The Translations of Villette and The Professor – New Acquisitions Part 2 – 400 Comes Up

While doing more research for the China article, the last of the translations series published recently, I found several more previously unknown editions. China brought the total score to 396 editions that have been reported here.

Earlier, recently, a new 2016 Italian edition was found with both novels, and indeed the other Brontë novels too, Tutti I Romanzi. It was published by Newton & Compton (1920 pp.). It has the translation of Marcella Hanau of Villette, and a new translation of The Professor by Angela Ricci. It’s only the second book which has both novels in translation (counting as two translated editions).

Cover of the 2016 Italian Villette,
The Professor and the other
Brontë novels

And an Italian The Professor was discovered that was published on 1 February of this year, also by Newton & Compton (192 pp.). It is a second edition for the Angela Ricci translation. From a chronological point of view this is the 399th translated edition. (It appears that nr. 398 is the Swedish The Professor of October 2016.)

The Villette and The Professor Translations – New Acquisitions

In the last few months more translated editions of Villette and The Professor have been published. And recently two more Villettes were announced to be published in a few months time. These new acquisitions will be presented here, as well as an update on the statistical figures, showing what a successful year 2016 has been. It is for instance the best ever year for The Professor, with 12 editions so far.

A few months ago, at about the time the Brazil article was published, a second Brazilian 2016 Villette was published by Marin Claret from São Paulo. It was translated by Solange Pinheiro (856 pp.). She has also translated Wuthering Heights.

Cover of the second 2016 Brazilian
Villette

Back cover of the second 2016
Brazilian Villette

The Translations, a Statistical Analysis - Part Two, the Lists

All the Brontë novels
It’s an exciting race for the top scorer competition of the amount of languages. Wuthering Heights has taken the lead, with 51 languages. Jane Eyre has 49. But there must be more. As a comparison Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland can be given. It has 174 languages. Jane Eyre especially, who is almost as iconic as Alice, should be able to come considerably closer. It is interesting to note that Jane Eyre took a 11-1 lead in the 19th century, against Wuthering Heights.

Villette is a very good third, with 31 languages.  On fourth place come The Professor  and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, with 28. Shirley has 27. Agnes Grey is last, with 25. There will be more for them too.
One would think that the amount of translated editions of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Shirley and Agnes Grey come close to the amount of The Professor (150). I would guess that there are at least about 2500 translated editions of Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre, each. Of both braille versions have also been found, but, especially because they are in English braille, these cannot be regarded as translations.

Update 29 December 2016. The latest scores are: Wuthering Heights 61, Jane Eyre 59, Villette 31, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall 30, Shirley 29, The Professor 28 and Agnes Grey 26.

In tables 8a-e you can see all the languages that have been found. The first two tables have the year in which the first translations of Villette and The Professor in a certain language was published.

The Translations, a Statistical Analysis - Part one

Having found nearly all translations we can get a good picture of how Villette and The Professor in time spread around the world. About half of the translated Villette and The Professor editions were published in the last 30 years. Some of these years have been very productive, although there have been remarkably good years earlier too. These best years, and decades, will be revealed below. Among other aspects there is also a review of the total amount of languages for all of the Brontë novels.

Winning years
We’ll begin with giving the winning years. For both Villette and The Professor it was 2013, with 9 and 11 translated editions respectively. For Villette the years 1932 (thanks to one French translation) and 2011 come second with 7, while 1975 and 2008 come next with 6. In the The Professor competition 2016 is on second place with 10 translated editions, while 2005, 2009, 2014, and 2015 come joint third with 8. When the figures for both books are combined 2013 comes out as the clear winner, with 20. The years 2014, 2015 and 2016 are on third place with 13, followed by 2005 with 12. In tables 1, 2 and 3 more good years are shown for the novels in these competitions.

Update, 6 January 2017: The year 2016 has taken the lead in the The Professor competition, it is now on 12 editions. The year has also moved to sole second place for the two novels combined, with 16 editions. 


