In alphabetical order
María Inés Arrizabalaga
Universidad Nacional de Córdoba, Argentina
The Angus Saga: how do hypermedia translation and quasi-Literature combine for a fictional world of the MacLachlan Clan?
Abstract
O primeiro guerreiro, the initial volume of Orlando Pães Filho’s A saga de Angus (The Angus Saga), was published in Brazil in 2003, appearing in different products of new media ever since. What is more, graphic novels and short animated films made after this saga have become part of the saga’s own website, where the MacLachlans’ fictional world is further exhibited. In this presentation, I plan to use three pairs of concepts to understand O primero guerreiro: the “fluidization” of knowledge and “hypermedia translation” for explaining the convergence of Literature and the Internet; “defictionalization” and “quasi-Literature” both in the passage of Literature to virtual environments, and in the saga’s reference to historical archives; finally, “post-translation” applied to new media products responding to the determinations of creative economy, and the “ecosystem mode” in which functional actives of culture interrelate. However, such diversification would not have had an impact on the saga’s literary fame if it had not been for the use of English as a lingua franca. What is more, translation into English in combination with the saga’s transit through the Internet make for new modes of “literary manipulation” as types of “rewriting.” My study hints at: i) “fluidization” of Pães Filho’s work in relation to the “MacLachlan Clan War” products in virtual environments; ii) “hypermedia translation” in new media products pertaining The Angus Saga, which are being promoted in English for strategic commercial reasons, and “live together” in a single fictional world; iii) “defictionalization” in connection not only to the saga’s textual analysis but also to its new media products’ hypertextual analysis; iv) “quasi-Literature” with regard to the referential use of historical archives in The Angus Saga and as a frequent condition of Epic Fantasy, presently redefined as “Neo Epic;” v) “post-translation” concerning the creation and manipulation of “literary memory effects” in accordance with the creative economy of both media type: traditionally conceived Literature and the Internet; iv) an “ecosystem mode” within which Neo Epic literary facts as facts of culture are equipped with functional actives allowing them to flow and be consumed in the environment of a “hypermodel” of action. I attempt to shed light on: i) the “multi talent requirements” implied in a literary fact “translated” to the new media and into English for the explicit purpose of expanding the consuming audience and consequently the scope of literary critics and translation scholars; ii) “digital nomadism” as characterises Pães Filho, his readers, literary critics and translation scholars, all of them dealing with products “in transit” from History to Literature – including the specific realm of “Neo Epic” – and English-dominated virtual environments; iii) the dynamics of “literary memory effects” in the framework of Literature, Media and Translation Studies.
Bio
María Inés Arrizabalaga holds a PhD in Translation Studies from Universidad Nacional de Córdoba [UNC] (Argentina). She is a full professor at UNC, where she currently holds the Chair of Translation Studies. María is also periodically teaching two university courses at Universidad Nacional de Entre Ríos [UNER] (Argentina), “Intercultural Studies” and “Introduction to Translation Studies”; besides, she has joined the Program for Research Strategic Planning at UNER Business School. María is Head to the Research Group “Estudios de Traducción Total” [EsTraTo] affiliated to UNC, which works in a coordinated manner with UNER’s research project “Create, Mediate, Translate.” She has over 15 years of experience teaching at University level both in Argentina and abroad, which includes job contracts and participation as a foreign expert in Brazil, China, Chile, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, Italy, Uruguay. María is experienced in organizing international congresses as well; in December 2019 she will be hosting the World Congress of Total Translation (Córdoba, Argentina). María is interested in the fields of Translation, Literary and Intercultural Studies, and Semiotics. She has recently written the script for and produced a TV series about research in Arts and the Humanities in Patagonia, available here.
Sanford Budick
The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel
Ciphertext and Conversion in The Merchant of Venice
Abstract
Many commentators have noted the degraded values for which this play's apparent heroes stand, especially the way their claims for Christian mercy are belied by merciless legalism and unabashed greed. A reactive reflection on the surface drama is thus an inner necessity generated by the play itself. In fact, Shakespeare here creates a counter-life of language that constitutes a ciphertext, complete with its own decoding, and that points the way to the creation of a distinctly Shakespearean mode of consciousness. This he achieves in a set of acute divergences from the outward meanings of a set of key terms, namely, nothing, hazard, three or the third, and conversion. These divergences within some meanings do not amount to subversions of all meaning, such as a deconstructionist reading might aim to uncover. Nor does the the play’s articulation of inner meanings bring with it an expectation that it can easily displace the allure of worldly values. To hear and see the play's affirmative inner drama requires learning an arduous language of self-reflection that unfolds in the play, step by step, from beginning to end. To aid in learning this language I enlist the aid of Kierkegaard, Husserl, Kant, and Foucault.
