From Britain to Brussels and back again: On the transfer of national images and linguistic interactions in Charlotte Brontë’s. The Professor and its first Dutch and French translations

This chapter examines the transfers of cultural images and linguistic interactions staged by Charlotte Brontë in her notoriously unsuccessful novel The Professor (published posthumously in 1857), and their back transfers as evidenced by the first French (Paris, 1858, tr. Henriette Loreau) and Dutch (Groningen, 1859, anonymous) translations. Brontë’s novel tells the story of a young Englishman leaving Great Britain to work in Brussels as a teacher and ultimately finding professional and romantic happiness after many struggles. It presents numerous critical and often dismissive images of the “Flemish” (meaning ‘Belgian’) and French people, of the Catholic Church it is associated with, and more generally of the mores and culture of “continentals.” With its negative and often hostile representation of (parts of) the receptor culture, it was a sensitive text to translate/transfer (back) into Dutch and French. In addition, the ample use of heterolingualism (French, occasionally Flemish) created several potential, practical obstacles to a smooth transfer process. This paper compares two very early translations of The Professor against the
backdrop of the wider historical pattern of reception of Charlotte Brontë’s works, with a special focus on how these translations rendered the original text’s heterolingualism and how they transferred its underlying axiological oppositions (British vs continental, Catholic vs Protestant, French vs English, French vs Belgian, Dutch vs Belgian).