A Woman’s Voice: Translating Rose de Freycinet’s Journal

Rose de Freycinet’s Journal covered a three-year circumnavigation around the World from 1817 to 1820, including a shipwreck. 

Is it more enriching for the Anglophone reader to hear the woman traveller’s own voice, albeit in translation, than to take cognizance of Rose’s adventures in a third-person narrative, as told by several scholars?

Professor Rivière is a recipient of an RGSSA Library Research Fellowship.

Image from Rose de Freycinet - Wikipedia

Relatively few European women travelled to distant places in the 18th century, accompanied or alone, and recorded their adventures, an exception being Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. By contrast, in the 19th century, several telling narratives in English were published by women travellers. Among the early ones scripted by French women was Rose de Freycinet’s Journal on a three-year circumnavigation that included a shipwreck. It continues to attract a great deal of attention nowadays, as shown by Suzanne Falkiner’s well-researched and highly-readable biography, Rose (ABC Books, 2022). During the eventful voyage of the Uranie (1817-1820), the first French scientific expedition since Nicolas Baudin’s voyage (1800-1804), Rose de Freycinet (1794-1832) wrote numerous letters to her cousin, Caroline de Nanteuil, née Barillon, to escape from the loneliness of being the only woman aboard and as an outlet for both her exhilaration and her pent-up frustration. Those letters remained in family archives until 1927, when they were published as the Journal de Madame Rose de Saulces de Freycinet by Charles Duplomb. In 1995, Marc Serge Rivière undertook a translation of Rose’s Journal into English, subsequently published by the National Library of Australia as A Woman of Courage. The Journal of Rose de Freycinet on Her Voyage around the World 1817-1820 (Canberra, First edition: 1996; Second edition: 2003). In this lecture, Serge Rivière will focus on the challenges which he faced during a two-year period of research and translating. As a translator, he endeavoured to recapture the Parisienne’s formal and informal voice and convey Rose’s highly personal, ‘gossipy’ and tendentious account of events and more attentive view of the ‘Other’. Her narrative has much greater appeal than the rather formal, dispassionate and scientific analysis of her erudite, aristocratic and largely humourless husband. Louis Claude de Freycinet. However, the question needs to be asked: Is it more enriching for the Anglophone reader to hear the woman traveller’s own voice, albeit in translation, than to take cognizance of Rose’s adventures in a third-person narrative, as told by several scholars? By analysing samples of Rose’s personal observations on Mauritius and Shark Bay, in the original and in Rivière’s translation, we can reflect on the complexity of balancing, in any translation, the structure of an intimate work with “the way in which various levels interact” (Marnie Bassett, Realms and Islands, 1962, p.89). Other aspects of the process of translation referred to will include: the need to be faithful to the original as against the readability of a text produced, striving for accuracy as well as independence of style, archaization and modernization of language. Seen in the context of other women travellers’ narratives in the 19th century, which the ongoing research explores, Rose’s account, when read alongside her husband’s, clearly highlights ‘the difference of value’, in Virginia Woolf’s words (A Room of one’s own, 1929). A limited knowledge of French will suffice to follow the main drift of this Lecture.