Radical translation at the ‘Break of Day’: Thomas Paine in a Celtic language

Löffler, Marion ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9076-5618 2025. Radical translation at the ‘Break of Day’: Thomas Paine in a Celtic language. History of European Ideas 10.1080/01916599.2024.2445414

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Abstract

This article presents the first detailed analysis of the ways in which border-crossing author and balladeer John Jones (pseudonym ‘Jac Glan-y-Gors’) remodelled a range of Thomas Paine’s writings into Welsh republican pamphlets by translating key passages, interpolating culturally relevant indigenous material, and consolidating Paine’s anti-monarchical core vocabulary. In doing so, the article provides a blueprint for examining the operation of intellectual networks who transferred ideas and cultural artefacts to smaller or non-hegemonic cultures and the process of embedding them. Jones’s work is analysed against the history of an early modern Welsh ‘translation culture’ that enabled a substantial expansion of radical translation activity, in tandem with the democratisation of the English press in the wake of the French Revolution of 1789, transferring Enlightenment and revolutionary artefacts, formats and ideas to Wales and the Welsh language. Using publishing networks that linked metropolitan London to rural Wales, an indigenous Welsh intelligentsia combined English models with indigenous cultural forms to produce a radical print culture in their own language. Jones’s republican pamphlets, the only substantial reception of Paine’s writings in Welsh, are read in the context of these processes.

Item Type:	Article
Date Type:	Published Online
Status:	In Press
Schools:	History, Archaeology and Religion
Publisher:	Taylor and Francis Group
ISSN:	0191-6599
Date of First Compliant Deposit:	18 January 2024
Date of Acceptance:	18 December 2024
Last Modified:	13 Jan 2025 12:30
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/165457

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