–227 children’s 107–11 clubs, see book clubs desultory  30, 89–90, 192, 199 directed  90–9, 103–4, 107–14 Evangelical practices of  34–5

female readers  211–14 frustration with translator  30–1, 219–27 ‘general reader’  xxxi, 8, 17–18, 21–2, 27, 42–3, 92–3, 123, 129–30, 167, 181–3, 196–7, 221 ‘interpretive communities’  197, 207–9 liberating  193–4, 211–19 motivations for  xxvii, 33–57, 88 negative responses  209–10 problems for historians of  195–7, 199–200 resisting dominant interpretations  xii–xiii, 192–5, 205–6, 211–14, 222–3, 226–7 sense of connection with dead authors  51–4, 58, 124–5, 127–8, 192–3, 203, 221–2 tipped-in items  202 working-class readers  55–7, 86–7, 90–2, 98–9, 112, 120–1 Reading Experience Database  xxx–xxxi relativism (philosophical)  224n.87 see also cultural relativism Renan, Ernest  142–3 Rhys, Ernest  100–1, 103–4, 171–2 Rhys-Davids, Thomas William  35–6 Richards, Grant  49–50, 59–60, 175–6 Richardson, Frederika, see Frederika Macdonald Richardson, John  4–6 Ridley, James  4–5, 75 Rig Veda, see Vedas Rihaku, see Li Po Roberts Brothers (publisher)  80, 139n.65 Robinson, Mary Agnes Frances  52, 124–5, 207–9 Robinson, Samuel  26–7, 85–6, 166 Rockhill, William Woodville  183–4 Rodwell, John Medows  30–1, 108–10, 170–1, 185–6 Rogers, Alexander  128–9 Romanian 36–7 Rosen, Augustus  90 Rosenberg, Harold  25–6 Ross, Edward Denison  23 Ross, James  5–6, 100, 103–4 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel  17–18 Rousseau, Samuel  9 Routledge 113–14 rubai (verse form)  xxi, xxvi, 58, 129–30 Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam (Fitzgerald’s translation)  xiii–xiv, xxi, xxv, 17–19, 39–40, 67, 80–1, 86–7, 128–9, 197–9, 200–3 as English classic  xxi–xxii, 39–40 as New Orleans carnival theme  75 and Victorian mourning culture  51–2 and working-class readers  55–6 becoming middlebrow  68–9

Index  253 craze for  18–19, 48–57, 85–6, 202 illustrated by Vedder  75 multiple translators  18–19, 59–60, 200–1 not chosen by Lubbock  95–7 places named after  75–6 popularity in USA  50 read by soldiers  xxi–xxii, xxv, 214–16 spoofs 44–5 Rudaki 12 Rumi  xxviii–xxix, 9, 42–3, 71, 80–1, 232 Masnavi  67n.10, 84–5 quoted at dinner party  66–7 streets named after  75–6 Ruskin, John  xxvi–xxvii, 63 criticizes Lubbock’s book list  91–2 Russell, Bertrand  170–1 Ryder, Arthur  73–4, 100–1, 170–2 Sacoontala, see Sakuntala Sackville-West, Vita  39–40 Sadi  ix–xi, xxix–xxx, 1–2, 5–9, 15, 30–1, 71, 85–6, 114–15, 142n.76, 178–9, 192–4, 206–7, 226–7 as traveller  222–4 Bustan  12–13, 37–8, 138, 209 favourite author of Leigh Hunt  220–1 his humour  194 maxims  66–7, 142–3 quoted at dinner party  66–7 read by Herman Melville  226–7 street named after  75–6 see also Gulistan Said, Edward W.  x, 9–10, 12–13, 24, 46–8 Sainte-Beuve, Charles Augustin  93–7 Sainte-Hilaire, Jules Barthélemy  91–2, 96–7 Sakuntala  xiin.11, 30–1, 41–2, 78–82 English playtext performed in India  73–4 first English translation  1–2 included in Lubbock’s list of one hundred best books  91–2, 113–14 multiple translations of  30–1, 100–1 ornamental edition issued by Stephen Austin 172–3 Sale, George  2–3, 30–3, 36–7, 86–7, 100, 170–1, 185–6, 200n.21, 210–11 Salisbury, Robert Gascoyne-Cecil, 3rd Marquess of  63 Samarqandi, Suzani  198–9 Sanskrit  xxviii–xxix, 1–3, 6–7, 10, 15–18, 23, 29–30, 41, 46, 60–1, 73–4, 80–2, 84–7, 90, 96–7, 100, 114–18, 137, 139–40, 153–6, 170–3, 180n.46, 188–90, 197–8, 205, 211–12, 218n.74, 219n.77, 224–5, 228–9, 232

