Editor’s Introduction

The enlightenment and revolutionary period in late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was an internationalist one. The internationalist perspective in studies of the enlightenment and the revolutionary period presupposes mobility of texts and people: ideas and behaviour can be seen manifesting themselves in different contexts from those in which they originally appeared. The movement of ideas from one cultural, and, consequently, linguistic context to another inevitably involves translation. Most major texts of the revolutionary period found immediate reception in other cultures through translation.But there has been little direct focus either on the specificities of translated texts (modifications, paratextual elements, particular translational choices) or on the translators themselves, their motivations, the particular readership they were translating for and so on. This issue of La Questione Romantica aims to be a first step in a process of focusing attention on the movements of ideas in translated texts and on translators working in the revolutionary period. It pays attention not only to the texts themselves but also to contexts – to translators’ aims and strategies, on editorial policies and productive processes, on readerships. The articles make no claim to any general statement but rather hope to shed light on the movement of ideas and information from one culture to another in a number of specific cases.