‘A Colossal Literary and Scientific Task’: Helen Maria Williams and the Personal Narrative of Travels to the Equinoctial Regions of the New Continent (1814–1829)

This chapter concentrates on Helen Maria Williams, Paris salonnière, radical author and poet. Her translation of Humboldt’s weighty account of his voyage through the Americas with the French Botanist Aimé Bonpland, the Relation historique du voyage aux regions équinoxiales du nouveau continent (1814-25), appeared as the seven-volume Personal Narrative of the Equinoctial Regions (Longman, 1814-29). Her rather literal translation was as unpopular as Black’s was well liked by a British readership, but it enjoyed Humboldt’s approval. Previously overlooked archival material detailing the corrections he made to her translation illustrate the close collaborative nature of the undertaking, but also the stylistic freedoms Humboldt permitted her. Williams’s frequently creative (or downright ‘unfaithful’) translational choices favoured the idiom of the sublime in tropical descriptions, which, in their phrasing, also recalled lines from Milton, Thomson or Blake. Williams therefore allowed works from the British literary canon to echo through Humboldt’s prose, making it seem subtly familiar to Anglophone readers. This chapter concludes by focusing briefly on William MacGillivray’s Travels and Researches of Alexander von Humboldt (1832), a successfully revised version of William’s Personal Narrative.