Alexander Bubb

The interest among Victorian readers in classical literature from Asia has been greatly underestimated. The popularity of the Arabian Nights and The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam is well documented. Yet this was also an era in which freethinkers consulted the Quran, in which schoolchildren were given abridgements of the Ramayana to read, in which names like 'Kalidasa' and 'Firdusi' were carved on the façades of public libraries, and in which women's book clubs discussed Japanese poetry. But for the most part, such readers were not consulting the specialist publications of scholarly orientalists. What then were the translations that catalysed these intercultural encounters? Based on a unique methodology marrying translation theory with empirical techniques developed by historians of reading, this book shines light for the first time on the numerous amateur translators or 'popularizers', who were responsible for making these texts accessible and disseminating them to the Victorian general readership. Asian Classics on the Victorian Bookshelf explains the process whereby popular translations were written, published, distributed to bookshops and libraries, and ultimately consumed by readers. It uses the working papers and correspondence of popularizers to demonstrate their techniques and motivations, while the responses of contemporary readers are traced through the pencil marginalia they left behind in dozens of original copies. In spite of their typically limited knowledge of source-languages, Asian Classics argues that popularizers 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 responses of their readers, likewise, frequently deviated from interpretive norms, and it is proposed 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.

Det småländska godset Huseby bruk köptes år 1867 av den unge Joseph Stephens som gjort sig en förmögenhet på att bygga järnväg i Brittiska Indien. När ­Stephens avvecklade sin indiska affärsverksamhet samlade han noggrant ihop sina brev, arbetskontrakt och lönelistor och skickade hem dem till Huseby, där de länge låg bortglömda i en kista på vinden. År 2008 upptäcktes kistan och den unika dokumentsamlingen kom att dra till sig historiker från flera länder. I den här boken lägger de fram sina resultat. Fram träder bilden av en historisk person och hans familj mitt i den koloniala expansion, globalisering och modernisering som svepte över världen under 1800-talet. Genom att utgå från Joseph Stephens och hans värld av envisa arbetare, fräcka konkurrenter och arroganta tjänstemän, långt från den koloniala maktens finrum, kan författarna ge nya perspektiv på det brittiska imperiet och dess verkningar i Indien och internationellt. INNEHÅLL Gunnel Cederlöf, "Huseby och det brittiska imperiet" Margareta Petersson, "Joseph Stephens familjen och arkivet" Henrik Chetan Aspengren, "Bombay möjligheternas stad" Ingemar Gunnarsson, "Från lärling till 'ingenjör'" Alexander Bubb, "Klass, bomull och 'Woddaries'" Radhika Krishnan, "Järnvägsbygget ur arbetarnas perspektiv" Dhiraj Kumar Nite, "En lycksökares liv och affärer i Indien och Skandinavien" Margareta Petersson, "Drömmen om eldorado"

Meeting Without Knowing It compares Rudyard Kipling and W. B. Yeats in the formative phase of their careers, from their births in 1865 up to 1903. The argument consists of parallel readings wed to a biographic structure. Reading the two poets in parallel often yields remarkable discursive echoes. For example, both men were similarly preoccupied with the visual arts, with heroism, with folklore, balladry and the demotic voice. Both struck vatic postures, and made bids for public authority premised on an appeal to what they considered the 'mythopoeic' impulse in fin de siècle culture. My methodology consists in identifying these mutual echoes in their poetry and political rhetoric, before charting them against intersections in their lives. Kipling and Yeats were, for much of their careers, irreconcilable political enemies. However, a cross-reading of the two poets' bardic ambitions, heroic tropes and interpretations of history reveals that, to achieve their opposed political ends, they frequently partook of a common discourse. Supplementing this analysis with biographical context, we can trace these shared concerns to their late 19th century artistic upbringing, and to the closely linked social circles which they inhabited in fin de siècle London. It is, in fact, their very mutuality during the 1890s which lent rancour to their ideological division after the Boer War. In turn, acrimony and denunciation only served to bind together all the more intimately, in an argumentative spiral of revolving discourses, two men who were often proximate but who actually met only in cartoons and satirical gossip.