Project MUSE®: Translation and Literature - Latest Articles
https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/344
Project MUSE®: Latest articles in Translation and Literature.daily12026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00text/htmlen-USVol. 15 (2006) through Vol. 17 (2008)Latest Articles: Translation and LiteratureTWOProject MUSE®Translation and Literature1750-02140968-1361Latest articles in Translation and Literature. Feed provided by Project MUSE®Second Finding: A Poetics of Translation (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/251005
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Dryden famously distinguishes three modes of translation: ‘metaphrase, or turning an author word by word, and line by line’, ‘paraphrase, or translation with latitude, where the author is kept in view by the translator . . . but his words are not so strictly followed as his sense’, and ‘imitation, where the translator . . . assumes the liberty, not only to vary from the words and sense, but . . . taking only some general hints from the original, to run division on the groundwork, as he pleases’. The trajectory of poetic translation in the West has seen examples, variants, and hybrids of all three of these methodologies over the centuries, with the presumption that imitation remains a category apart from
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/344/image/coversmallSecond Finding: A Poetics of Translation (review)2008-10-10text/htmlen-USSecond Finding: A Poetics of Translation (review)2008-10-102008TWOProject MUSE®164052026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002008-10-10Translation as Offence: The Case of Desfontaines
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/251006
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Translation between the vernaculars, it could well be argued, emerged fully during the eighteenth century. National languages had all but replaced Latin as the medium of print communication, and readers became dependent on translators for access to the vast number of publications in modern European languages, as well as to a widening array of other living languages from around the globe. France was a crucial hub for European translation in this era, well situated geographically to mediate works from other European countries, and a cultural centre of translation because of the predominance of the French language. Writings of all kinds were translated into French, and thence into other vernaculars, a
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/344/image/coversmallTranslation as Offence: The Case of Desfontaines2008-10-10text/htmlen-USTranslation as Offence: The Case of Desfontaines2008-10-102008TWOProject MUSE®715972026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002008-10-10Das Nibelungenlied: Song of the Nibelungs (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/251007
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Nobody should blame any author or translator for the sins of the copy-writers who supply the blurbs for books, but the declaration on the cover of this new verse translation of the Nibelungenlied invites comment, since the interested but casual reader might well be influenced by it. The translator, we are told, ‘brings to life in English for the first time the great German epic poem that inspired Richard Wagner’s opera tetralogy Der Ring des Nibelungen and J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings. His verse translation underscores the all-important formal aspects of the poem and preserves its haunting beauty.’ The factual errors can be dismissed: Wagner’s operas used in their final form the rather different
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/344/image/coversmallDas Nibelungenlied: Song of the Nibelungs (review)2008-10-10text/htmlen-USDas Nibelungenlied: Song of the Nibelungs (review)2008-10-102008TWOProject MUSE®219012026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002008-10-10The Cambridge Companion to Lucretius (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/251008
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Reception (the currently favoured word) is today everywhere to be found within Classics. We now like to say that the discipline involves not only the study of classical antiquity ‘in itself’ but also its place in the cultural imaginary of the West (and beyond) down to our own time. So it is significant that when Cambridge University Press started to include classical authors in its acclaimed and ever more extensive series of Companions, the Classics editor Pauline Hire decided that all the volumes on classical authors and themes would include a section on reception, and that only those authors would be chosen who had a certain standing in European culture as a whole. The first two (Virgil and Greek Tragedy)
