Mary E. Wilkins Freeman’s Regional Stories in France and Switzerland: Translators, Periodical Translation, and the Transnational Literary Marketplace

This essay compares the French translations of American regionalist Mary E. Wilkins Freeman’s short fiction, which appeared in France and Switzerland in the 1890s in a selection of their literary periodicals. It examines different approaches of translation and adaptation despite the common target language. In France, novelist and critic Thérèse Bentzon translated and introduced Freeman in the Revue des Deux Mondes. In Switzerland, translators and writers Lydie Charlier, Édouard Tavan, and Auguste Glardon mediated Freeman’s regionalism in Semaine Littéraire, Bibliothèque Universelle et Revue Suisse, and in a book collection. These translations of Freeman testify to the malleability of the regional story and how transnational circulation and adaptation is as intrinsic to the genre as supposedly its distinctively local character. Examining translators’ strategies to localise foreign literature draws critical attention to more nuanced, multiple, and at times collaborative understandings of authorship.