Our next Reading and Reception Studies Seminar will be held on Tuesday 14 March,
5.00-7.00 pm, in the Reading Room (Main Building) at Clare Hall College,
Herschel Road, Cambridge.
Dr Alison Martin (Kassel) will be giving us a presentation entitled 'Annotation
and Authority: Georg Forster's footnotes to "Nachrichten von den Pelew-Inseln"
(1789)'.
The meeting will conclude with a glass of wine.
This will be the first of three seminars at Clare Hall under the title of
'Journeys into the Exotic', looking at depictions of the colonial exotic in
18th and 19th-century literature. Two further seminars will be held in May, the
details for which will be sent with our Summer Term list and found on our
website: <www.clarehall.cam.ac.uk/rbae/RRSS-2005-2006>.
BARS members would be very welcome to join us.
Best wishes,
(Dr) Elinor Shaffer
Seminar Convenor
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Until recently, the role of Georg Forster (1754-1794) as translator has largely
been ignored, with scholarly attention focused most strongly on his work as an
explorer, naturalist and radical intellectual. Yet he was one of the most
prodigious translators of travel writing from English and French into German at
the end of the eighteenth century. Forster refused to adopt a politics of
self-effacement, of 'invisibility' (Venuti, 1995) but rather exploited to the
full the activity of translation to affirm his status as Anglo-German cultural
ambassador and European authority in the fields of natural science and travel
writing. Nowhere is this more apparent than in his 1789 translation of George
Keate's 'Account of the Pelew Islands situated in the Western Part of the
Pacific Ocean' (1788), in which he added forty-one footnotes to the text, some
of them so long that they ran over a full three pages, querying, correcting and
providing supplementary information. As a translator, Forster's engagement with
the English text was not only through the act of translating the text itself,
but also through his extensive addition of paratextual commentary. This paper
explores how, through the use of these dissociative utterances, Forster
reframed the text in the translation to enforce a double-edged reading of it,
thereby inverting the usual hierarchy of original over translated text and of
author over translator.
ALISON E. MARTIN studied Modern Languages at Cambridge and gained an M.A. in
Modern Dutch Studies from University College London. She has recently been
awarded a PhD from Cambridge for her thesis "Sensibility and the Rhetoric of
Travel Writing: Representations of England in German Travel Accounts,
1783-1840". She is currently teaching in the English Dept of the University of
Kassel, Germany. Her main research interests lie in travel writing, eighteenth-
and nineteenth-century aesthetics, and cultural relations between Britain,
Germany and the Low Countries.
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