The project is called Prismatic Jane Eyre and is the brain child of University of Oxford professor Matthew Reynolds.
In collaboration with an international team of more than two dozen scholars they dove deep into the publishing history of Charlotte Brontë’s classic 1847 novel, Jane Eyre.
Why Jane Eyre?
Says Reynolds:
The more I thought about and re-read Jane Eyre, the more it came to seem the perfect book for the kind of exploration I wanted to make. It was full of contradictions that were likely to play out differently in different places, times and tongues. It was a powerfully feminist book, yet also a romance. It attacks slavery and the class system, and yet is permeated by racist and classist assumptions. It sets ‘Reason’ against ‘Passion’, independence against love.
1955 Tomoji Abe
594 different translations into fifty-seven languages were digested, including a colloquial Russian translation from 1849 and the only known Arabic translation by a female in 2014.
There are cool interactive maps and timelines that document the translations by country and date and an option that displays each cover by country with accompanying bibliographic information.
h/t Poets & Writers
