Translation in Decadence: George Moore’s Confessions of a Young Man

Abstract

Although it is presented as a first-person narrative or memoir, George Moore’s Confessions of a Young Man (1888) blurs generic boundaries between fiction and autobiography and between criticism and creative practice. This essay explores the role of translation in Moore’s cultivation of an elusive and slippery narrative identity. Focusing upon his renderings of texts by Stéphane Mallarmé and J.-K. Huysmans, I propose that Moore’s translational practice is decadent in both its choice of subject matter and the particularities of its forms and context. I consider the central role played by translated excerpts within journalistic writings as a mode of textual transmission at the end of the nineteenth century. Within this broader context, Moore repurposed translated material from his nonfictional writings within his fiction to generate a playfully complex web of literary and aesthetic connections. His writings create paradox and irony within communities of interlinguistic allusion that characterize decadence more generally.