[eBook] [PDF] For Asian Classics on the Victorian Bookshelf Flights of Translation 1st Edition By Alexander Bubb

[eBook] [PDF] For Asian Classics on the Victorian Bookshelf Flights of Translation 1st Edition By Alexander Bubb

The interest among Victorian readers in classical literature from Asia has been greatly underestimated. The popularity of the Arabian Nights and The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam is well documented. Yet this was also an era in which freethinkers consulted the Quran, in which schoolchildren were given abridgements of the Ramayana to read, in which names like ‘Kalidasa’ and ‘Firdusi’ were carved on the façades of public libraries, and in which women’s book clubs discussed Japanese poetry. But for the most part, such readers were not consulting the specialist publications of scholarly orientalists. What then were the translations that catalysed these intercultural encounters? Based on a unique methodology marrying translation theory with empirical techniques developed by historians of reading, this book shines light for the first time on the numerous amateur translators or ‘popularizers’, who were responsible for making these texts accessible and disseminating them to the Victorian general readership.