Edwin Arnold incorporates original phrases of in translation  138–9 pseudotranslations of  128–32 sloka  158–60, 164–5 Sassoon, Siegfried  217–18 Schleiermacher, Friedrich  19–20, 137–8 School of Oriental and African Studies  23 schools  90–1, 97–8 in India  111 prize books  107–10 Schopenhauer, Arthur  22 Schuler, Gottlieb Frederick Henry  222–3 Schwab, Raymond The Oriental Renaissance  xi–xii, xxxi scissors-and-paste journalism  70–1 Scott, Cyril  75 Scott, Sir Walter  34–5, 95n.17 on Galland’s translation of Arabian Nights 118–19 Selborne, Roundell Palmer, 1st Earl of  18–19 Sen, Keshub Chandra  34–5 Series (publishing) Aldine Poets  99 Bohn’s Standard Library  81–2, 99, 169–70 Camelot Classics  99–101, 103–4, 114–15, 193–4 Chandos Classics  80–1, 99–100, 103–4, 107–8, 113–14 Collins’ Classics  99 Everyman’s Library  30, 37–8, 99–104, 109, 153–4, 170–2, 183–4 Gowan’s Cosmopolitan Library  101–2 Harvard Classics  114 Heinemann’s International Library  101–3 International Library of Famous Literature 101–3 Macmillan’s Colonial Library  38–9 Modern Library  228–9 Nelson’s Sixpenny Classics  99 Omar Series  49–50 Oxford World’s Classics  29–30, 101–2, 185–6 Penguin Classics  29–30 Prize Library  107–8 Sacred Books of the East  28, 31–2, 184–91 Short Histories of the Literatures of the World  103–4, 230–1 Sir John Lubbock’s One Hundred Best Books 113–14 Temple Classics  99–100, 107–8, 153–4, 157–8, 205 Unity Series  42 Universal Classics Library  101–3 Wisdom of the East  xxvi, 30, 37–8, 42–3, 80–3, 184–91, 209, 218–19, 232–3

254 Index Series (publishing) (cont.) World’s Great Classics  x–xi, 101–2, 104–7 World’s Greatest Books  101–2, 104–7 Sette of Odd Volumes, Ye  207 Shahnameh  xi–xii, 9–10, 11n.36, 123–4, 144, 173–4 Atkinson’s translation  10, 16–17, 21–2, 100, 107–8, 113–14, 123, 126–7, 145–7 first English translation  1–2 illustrated by Patten Wilson  25, 145–7 included in Lubbock’s list of one hundred best books  91–2, 94–6 theme at New Orleans Carnival (1894)  75 translations for children  21–2, 108–9, 111 Shakespeare, William  95–6, 100, 124–5, 200–1, 215, 225 Shankara 76–7 Shelley, Percy Bysshe  1, 10–11, 71, 232–3 Shijing  15–16, 147, 217 first cheap edition  113–14 included in Lubbock’s list of one hundred best books  91–2, 94–6, 98 Shorter, Clement King  49, 85–6, 91 Shudraka 73–4 Shujing 15–16 Siddiqui, Muhammad Abdul Aleem  170–1 Sidney, Sir Philip  225 Simpson, William  202n.31 Sinnett, Alfred Percy  84–5 Smiles, Samuel  113 socialism  55–6, 70–1, 188, 198–9 Society of Jesus (Jesuits)  36–7, 107n.51 Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge 89–90 Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge 35–6 Socrates 78 Southey, Robert  1, 198–9 Stanley, Henry Edward John, 3rd Baron Stanley of Alderley  36–8 Stead, William Thomas  61–2 Steiner, George  121–2 Stephen Austin (publisher)  126–7, 172–6, 194 Stephens, James  223–5 Stephens, Leslie  51–2 Shaw, George Bernard  80–1 debates Islam with cleric  170–1 Stokes, Whitley  17–18 Strachey, Edward  194–5 Sudan  xxxii–xxxiii, 24, 44–5 Sufism  xxiii–xxiv, 12–13, 58–9, 75–6 Swan Hill Literary Society  207, 221 Swedenborgianism 213