Although the nothing in itself is invariable (zero, a cipher), how it is framed determines very different thoughts of the nothing. In The Merchant of Venice there are principally two framings of the nothing: one is the monetarized or sexualized thoughtlessness that pretends to fullness but conceals emptiness; the other is a beginning of the human in the thinking created by acceptance of our own potential nothingness and concomitant suspension of accustomed ideas of the human. This latter thinking of the nothing, which Husserl calls an "un-humanization," an "Entmenschung," is at the furthest remove from either nihilism or dehumanization since it poises us for finally being able to affirm the human without prejudgments or prejudices. This active thinking of the nothing corresponds to Husserl's "bracketing" and "radical self-reflection" (both "acts of the second degree") that silently disclose the mind's consciousness of being. In Husserl's theory and Shakespeare's practice this is a consciousness which, instead of possessing the objects of the world, effects "acts of reflection directed to them" and grasps the actuality their own being. Besides this re-thinking of the nothing, The Merchant of Venice necessitates parallel probings of the terms hazard, the third, and conversion. Each of these terms has an indispensable role in the play's active making of a consciousness that can claim to be human.
Although the nothing in itself is invariable (zero, a cipher), how it is framed determines very different thoughts of the nothing. In The Merchant of Venice there are principally two framings of the nothing: one is the monetarized or sexualized thoughtlessness that pretends to fullness but conceals emptiness; the other is a beginning of the human in the thinking created by acceptance of our own potential nothingness and concomitant suspension of accustomed ideas of the human. This latter thinking of the nothing, which Husserl calls an "un-humanization," an "Entmenschung," is at the furthest remove from either nihilism or dehumanization since it poises us for finally being able to affirm the human without prejudgments or prejudices. This active thinking of the nothing corresponds to Husserl's "bracketing" and "radical self-reflection" (both "acts of the second degree") that silently disclose the mind's consciousness of being. In Husserl's theory and Shakespeare's practice this is a consciousness which, instead of possessing the objects of the world, effects "acts of reflection directed to them" and grasps the actuality their own being. Besides this re-thinking of the nothing, The Merchant of Venice necessitates parallel probings of the terms hazard, the third, and conversion. Each of these terms has an indispensable role in the play's active making of a consciousness that can claim to be human.
Bio
Sanford Budick received his A.B. from Harvard and his Ph.D. from Yale. Before being appointed Professor of English at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem he was Professor of English at Cornell University. He is the author of Dryden and the Abyss of Light: A Study of Religio Laici and The Hind and the Panther (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1970), Poetry of Civilization: Mythopoeic Displacement in the Verse of Milton, Dryden, Pope, and Johnson (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974), The Dividing Muse: Images of Sacred Disjunction in Milton’s Poetry (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), The Western Theory of Tradition: Terms and Paradigms of the Cultural Sublime (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2000), Kant and Milton (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2010).
With Geoffrey Hartman he edited Midrash and Literature (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986). With Wolfgang Iser he edited Languages of the Unsayable: The Play of Negativity in Literature and Literary Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989; reprinted Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996) and The Translatability of Cultures: Figurations of the Space Between (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996).
With Geoffrey Hartman he edited Midrash and Literature (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986). With Wolfgang Iser he edited Languages of the Unsayable: The Play of Negativity in Literature and Literary Theory (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989; reprinted Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996) and The Translatability of Cultures: Figurations of the Space Between (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1996).
Among his awards are a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Fellowship of the (U.S,) National Endowment for the Humanities, and two James Holly Hanford Awards (1987 and 2012) of the Milton Society of America for best books on Milton.
He is currently completing a book on Shakespeare.
He is currently completing a book on Shakespeare.
Isabelle Gadoin
Université de Poitiers, France
Anthony Hartley
William Morris, a cross-cultural poet, writer and artist
Abstract
William Morris is extremely famous for his career as a designer and one of the founders of the whole movement of the Arts and Crafts in Late Victorian England. But the other side of his career, as a man of letters, is far less abundantly documented. While his Socialist utopia News from Nowhere (1890) is still read and commented upon today, far less attention has been given to his early poems, as well as his late romances written in a mock- mediaeval style which was to inspire the whole twentieth-century movement of “Fantasy” literature.
