Professor%20Matthew%20Reynolds: List of publications

Jane Eyre, written by Charlotte Brontë and first published in 1847, has been translated more than six hundred times into over sixty languages. Prismatic Jane Eyre argues that we should see these many re-writings, not as simple replications of the novel, but as a release of its multiple interpretative possibilities: in other words, as a prism. Prismatic Jane Eyre develops the theoretical ramifications of this idea, and reads Brontë's novel in the light of them: together, the English text and the many translations form one vast entity, a multilingual world-work, spanning many times and places, from Cuba in 1850 to 21st-century China; from Calcutta to Bologna, Argentina to Iran. Co-written by many scholars, Prismatic Jane Eyre traces the receptions of the novel across cultures, showing why, when and where it has been translated (and no less significantly, not translated - as in Swahili), and exploring its global publishing history with digital maps and carousels of cover images. Above all, the co-authors read the translations and the English text closely, and together, showing in detail how the novel's feminist power, its political complexities and its romantic appeal play out differently in different contexts and in the varied styles and idioms of individual translators. Tracking key words such as 'passion' and 'plain' across many languages via interactive visualisations and comparative analysis, Prismatic Jane Eyre opens a wholly new perspective on Brontë's novel, and provides a model for the collaborative close-reading of world literature. Prismatic Jane Eyre is a major intervention in translation and reception studies and world and comparative literature. It will also interest scholars of English literature, and readers of the Brontës.

Ch. 8 of Prismatic Jane Eyre: Close-reading a World Novel Across Languages

Multilingualism is integral to the human condition. Hinging on the concept of Creative Multilingualism - the idea that language diversity and creativity are mutually enriching - this timely and thought-provoking volume shows how the concept provides a matrix for experimentation with ideas, approaches and methods. The book presents four years of joint research on Creative Multilingualism conducted across disciplines, from the humanities through to the social and natural sciences. It is structured as a manifesto, comprising ten major statements which are unpacked and explored through various case studies across ten chapters. They encompass areas including the rich relationship between language diversity and diversity of identity, thought and expression; the interaction between language diversity and biodiversity; the 'prismatic' unfolding of meaning in translation; the benefits of linguistic creativity in a classroom-setting; and the ingenuity underpinning 'conlangs' ('constructed languages') such as Tolkien's Quenya and Sindarin, designed to give imagined peoples a distinctive medium capable of expressing their cultural identity. Creative Multilingualism: A Manifesto is a welcome contribution to the field of modern languages, highlighting the intricate relationship between multilingualism and creativity, and, crucially, reaching beyond an Anglo-centric view of the world. Intended to spark further research and discussion, this book appeals to young people interested in languages, language learning and cultural exchange. It will be a valuable resource for academics, educators, policy makers and parents of bilingual or multilingual children. Its accessible style also speaks to general readers interested in the role of language diversity in our everyday lives, and the untapped creative potential of multilingualism.

Translation can be seen as producing a text in one language that will count as equivalent to a text in another. It can also be seen as a release of multiple signifying possibilities, an opening of the source text to Language in all its plurality. The first view is underpinned by the regime of European standard languages which can be lined up in bilingual dictionaries, by the technology of the printed book, and by the need for regulated communication in political, academic and legal contexts. The second view is most at home in multilingual cultures, in circumstances where language is not standardised (e.g., minority and dialectal communities, and oral cultures), in the fluidity of electronic text, and in literature. The first view sees translation as a channel; the second as a prism. This volume explores prismatic modes of translation in ancient Egypt, contemporary Taiwan, twentieth-century Hungary, early modern India, and elsewhere. It gives attention to experimental literary writing, to the politics of migration, to the practices of scholarship, and to the multiplying possibilities created by digital media. It charts the recent growth of prismatic modes in anglophone literary translation and translational literature; and it offers a new theorisation of the phenomenon and its agonistic relation to the ‘channel’ view. Prismatic Translation is an essential intervention in a rapidly changing field.

This chapter explores the inherent multimodality of language across sight and sound. Specifically, it considers the letter “│”, offered by Adam in Dante’s Paradiso as the word for God in his long-lost Edenic language, and of course familiar in English as the first-person subject pronoun (sometimes mistaken for the number 1). This “│” can function both as an image and as something that has a linguistic (e.g., metrical) value, and therefore it complicates multimodal analyses. Because of this, it poses a particular and suggestive challenge to translation. This chapter traces the translational ramifications of “│”, seeking to elucidate the element of illustration that inheres in translation, and vice versa, as well as the pictorial aspect of all writing.

The Literary in History (and in the History of Translations) The relationship between literature and history is complicated; so is that between literary translation and the history of translation. This essay begins by making some general theoretical assertions: texts known as literary do not inhabit chronology in the same way as other kinds of texts; translations, especially, disrupt historical timelines since they (almost always) arise from at least two different moments and locations. The essay then focuses on the work of John Dryden, referring also to the King James Bible and to Samuel Purchas’s translation of the Mexica Codex Mendoza, and asks what kind of historical contextualisation is necessary if these texts are to be situated, not in ‘history’ but in a ‘history of translations’.

‘Babel’ is a paradoxical word. It is a name that was given to a city at the moment of its abandonment, and to a tower at the moment of its failure to be built. It signifies the variety of languages and yet is itself to be found unchanged in very many languages of the world. People can understand the word ‘Babel’; but what it means is the disintegration of understanding. Its meaning is the confusion of meaning.

The essays gathered here challenge current notions of the accessibility of culture, whether in overtly ideological and politically repressive contexts, or in seemingly 'neutral'; cultural scenarios.

Translation, illustration and interpretation have at least two things in common. They all begin when sense is made in the act of reading: that is where illustrative images and explanatory words begin to form. And they all ask to be understood in relation to the works from which they have arisen: reading them is a matter of reading readings. Likenesses explores this palimpsestic realm, with examples from Dante to the contemporary sculptor Rachel Whiteread. The complexities that emerge are different from Empsonian ambiguity or de Man’s unknowable infinity of signification: here, meaning dawns and fades as the hologrammic text is filled out and flattened by successive encounters. Since all literature and art is palimpsestic to some degree — Reynolds proposes — this style of interpretation can become a tactic for criticism in general. Critics need both to indulge and to distrust the metamorphic power of their interpreting imaginations. Likenesses follows on from the argument of Reynolds’s The Poetry of Translation (2011), extending it through other translations and beyond them into a wide range of layered texts. Browning emerges as a key figure because his poems laminate languages, places, times and modes of utterance with such compelling energy. There are also substantial, innovative accounts of Dryden, Stubbs, Goya, Turner, Tennyson, Ungaretti and many more.