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/344/image/coversmallThe Cambridge Companion to Lucretius (review)2008-10-10text/htmlen-USThe Cambridge Companion to Lucretius (review)2008-10-102008TWOProject MUSE®254702026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002008-10-10Snow Part / Schneepart, and: Partie de neige (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/251009
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Schneepart was the first publication from Paul Celan’s literary remains. It came out in 1971. But it wasn’t his first posthumous collection: Lichtzwang, the previous one, appeared not long after his death in April 1970, though every aspect of it apart from the final checking of proofs was attended to by Celan himself. Nearly the same is true of Schneepart – though he didn’t send it to his publishers, he completed a fair copy for Gisèle Celan-Lestrange, his wife, in September 1969, just before his only visit to Israel, and there is also a contemporary and near-identical typescript. This resembles the orderly care he dispensed on his other collections, and it had become his custom to prepare his volumes well
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/344/image/coversmallSnow Part / Schneepart, and: Partie de neige (review)2008-10-10text/htmlen-USSnow Part / Schneepart, and: Partie de neige (review)2008-10-102008TWOProject MUSE®185952026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002008-10-10Spartacus: Film and History, and: Troy: From Homer’s ‘Iliad’ to Hollywood Epic (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/251010
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The cinema was enamoured with the ancient world almost at birth. Since Giovanni Pastrone’s Cabiria (1914) that world has been the setting for many of the industry’s most ambitious productions. The legendary expensiveness of Joseph L. Manckiewicz’s Cleopatra (1963) indeed almost killed the genre, but computer-generated imagery has given it a new lease on life by making the spectacle easier to manage and manipulate. Ridley Scott’s Gladiator (2000) was an international success and rekindled the flame, and Zack Snyder’s 300 (2007; on the battle of Thermopylae) has confirmed that classical antiquity can still be box office magic. Such efforts often make a claim on historical authenticity as a selling point;
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/344/image/coversmallSpartacus: Film and History, and: Troy: From Homer’s ‘Iliad’ to Hollywood Epic (review)2008-10-10text/htmlen-USSpartacus: Film and History, and: Troy: From Homer’s ‘Iliad’ to Hollywood Epic (review)2008-10-102008TWOProject MUSE®200502026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002008-10-10The Virgilian Tradition: Book History and the History of Reading in Early Modern Europe, and: The Other Virgil: ‘Pessimistic’ Readings of the Aeneid in Early Modern Culture (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/251011
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Craig Kallendorf probably knows more than anyone else about the reception of the Aeneid in the Renaissance. With books on Virgil and Epideictic Rhetoric in the Early Italian Renaissance (1989) and on Virgil and the Myth of Venice (1999) he has established himself as someone who understands the detail of how Virgil was imitated, printed, annotated, allegorized, scribbled on, and parodied in the fifteenth to sixteenth centuries. The first volume reviewed here, The Virgilian Tradition, reprints fourteen of his essays from a variety of sources and over more than two decades (1983–2005). It provides an opportunity to reflect on how his thinking, and thinking about classical reception more widely, has changed over
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/344/image/coversmallThe Virgilian Tradition: Book History and the History of Reading in Early Modern Europe, and: The Other Virgil: ‘Pessimistic’ Readings of the Aeneid in Early Modern Culture (review)2008-10-10text/htmlen-USThe Virgilian Tradition: Book History and the History of Reading in Early Modern Europe, and: The Other Virgil: ‘Pessimistic’ Readings of the Aeneid in Early Modern Culture (review)2008-10-102008TWOProject MUSE®131602026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002008-10-10Proust, Blanchot and a Woman in Red, and: Proust’s English (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/251012
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Of the three texts making up Lydia Davis’ pamphlet, the first, ‘A Proust Alphabet’, is a kind of jotter recounting the struggles Davis encountered while translating Du côté de chez Swann for the new Penguin edition of Proust’s novel (In Search of Lost Time, 2002, which I reviewed in Translation and Literature Vol. 13 for 2004). The other two texts are an essay dissecting the narrative voice in Blanchot’s Celui qui ne m’accompagnait pas, and an evocative mixture of dream and waking experiences inspired by Michel Leiris’ Nuits sans nuit et quelques jours sans jour. They form No. 5 of the elegantly produced Cahiers series from the CWT/AUP – a series largely devoted to the space between text and translation
