At the end of the nineteenth century, within French Symbolist circles, translation emerged as a dynamic and experimental practice, distinct from the rigid academic philological approaches and the tradition of the belles infidèles. Many Symbolist writers, including renowned figures such as Stéphane Mallarmé, Joris-Karl Huysmans, and Marcel Schwob, as well as lesser-known but equally significant contributors like Alfred Jarry, Pierre Louÿs, Renée Vivien, Pierre Quillard, Laurent Tailhade, Hugues Rebell, André-Ferdinand Herold, Félix Fénéon, and Victor Barrucand, engaged in translation as a creative endeavor. These writers did not limit themselves to translating contemporary works; they also turned to ancient and medieval texts. For them, translation was not merely an act of linguistic transposition but a space for stylistic experimentation, where they navigated the tension between appropriation and self-alienation.

While it is difficult to define a unified ‘Symbolist style’ of translation, certain tendencies can be identified in their works, particularly in their resistance to the prescriptive norms of academic translation. The Symbolist belief in the inseparability of form and content inspired innovative approaches to translation, emphasizing the aesthetic and sonic qualities of language over strict fidelity to the source text. This creative ethos allowed Symbolist writers to view translation as a means of enriching their own literary practice, rather than as a secondary or derivative activity.

In this paper, rather than focusing on the linguistic choices made in their translations, we will examine the critical reception of these works, particularly within the Symbolist press and literary magazines. Reviews of their translations often highlighted questions of style, assessing how the act of translation influenced or diverged from the writers’ original creative output. These critiques reveal a broader cultural dialogue about the role of translation in shaping literary innovation. For Symbolist writers, foreignizing effects in translation were not merely about preserving the ‘otherness’ of the source text but also about using that otherness as a catalyst for innovation. They experimented with new linguistic possibilities in French, thereby expanding the expressive potential of their native language. The foreignness of the text became a means of transformation, enabling them to reimagine their own literary style and challenge conventional norms.

Ultimately, the Symbolists approached translation with a consciousness of creative gain rather than a sense of loss from the original. They envisioned translation as a transformative process, one that could create a space where the translated text became something entirely new—a work of art in its own right. This paper seeks to explore how Symbolist writers redefined translation as a site of literary experimentation, blurring the boundaries between original and translated works.

The dominant contemporary approaches to translation prize the visible translator’s subjective response to the source text as a responsible and ethical practice of translation. For example, Silvia Kadiu, in her Reflexive Translation Studies, reflects on ‘translator’s turn’ which highlights “the creative, experimental and subjective aspects of translating”. In so doing, Kadiu places the translator’s ethical practice in the tradition of hermeneutic reflexivity. This notion of the ethical translation derives from Kadiu’s rapports with Lawrence Venuti’s deconstructivist concept of foreignization. Venuti’s foreignization, heavily indebted to Fridriech Schleiermacher’s hermeneutics, militates against the disciplined translation of domestication which emphasizes fluency and transparency. Kadiu’s rapport with Venuti returns us to Schleiermacher’s ethical base of an ‘oscillation between the determinacy of the particular and the indeterminacy of the general image’. As Andrew Bowie points out in his introduction to Schleiermacher’s Hermeneutics and Criticism and Other Essays, this oscillation characterizes “the relationship between the universal aspect of language and the fact that individuals can imbue the same universally employed word with different senses”: “Language only exists via thought, and vice versa; each can only complete itself via the other”. Here Schleiermacher’s hermeneutical translation/interpretation allows us to go beyond the failed ‘linguistic turn’. This paper, based on Schleiermacher’s hermeneutics, reads D. H. Lawrence’s translation of the Russian philosopher Lev Shestov’s Apofeoz bezpochvennosti (‘Apotheosis of Groundlessness’), which was published under the writer’s own title All Things Are Possible. Lawrence, as if he saw his role as an editor who “Englished” his Russian friend Samuel Koteliansky’s translation, penned a ‘Foreword’, which epitomizes Shestov’s anti-dogmatic and proto-existential thinking: “Shestov’s style is puzzling at first. Having found the “ands” and “buts” and “becauses” and “therefore” hampered him, he clips them all off deliberately and evn spitefully, so that his thought is like a man with no buttons on his clothes, ludicrously hitching along all undone”. Lawrence goes on to say that “The real conjunction, the real unification lies in the reader’s own amusement, not in the author’s unbroken logic”. His translation shows ‘language only exists via thought, and vice versa; each can only compete itself via the other’.

