An Experiment in the Study of Translations: Prismatic Jane Eyre

Like many other books, Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre does not exist only in English. It has been translated hundreds of times, by hundreds of translators, into more than fifty languages. Each time, things change: there is loss, no doubt, but also gain and transformation. New languages create new forms of expression; translators see the novel in different lights; latent imaginative and political energies can emerge in each fresh context; the book can strike its varied millions of readers in a myriad of ways.

How can we understand this dizzying textual and linguistic proliferation? What can we learn from studying it? How can we even grasp it, so that it can begin to be understood?

This is what the Prismatic Jane Eyre research project sets out to discover.