Late Victorian Ballad Translation

This dissertation investigates late Victorian ballad translations that depict non-British people. It focuses on ballads published in the 1890s, at the height of imperialist expansion and at a peak of ballad collecting and editing. In this period, as recent criticism in the field has shown, many ballad scholars, collectors, and publishers treated this verse form like an artifact in a Victorian museum: they framed, bowdlerized, and decontextualized the ballad, as if it were an inanimate object, rendering it easily consumable for the middle classes. By looking at poets who translated the ballad rather than publishers who ‘artifactualized’ it, I show that the ballad remained a vital—even rebellious—politically engaged form, even during this period of intense collecting and cataloguing. My work contributes to the burgeoning field of global poetics through an investigation of four poets: William Morris, Rudyard Kipling, Robert Louis Stevenson, and E. Pauline Johnson. My first chapter, a study of Morris’s ballad translations from Danish and Icelandic, argues that Morris figured the ballad as embodying folk up-rising. My second chapter argues that Kipling’s ballad translations are from “Atkinsese,” a language named after Tommy Atkins, the soldier-speaker the “Barrack-Room Ballads.” Tommy sings of the experiences of empire, but, in the margins of the text, an editor-figure retranslates Tommy’s words in order to undercut the authority that Tommy establishes. In my third chapter, I show that Stevenson’s translations from Tahitian blend Indigenous rhythms with conventions of the classical epic in an attempt at translating ethically. Finally, in my fourth chapter, I argue that Johnson’s The White Wampum includes hybridized balladic monologues that not only translate Indigenous Canadian voices into fluent English, but also translate the concept of the wampum belt to create hybridized “verse-wampum.” This dissertation dwells in the thresholds of Victorian poetry—in the margins of pages, at the borders of nations and of languages—in order to suggest that these zones of interaction and interpretation were broader and more significant than currently conceived.Ph.D.2018-07-08 00:00:0