Prismatic Scenes: The Red-Room

This prismatic animation, created by Paola Gaudio, presents a passage from the iconic episode in Chapter 2 of Jane Eyre, in which the young Jane, having stood up to John Reed’s bullying, is locked in the ‘red-room’ as a punishment. Brontë’s English is shown together with Danish translations by Aslaug Mikkelsen (1957), Christina Rohde (2015) and Luise Hemmer Pihl (2016), selected and back-translated by Ida Klitgård; French translations by Marion Gilbert & Madeleine Duvivier (1919), R. Redon & J. Dulong (1946), Léon Brodovikoff & Claire Robert (1946), Charlotte Maurat (1964), Sylvère Monod (1966) and Dominique Jean (2008), selected and back-translated by Céline Sabiron (with a few additions by Matthew Reynolds); and Russian translations by Irinarkh Vvedenskii (1849), Anon (1849), Anon (1901), Vera Stanevich (1950) and Irina Gurova (1999), selected and back-translated by Eugenia Kelbert.

Full details of the translations quoted are in the PDF attached to this record. 

In the animation, the English text appears in blocks, so you have time to read it. Click on the revolving globe in the bottom right-hand corner to start the translations appearing. You will see that colour is used in two ways: the colour of the text is keyed to the language of the translation, while the colour of the frame around each translation shows you which English words it corresponds to. When all the translations have appeared around a given block of text, click on the revolving globe again to move forward, and click once more to launch the next set of translations. You can also navigate using the numbers in the left-hand margin or the triangles in the bottom left-hand corner.

For discussion, see Matthew Reynolds et al., Prismatic Jane Eyre: Close-Reading a World Novel Across Languages (Cambridge: Open Book, 2023). https://doi.org/10.11647/OBP.0319