Jayne Winter (Newcastle): Translating Ballads
SML Research Seminar Series
Location: Research Beehive 2.20, Old Library Building
Time/Date: 17th October 2013, 16:00 - 17:00
How were British and German ideas about oral poetry and national literature shaped by each other? Jayne Winter will consider the effect of translating ballads from one language to another, pseudo-translation and the transfer of ballads from the oral tradition to a printed medium. The paper will explore how Herder’s translations from Thomas Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765) and Scottish folksongs in his Volkslieder collections (1774-1779) were informed by his own preconceptions of ancient poetry and Percy’s theoretical texts to construct a new ballad aesthetic, and will then trace how Matthew Lewis’s English translations of Herder’s Volkslieder, included in his Tales of Wonder (1800), gave rise to a different understanding of the German ballad in Britain. Whereas Herder drew together examples of folk song from different languages to provide the material for national literary renewal, Lewis played on translation and the explicitly foreign character of his sources to create sensational effects and emphasise foreign difference.
Image: Frontispiece of Thomas Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry with the motto "The work of the bard endures"
Published: 3rd June 2013