The lecture will focus on Morris’s partly neglected love of letters, both in the sense of literature as a whole, and of individual letters. Morris loved the letter as a writer, but also as a visual artist: from an early stage of his career, he practiced calligraphy as leisure, before turning to book-printing as a professional activity in the last years of his life. This love of letters will be studied on the basis of a particular case-study: his production of a calligraphic and illustrated version of the mediaeval Persian poems of Omar Khayyam, the Rubbayiat, in their English translation by Edward FitzGerald (1859).
Aside from his passion for letters, in both their graphic and poetic dimension, Morris’s work on the Rubbayiat shows how deeply intercultural and intermedial his inspiration was. He recreated for the English readers of the Persian poet a visual world which borrowed from his other creations in the field of textiles, carpets, wall-papers, etc., and brought together East and West in a completely hybrid visual creation. It is those eminently cross-cultural and trans-disciplinary sources of inspiration that the paper will unravel.
Bio
Isabelle Gadoin is Professor of British Art and Literature at the University of Poitiers, France. She is a Thomas Hardy specialist, and one of the founding members of the French Association for Thomas Hardy Studies (“FATHOM”), as well as the co-editor of the online Journal of the association. Apart from her interest in Victorian literature, she has worked mostly on the question of visual perception and the apprehension of space in novels and travel narratives, and more generally in the field of Visual Culture Studies and text-and-image studies, on which she has published extensively. She teaches in the Master Degree on Text and Image at the university of Poitiers, and is the president of the French Society for Intermedial and Intertextual Studies (“SAIT”, “Société Angliciste Image-Texte”). She also holds an MA in Art History from the Sorbonne, for which she specialized in Islamic art, working more precisely on the reception of Persian art in Victorian Britain, and she is currently on research leave, writing a book on that subject.
Emeritus Professor, Centre for Translation Studies, University of Leeds, UK
Adrian Poruciuc
Creating a new genre via crowdsourced post-editing of NMT: the challenging case of English, Japanese and rugby
Abstract
My presentation addresses a situation where non-professional translators are asked to translate texts in a source language genre which has no clear counterpart in their own language. Thus, effectively they are being invited to create a new genre of writing in the target language. In addition to being non-professionals, the translators form a loose-knit group of volunteers with no style guide or moderators/revisers to regulate the form of their translations. While these translators have no shared explicit meta-vision of how to translate, they do have in common their insider knowledge of the technical domain of the discourse. In the situation I describe, the source language is (mostly) English, the target language Japanese, the domain rugby football and the genre live match commentaries. The linguistic ‘common denominator’ – and potentially harmonising force – is the fact that the volunteers do not translate from scratch but instead post-edit the output of a machine translation system (MT). This challenge has arisen within the ScrumSourcing project, which relies on an online collaborative translation scenario to enable rugby fans to create an MT service to support ‘talking rugby’ between Japanese- and English-speaking fans during Rugby World Cup 2019 (RWC2019) in Japan. The platform developed by NICT, is freely available on portable devices.
The best training data for adapting neural MT to a specialised domain is large volumes of translated sentences typical of that domain, but we have found very little parallel data to harvest. World Rugby publishes the official Laws of the game Rugby Union in 10 languages, including English and Japanese. While we have included them, they are of limited use. First, the legalistic style is remote from that of match reporting. Second, many expressions that are highly frequent in match reports – for example, ‘feed, ‘clear’, ‘steal’ – are totally absent from the Laws. World Rugby also has news pages in Japanese as well as English, but the volume of segment-for-segment translations is very small as a result of extensive editing. In the absence of parallel data, the role of the volunteer fans is to generate it by post- editing (i.e., revising) the translations of match reports produced by the current baseline system. The revised translations are used to adapt the system and incrementally improve quality over repeated post-editing and re-training cycles.
