] "A Beautiful and Living Picture": Translation, Biography, Reception, and Feminism in Maria Roscoe's Vittoria Colonna: her life and poems (1868) "... it is only fair to add that whatever merits her poetry does possess, Mrs. Roscoe has done her best to annihilate." (The Saturday Review 1868: 530) "... as a literary production, it is impossible to praise Mrs. Roscoe's book." (The Saturday Review 1868: 531) It is, perhaps, not too much of an overstatement to say that the reviewer for the Saturday Review was unimpressed with Maria Roscoe's 1868 biography of Renaissance poet Vittoria Colonna (1490-1547), which included a number of translations from Colonna's poems. Articulating a horror of translating poetry into prose, the reviewer also notes that Roscoe's Italian is not particularly good, suggesting snidely that "perhaps she will try her hand at Sanskrit in her next volume" (The Saturday Review 1868: 530). The review points out a historical quibble with one of Roscoe's less defensible assertions, that Colonna was the first sacred poet of Italy, before finally settling on the structure of the biography itself, which the reviewer sees as an "elaborately inconsecutive" product of an "authoress" with a "truly feminine fondness for going off at a tangent into speculations very remotely connected with her subject, and neither novel nor striking in themselves" (ibid.). The reviewer is right on many counts. Roscoe's Italian is demonstrably insufficient at times, her translations are often tone-deaf and unpoetic, her grasp of literary history occasionally dubious, and her book a curious amalgam of biography and theological history. The femininity of tangents aside, Roscoe's work frequently departs from the titular subject of her book, Vittoria Colonna, to discuss the development of reformist thought in Italy and abroad. Yet there is something singular about Roscoe's work, both in the translations and in the biography, that deserves a closer look. Taking an approach to the text informed by translation studies, cultural studies, book history, and feminist literary historical revision, this article explores how, inaccurate as the translations may be and irrelevant as the tangents might seem, Roscoe's book insists both on its own author's right to her topics, both central and tangential, and on the value of its female subject's life and experiences. The analysis that follows traces the complex interaction between biography and translation, examining how the biography can be used as a key for investigating Roscoe's translations at the same time as the translations are presented as factual evidence for the biography. By treating the translations and biography as complementary forms of rewriting (see Lefevere 1992b), we can see how the two forms coincide to produce a unified work. As parallel forms of representation the biography and the translations each contribute to a complex picture of both Roscoe's subject and of Roscoe's own project, presenting an important translational corollary to observations about the contradictions of ...
