The question of how translation can do justice is not about seeking equivalence but of acknowledging that translation is, following Spivak, insufficient but necessary nonetheless. I suggest that in asking what kind of justice translation might do, the term translation is carried across (trans-latio) from its technical or formal to its ethical-political dimensions, and the term justice is shifted from the terrain of the quest for parity or alikeness (eye for an eye) to the terrain of repair, dignity, care, responsibility, a justice on terms that are yet to be ascertained. This makes translation into a critical concept in theatre and performance, where, perhaps more than in any other art form, there is a systemic concern with how humans relate to each other and to non-human others.

The style of George Meredith represents an opposite extreme from Trollope: dense with epigram and ornament, it is frequently denigrated as extravagant and obscure, violating the realist conventions that Trollope worked hard to establish. However, Chapter 6 demonstrates how Meredith drew on the virtues of Asiatic and baroque styles to create a new form of psychological realism characterized by “fervidness,” the intensity that arises when contradictory principles are held in tension. On the one hand, Meredith gravitated to short forms like epigram to distill complex thoughts into memorable phrases; on the other, he delighted in the flights of fancy permitted by prosaic expansiveness. Through a consideration of major and minor work, this chapter reveals how fervidness is embodied structurally as a drama between conditions of freedom and constraint that impinge upon the development of central characters. In this way, Meredith’s “fervidness” formally replicates a dynamic that plays out thematically, making his style much more referential in terms of its relation to content than that of either Thackeray or Trollope before him.