The spectre of translatio in Restoration French Romanticism: Charles Nodier's Smarra, ou les démons de la nuit as pseudotranslation

Abstract In recent years, critics have noted the significance of developments in translation practice and theory to the formulation of the Romantic movement in Europe and the decline in eighteenth‐century Neoclassicism. The emergence of translation as national‐cultural exchange and the decline in translatio as classically oriented historical remediation signaled the national‐cultural turn of literary cultures in the nineteenth century. This article approaches the nuances of this shift through its reading of Charles Nodier's pseudotranslation Smarra, ou les démons de la nuit (1821), which has long‐provoked critical apprehension due to its thematic and structural dichotomization of both Neoclassical and Romantic writing practices. In so doing, it reads Smarra 's textual dissonances as a commentary on translation's form, purpose, and function within the literary context of Restoration France Ditto; specifically, as a staging of the identitarian debates in 1820s France around Neoclassicism and Romanticism, which measured their differences through the reception and translation of foreign literatures. Ultimately, this article argues that through Smarra , Nodier aims to relocate the textual practices underpinning the philosophy of translatio to a nineteenth‐century France increasingly defined by the nationalizing bent of its literary culture.