The idea of this paper germinated when we began translating a bunch of women-centric stories from Indian Nepali Literature into English. As faculty members of English Literature at Sikkim University, India, we live in Sikkim and have access to Nepali, the lingua franca of the state. In fact, for one of us, Nepali is the native tongue, although ethnically she is a Lepcha woman. The other translator is not a native Nepali speaker but has acquired the language (speaking, reading and writing). As we took up Nepali stories for translation, we were forced to think about our position as translators vis-à-vis the source language culture and target language. Encapsulating the narrative style of Nepali as a native language into English landed us in the dilemma of ethics and aesthetics for what appears “acceptable” in English language forced us to compromise with the style and tonality of the native texts. The paper therefore deals with the question of how to ethically represent a native text in the world literary scenario and carve a place for it in the world literature maintaining the aesthetics. How to negotiate the question of translatability and untranslatability when the translators are removed from both the source and the target language ethnically? How do the translator’s strategies define their relationship with place as they strive to retain the local “flavour” and “feel” of the narrative? Can ethics and aesthetics of translation be maintained at the same time? How is the mind of a postcolonial translator always dominated by the invisible English reader essentially occupying a superior position and dictating the terms of translation both through theory and practice? How then can the translators’ conscious choice of a readership help them to take decisions in regard to the representation of the native people and place?

Claude Debussy’s "Pelléas et Mélisande" (premiered 1902) is often seen as a quintessentially French opera and as an expression of the search for an authentic form of musical nationalism in the wake of France’s defeat by Prussia in 1871. Roger Nichols, for instance, refers to it as as “this most French of French masterpieces”, and Debussy himself signed himself proudly as a “musicien français” (and was described as such on his tombstone). Yet this reading of the opera overlooks the strikingly cosmopolitan range of musical influences that Debussy drew upon when writing the score, just as it fails to account for the libretto’s interest in alterity and articulation of an ethics of hospitality towards the other. This paper will first map the opera’s various foreign sources, arguing that they represent Debussy’s attempt to fashion a contemporary French musical vernacular that drew explicitly on foreign influences. Beginning with Maurice Maeterlinck’s original play, which offered a stylised view of the Northern European gothic as popularised by the English Pre-Raphaelites, these include the music dramas of Richard Wagner, echoes of the emerging school of Italian verismo, and even the dramatically declamatory style of Modest Musorgsky. Debussy’s opera thus emerges as a product of a deliberate act of translation, reflecting the lively debate between adherents of nationalism on the one hand, and cosmopolitanism on the other, that was then raging in literary circles in France. But there is more at stake here than merely the kind of routine assimilation of foreign influence and fascination with exoticism that were such a characteristic feature of French culture during the Third Republic (as evinced, for instance, by the kind of cultural and colonial encounters that took place at the sequence of Universal Exhibitions that were hosted in Paris). Here, the discussion turns to the opera’s mysterious heroine. Who is Mélisande, where is she from, and how has she found herself in the kingdom of Allemonde? There have been many attempts to answer such questions, with critics and commentators seeing her variously as a femme fatale, a naïve child, or even a survivor of abuse. This paper will propose that she represents a refugee and that her arrival in Allemonde tests the limits of the characters’ openness to the figure of the other. Strikingly, much of the social element of Maeterlinck’s original drama was omitted in Debussy’s libretto, lending the opera a timeless, abstracted air, yet traces of ethical debate remain. To test this hypothesis, the opera will be framed by a discussion of ideas dating from both a century before and a century after its composition: Immanuel Kant’s Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch (1795) and Jacques Derrida’s On Cosmopolitanism (1997).