Prismatic Words: 'Ugly and brutto/a'

The anonymous translator of the first Italian Jane Eyre, published in 1904, had Lesbazeilles-Souvestre’s French version open in front of them, and almost every time Lezbazeilles-Souvestre wrote ‘laid(e)’, they put the nearest Italian equivalent, ‘brutto/a’. However, they also used ‘brutto/a’, and its derivative noun ‘bruttezza’, on several other occasions, as shown in this prismatic animation (researched by Matthew Reynolds).

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

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