Hunter Recognized with Prestigious Translation Award for Book on French Philosopher Louise Dupin
Dr. Angela Hunter, professor of English at UA Little Rock, is on cloud nine after learning that her years of hard work translating the unpublished work of 18th-century French philosopher Louise Dupin have been recognized as one of the most outstanding works of French-to-English translation.
Hunter and her co-author, Dr. Rebecca Wilkin of Pacific Lutheran University, were selected for the 37th Annual French-American Foundation Translation Prize in Nonfiction for their co-translation of “Louise Dupin’s Work on Women: Selections.” They received their award, which comes with a $10,000 prize, at The Strand Bookstore in New York City June 18.
“I am so thrilled and shocked to have received this award,” Hunter said. “When we found out that we were one of the finalists, we didn’t have too much hope that we would win the big award because there are some exciting and interesting texts in the finals. It was a great and welcome surprise to find out that we won.”
The French-American Foundation Translation Prize, funded by the Florence Gould Foundation, honors the best of French-to-English translation. In keeping with the foundation’s mission to strengthen ties between the United States and France, the prize has established itself as a valuable element of intellectual and cultural exchange between both countries, promoting French literature in the U.S. and providing greater visibility to translators and their craft.
The French-American Foundation noted that the 2023-24 cycle was one of their most competitive to date. The foundation’s jury of literary professionals spent five months reviewing submissions, which were judged on a wide range of criteria, including accuracy in conveying the sense of the original work, awareness of stylistic, linguistic, and cultural nuance, and the level of difficulty of the translation itself. Hunter and Wilkin were selected from more than 80 submissions.
Their goal is to bring Dupin’s most important intellectual contributions to a wider audience at a time when interest in early female philosophers is on the rise.
“Most of her correspondence was destroyed after her death, so we may never know what persuaded her not to complete and publish her work,” Hunter said. “The image of her has been portrayed as a beautiful, gracious woman, a friend to many philosophers and artists, and a great conversationalist. It’s very important to me that she is recognized as a thinker in her own right and not just as a featured friend and employer of Jean-Jaques Rousseau, who used his time in her employ to expand his own knowledge base and even borrowed ideas from Dupin.”
Hunter and Wilkin haven’t finished their translations of Dupin’s manuscripts and are hoping to release further translations as part of a digital archive project or a special edition of a journal. Meanwhile, Hunter’s research on Dupin has inspired her in a new way.
“I’ve been researching Louise Dupin for more than a dozen years, and now I’ve shifted gears,” Hunter said. “I’m working on a creative historical fiction project set in an 18th-century salon in Paris. Louise Dupin’s salon is the centerpiece of this historical fiction project.”
Hunter has found Dupin to be an interesting historical figure who has only been recognized in recent years for her contributions to philosophy and feminism. Dupin is primarily known for holding an important literary salon in Paris that encouraged many of the academic elites of the time and for her friendship with philosopher Jean-Jaques Rousseau, who served as a secretary in her household from 1745 to 1751.
Hunter and Wilkin received a $133,333 Scholarly Translations and Editions grant from the National Endowment for Humanities in 2020 to publish this edition of Dupin’s unpublished treatise. Oxford University Press published the book in July 2023. It is described as the French Enlightenment’s most in-depth feminist analysis of inequality and its most neglected one.
“For much of the time since her death, she was recognized more as a salon holder, a beautiful woman who was well known and had a lot of connections among enlightened intellectuals,” Hunter said. “She wrote this large work of feminist philosophy, but she did not end up fully completing it, nor did she publish it in her lifetime.”
Since Rousseau became a well-known philosopher, Dupin’s manuscript was sold widely and held in many different collections. Prior to the publication of this translated book (and a French edition that was published in 2022), researchers would have had to look through more than 10 archives in three different countries to read Dupin’s work.
“Since Rousseau was her secretary for this project, his handwriting is on many of the manuscript pages,” Hunter said. “The pages were sold at auction in the 1950s and dispersed all over. Her work is a really strong, powerful feminist critique of science, history, inheritance, law, and sexism. She made a strong argument for total equality between men and women. The fact that she is finally coming to light as a philosopher in her own right is very exciting.”
