Performing Scientific Knowledge Transfer: Anne Plumptre and the Translation of Martin Heinrich Lichtenstein’s Reisen im südlichen Afrika (1811)’

摘要

In 1812, the account by the German zoologist Martin Heinrich Lichtenstein (1780- 1857) of his South African travels, the Reisen im südlichen Afrika in den Jahren 1803, 1804, 1805 und 1806 (1811-12), appeared in English with the London publisher Henry Colburn. The Travels in Southern Africa, in the Years 1803, 1804, 1805 and 1806, translated by Anne Plumptre (1760-1818), quickly drew the attention of British critics. One of the most comprehensive accounts to emerge on the interior of Africa, Lichtenstein's travelogue drew amply on official reports, private journals and scientific papers to offer a narrative of the Cape Colony that cast itself as emphatically different than those of previous travellers, notably the British statesman Sir John Barrow's Account of Travels into the Interior of South Africa (1801-04). Yet the journalist writing in the Monthly Review, Joseph Lowe, was wary of heaping praise on the English translation of Lichtenstein's narrative: "We cannot help feeling both surprize [sic] and regret that Miss Plumptre did not take on herself the task of reducing and adapting his diffuse composition to the taste of the English public," Lowe complained (351). 1 Indeed, he noted of Plumptre, she "has occasionally subjoined an [sic] useful annotation: but this serves little other purpose than to tantalize the reader with a view of the improvement which the book might have received at her hands" (351). Were she to take on another translation for Lichtenstein, Lowe concluded, "we hope that her modesty will not prevent her from lopping off his manifold exuberances" (352).