“The Burthen of the Curse of Babel”: Mary Shelley’s Handling of Shelley’s Translations

Abstract

Percy Bysshe Shelley authored numerous translations, in poetry as well as in prose, from modern and classical languages. Only three of them were published in his lifetime: the translation of Dante’s sonnet, “Guido, vorrei, che tu, e Lappo, ed io”, and the sonnet-version of an idyll by Moschus appeared in the Alastor volume, while the last stanza of the rendering of Dante’s Canzone, “Voi, che ’ntendendo, il terzo Ciel movete”, was printed after the Advertisement to Epipsychidion. Shelley’s other translations may also have been intended for publication; however, after his untimely death, Mary Shelley published only a few, much sanitised specimens of them, which she grouped together at the end of her successive editions of Shelley’s works. Thus, not only did she contradict her statement in the Preface to Posthumous Poems of Percy Bysshe Shelley that “I have been more actuated by the fear lest any monument of his genius should escape me, than the wish of presenting nothing but what was complete to the fastidious reader”, but she also implied that his translations were distinct from, and subsidiary to, his original compositions. The article traces the reasons for such treatment back to Shelley’s own attitude towards translation and reconstructs the editorial history of his renderings from Mary Shelley’s Posthumous Poems to the present to show how her decisions, and therefore, ultimately, Shelley’s views, have influenced later editors.