Cosmos: The Universe Translated

This chapter is devoted to Humboldt’s last, great work Cosmos. This multi-volume ‘Sketch of a Physical Description of the World’ ranged encyclopaedically from the darkest corners of space to the smallest forms of terrestrial life, describing the larger systems at work in the natural world. But, as British reviewers were swift to query, where was God in Humboldt’s mapping of the universe? Appearing on the market in 1846, just a year after Robert Chambers’ controversial Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, Humboldt’s Cosmos unavoidably underwent close scrutiny. Hitherto overlooked correspondence between Humboldt and Edward Sabine shows how the Sabines deliberately reoriented the second volume of the English translation for Longman/Murray explicitly to include references to the ‘Creator’ and thus restore Humboldt’s reputation. The fourth volume of the Longman edition on terrestrial magnetism – Edward Sabine’s specialism – included additions endorsed by Humboldt which made Sabine appear as co-writer alongside the great Prussian scientist, and Cosmos a more obviously ‘English’ product. Otté, who produced the rival translation for Bohn, was initially under pressure herself to generate ‘original’ work that differed from its rival, producing a version of a work that would remain central to scientific thought well up to the end of the nineteenth century.

‘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.

‘A Plain and Unassuming Style’: Thomasina Ross and Humboldt’s Travels (1852–1853)

A comparison of Williams’s and Ross’s respective translations forms the central focus of this chapter. Ross’s abridged and modernised translation which appeared in three volumes (1852-53) in Henry Bohn’s Scientific Library series successfully eclipsed the badly received (and by then largely forgotten) Longman edition. Its relative brevity, greater linearity and far lower price made it more accessible to general readers. Yet Humboldt scholars have ignored it precisely because it is not considered as comprehensive or authoritative. While this chapter acknowledges the palimpsestic qualities of Ross’s version, which carries glimpses of Williams’s translation beneath the surface, it argues that Ross’s edition recast Humboldt, and Humboldtian writing, in new and striking ways. Ross omitted his repeated emphases on processes, rather than merely results, and on failure as key to experimentation. Above all her erasure of his emphasis on intellectual sociability was responsible for cultivating the lingering misperception of the Prussian as a lone genius.

Introduction

Straddling comparative literary and cultural studies and the history of science, this chapter insists on the importance of translation to the scientific culture of early- to mid-nineteenth-century Britain. It emphasises the centrality of women to the translation of Humboldt’s work for a British readership and explores more generally the reception of his work by the British critical press.

Conclusions

The conclusion reflects more generally on gendered identity in scientific translation and specifically on the role of women in redefining the British scientific community at mid-century. Humboldt’s collaboration with his female translators undoubtedly cast him in a favourable light, advertising his readiness to collaborate with women on the international transmission of his work. This study therefore revises the notion of Humboldtian writing as male-oriented and ambiguously homoerotic and disputes the suggestion that he showed a disregard, even dislike, for women. By examining the British translations of Humboldt’s works as multi-vocal and multi-authored texts, rather than viewing them simply as ‘transparent’ documents, it therefore explores in a very immediate way the complex business of transforming his complex scientific ideas and images into a different language, culture, and society.

The Poetry of Geography: The Ansichten der Natur in English Translation

This chapter discusses the salient differences between the two different contemporaneous versions of Humboldt’s Ansichten der Natur: Elizabeth Sabine’s Aspects of Nature (Longman, 1849) and Otté and Henry Bohn’s Views of Nature (Bohn, 1850). Humboldt initially wrangled with Elizabeth Sabine and her husband Edward, President of the Royal Society, over the English title but did not interfere further in the translation of this hybrid essay collection that combined science and aesthetics. The descriptive landscape ‘tableaux’ posed various translational difficulties in the strong imaginative appeal they carried but also the philosophical concepts underpinning them, for which Humboldt had created his own terms. Bohn and Otté enhanced the visual interest of the landscape features in Humboldt’s narrative by appealing more directly to the categories of the sublime and picturesque playing up contrasts between fore- and background; Sabine was more explicit in strengthening the spiritual message conveyed through landscape description.

Styling Science

This chapter sets out the critical and historical framework of this study by focusing on three key aspects. Firstly, it attends to the characteristic features of and changes in scientific writing in nineteenth-century Britain, taking examples from the work of Charles Lyell, Michael Faraday and Charles Darwin, to establish a sense of the repertoire of stylistic models on which Humboldt’s British translators could draw. A second section examines Humboldt’s own writing style and briefly addresses the difficulties inherent in translating it from the French- or German-language originals. Finally, this chapter focuses in particular on style in translation and explores the swiftly evolving field of translation theory in the nineteenth century, drawing in particular on Friedrich Schleiermacher, to contextualise the strategies that Humboldt’s translators were employing.

Dispute and Dissociation: John Black’s Political Essay on the Kingdom of New Spain (1811)

This chapter examines the first of Humboldt’s works to appear in English translation, John Black’s oft-maligned rendering of the Essai politique sur le royaume de la Nouvelle Espagne (1808-11) as the Political Essay on the Kingdom of New Spain (Longman, 1811). Black resituated and rhetorically manipulated Humboldt’s text by appending a hefty footnote apparatus, which gave the narrative a second, highly audible, paratextual voice in constant dialogue with Humboldt’s own. Black therefore subverted the traditional power differential between author and translator to make the Political Essay critical of the very source text it apparently reproduced. His efforts at establishing his own authority and credibility through self-promotion backfired into intrusive pedantry. However, they did cause Humboldt to consider carefully the need for much closer collaboration with future translators, which offers a neat transition into the next chapter.