Royall Tyler

Royall Tyler (b. 1757–d. 1826) was born to a prominent merchant family in Boston and came of age in the decades leading up to the American Revolution. He entered Harvard College in 1771 and earned his bachelor of arts degree three months after the Declaration of Independence was signed in 1776. Tyler then enlisted in the Revolutionary Army, although he remained in Boston and Cambridge studying law. His active military service seems to have been limited to serving as a brigade major during the unsuccessful 1778 attempt to capture Newport, Rhode Island. As the war continued, Tyler earned his master of arts degree from Harvard in 1779 and engaged in a failed courtship of Abigail Adams, the daughter of future president John Adams. After the war, Tyler became involved in the suppression of Shays’ Rebellion in 1786. When Daniel Shays fled to Vermont, Tyler was assigned to negotiate with authorities in New York, which still laid claim to the territory, to ensure that the rebel did not find safe harbor. In New York City Tyler launched his literary career; in April 1787, The Contrast began its run in New York as the first professionally produced American comic drama and one of the first successful American plays. Months later Tyler produced a second play, May Day in Town, that is no longer extant. In 1790, Tyler returned to Boston and married Mary Palmer, who would later publish the first American manual for infant care. They relocated to Vermont, where the couple remained for the rest of their lives. In the years to follow, Tyler published numerous poems and essays, including a popular series of essays in collaboration with Joseph Dennie under the title of “Colon & Spondee.” In 1797, Tyler published the novel The Algerine Captive, which achieved moderate success and was one of the first American books to be republished in Great Britain. In the 1800s and 1810s Tyler served for six years as the chief justice of the Vermont Supreme Court and launched a failed bid for the U.S. Senate. He completed several new plays, including his biblical dramas and the epistolary satire The Yankey in London (1809). At the time of his death in 1826 he was rewriting the first half of The Algerine Captive as a New England picaresque titled The Bay Boy, which would remain unpublished until 1968.

Royall Tyler in Hungary

American-Hungarian relations were rarely closer on the personal level than in the interwar years. Although the United States followed the path of political and diplomatic isolation from Europe in the 1920s and 1930s, and its absence in the League of Nations was conspicuous, in the financial and economic realm it remained more active, and many Americans worked in the various reconstruction projects across Europe either in their private capacities or under the auspices of the League. Royall Tyler was one such person who spent the larger part of the 1920s and 1930s in Hungary. Since the start of the financial reconstruction of Hungary in 1924, Tyler was a constant participant in Hungarian financial life, a contact between the Hungarian government and the League of Nations, and a sharp observer of events throughout the years he spent in Hungary and Europe. This essay focuses on his activities concerning Hungary’s financial and economic reconstruction and recovery. (ZP)

Audience Attitude and Translation Reception

This article proposes a skopos-based analysis of the English translations of the eleventh century Japanese literary work, Genji monogatari (“The Tale of Genji”) as a means of understanding the basis for the translations’ differing receptions among their target audiences. The translations, by Suematsu Kenchō, Arthur Waley, Edward Seidensticker and Royall Tyler, are widely spaced chronologically, being published between 1888–2001, and were each produced with differing audiences and aims, thus making them a useful corpus for this analysis. In addition, all of the translators have written, with varying degrees of explicitness, about their motivations and purposes in conducting their translations. First, through an analysis of the translators’ writings, introductions, and individual circumstances, the article will demonstrate how the skopos for each translation can be determined. Second, through an analysis and comparison of text excerpts, it will demonstrate how the skopos influenced the translation choices of the individual translators, with material being, for example, omitted, changed in psychological tone, or rendered more explicit, depending upon the individual translator’s overriding purpose in their work. Finally, through an analysis of the reviews of the various translations, it will consider the extent to which each translator was successful in achieving a positive and intended response to his translation in the target audience.

The Free Europe University in Strasbourg: U.S. State-Private Networks and Academic “Rollback”

The Free Europe Committee (FEC, known from 1949 to 1952 as the National Committee for a Free Europe) was created in June 1949 in line with George Kennan's push for a greater mobilization of the private sector in U.S. political warfare against the Soviet Union. An oft-mentioned but little-explored part of the FEC conglomerate was the Free Europe University in Exile (FEUE), established in Strasbourg in 1951. This article focuses on four Americans who played lesser-known but, in their individual ways, central roles in the formation and running of the FEUE: James Burnham (the consultant), DeWitt Poole (the diplomat), Royall Tyler (the point man), and Adolf Berle (the intellectual). By tracking their input, the impulses that led to FEUE's formation, and its eventual demise, the article presents the university as a microcosm not just of the large-scale FEC operation but also of various strands that fed into U.S. political warfare as a whole.