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/344/image/coversmallProust, Blanchot and a Woman in Red, and: Proust’s English (review)2008-10-10text/htmlen-USProust, Blanchot and a Woman in Red, and: Proust’s English (review)2008-10-102008TWOProject MUSE®132252026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002008-10-10A Companion to the Classical Tradition (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/251014
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The classical tradition is an enormous cake to bake and serve up. My metaphor points to two questions: the ingredients which went into the process and the resulting confection. Craig Kallendorf, as one might expect from his previous publications, proves to be a very competent baker, though not in the master chef category. The ingredients he has assembled include some of the finest – exactly the scholars one would choose to advise on and contribute to such a volume. It is his cutting of the cake which is disappointing, to me at least. I know from experience that editing a volume of this nature is one of the hardest projects one can undertake. One’s initial conception of such a book is often modified in the
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/344/image/coversmallA Companion to the Classical Tradition (review)2008-10-10text/htmlen-USA Companion to the Classical Tradition (review)2008-10-102008TWOProject MUSE®305662026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002008-10-10C. P. Cavafy: The Canon; The Original One Hundred and Fifty-Four Poems (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/251015
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Cavafy’s complete poems have been translated several times – by John Mavrogordato (1951); Rae Dalven (1961); Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard (1975, revised 1992); and Aliki Barnstone (2006) – there is a comprehensive list at
http://www.cavafy.com/companion/bibliography/select.asp
. Now this bilingual edition brings face to face with the Greek the body of translations by Stratis Haviaras first published by Hermes Publishing in Athens (2004). The appeal of Cavafy’s poems for an English readership is well attested, and its strange survival in English translation is well enough known. E. M. Forster praised Cavafy’s poetic use of personal experience, Rex Warner his ‘discovery of what amounts to a
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/344/image/coversmallC. P. Cavafy: The Canon; The Original One Hundred and Fifty-Four Poems (review)2008-10-10text/htmlen-USC. P. Cavafy: The Canon; The Original One Hundred and Fifty-Four Poems (review)2008-10-102008TWOProject MUSE®127752026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002008-10-10The Reception of Sir Walter Scott in Europe, and: The Reception of Jane Austen and Walter Scott: A Comparative Longitudinal Study (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/251017
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The first of these volumes, in the Athlone series on the reception of British authors in Europe, should prove a valuable resource for Scott scholars – and for students of European culture in the last two centuries. It covers his reception in French, Spanish, Catalan, German, Hungarian, Czech, Polish, Russian, Slovene, Danish, Norwegian, and Swedish. The last three are parcelled into a single chapter. Scott’s French reception, by contrast, gets two chapters, his Hungarian two, and his German three (covering respectively nineteenth-century Austria; ‘German Literary Histories, 1820–1945’; and Scott in East, West, and Reunified Germany, 1949–2005). Four synoptic chapters round off the volume. Tom Hubbard
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/344/image/coversmallThe Reception of Sir Walter Scott in Europe, and: The Reception of Jane Austen and Walter Scott: A Comparative Longitudinal Study (review)2008-10-10text/htmlen-USThe Reception of Sir Walter Scott in Europe, and: The Reception of Jane Austen and Walter Scott: A Comparative Longitudinal Study (review)2008-10-102008TWOProject MUSE®226472026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002008-10-10Translations, Refractions, Versions
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/251018
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Quite some time ago, as a student, I was introduced to the I Ching and the idea of casting coins to form a hexagram, the essential unit of divination. The mechanical process led into interpretation, in which the fixed pattern of lines was subject to change, realignment, and positions complementary to the opening meaning. For years I struggled to find a pattern in poetry which could be applied to the shifting perceptions of texts in their original languages, in which these shifts could be included as part of the translation. Very much like underpainting, I wanted the layers of work and reversals of thought included in the finished piece. This led to the idea of a ‘refraction’, a work presented in its original