While the volunteers are knowledgeable about rugby, they sometimes find the frequent English metaphors opaque. Moreover, a challenge for fans translating live match commentaries from English is the absence of an established corresponding genre in Japanese. Essentially, they are called upon to ‘invent’ a new style of writing influenced with certainty by the characteristics of the English source texts and – arguably – by those of the MT output. Additionally, in the Japanese to English direction, the pool of potential volunteers is smaller, reducing the volume of bitext with a genuine Japanese source that we can expect to obtain. This imbalance prompted us to incorporate back-translated, ‘synthetic’ data in the adaptation of the Japanese to English MT engine, thus translationese further muddies the stylistic waters.
The best training data for adapting neural MT to a specialised domain is large volumes of translated sentences typical of that domain, but we have found very little parallel data to harvest. World Rugby publishes the official Laws of the game Rugby Union in 10 languages, including English and Japanese. While we have included them, they are of limited use. First, the legalistic style is remote from that of match reporting. Second, many expressions that are highly frequent in match reports – for example, ‘feed, ‘clear’, ‘steal’ – are totally absent from the Laws. World Rugby also has news pages in Japanese as well as English, but the volume of segment-for-segment translations is very small as a result of extensive editing. In the absence of parallel data, the role of the volunteer fans is to generate it by post- editing (i.e., revising) the translations of match reports produced by the current baseline system. The revised translations are used to adapt the system and incrementally improve quality over repeated post-editing and re-training cycles.
While the volunteers are knowledgeable about rugby, they sometimes find the frequent English metaphors opaque. Moreover, a challenge for fans translating live match commentaries from English is the absence of an established corresponding genre in Japanese. Essentially, they are called upon to ‘invent’ a new style of writing influenced with certainty by the characteristics of the English source texts and – arguably – by those of the MT output. Additionally, in the Japanese to English direction, the pool of potential volunteers is smaller, reducing the volume of bitext with a genuine Japanese source that we can expect to obtain. This imbalance prompted us to incorporate back-translated, ‘synthetic’ data in the adaptation of the Japanese to English MT engine, thus translationese further muddies the stylistic waters.
Bio
Anthony Hartley is Emeritus Professor of Translation Studies at the University of Leeds, UK. He has a long record in the design, implementation and evaluation of software tools for translators and translation users.
Trained initially as a translator and interpreter (French and Russian), he worked professionally in both fields while lecturing at Bradford University. He then moved into Computational Linguistics, holding a research post at the University of Sussex before becoming Professor of Language Engineering at Brighton University. In 2001 he was appointed founding Director of the Centre for Translation Studies at Leeds. He built a team of talented young researchers in corpus- and computational-linguistics which captured significant grants from UK and EU sponsors for projects in translation research and e-learning. Since moving to Japan in 2009 he has held posts at Tokyo University of Foreign Studies and Rikkyo University. He has held visiting appointments at the universities of Laval, Lille, Sydney and Tokyo.
Trained initially as a translator and interpreter (French and Russian), he worked professionally in both fields while lecturing at Bradford University. He then moved into Computational Linguistics, holding a research post at the University of Sussex before becoming Professor of Language Engineering at Brighton University. In 2001 he was appointed founding Director of the Centre for Translation Studies at Leeds. He built a team of talented young researchers in corpus- and computational-linguistics which captured significant grants from UK and EU sponsors for projects in translation research and e-learning. Since moving to Japan in 2009 he has held posts at Tokyo University of Foreign Studies and Rikkyo University. He has held visiting appointments at the universities of Laval, Lille, Sydney and Tokyo.
Adrian Poruciuc
Alexandru Ioan Cuza University of Iași, Romania
François Vergne
The peculiar position of Germanic runes in the history of script
Abstract
In the domain that one may designate as “visual communication” the most important sector is occupied by the history of script. Whoever intends to give a talk on the latter should take into account that many people of today’s world – and especially of Europe – consider that “script” simply means “alphabetic writing”. However, neither Egyptian hieroglyphs, nor Mesopotamian cuneiforms represent alphabetic systems. With a view to the planned keynote presentation, worth observing is also that there has been a long debate on whether, originally, script was meant for down-to-earth communication, or for divination and magic. Recently, more and more scholars – including Gimbutas, Winn, Haarmann, Merlini, Lazarovici, Mair and others – have argued that the earliest forms of script belonged to the domain of religious-ritual practices. Also, throughout the last half-century or so, researchers have studied and classified numberless archaeological items coming from Southeast European sites such as Vinča (Serbia), Karanovo (Bulgaria) and Tărtăria (Romania). The figurative and non-figurative signs engraved on many of those items (be they tablets, pots, amulets or statuettes) appear to be manifestations of the neolithic-eneolithic “Danube civilization”; and recent measurements have indicated that the “Danube Script” (DS) predates the Egyptian and Mesopotamian writing systems by about two millennia. Against such a background, it would seem to be out-of-place to compare the Germanic runic script – whose earliest occurrences date from the second century CE – to the prehistoric Danube Script (DS), or to the ancient writing systems of Egypt, Mesopotamia, the Indus Valley, China, or the Eastern Mediterranean. Nevertheless, as the author of the talk-to-be intends to demonstrate, the rather peculiar features of the Germanic runes reflect all the stages of the history of script: from symbolic pictograms to abstract-looking logograms and, finally, to phonograms, that is, to alphabetic signs.
