Mélanges de poésie anglaise translated by Marie-Geneviève-Charlotte Thiroux d’Arconville

Marie-Geneviève-Charlotte Thiroux d’Arconville (1720–1805) was a prolific author in a wide range of genres, including literary, scientific, and didactic works, as well as translations. Her Mélanges de poésie anglaise (1764), her fifth translation from English to French, comprises prose versions of three works by three separate English poets of the Restoration period and early eighteenth century. Each of these poets was already known to French readers in previous translations. The three works were John Sheffield’s An Essay Upon Poetry (1682), Alexander Pope’s The Temple of Fame: A Vision (1715), and Matthew Prior’s “Henry and Emma, a Poem, Upon the Model of The Nut-brown Maid” (1709). Despite the belatedness of her translations of these works, not least the justly famous works of Pope in France, the collection is significant because, in an era when literary exchange seemed driven by novelties, Thiroux d’Arconville linked English poets to French Neoclassicism. Such a selection, focused on poetics and poetic form, helped solidify a poetic canon on both sides of the Channel.