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/344/image/coversmallTranslations, Refractions, Versions2008-10-10text/htmlen-USTranslations, Refractions, Versions2008-10-102008TWOProject MUSE®818852026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002008-10-10The Táin, translated from the Old Irish Epic Táin Bó Cúailnge (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/251019
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A writer venturing on a new literary translation of the Táin has to reckon with a powerful predecessor, rather as Seamus Heaney had to look over his shoulder at a gifted mocker, Flann O’Brien, in translating Buile Suibhne. Thomas Kinsella’s elegant ‘plainstyle’ version of The Táin for Oxford University Press in 1969 has been admired as the finest modern translation of an Old Irish classic, not only for its linguistic achievement but also for creating a coherent new narrative out of the textual components. There might have seemed more room for Carson to take on a different member of that series of strange semi-epics in the Irish tradition: those things that might be called, borrowing W. P. Ker’s term for
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/344/image/coversmallThe Táin, translated from the Old Irish Epic Táin Bó Cúailnge (review)2008-10-10text/htmlen-USThe Táin, translated from the Old Irish Epic Táin Bó Cúailnge (review)2008-10-102008TWOProject MUSE®113722026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002008-10-10Faustus: From the German of Goethe (review)
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/251020
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In late summer 1814 Coleridge began translating Faust for John Murray, but abandoned the project that October. A few years later, interest in Faust was reawakened by Moritz Retzsch’s drawings of scenes from the play. In June 1820 another publisher, Messrs Boosey and Sons, published a version of Retzsch’s drawings with a summary and partial translation of the text by ‘a German in humble circumstances’. In September 1820 they published a different version, also anonymous, and that version is presented here as the work of Coleridge. But is it?
The evidence for Coleridge’s authorship has been reviewed by Roger Paulin, William St Clair, and Elinor Shaffer (at
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/344/image/coversmallFaustus: From the German of Goethe (review)2008-10-10text/htmlen-USFaustus: From the German of Goethe (review)2008-10-102008TWOProject MUSE®108292026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002008-10-10The ‘Freynshe booke’ and the English Translator: Malory’s ‘Originality’ Revisited
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/251021
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Felicity Riddy remarks a familiar phenomenon in Malory’s Morte Darthur when she cites a passage at the end of Book 8:1
The narrator interrupts himself and moves out of the narrative altogether:
And so I leve here of this tale, and overlepe grete bookis of sir Launcelot, what grete adventures he ded when he was called le Shyvalere de Charyot. For, as the Freynshe booke sayth . . .
And he goes on, with grand irrelevance, to describe what the Freynshe book in fact does not say.2
But Malory’s questionable protestations about his use of his source usually go unnoted, reflecting the widespread recognition that translation in fifteenth-century England frequently employed such a
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/344/image/coversmallThe ‘Freynshe booke’ and the English Translator: Malory’s ‘Originality’ Revisited2008-10-10text/htmlen-USThe ‘Freynshe booke’ and the English Translator: Malory’s ‘Originality’ Revisited2008-10-102008TWOProject MUSE®728152026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002008-10-10Hesiod goes Augustan: An Early English Translation of the Theogony
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/251022
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Hesiod was the object of one of George Chapman’s English versions of the classics as early as 1618, but Chapman’s labours extended only as far as the Opera et Dies. The Theogony had to await its first English translator until the eighteenth century. An excerpt was undertaken by William Broome as ‘The Battle of the Gods and Titans’, published in 1727. William Cooke, also known as the translator of Bion and Moschus, then issued his comprehensive translation of Hesiod, Works and Days and Theogony, in 1728. Cooke’s is the first complete English rendering of the latter poem we know of, as well as the last to be published in the eighteenth century, going through a number of editions.1
But it is not as
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-16T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/344/image/coversmallHesiod goes Augustan: An Early English Translation of the Theogony2008-10-10text/htmlen-USHesiod goes Augustan: An Early English Translation of the Theogony2008-10-102008TWOProject MUSE®441302026-05-16T00:00:00-05:002008-10-10