‘J’ai en main un homme qui m’aiderait’: Voltaire and Henri Rieu

Breathe, Alice Georgette Hood (5 July 2023). ‘J’ai en main un homme qui m’aiderait’: Voltaire and Henri Rieu (Unpublished). In: 16e Congrès International d'Études du XVIIIe Siècle / Translators as cultural agents. Rome.

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Henri Rieu (1721–1787) was a core member of Voltaire’s entourage in Ferney throughout the 1760s and 70s. Rieu had previously lived and worked in Amsterdam, Batavia (Jakarta), and the West Indies, and could speak French, Dutch, English, Spanish, and German. We know that he acted in Voltaire’s amateur productions, put him in touch with publishers both locally and in Holland, and kept an extensive archive of his works. During Voltaire’s lifetime, Rieu also edited a multivolume anthology of French plays. In the last decade of his own life, he published, anonymously, a dozen translations from English, Dutch, and German. This paper seeks to assess Rieu’s potential impact on Voltaire’s work and reputation, but also to examine his own work as a translator from English of novels such as The Excursion by Frances Brooke and Cecilia by Fanny Burney, as well as travelogues such as A view of society and manners in France, Switzerland and Germany by John Moore and Sketches of the natural, civil and political state of Switzerland by William Coxe.

Item Type:	Conference or Workshop Item (Paper)
Division/Institute:	06 Faculty of Humanities > Department of Linguistics and Literary Studies > Institute of French Language and Literature 06 Faculty of Humanities > Department of Linguistics and Literary Studies > Institute of French Language and Literature > Literary Studies
UniBE Contributor:	Breathe, Alice Georgette Hood
Subjects:	800 Literature, rhetoric & criticism > 840 French & related literatures 400 Language > 440 French & related languages
Language:	English
Submitter:	Alice Georgette Hood Breathe
Date Deposited:	03 Apr 2024 14:36
Last Modified:	03 Apr 2024 14:36
URI:	https://boris.unibe.ch/id/eprint/194845