From American Frontier to European Borders: Publishing French Translations of Mark Twain's Novels Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn (1884-1963)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
As Meredith McGill put it, "publishing history is most valuable to literary history when it dislocates its subject—when it redraws the boundary between the literary and what lies outside of it."1 Literary translation being a particular area of the literary, the corpus of French translations of Mark Twain's novels illustrates the accuracy of this statement. Far from being self-contained fields of study, book history and literary translation combined help to shape a truly international approach to the history of the book insofar as they allow for a comparative and contrastive approach from which the common points and differences between the several histories of books emerge. Given Mark Twain's popularity and his central position in American literature, it is not surprising that his novels should have been translated into French at a very early stage nor that they were published or translated again so many times. The corpus of translations of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884) is vast indeed.2 This article takes into account all of the existing versions, with special emphasis on the first translations and on those that are still available for readers at the turn of the twenty-first century. Of the total number of [End Page 235] versions, only a handful are still being published and make up what can be called today's canon.3 The first remarkable feature of this canon is that two versions of each novel are currently available on the market. The second is that one of each of these versions addresses a different readership than the one they were initially meant for.4 The canon is therefore marked by mutability and border-crossing. The novels were first translated in 1884 and 1886 respectively—a fairly short delay for American novels at the time—and even though these versions are faulty from a literary point of view, they still deserve attention insofar as they introduced the novels into a new culture and environment. The versions that make up today's canon—namely the 1904 and 1963 versions of Tom Sawyer and the 1948 and 1960 translations of Huckleberry Finn—deserve attention because they have a high degree of visibility for the French readership. These versions were interspersed with, and followed by, a string of others that quickly faded into oblivion and were never published again, or rarely so. The purpose of this essay is to demonstrate why some versions outlived others and why some versions came to cross the border between adult and children's literature. In the light of recent research, it is now common sense to assert that "books … are no respecters of national borders,"5 and translations, which are the result of cultural exchange, obviously cross them. But borders can also refer to the dividing lines between literary genres, in which case they conjure up the central notion of readership. The progress of Twain's novels illustrates that books are indeed no respecters of borders, be they national or literary. The case of Tom Sawyer provides, from the outset, an example of the influence borders and the absence of an international copyright agreement can have on the distribution of a book. Because the book's publication was delayed in the United States until late 1876 in order to secure a British copyright, the American market was flooded with cheap pirated versions published north of the border and copied from hastily imported British ones, which infuriated the author and entailed a substantial financial loss.6 When it was translated into French from the same British version, the novel, originally aimed at a wide audience in terms of age and sex groups, was turned into a children's book and crossed both the Channel and the border between genres. An amazing criss-cross pattern can also be found in...
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.006 | 0.004 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.004 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.009 | 0.002 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".