Bio
Adrian Poruciuc is Emeritus Professor of Linguistics at the Department of English of Universitatea “Alexandru Ioan Cuza” din Iaşi (UAIC) He has taught ten different language and linguistics-related courses, participated in research projects on applied linguistics and cultural anthropology for the UAIC, the Romanian Institute of Thracian Studies (Bucharest) and the Institute of Archaeology (Iaşi). He supervised numerous dissertations and theses on issues of historical-comparative linguistics and cultural anthropology. At present he supervises PhD theses at the Faculty of History of the UAIC. He has published books, studies and articles on many topics, mainly in the fields of Indo-European and Germanic studies, archaeolinguistics and archaeomythology. Some of his most significant volumes are the following: Prehistoric Roots of Romanian and Southeast European Traditions (Sebastopol, California: Institute of Archaeomythology, 2010), A Concise History of the English Language (Iaşi: Demiurg, 2004), Structuri dramatice şi imagini poetice la Shakespeare şi Voiculescu/Dramatic Structures and Poetic Imagery in Shakespeare’s and Voiculescu’s Sonnets (Iaşi: Demiurg, 2000), Limbă şi istorie engleză/English Language and History (Iaşi: Polirom, 1999), Confluenţe şi etimologii/ (Iaşi: Polirom, 1998), Istorie scrisă în engleza veche/History Written in Old English (Iaşi: Editura Moldova, 1995), Archaeolinguistica/Archaeolinguistics (Bucureşti: Bibliotheca Thracologica, 1995). He lectured at a number of foreign universities, including University of Chicago (as Fulbright Visiting Scholar 1990-1992), University of Evansville (Indiana), University of Columbus (Ohio), Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg, Ludwig Maximilian Universität München, Université Catholique del’Ouest (Angers), Universidad de la Laguna (Tenerife), Nov Bălgarski Universitet (Sofia). He gave the keynote address at the Second Arheoinvest Congress (Iaşi, 7-9 June 2012), and he chaired numerous sessions at other academic gatherings organized in Romania or abroad. He became Fellow per la Letteratura, Compagnia di San Paolo – Bogliasco, Italy (2003) and Fellow of the Institute of Archaeomythology, Sebastopol, California (2005). Adrian Poruciuc also held the position of Director of the summer courses entitled “Romania – Language and Civilization” organized at the UAiC (1995-2012).
François Vergne
Université Paris III, Sorbonne-Nouvelle, France
Italian Fantasies : Regaining Paradise in Frederick William Rolfe’s Stories Toto Told Me
Abstract
Frederick William Rolfe (1860-1913), or Baron Corvo as he styled himself during the first phase of his career following a few months spent in Rome in 1890, was a Catholic convert, failed priest, unemployable painter, unsung pioneer of photography, aspiring gondolier, vicious polemicist and lover of his own sex. Rolfe is an author whose work has invariably been obscured by the legends which have accreted around his life. This was partly the fault of Rolfe’s own myth-making tendencies, such as his uncertain self-attribution of an aristocratic title, but also the result of a wildly successful but deliberately misleading first biography by A. J. A. Symons, The Quest for Corvo, published in 1934. This inevitably raises the question: ‘Why bother with an apparently minor writer?’
The answer is to be found in his works themselves. Often dismissed as one of the petits-maîtres of the English Decadent movement, Rolfe was not just one of the many eccentric dilettantes dabbling with varying degrees of success in literary matters – one of those that the early 21st century reader with an interest in the history of the ‘Yellow Nineties’ inevitably discovers in the shadow of the artistic giants of the period (Wilde, Beardsley, the young Yeats, etc.). Frederick Rolfe, although he unrealistically saw writing as a rather vulgar (and, he hoped, temporary) way of making a living, took literary creation very seriously when, however reluctantly, he decided to engage in it.