Click to enlarge

Decades
The years show a clear trend. It started quite slowly, but the amount of translated editions first really started to grow in the 1940s. It has been a quite regular growth since then, as this graph shows, as well as the accumulated total of translations of both novels. At present it is 218 for Villette and 170 for The Professor.

By 1920 The Professor had taken a 18-9 lead, but from then on till the end of the century Villette won every decade: 1920s, 4-0; 1930s, 13-2; 1940s, 16-12; 1950s, 15-7; 1960s, 15-3; 1970s, 29-10; 1980s, 16-5 and 1990s, 26-17 (Note: the year of publishing of 12 French Villettes is not known, 7 are from between 1933 and 1948, 5 between 1950 and 1978, these have been divided here over these 5 decades in this count. Three unknown editions of The Professor have been given to the 1940s, the 2000s and 2010s). In this century The Professor won the first decade, 43-35, and is in the lead in this present decade, 53-37. It is remarkable that this present decade is already the best scoring one, with more than 4 years to go.

In table 4 the full figures for the decades are given, and they're also shown in the second graph.

The 1970s
In the 1970s the score of translated editions more than doubled in comparison to the previous decade. It was the great leap forward for Villette. It is an interesting phenomenon that the novel owes much here to Eastern European, then communist countries. Out of 27 editions, 19 were published there, divided over 7 countries. Serbia was a clear winner with 7 Villettes. Croatia came second with 4. Germany is third with 3, with two from East Germany.

The following decades
The communists continued to show more interest in the 1980s. They had a majority in languages and editions. But Germany was the winning country, West-Germany, with 4. Remarkably, two years had no translation of Villette or The Professor at all, 1981 and 1988. The only other year to do that since 1943 was 1954.

Although communism fell in eastern Europe in 1989 the countries continued to dominate the statistics, with Villette majorities in the amount of languages (9 out of 15) and editions (16 out of 26) in the 1990s. It was helped by a Chinese edition, still a communist country. Russian was the individual winner, with 5 editions. German is second with 4. Russia scores a resounding victory in the 2000s, with 15 Villettes! The Netherlands come second with 3. The decade has 11 languages, and 34 editions. The 2010s have already got 17 languages for Villette, and 37 editions as well. Russian has taken a lead. It’s on 6 (editions). Italian is on 5 and Brazilian-Portuguese have 4.

Table 5 gives the winning decades for both novels together, tables 6 and 7 give the Villette and The Professor results.

Villette: Countries and translators
The Dutch language scores a resounding victory in the competition of the most different translations of Villette. It includes one translation that is probably Flemish. It has 7. Germany and France have 5, Italy has 4.

French is the winner in the race of languages with most editions, with 39, followed by Russian with 30. Germany has 20, Dutch has 12 and Hungarian is fifth with 11. Russia appears to have the best running single translation. It got to 27 editions!

Henriette Loreau is easily the winner in the longest running category. Her French translation of The Professor was first published in 1858, and last in 2016. That's a near-perfect score of 158 years! Tyyni Haapanen-Tallgren is on second place with a splendid 96 years with her Finnish Villette (1921-2017). Róża Centnerszwerowa comes third with 74 years, with her Polish Villette  (1939-2013). The first man is on fourth place. Gaston Baccara is on 68 years with his French Villette  (1945-2013). It will be very interesting of course to see what the score will look like in 40 years time.

Women easily win the translator competitions, as could be expected. They have most translations and editions. One translation was done by two men, the Arab Villette. Its cover drawing, joint nr. 1 in the cover top 6, was made by a woman, Safwa Farid, I recently learnt.

Eric Ruijssenaars
(with thanks to René van Oers for the tables and graphs, and for earlier efforts to make documents publishable on the blog.)

Villette and The Professor on the Balkan – Part Two

In this article the translations of Villette and The Professor that were published in the countries of the former Yugoslavia will be described, except for those from Slovenia (and Macedonia), which were dealt with in the previous article. In these countries – Serbia, Croatia, Bosnia-Hercegovina and Montenegro – it is essentially Serbo-Croatian that is being spoken, which, incidentally, I forgot to mention in the  list of languages that have a Villette translation. Because Serbian and Croatian can now be regarded as two languages – both have their own translations - it means that the amount of languages for that novel is raised to 31.

