Radical Translations: The Transfer of Revolutionary Culture between Britain, France and Italy (1789-1815)

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The international circulation of radical ideas of equality and rights has deeply shaped European societies since the revolutionary period. Yet today, this legacy of internationalism is assumed to be over or at least incapable of being translated into new contexts. This project looks to the French Revolution to reactivate this shared radical past. It asks: what was the impact of translation on revolutionary thought and politics? And how is our relation to revolutionary ideas mediated by translation even today? Revolutionary translations have long been left unexamined or devalued as mere copycat propaganda. Our project, in contrast, seeks to reposition the role of translators not as passive collaborators but as active militants seeking to 'spread democracy' into new cultures and languages - a contested idea then as now. Focusing on why and when translation happens as well as where it fails, we seek to understand how a transnational revolutionary idiom was adopted, adapted, resisted or rejected in the effort to create culturally specific tools for political action on the ground. We also seek to illuminate the crucial role played by translation in enabling democratic movements to reach wider publics and cast themselves as part of an international struggle. The investigation will focus on two axes: one connecting Britain and France and the other crossing the Alps to Italy and back, with Anglophone texts often reaching Italian readers via French translation. A key output will be a database containing information on an estimated 400 translations with a radicalizing purpose, scattered in libraries and archives around the world and never systematically collated. We will consider a diverse range of material including: published translations, self-translations, texts imagined as translations as well as unpublished or projected translations, blocked by rapidly changing political events and recoverable from periodicals, publisher's prospectuses, and personal correspondence. We will use prosopographical data models to shed light on the shadowy world of translators and their professional and political identities, beginning with a core list of 50 translators working across English, French and Italian, scalable to other languages. We will identify a series of case-studies to analyse how translators sought to overcome real asymmetries between countries and areas of society in both material and symbolic resources. Our project is not limited to historical questions. To test the capacity of revolutionary ideas to resonate today we will invite students, translators, theatre practitioners and grassroots activists to translate and perform a selection of radical texts in present-day language. These translation and performance activities - documented on the project website - aim to enhance public awareness of the cosmopolitan roots of radical thought as well as stimulate new methods of translating radical works as 'living texts'. The same search for a 'presence effect' in translation will shape a new anthology of translated texts, finally making available in English forgotten masterpieces of radical culture.By foregrounding radicalism, this project has the potential to rewrite fundamental assumptions about translation as a cultural and creative activity. In the convulsive political climate of revolution, translation was not simply a new container for an esteemed original but became a type of direct action, dependent on the opening or closing of political opportunity. By highlighting the all-important time factor in the analysis of radical translation, this project will address the following more speculative questions: - Is there a transnational revolutionary idiom and does it vary from place to place? - Can translation identify how ideas are assimilated and which remain inappropriate and out of place?- How might a focus on radical translation challenge our understandings both of what is 'radical' and what is a 'translation'?