Taking Liberties

Abstract This article offers a survey of translation practices in early novels, focusing on their source in a common European education in rhetoric and paying particular attention to translations of French and English novels written and translated between 1650 and 1800, the period generally recognized as the birth of the novel. The freedoms taken with translations can be traced to certain rhetorical exercises common from the Middle Ages through the 18th century. Yet, during the 18th century, as the novel was emerging, translators evince a particular predilection for amplifying sentiment and forging techniques of realism – the two primary developments of the eighteenth-century novel. Translators and translator-novelists identified that the ‘interest’ of the novel bore directly on the notion of sensibility, and that the translator’s goal was to develop this interest. They therefore foregrounded affectivity as the target of their revisions.