Antipodean Transformations
Adaptations and Translations of Barrington’s Voyage
On Thursday 31 July 2008 at 5.45pm Nathan Garvey will present, in the McArthur Gallery off the Redmond Barry Reading Room at the State Library of Victoria, a paper on the books spuriously attributed to celebrity convict George Barrington (1755?–1804).
Barrington’s Voyage was probably the most widely read work on the early years of European settlement in Australia. First published as A Voyage to New South Wales (London, 1795), the text’s combination of plagiarised material and exciting fictional adventures revolving around its supposed author was tremendously popular, and was quickly appropriated and reprinted by numerous publishers of chapbook-style works. But the publishing history of Barrington’s Voyage was to take more unusual directions. An elaborate expanded edition was published in London in 1802–3, by which time it had been gentrified through scholarly translations into French and Russian. From 1806, an adapted version of the text was included in a canonical French collection of voyage narratives for young readers, which was to provide a model for subsequent translations. Throughout its convoluted publishing history, the Voyage was particularly open to transformations, since various publishers adapted the work—and the text itself—to suit different markets and readerships. The narrative that had originally been, in some senses, a “translation” of the material of a semi-official travel narrative for a popular readership, was modified over time to reflect its changing audiences.
This paper will explore how and why Barrington’s Voyage was transformed over the course of its publishing history.
Nathan Garvey is the C. H. Currey Memorial Fellow at the State Library of New South Wales for 2008. He recently completed his PhD, on the publication of the George Barrington books, in the English Department at the University of Sydney. His book, A Deceptious Mask: A Publishing History of the George Barrington Books, is due for publication later this year.
This is a Bibliographical Circle Event.