Abstract
Building on insights gained recently in translation studies, Hilary Brown provides this welcome reassessment of Luise Gottsched’s activities as a translator. Gottsched’s literary output, especially her dramas, are often given more attention than her translations, and Brown shows how this has skewed the recognition of her importance as a translator and mediator between different cultures. To begin with, she was not, as is often thought, exploited by her husband, but was a scholarly companion, an independent thinker who kept abreast of many of the developments in philosophy and religion, science and literature coming from abroad that with her efforts were to shape her age. In contrast to feminist criticism, Brown stresses that Gottsched was not hampered by being a woman, since her marriage to Johann Christoph created the fertile ground where she could pursue her activities and become the first important modern woman translator in Germany. Her range was broad, covering Greek, Latin, French and English, poetry, prose and drama. Brown is not the first to have noticed the high quality of some of Gottsched’s translations but she is the first to see them in the broader context of the development of translation in the Enlightenment. Thus, with her translations of religious and philosophical writings (Bayle, Leibniz, Eachard), Gottsched can be firmly placed within the avant-garde with its mission to extend the horizons of the reading public. Through her recognition of the importance of British journals and her translations of them Gottsched proved extremely influential. Here again she was at the forefront of literary life in Germany, helping to establish the sense of a shared culture. After Lessing’s seventeenth Literaturbrief the Gottscheds were often thought of as conservative and backward-looking, but Brown shows how Luise Gottsched’s widely read translations of foreign plays are best understood when located in the context of the ambitious theatre reforms she undertook with her husband. Brown undertakes a close analysis of Gottsched’s translation of Pope’s The Rape of the Lock and is able to demonstrate how her line-by-line translation of a far from straightforward and controversial poet into a verse form different from the original was able to provide new impulses for German writers. Equally new and ground-breaking were her translations of scientific works: her translation of academic papers published by the Académie Royale in Paris became important for the scheme to set up a parallel academy in Vienna. As Brown stresses, it is important when assessing translations in the eighteenth century that modern ideas about originality, stemming from the late eighteenth century, do not apply; many of Gottsched’s translations were adaptations, and her ‘original’ works were usually closely modelled on texts she had translated. The blurred distinction was a crucial aspect of the literary life of the early eighteenth century and opened doors to the exchange of ideas between cultures. Brown sometimes exaggerates her claims for Gottsched’s translations or diverts the argument into character analysis. Thus she is ‘feisty’ rather than under the direction of her husband, which is clearly a riposte to some feminist criticism and produces another myth. Some further detailed examination of the translations would have been welcome and there is repetition of some well-known facts. On the whole, however, the book is well researched and makes an important contribution to our understanding of the processes of translation in eighteenth-century Germany.