Radical Translations: The Transfer of Revolutionary Culture between Britain, France and Italy (1789-1815)

The international circulation of radical ideas of equality and rights has deeply shaped European societies since the revolutionary period. Yet today, this legacy of internationalism is assumed to be over or at least incapable of being translated into new contexts. This project looks to the French Revolution to reactivate this shared radical past. It asks: what was the impact of translation on revolutionary thought and politics? And how is our relation to revolutionary ideas mediated by translation even today?

Revolutionary translations have long been left unexamined or devalued as mere copycat propaganda. Our project, in contrast, seeks to reposition the role of translators not as passive collaborators but as active militants seeking to 'spread democracy' into new cultures and languages - a contested idea then as now. Focusing on why and when translation happens as well as where it fails, we seek to understand how a transnational revolutionary idiom was adopted, adapted, resisted or rejected in the effort to create culturally specific tools for political action on the ground. We also seek to illuminate the crucial role played by translation in enabling democratic movements to reach wider publics and cast themselves as part of an international struggle.

The investigation will focus on two axes: one connecting Britain and France and the other crossing the Alps to Italy and back, with Anglophone texts often reaching Italian readers via French translation. A key output will be a database containing information on an estimated 400 translations with a radicalizing purpose, scattered in libraries and archives around the world and never systematically collated. We will consider a diverse range of material including: published translations, self-translations, texts imagined as translations as well as unpublished or projected translations, blocked by rapidly changing political events and recoverable from periodicals, publisher's prospectuses, and personal correspondence. We will use prosopographical data models to shed light on the shadowy world of translators and their professional and political identities, beginning with a core list of 50 translators working across English, French and Italian, scalable to other languages. We will identify a series of case-studies to analyse how translators sought to overcome real asymmetries between countries and areas of society in both material and symbolic resources.

Our project is not limited to historical questions. To test the capacity of revolutionary ideas to resonate today we will invite students, translators, theatre practitioners and grassroots activists to translate and perform a selection of radical texts in present-day language. These translation and performance activities - documented on the project website - aim to enhance public awareness of the cosmopolitan roots of radical thought as well as stimulate new methods of translating radical works as 'living texts'. The same search for a 'presence effect' in translation will shape a new anthology of translated texts, finally making available in English forgotten masterpieces of radical culture.

By foregrounding radicalism, this project has the potential to rewrite fundamental assumptions about translation as a cultural and creative activity. In the convulsive political climate of revolution, translation was not simply a new container for an esteemed original but became a type of direct action, dependent on the opening or closing of political opportunity. By highlighting the all-important time factor in the analysis of radical translation, this project will address the following more speculative questions:
- Is there a transnational revolutionary idiom and does it vary from place to place?
- Can translation identify how ideas are assimilated and which remain inappropriate and out of place?
- How might a focus on radical translation challenge our understandings both of what is 'radical' and what is a 'translation'?

Our research aims to establish a feedback loop between translation strategies and political activism, past and present. To test the hypothesis that the revolutionary idiom remains alive and capable of ongoing extension, we will run 2 year-long collaborative translation and performance projects in Year 1 & 2 aimed at the following diverse constituencies:
- Students from the UK, France and Italy as the next generation of translators
- Activists from grassroots organisation which trace their roots to the revolutionary period
- Cultural collaborators from the fields of translation and performance
- Non-academic audiences engaged through our project partners
- Public users of our website
In particular, we will invite grassroots organisations engaged in promoting the core values of radical democracy to act as 'focus groups' in a series of planned activities aiming to extend and improve the public discourse of rights.

In the academic year 2019-20, international students will team up with members of the British Deaf History Society Association (BDHSA) to translate, adapt and perform a play by the English radical Thomas Holcroft. Deaf and Dumb (1801, from a 1798 French original) tells the story of Abbé De L'Épée, inventor of the world's first sign language and celebrated as a national hero by French revolutionaries. They will be engaged through 3 translation workshops led by the acclaimed translator Cristina Viti, followed by 3 performance workshops led by Simon Hatab, dramaturge at the Opéra National de Paris. The collaboratively reworked text will then be performed at the Institut français, the premier cultural institute representing France in the UK. We will make this a Deaf-inclusive event through innovative use of live-captioning and British Sign Language (BSL). The BDHSA assures us that this event will have significant resonance with the Deaf community in London and nationally and will enhance public awareness of the complexity of the history of sign language including BSL, which is still not recognized as an official language in England and Wales.

In 2020-21 we will work again with Viti and Hatab. Our focus groups for this year will be a new cohort of international students and members of Humanists UK, who have agreed to respond to two anti-clerical, pro-republican farces: Le Jugement dernier des rois by Maréchal and Il ballo del papa by the Italian Jacobin Salfi. Humanists UK are a national charity working on behalf of non-religious people, with over 65,000 members and direct policy impact through membership of the All-Party Parliamentary Humanists Group. Their responses, and those of the students, will be incorporated into a new tri-lingual adaptation and performance that will take place at the Italian Cultural Institute in London (ICI), the official body promoting Italian language and heritage in the UK. Through the extensive networks of Humanists UK and ICI we will engage non-academic constituencies and enhance public awareness of the intertwined radical traditions of Britain, France and Italy.

The process will be documented via our website, where short film clips of the rehearsals and final performance will also be posted. Together the database, website, academic outputs, translation workshops and performances will:
- Influence the quality of public discourses on rights and freedom through mobilizing grassroots organisations on key historical texts and keywords that matter to them
- Provide a platform for voices currently underrepresented in academia and society and help address the issues they raise re: communicating their vision for a more inclusive and open society
- Stimulate the cultural practices of radical translators, theatre practitioners and publishers by reviving neglected radical texts that require new approaches to translation, staging and adaptation
- Create new active-learning strategies that link the classroom to the world outside and encourage critical thinking