French Tongues in the Caucasus: An Exercise in Taste and Translation

Abstract: Voyage au Caucase , Alexandre Dumas’s 1859 travelogue about his Caucasus journey, is historically and epistemologically situated between narratives of the 17th- and 18th-century aristocratic Grand Tour and those of our contemporary moment, split between privileged tourist chronicles and global accounts of border and migration crises. It is worth rereading Dumas’s text both for its consistent unearthing of the deeply planted seeds of modern imperialism and nationalism, and for its intermittent observations on its own part in their sowing. If modern travel writing inevitably raises questions of esthetic and ethical taste—the good, the bad, and the ugly—it also engages freely with the subject of sensorial taste—the delicious and the disgusting—that, for the past few centuries, has never been far behind.