ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the literary functions of translations produced and distributed in France in the period from 1800 to 1850. In the French literary system of the first half of the nineteenth century, one can expect translation to play a role in the so-called struggle for Romanticism. The translation of foreign works bears all the ambiguously innovatory features of original Romantic works. The works translated into prose functioned in an intermediary zone set apart from the stage and from drama itself. As a consequence of their a-systemic position, then, translations often played a primary role in the development of a new dramatic art. The change from verse to prose was inevitably accompanied by a series of innovations such as 'local colour', the use of idiomatic speech and variations in linguistic register and the preservation of features belonging to foreign genres and traditions. In general, the principles that determine the translation of drama also apply to poetic texts.