Swinburne, Algernon  192–3 Symonds, John Addington  192–5, 200, 211, 219–20 Syriac 81–2 Tagore, Rabindranath  197–8, 228–9 called an ‘impostor’ by Mitford  129 translation of Kabir  xxiv–xxv, 80–1, 207–9, 213–14 Taher-Kermani, Reza  xi–xii Talboys Wheeler, James  98–9, 115–17, 120, 153–4, 157–8 Tale of Genji  15–16, 206–7 Talmud  33–4, 41, 97–8, 100, 198–9, 198n.16, 211–12 Tamil 35–6 Tang Dynasty  15–16, 68–9, 115–16, 127–8, 217 tanka (verse form)  xxvi tawil (verse form)  xxx–xxxi, 58, 164–5 Tennyson, Alfred  x, xxi, xxx–xxxi, 2–3, 49–50, 56, 58, 83–4, 139 imitation of Arabic prosody  164–5 Terry, Stewart Bruce  xiv–xv, 104–7, 112, 211–12 Teschemacher, Hubert Engelbert  38–9 Theosophical Society  xxiv, 20–1, 43–4, 46, 111–12, 197, 205, 223–4 in Chicago  152–3 in New York  232–3 Sinnett’s Esoteric Buddhism 84–5 Thompson, Eben Francis  53–5, 202 Thoreau, Henry David  27–8, 40–1, 46, 232–3 Tibetan  84–5, 87, 165, 183–4 Tokyo (Edo)  xxvi, 38–9, 71–2, 129, 147–8, 178–9, 230–1 Tolstoy, Leo  xxx–xxxi, 218 Torrens, Henry  132 tourism  20–1, 37–8 Tovey, Duncan Lorimer Pattison  218–19 Transcendentalism  1–2, 27–8, 170–1 Translation 118–65 and politics  23–4, 42–3, 188 as domestication  xxii, 29–30, 115–19, 123–4, 165 as force for cultural melding  42–3 as versification  8–11, 20–1, 31–2, 148–51 Asian proportion of translations produced in 19th Century  xxxi assumption that only social elites read translations xii definition of popular translation  19–21 disputing accuracy of  61 female translators  8–9, 137–52, 162–4

Index  255 figured as mining or excavation  28–30, 61, 95–6, 148–51, 158–60, 184–5 ‘flights’ of translation  xii–xiii for commercial gain  28–30, 119, 127–9, 142–3, 167 ‘foreignizing’  103–4, 116–17, 120–4, 133, 138, 165 influence of popular translators  xii multiple translations of same text  xi–xii, 30–1, 136–7, 153–4 native-speaking translators  129–30, 152, 188–90, 207–9 synonyms for  20–1, 121–2 theories of  xxx–xxxi, 119–22 through an intermediate language  10–11, 15–16, 19–22, 153–4 translators’ prefaces  xii–xiii, xxi, 5–6, 8, 21–2, 28–9, 40–2, 52–5, 58–60, 67–8, 107–9, 115–16, 124–5, 127–8, 130–2, 145, 148–51, 155, 158–60, 164–5, 184–8, 200–1, 205, 221–3, 230–1 see also untranslatability transliteration  54–5, 129–30 travel  xxvii, 23–4, 37–41, 55–6, 87, 117, 222–4 disappointment that reality failed to match literary descriptions  38–9, 217 reading in preparation for  37–9 travel writing  xii, xxxii–xxxiii, 7–8, 69–70, 83–4, 88, 99, 130–2 Tripitaka 28 Trübner, Nicholas  31–2, 80, 84–7, 92–3, 171–2, 183–5 ‘prince of oriental publishers’  81–2 Truth-Seeker Company (publisher)  203 Tully, Richard  53–4 Turkish language  23, 28n.90, 69–70, 81–2, 87, 89–90, 101–2 Turner, Nellie  108–10 Tutinama 5–6 Underhill, Evelyn  139–40, 213–14 Unitarianism  26–7, 33–6, 45–6 United States of America  xxxi, 33, 45–6, 50, 54–7, 74, 84–5, 108–9, 186–7, 197, 200–4, 206–7, 211, 213, 226–9, 232–3 general election (1912)  104–7 interest in British Empire  44–5 library users in Muncie, IN  86–7 place names in  75–6 public buildings  76–8 Theosophical Society  112, 152–3 universal library  xii–xiii, 115–16, 228–9