Montenegro
The first Villette in (Cyrillic) Serbo-Croatian was published in 1956 in Montenegro, in the town of Cetinje. It was published in two volumes, of 303 and 291 pages, translated by Tadija Gavrilović, and published in three versions, with red, blue and violet covers.

Cover of the 1956 Montenegrin Villette

Cover of the 1956 Montenegrin Villette

Cover of the 1956 Montenegrin Villette

Villette and The Professor in Romania and Bulgaria

Romania

Villette
Romania’s first translation of Villette, by George Demetru-Pan, was published in 1940 by Capitol from Bukarest (276 pp.).  Demetru-Pan (1911-1972) also translated works from Arab and Spanish and he was a poet and a novelist. The title of his abridged version of Villette was Mascarada (Masquerade).

Cover of the 1940 Romanian Villette

A revised and improved version of Mascarada, edited by Luxa Stefan-Andreescu, was published in 1993 by Lucman from Bukarest, as Te-am dorit intr-o seara (Mascarada). That new title part is, in translation: ‘I wanted one evening.’ It still is an abridged version, with 335 pages only.

Cover of the 1993 Romanian Villette

In 2010 a second revised edition was published by Artpress from Timisoara, edited by Valerică Dinu. A picture of the cover couldn’t be found.

A full translation was published in 1975 by Eminescu from Bukarest. The translation (599 pp.) was done by Mihai C. Delescu, who also translated French works.

Cover of the 1975 Romanian Villette

The second edition of Delescu’s translation was published in two volumes (317 and 311 pp.) in 1993 by Elinor from Bukarest. It had illustrations by Adriana Ioniţă.

Covers of the 1993 Romanian Villette

The third translation, by Lucian Popa, was published in 2012, in two volumes again (416 and 368 pp.), by Adevarul from Bukarest. Popa also translated Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book. This ediition appeared in the ‘Surorile Brontë’ series with most of the other novels of the sisters.

Villette and The Professor in the Nordic countries

Denmark
After the 1853-4 Danish Villette there has only been one more translation of Villette. It was published in 1976 by Hernov, in cooperation with the Nyt Dansk Litteraturselskab (552 pp.), and translated by Luise Pihl, who also did The Professor, Wuthering Heights and Agnes Grey, as well as several Jane Austen books. In 1994 it was released as an audiobook, on cassette tapes. Earlier, in 1986, a Danish Villette was also published as an audiobook on cassette tapes, but it’s not entirely clear if this is the Pihl translation too. It’s very likely though.

Cover of the 1976 Danish Villette

The Professor

Charlotte’s posthumously published first novel was quickly translated in Danish. Laereren. En Fortaelling was published in the same year, 1857 (Kopenhagen; 360 pp.). The name of the translator is not given. The title page gives Fr. Waldike as the publisher. It published books until at least 1868.
On the title page it also says ‘Expeditionen af Husbibliotheket’, Expedition of house library, in translation. Two more books are known with this text, both from 1857 too (translations from Thackeray and Hawthorne).

Villette and The Professor in Hungary

Villette

Ilona Róna (1904-199?) translated many books, for instance of Jane Austen, Wiliam Makepeace Thackeray and Gore Vidal, and also from other languages. Villette was her only Brontë translation. It is the only Hungarian translation of the novel. It first appeared in 1967, twice, published by Európa from Budapest (566 pp.).

Cover of the first 1967 Hungarian
Villette

Cover of the second 1967 Hungarian
Villette

The third and four editions, published in 1969 and 1973 (by the same publisher; 586 and 537 pp. respectively) had the same cover as the second edition. In 1974 it was again published, in two volumes (319 and 334 pp.), together with Charlotte’s Henry Hastings, by the same publisher, as well as in two other 1974 editions with both stories, firstly by Európa  and Alföldi Ny from Debrecen. and secondly by Európa, Alföldi Ny and Madách Kiadó from Bratislava (Slovakia).

