Radical translation at the ‘break of dawn’: Thomas Paine in a Celtic language

Loeffler, Marion ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-9076-5618 2024. Radical translation at the ‘break of dawn’: Thomas Paine in a Celtic language. History of European Ideas Item availability restricted.

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Abstract

This case study of the ways in which border-crossing author, balladeer and satirist John Jones (pseudonym ‘Jac Glan-y-Gors’), remodelled a range of Thomas Paine’s writings into two Welsh republican pamphlets by translating key passages, interpolating culturally relevant material, and consolidating Paine’s anti-monarchical core vocabulary into connected paragraphs, illustrates the operation of intellectual networks and the process of ideas transfer to and in a smaller culture. Jones’s work is analysed against the background of official translation from English to Welsh from Elizabethan times and an emerging tradition of private political translation in the eighteenth century which, in tandem with the democratisation of the English press, explosively expanded in the wake of the French Revolution of 1789, transferring Enlightenment and revolutionary artefacts, formats and ideas to Wales and the Welsh language. Using shared publishing networks, an indigenous Welsh intelligentsia used English models as well as indigenous cultural forms to produce a new Welsh radical literature and vocabulary. Jones’s work is 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:	5 December 2023
Last Modified:	18 Jan 2024 20:15
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/165457

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