University College London  121, 155–6, 186–90 untranslatability  18–19, 29–30, 116–17, 123–4, 219–20, 225–6, 232 Unwin, Thomas Fisher  15, 21–2, 48n.49, 152, 172, 176 Iranian sympathies  173–5 Upanishads  100n.33, 138, 192n.2, 206–7, 223–4 Upward, Allen  186–8, 190–1 Utilitarianism  17–18, 34, 89–91 Valmiki  154–5, 158–65 admitted to Sainte-Beuve’s Temple of Taste 93–7 may not have existed  60–1 story of how he invented the sloka 158–60 vampires 130–2 Van Doren, Mark  228–9 Vedanta Society  205 Vedas  28, 34, 155–6, 223–4 Rig Veda  96–7, 100, 100n.33, 137, 155–6 Vedder, Elihu  75, 128–9 Venuti, Lawrence  xxx–xxxi, 116–17, 119–22, 132, 137–8 Verne, Jules  152n.95 Victoria, Queen of England  173 Virgil  78, 157–8 Vision of Mirza 63–4 Vizetelly, Henry  169–70 Voltaire  96–7, 205–6, 230 Vyasa  157–8, 204 admitted to Sainte-Beuve’s Temple of Taste  93–4, 96–7 Waddell, Helen  xiv–xv, 147–51, 183–4, 228–9 Waley, Arthur  xv, 15–16, 68–9, 148–51, 217, 228–9 criticized by Pound  127–8 Wallis Budge, Ernest Alfred  80–1 Walsh, Clara  xxvi, 139–40 Walter Scott (publisher)  93–4 Warne, Frederick  100, 113–14 Warner, Arthur George  16–17, 126–7 Washington, George  70–1 Watkins Books  80–1 weltliteratur, see world literature wenyan xiaoshuo (Chinese genre)  97–8 West Norwood Cemetery  51–2 Whinfield, Edward Henry  18–19, 53–4 Whiteside, Thomas Clair  216 Whitman, Walt  xxx–xxxi, 15, 58 annotations of Rubaiyat 202 Whitney, William Dwight  170–1 Wigan Free Library  84–5

256 Index Wilde, Oscar  49–50 Wilkins, Charles  1–2, 27–8, 40–1, 46, 170–1 Williams & Norgate (publisher)  133–4 Willow Pattern  73–4 Wilmot-Buxton, Ethel Mary  139–40 Wilson, Edmund  158, 223–4 Wilson, Horace Hayman  8, 118–19, 139–40, 171–2 Wilson, Patten Shahnameh illustrations  25, 145–6 Woitsch, Leopold  127–8, 134–5 Woolf, Virginia on the ‘common reader’  xxvii–xxviii, 205–6 Working Men’s College  90–1, 207 world literature  ix–xii, 75–6, 87, 117, 178–9, 225–6 connection with orientalism  x world canon  100–1, 115–17

Yeats, William Butler  193–4 Yellow Book 25 Yiddish xiii–xiv yoga 34–5 Yoga Aphorisms of Patanjali 232–3 Yohannan, John D.  24 Young Turk movement  42–3 Zend Avesta  6, 28, 34 Zimmern, Helen  113–14, 124–5, 139–40, 151–2 early life  24 Epic of Kings  16–17, 25, 142–7, 173–4 Garnett introduces her to the Shahnameh 22, 102–3 on popularization  21–2 overlooked  24, 123–4, 126–7 Zoroaster 76–8 Zoroastrianism  27n.84, 63–4