Synopses & Reviews
THE OXFORD HISTORY OF LITERARY TRANSLATION IN ENGLISH
General Editors: Peter France and Stuart Gillespie
This groundbreaking five-volume history runs from the Middle Ages to the year 2000. It is a critical history, treating translations wherever appropriate as literary works in their own right, and reveals the vital part played by translators and translation in shaping the literary culture of the English-speaking world, both for writers and readers. It thus offers new and often challenging perspectives on the history of literature in English. As well as examining the translations and their wider impact, it explores the processes by which they came into being and were disseminated, and provides extensive bibliographical and biographical reference material.
In the period covered by Volume 2 comes a drive, unprecedented in its energy and scope, to bring foreign writing of all kinds into English. The humanist scholar depicted in Antonello's St Jerome, the jacket illustration, is one of the figures at work, and one of the most self-conscious and prolonged encounters that took place was with the Bible, a uniquely fraught and intimidating original. But early modern English translation often finds its setting within far busier scenes of worldly life - on the London stage, as a bid for patronage, for purposes polemical, political, hortatory, instructional, and as a way of making a living in the expanding book trade.
Translation became, as never before, a part of the English writer's career, and sometimes a whole career in itself. Translation was also fundamental in the evolution of the still unfixed English language and its still unfixed literary styles. Some translations of this period have themselves become landmarks in English literature and have exercised a profound and enduring influence on perceptions of their originals in the anglophone world; others less well-known are treated more comprehensively here than in any previous history. The entire phenomenon is documented in an extensive bibliography of literary translations of the period, the most comprehensive ever compiled. The work of our early modern translators, with all its energy, is not always scholarly or even always convincing. But after this era is over English translation never again feels quite so urgent or contentious.
Review
"An essential contribution to the fields of both historic translation studies and early modern literary studies...In the very high quality of its contributions and exhaustive coverage of early modern translation activity, this is a simply outstanding book...A landmark publication that will do much to recast the position of translation within wider early modern literary studies, and that will serve to underpin our engagement with the subject for the foreseeable future." --Renaissance Quarterly
Synopsis
Translation has played a vital part in the history of literature throughout the English speaking world. This work aims to cast new light on the history of English literature and the changing nature and function of translation as well as the social and intellectual milieu of the translators.
About the Author
Gordon Braden is Linden Kent Memorial Professor of English at the University of Virginia. He is the author of
Renaissance Tragedy and the Senecan Tradition (1985),
Petrarchan Love and the Continental Renaissance (1999), and, with William Kerrigan,
The Idea of the Renaissance (1989).
Robert Cummings is a Senior Lecturer in English Literature. He has edited Spenser: The Critical Heritage and Seventeenth-Century Poetry for the Blackwell Annotated Anthology series. He is the author of critical and bibliographical articles, mainly on sixteenth and seventeenth-century British poetry (Gavin Douglas, Drummond, Spenser, Jonson, Herbert, Marvell) but also on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century topics. His interests in neo-Latin literature are reflected in publications on Alciati. He is Review Editor of Translation and Literature, and has written on a variety of translation-related topics.
Stuart Gillespie is Reader in English Literature at Glasgow. He has conducted research on both sides of the Atlantic on manuscript English translations from the classics, some of which will be described in his monograph forthcoming from Blackwell. In the field of classical reception he co-edited The Cambridge Companion to Lucretius (with Philip Hardie, 2007), and is currently writing for the Oxford History of Classical Reception in English Literature. He has held visiting fellowships at Yale University and the Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington DC. He has acted as an editor, advisor, or contributor on numerous standard reference works and other large projects, including the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, the Oxford Companion to English Literature, the Oxford Guide to Literature in English Translation, the Harvard UP compilation The Classical Tradition, the Dictionary of British Classicists, and The Year's Work in English Studies.
Table of Contents
General Editors' Foreword List of Contributors
Abbreviations
Preface
1. The Corpus of Translations and their Place in the Literary and Cultural World, 1550-1660
1.1. An Overview, Gordon Braden
1.2. Pedagogical Uses of Translation, Louis Kelly
1.3. Translation and the English Language, Danielle Clarke
1.4. Translation and Religious Belief, Louis Kelly
1.5. Translation and Literary Innovation, Robert Cummings
2. Translators and their Milieux
2.1. Commerce, Printing, and Patronage, Brenda M. Hosington
2.2. Translating at Leisure: Gentlemen and Gentlewomen, Gillian Wright
2.3. Case Studies
George Chapman, Stuart Gillespie
Anthony Munday, Helen Moore
Mary Sidney Pembroke, Gillian Wright
Thomas Stanley, Stuart Gillespie
3. Approaches and Attitudes to Translation
3.1. Translating Procedures in Theory and Practice, Gordon Braden
3.2. Dictionaries and Commentaries, Robert Cummings
3.3. Commonplaces and Metaphors, A. E. B. Coldiron
4. The Bible and Biblical Commentary
4.1. The Bible, Andrew Taylor
4.2. The Psalms, Donald Mackenzie
4.3. Biblical Commentary, Andrew Taylor
5. Non-Dramatic Verse
5.1. Epic Kinds, Gordon Braden
5.2. Didactic Kinds, Alastair Fowler
5.3. Moral Kinds, Glyn Pursglove
5.4. Lyric, Joshua Scodel
5.5. Pastoral and Idyll, G. W. Pigman III
6. Drama
6.1. Tragedy, Gordon Braden
6.2. Comedy, Gordon Braden
6.3. Pastoral Drama, G.W. Pigman III
7. History and Politics
7.1. Ancient History, Robin Sowerby
7.2. Biography, Gordon Braden
7.3. Modern History and Politics, Peter Burke
8. Prose Fiction
8.1. Ancient and Modern Romance, Helen Moore
8.2. Realism, Robert Maslen
8.3. Prose Satire, Robert H. F. Carver
9. Moral, Philosophical, and Devotional Prose
9.1. Classical Moralists and Philosophers, Robert Cummings
9.2. Modern Philosophical and Moral Writing, Robert Cummings
9.3. Mirrors for Policy, Robert Cummings
9.4. Spiritual and Devotional Prose, Alison Shell
10. The Translators: Biographical Sketches
General Bibliography of Translations
Bibliographical Index to Source Authors
Index