Adapting, Translating, Illustrating: French Ballads of Reading Gaol in Word and Image

The aim of this chapter is to offer a reflection on the relationships and intersections between the realms of adaptation, illustration, and translation. My hypothesis is that translation may help us conceptualise the links between adaptation and illustration and that affinities may exist between the acts of linguistic and intermedial translation. Both are forms of transpositions or adaptations, performed through the superimpositions of filters and the weaving of rich intertextual/interpictorial networks, sparking dialogues between both cultures and media, and thus forming rhizomes. The chapter focuses on French transpositions—in both text and image—of The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898), the last text that Oscar Wilde published in his lifetime. The “transcription” of The Ballad of Reading Gaol by Henry D. Davray (first published by the Mercure de France publishing house in May 1898) is one of the best documented cases of collaboration between Wilde and one of his translators. The chapter reconstructs the cultural networks behind the translation and subsequent illustration of Wilde’s Ballad, offering a glimpse into the rich Franco-British cultural exchanges in the late-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It subsequently analyses Davray’s collaboration with Wilde on the translation of The Ballad and dwells on the discussions around the idea of turning Wilde’s Ballad into a prose poem in French, a form of domestication, or transcultural adaptation. It eventually compares and contrasts the two earliest French illustrated versions of Reading Gaol, both based on Davray’s prose translation and prefaced by Davray: a 1918 edition with woodcuts by Jean-Gabriel Daragnès and a 1927 edition containing coloured plates by Jean-Georges Cornélius. The cross-examination of those verbal and visual translations of The Ballad of Reading Gaol enables me to show how illustration can indeed be seen as a form of adaptation, a process of re-vision and (re-)interpretation.