The Demon of Translation: Translation and Mediation in British Romanticism

Through three readings which chronologically and thematically build on each other-taken from Keats's sonnet On First Looking into Chapman's Homer, Coleridge's journal The Friend, and Scott's novel The Antiquary, with additional material drawn from Goethe's play Faust-, the present article traces how Romantic writers contended with increasingly international and intermedial contexts, and how they did so in ways that challenged earlier self-perceptions. To reconstruct this alternative orientation for Romanticism and its critical reading, the article examines how practices and theories of translation and mediation interacted and mutually reinforced each other. Writers staged such interactions in scenes of imagined translation in order to trace an aesthetic ideology which reverses the marginalization of mediation and translation by instead centering these concepts. The article theorizes what it means to place British Romanticism in a European context-that is, a transnational and intermedial context. Each of the cases examined allegorizes crucial questions pertaining to the implications of translation and mediation for Romantic textuality by staging numerous transfers among and between numerous languages and media: the resulting excess of movement betokens a sublime insight into the nature of a reconceived Romantic textuality.