The Oxford Guide to Literature in English Translation (review)

Peter France, ed., The Oxford Guide to Literature in English Translation. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000, xxii + 656 pages.

The Guide is more English than England. Seventeen of its 113 contributors live in the United States, eleven in Scotland, five in Canada, three in Wales, two in Ireland, two in India, two in Hong Kong, and one each in Brazil, France, Iceland, Japan, Korea, Portugal, South Africa, Spain, and Turkey. The high proportion of scholars from England does not guarantee English favoritism. The labors of London, Oxford, and Cambridge are duly commended but Anthony Pym concludes that "American translators have tended to be the more dynamic and innovative." Several Loeb, Everyman, and Penguin translations suffer rebuke.

The Guide tells of English translation's martyrs and heroes. James Long's translation of Dinabandhu Mitra's anti-colonial Bengali play Nil-darpana (1860) landed him in jail. André Brink's novel Kennis van die Aand (1973) was banned in South Africa; Brink promptly translated it into English (Looking on Darkness, 1974). Heinemann's African translation series is congratulated because it might "do much to allow one half of Africa to read the other."

Many contributors are translators. They write with experience, provide insider insights, bow, mince, and praise. The translations of William Arrowsmith, Michael Hamburger, Philemon Holland ("the Translator General in his Age"), Richard Howard, Gregory Rabassa, Burton Raffel, Dorothy Sayers, John Addington Symonds, Arthur Symons, and Charles Tomlinson are acclaimed. Heroic conquests are recalled: Katherine Philips' Corneille, George Webbe Dasent's Norse sagas, Katherine Prescott Wormeley's translation of every novel and tale in Balzac's La comédie humaine, Charles Leland's twenty volumes of Heine, and John Bowring's pioneering translations of Czech, Dutch, Hungarian, Polish, Spanish, and Russian poetry. The translations of John Dryden, Alexander Pope, Edward FitzGerald, Constance Garnett, and Scott Moncrieff are marvels still. Two of the contributors to the Polish section recommend themselves.

Part I of the Guide arrays seventeen essays on the theory and history of translation. The essayists are stellar, the essays concise and concrete. The six essays of the theory section introduce the peculiar problems that deprive translators of sleep. The five essays of the history section skim shifts of taste, skill, productivity, and enmity. The final five essays are topical: poetry, theater and opera, sacred texts, children's literature, and oral literature. Part I takes 120 pages.

Part II takes 500. Part II surveys world literature translated into English. Names and titles come thick and fast. Space is at premium and each contributor to the Guide fills it differently. Many love their subject, some moan the state of things. Some quote often, some omit quotations. They discuss translation theory, the spirit of language, degrees of difficulty, and the merits of rhyme. Lovers of lists will love the Guide.

Everywhere the Guide looks there is inequality. Accounts of translations of Caribbean, Czech, Georgian, Korean, Romanian, Serbo-Croat, and Ukrainian literature take less than three pages each, less space than Homer alone, or Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Virgil, Dante, Cervantes, or Goethe. Great translators race to the heights, they translate the best they can find. The first English translators of Russian and Japanese began with poetry.

English translation has a glorious history, yet it tags along behind translations into French, German, Russian, Spanish, Latin, and Arabic. The first English Plato was translated from Latin. The first English Cicero and first English Koran were translated from French. Sir Thomas North's Panchatantra translates an Italian translation of a Latin translation of an Arabic translation of the Sanskrit text.

The last five hundred years of English translation kept pace with English literature, dodging censors, finding publishers, appealing for cash. In the nineteenth century matters improved. Max Müller's Sacred Books of the East opened new worlds for English readers. Professional translators multiplied. Trade publishers launched translations of world classics in competing series: Bohn's Standard Library, Collier's Harvard Classics, Dent's Temple Classics, Dutton's Everyman...