This is the case with his Stories Toto Told Me, written between 1891 and 1895 and first published in The Yellow Book. These texts, which Shane Leslie described as a ‘a natural comminglement of the Pagan and Christian tradition in the form of modern Italian folk-lore’, enchanted the readers of the time with their little narratives that offer a modern, comfortably picturesque and fantastical-cum-decadent version of Jacobus da Varagine’s Golden Legend.
What particularly strikes the modern reader of the Stories Toto Told Me is their experimental quality. Rolfe deliberately sought to create the illusion (as the title indicates) of a mere rendering in the English Language of tales told by young characters who express themselves in a language combining English, Italian and Latin elements. There is an illusion of simplicity based upon the creation of new words and expressions, the use of ‘impollués vocables’ (Jean Moréas), neologisms that had not been debased by the inaccurate and vulgar usage of the English of Rolfe’s time. To create this illusion, Rolfe was obliged to create a very elaborate system of writing in which one feels a remarkable tension between the younger Italian narrators (who express themselves in an idealized ‘prelapsarian’ language) and the unsurpassable timelessness of Latin prayers repeatedly quoted as befits tales told/written in praise of ‘The Padre Eterno’. This self-conscious attempt (the first in Rolfe’s literary career) at blurring the distinction between the oral and the written forms, between dialects and languages, at creating an altogether new mode of expression, accounts for the unique status of the Stories Toto Told Me in the literature of the Yellow Nineties. There might just be an element of truth in R. H. Benson’s description of them as « the fifth gospel ».
The answer is to be found in his works themselves. Often dismissed as one of the petits-maîtres of the English Decadent movement, Rolfe was not just one of the many eccentric dilettantes dabbling with varying degrees of success in literary matters – one of those that the early 21st century reader with an interest in the history of the ‘Yellow Nineties’ inevitably discovers in the shadow of the artistic giants of the period (Wilde, Beardsley, the young Yeats, etc.). Frederick Rolfe, although he unrealistically saw writing as a rather vulgar (and, he hoped, temporary) way of making a living, took literary creation very seriously when, however reluctantly, he decided to engage in it.
This is the case with his Stories Toto Told Me, written between 1891 and 1895 and first published in The Yellow Book. These texts, which Shane Leslie described as a ‘a natural comminglement of the Pagan and Christian tradition in the form of modern Italian folk-lore’, enchanted the readers of the time with their little narratives that offer a modern, comfortably picturesque and fantastical-cum-decadent version of Jacobus da Varagine’s Golden Legend.
What particularly strikes the modern reader of the Stories Toto Told Me is their experimental quality. Rolfe deliberately sought to create the illusion (as the title indicates) of a mere rendering in the English Language of tales told by young characters who express themselves in a language combining English, Italian and Latin elements. There is an illusion of simplicity based upon the creation of new words and expressions, the use of ‘impollués vocables’ (Jean Moréas), neologisms that had not been debased by the inaccurate and vulgar usage of the English of Rolfe’s time. To create this illusion, Rolfe was obliged to create a very elaborate system of writing in which one feels a remarkable tension between the younger Italian narrators (who express themselves in an idealized ‘prelapsarian’ language) and the unsurpassable timelessness of Latin prayers repeatedly quoted as befits tales told/written in praise of ‘The Padre Eterno’. This self-conscious attempt (the first in Rolfe’s literary career) at blurring the distinction between the oral and the written forms, between dialects and languages, at creating an altogether new mode of expression, accounts for the unique status of the Stories Toto Told Me in the literature of the Yellow Nineties. There might just be an element of truth in R. H. Benson’s description of them as « the fifth gospel ».
Bio
François Vergne-Clary is a ‘Maître de conferences’ at the Département du Monde Anglophone, Université de Paris III-Sorbonne Nouvelle. He is the author of a doctoral thesis on the works of Frederick W. Rolfe, Baron Corvo and has published numerous articles on French, English and Italian fin-de-siècle literature. At present he is working on cultural exchanges between Italy and Great-Britain and travel literature —whether real or imaginary— from Patrick Leigh Fermor to Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa and Mario Praz.
