Dr. Aleksondra Hultquist

University of Melbourne

Eliza Haywood’s (1693?-1756) contributions to English literature—to the history of the novel, to the development of modern journalism, to political satire, among other forms—have been avidly studied by scholars for the past twenty years.   To date her translations are little studied; however, they have much to reveal about how her authorial influence—both in her choice of text for translation and in the ways in which her translation alters original text—manipulates the style and meaning of the source text.  Her translations, though usually true to the main body and spirit of the text, nevertheless are influenced deeply by her own specific literary style as well as her sexual-political agendas.  This paper examines eighteenth-century translation “theory” and uses that to evaluate Eliza Haywood’s translation of Madeleine Angelique Poisson de Gomez’s Les Journées Amusantes as La Belle Assemblée.  I posit that Haywood’s literary amendments, specifically in her addition of a fatal love story—“The History and Misfortunes of Fatyma”—create female subjectivity.  In addition to small textual changes that recalibrate the style and the emotional voltage, Haywood also makes certain insertions, inventions of her own, that are wholly absent from the original text.  A slave woman who plays a minor and somewhat barbaric role in the French original, Fatyma in Haywood’s addition is differently valued and evaluated.  By providing a back story based on intense desire, Haywood creates an identity and subjectivity for this minor character, momentarily making Fatyma the heroine of her own history, rather than the villain of another’s