Radical Translations: The Transfer of Revolutionary Culture between Britain, France and Italy (1789-1815)

Radical Translations: The Transfer of Revolutionary Culture between Britain, France and Italy (1789-1815) (2019-2023) is a research project led by Prof. Sanja Perovic (PI) with Rosa Mucignat (co-I) and Erica J. Mannucci (international co-I) and hosted by the Department of Languages, Literatures and Cultures at King's College London, in collaboration with King's Digital Lab. For more information, visit https://radicaltranslations.org.Radical Translations looks to the French Revolution to recover the vitality of Europe’s shared radical past. In the convulsive political climate of revolution, translation was not simply a new container for an esteemed original. It was also a type of direct action in which translators acted as key cultural mediators seeking to ‘spread democracy’ into new cultures and different language communities – a contested practice then as now. The project focuses on translations to and from Italian, English and French, and has identified over 900 translations with a radicalising purpose that have never been systematically studied. Our bibliography of translations (dataset 1)includes separate records for paratexts, which are extensively annotated. The project also illuminates the lives of circa 500 translators (dataset 2), ranging from revolutionaries who were well-known translators to lesser known radicals to anonymous to pseudonymous translators whose lives are barely known at all. Some are professional translators; others translated only on occasion. What unites them all is the way they use translation to extend radical ideas of liberty and equality into new contexts. In putting translation at the centre of revolutionary lives, we also seek to recover translation as a political and social event. How did these translators use translation to respond to a changing political landscape, marked by new opportunities and new modes of repression? A key element of the project, therefore, has been the construction of chronologies in three linguistic contexts that foreground events at the intersection of translation activity, political radicalism and publishing history (dataset 3). The fascinating, itinerant lives of many of our translators are recorded in the places they traversed (dataset 4). The "Lives in Translation" blogpost series, published on the project website, presents thumbnail sketches written by students and the project team zooming in on interesting texts and translators (dataset 5).This project has received funding from the Arts & Humanities Research Council (AHRC) (project reference AH/S007008/1 see: https://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=AH/S007008/1)Selected publications:Ciula, Arianna, Vieira Miguel et als. “Small Data and Process in Data Visualization: The Radical Translations Case Study”, Proceedings - 2021 IEEE 6th Workshop on Visualization for the Digital Humanities, VIS4DH 2021Conference. DOI: 10.1109/VIS4DH53644.2021.00005Deseure, Brecht and Sanja Perovic, “Radical Retranslations of the Revolutionary Era: Britain, France, Italy (1789-1815)”, Essays in French Literature and Culture 59 (2022): 21-42.Deseure, Brecht, “The Bastille as a Transnational Symbol of Despotism: Translations and Editions of Remarques Historiques et Anecdotes Sur Le Château de La Bastille (1774–98)”, European Review of History: Revue Européenne d’histoire 6 (2023): 929–57. doi:10.1080/13507486.2023.2169108.Mannucci, Erica J., Rosa Mucignat and Sanja Perovic (eds), “Entangled Histories of Revolution in Europe: Translation and Transnationalism”, Introduction to Special issue of History of European Ideas 51 (6). https://doi.org/10.1080/01916599.2024.2444831Mannucci, Erica J. and Rosa Mucignat, “The Many Lives of Fenelon: Transformations of a Revolutionary Play in France and Italy”, in Metamorphoses: Tracing the Translator in the Long Eighteenth Century (1660-1830), ed. by Brecht de Groote et al., pp. 141-164 (Brepols, 2025).Mannucci, Erica J., “Déplacer et replacer la poésie révolutionnaire entre la France et l’Italie: Le cas de Giovanni Fantoni”, in Un engagement en vers et contre tous. Servirles révolutions, rejouer leurs mémoires (1789–1848), ed. by Claire Siviter and Jérémy Decot, pp. 97–11 (Presses Universitaires Blaise Pascal, 2021).Mannucci, Erica J., “Researching Revolutionary Translation. An Interdisciplinary Perspective”. CONTEMPORANEA, 27(2024): 639-644.Mucignat, Rosa and Sanja Perovic, ‘ “Serving Other Oppressed Peoples”: The Radical Translations Project and the Extension of Liberty (1789-1815)’, Digital Enlightenment Studies 1 (2023). DOI: https://doi.org/10.61147/des.9Mucignat, Rosa and Sanja Perovic, “Modelling the Radical: Insights from a Database of Revolutionary-Era Translations”, in Early Modern Translation and the Digital Humanities, ed. by Hilary Brown et al., (Metzler, 2025). https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-70483-7_8Mucignat, Rosa, “Libertà ed eguaglianza: La traduzione nell’Italia del triennio democratico (1796-1799)”, ri.tra | Rivista Di Traduzione: Teorie Pratiche Storie 3 (2025): 218–240. https://doi.org/10.13135/2975-0873/12909Mucignat, Rosa, “Revolutionary Shocks in Translation: Political and Linguistic Change in the Discourse of Radical Translators (1789-1815)”, Litteraria Pragensia 69 (2025) https://litterariapragensia.ff.cuni.cz/magazin/2025-35-69/Mucignat, Rosa, Sanja Perovic, Jacob McGuinn and Cristina Viti, An Anarchist Playbook: Fragments from the Conspiracy of Equals (Tenement Press, 2024).Perovic, Sanja, “Translation and Transnational Narratives of Revolution: Constructing a Critical History in the Present”, Encounters in Translation 1 (2024). URL : https://publications-prairial.fr/encounters-in-translation/index.php?id=188Perovic, Sanja, “Translating the French Revolution: People, Commitments, Texts, Method”, in The Greek Revolution of 1821: European Contexts, Scottish Connections, ed. by Roderick Beaton et al., pp. 64-85 (Edinburgh University Press, 2024).Perovic, Sanja, “Translating Revolutionary Language”, in Transnational French Studies, ed. by Charles Forsdick et al. (Liverpool University Press 2023). https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv33b9qffNiccolò Valmori, “Revolutionary translators and the political uses of translation in Milan during the revolutionary Triennio, 1796-1799”, Mélanges de l’École française de Rome – 136 (2024). https://doi.org/10.4000/13om7