Asian Classics on the Victorian Bookshelf

Abstract

Asian Classics on the Victorian Bookshelf focusses on the mass-translation of Asian literature for consumption by the late Victorian reading public. It aims to invert our established understanding of orientalism, by showing how texts like the Quran, the Ramayana and the Shahnameh were not appropriated exclusively by a cadre of scholars, who subjected them to Western aesthetic norms and moral standards. In fact, their dissemination in the West was due largely to amateur translators pursuing an incongruous variety of political, religious, and commercial goals. It explains the whole process whereby popular translations were written, published, distributed to bookshops and libraries, and ultimately consumed by readers. The book argues that amateur translators or ‘popularizers’, in spite of their typically limited knowledge of the source-language, produced versions more respectful of the complexity, cultural difference, and fundamental untranslatability of Asian texts than the professional orientalists whose work they were often adapting. The reception of these texts by contemporary readers, likewise, frequently deviated from interpretive norms, and the book proposes that this combination of eccentric translators and unorthodox readers triggered ‘flights of translation’ whereby historical individuals can be seen to escape the hegemony of orientalist forms of knowledge.