Villette and The Professor in Czechia and Slovakia

 Czechia

Villette
The first Czech Villette was published in two volumes in 1907-8 by Jan Laichter from Prague (369 and 393 pp.), in a translation by Zdeněk Franta (1868-1943). He also translated Jane Eyre and Shirley, as well as for instance Dickens’ Little Dorrit and Bleak House.
The second edition of this work was published by Jan Laichter again in 1928. Whereas in the first edition the author’s name was just given as Charlotte Brontë, twenty years later that was strangely changed into Karolina Brontëová. It’s a remarkable echo of the old rumour that Caroline was the author’s first name (as shown by an article I wrote in 2011). This 1928 edition (376 and 400 pp.) doesn’t seem to mention the translator’s name.

The covers of the 1928 Czech Villette

The third edition of Franta’s translation was published in 1948, again by Jan Laichter (422 and 443 pp.). Apart from nrs. 1 and 2 the two covers are identical.

Cover of the first volume of the 1948
Czech Villette

France as Other: Charlotte Bronte’s Divided Response to Francophone Culture

Throughout Charlotte Bronte’s life and works, France and the French language and culture occupied a prominent place in her mental landscape.  It is, however, a conflicted place.  On the one hand, she almost revered the French language, seeing it not only as an employment asset and hence a route out of provincial stagnation, but also as a sign of personal cultivation.  On the other hand, France was home to at least three social phenomena which are demonised in her work: the Catholic Church, a lax attitude to sexuality, and a pettifogging system of domestic surveillance.  Charlotte’s image of France was thus constructed as ‘other’ to English culture in two opposite senses: as the object of desire and as the locus of fear and loathing.  A refinement of this effect is that the desirable qualities tend to be associated with men, while the disgust and hatred are centred on women.

This statement is a generalisation, but it is drawn from well-known aspects of Charlotte’s life and works.  It was almost certainly Charlotte who devised the plan to go to Brussels with Emily to perfect their French and German and it was her energy and determination that carried it through.  After her stay in Brussels, Charlotte is particularly pleased to receive books in French from her friend William Smith Williams, and for a while tells him that she learns by heart a passage in French every day.  In Jane Eyre, Charlotte represents Jane as feeling quiet satisfaction in her ability to reply to her French pupil, Adèle, in her own language; it is a sign that she is in touch with ‘culture’ in its larger sense. The Yorke family in Shirley (based on the family of Charlotte’s friend Mary Taylor) are admired for their easy familiarity with French culture, which stands as a sign of larger travels, and speculative, interesting minds ready to debate politics and philosophy.  In Villette, it is M Paul Emanuel who represents the widening of horizons, the stretching of the mind, which Lucy prizes above comfort and security.

Finding Brontë in Brussels: reflections on literary tourism

In March 2014 I visited Brussels to carry out some preliminary research for a project on Charlotte Brontë and Brussels. The work came out of my book research on mobility in the Victorian novel, in which I look at Charlotte Brontë’s writing on travel to Europe in Villette and The Professor. This was coupled with a developing project on literary tourism, and I became interested in how and why “Brontë’s Brussels” as a tourist site has received so little critical attention from scholars, overshadowed as it is by the more famous Brontë location, the Parsonage at Haworth.

My Brussels trip formed the basis for extending and developing these ideas; I wanted to get a sense of how the locations informed the descriptive settings of Villette and The Professor and above all to learn more about how literary tourists, past and present, have forged their relationships to the city’s spaces through these texts.

Just as any self-respecting nineteenth-century tourist would head to Brussels armed with their Baedeker or Murray’s handbook to tour the sites, I set off armed with copies of Eric Ruijssenaars’s Charlotte Brontë’s Promised Land: The Pensionnat Heger and other Brontë places in Brussels and Helen MacEwan’s Down the Belliard Steps: Discovering the Brontë’s in Brussels, both invaluable guides for touring Brontë’s Brussels locations (1). (I also later took one of the walking tours run by the Brussels Brontë group, a highly enjoyable and very informative experience).

The Belliard Steps
(photo Charlotte Mathieson)