Stevenson believed that Indigenous Tahitians were near extinction, and so he translated their story into a comparable English-language form that was, he believed, likewise being irreversibly changed by the forces of colonialism: the Scottish genre of the ballad. What occurs in Stevenson’s ballad translation, therefore, is not only a kind of literary salvage anthropology, but also an attempt to share in mourning.
While bardic literature in the late eighteenth century empire evoked amnesia, dissociation, and forgetfulness, this late nineteenth century ballad is a kind of haunting—a refusal to allow forgetting—as it is written in a dead genre, and features a people and a culture who are, in Stevenson’s eyes, as good as dead.
This paper—one of two published extracts of my dissertation chapter on Robert Louis Stevenson—explores the ways in which Stevenson translated the ballad as an attempt to reckon with the impact of the British empire.
While his approach to this Indigenous legend and to Indigenous Polynesian people more broadly does not conform with our contemporary understanding of Indigenous cultural resilience, his translation in this ballad nonetheless ran counter to late Victorian conceptions of Indigenous Polynesians.
In this paper, I show that the critical assumptions that are made about late Victorian representations of Indigenous people ought to account for the ways in which translation reveals counter-currents: affinity rather than displacement; empathy rather than narcissism.
Image: Robert Louis Stevenson (right) and his stepson Lloyd Osborne (left) in Tahiti in 1888. Both men wear patterned sarongs. Photo held at the Writer's Museum, Edinburgh. View other photographs in this collection.
