The chapter deals with fidelity of form: after briefly considering prose translations of Virgil, I analyse the wide range of choices of metre for the Eclogues, Georgics and Aeneid. One of the largest issues facing any translator is whether or not to attempt to find an equivalent of Virgil’s dactylic hexameter. After discussion of prosody wars in French and English, I examine Italian Aeneids in depth and then metrical experimentation in English translations from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries. The final portion of the chapter is devoted to the hexameter in the hands of translators into German, Slovenian, Russian, Czech, Slovak, Finnish and Hungarian, with a glance at twenty-first-century hexameter translations in Italian and English. Throughout I explore the ideological significance attached to the chosen metre by analysing the familiar cultural paradigms invoked by each choice. There are two axes on which choice of metre can be located: past/present and home-grown/foreign.

The chapter deals with fidelity of content, specifically concepts and register. I first discuss the querelle (‘dispute’) between those who favoured word-for-word translations and those who believed in updating or beautifying the ancient text for their contemporary audience, as captured in the phrase ‘les belles infidèles’, an approach which involves the notion of ‘compensation’. I then ask how translators tackle key concepts in Virgil’s oeuvre, such as the untranslatable pietas of the Aeneid, along with specific challenges that arise from Virgil’s Latin texts, such as puns and the incomplete lines. I investigate how translators attempt to match the various registers of the Eclogues, Georgics and Aeneid, then I consider the lens provided by the theoretical spectrum of domestication and foreignization, with examples including Aeneid translations in Italian, English, Romanian, German, Brazilian Portuguese and Russian, concluding with Chew’s uncategorizable Georgics.

Here I consider ways in which Virgil’s text is supplemented by translators. These supplements can take the form of translating additional material and of adding paratextual, explanatory material. Notable supplements considered include the spurious incipit of the Aeneid, the poems of the Appendix Vergiliana and the Latin supplement to the Aeneid written by Maffeo Vegio in 1428 which provides a happy conclusion to the poem. The paratextual material I consider consists of translator’s prefaces, notes and comments, along with issues raised by the cover, the title page, the dedication and endorsements, the mise-en-page, headings and illustrations, whereby the translator and/or printer attempts to frame and direct the reader’s experience. The presence or absence of the Latin text en face and the kind of annotation supplied raise the question of the intended uses of the translations. The chapter closes with a study of Douglas’ assertion of authorial presence through his paratexts.

The role of France in David Hume’s intellectual biography is difficult to overestimate. He visited that country three times, wrote the Treatise in La Flèche, and reached the peak of his success during the years he spent in Paris (1763–66), where he was welcomed as a highly valuable member of the Republic of Letters. He cared greatly about the circulation of his writings in France, and actually succeeded in establishing his reputation across the Channel. The History of England made him an outstanding historian, the Natural History of Religion an authoritative esprit fort, but it was the Essays that confirmed him as a subtle political thinker and, what he cared about most, as a profound philosopher in the eyes of his French readers. Before and besides being translated in the form of collections, many of Hume’s essays were translated, summarised, commented on, reviewed, and discussed individually, giving rise to a complex and divergent reception. The present chapter provides an overview of this reception, based on first-hand research on eighteenth-century French translations, reviews, commentaries and criticisms of the Essays.

This chapter examines H.D.’s and Pound’s early work with Greek lyric – in particular, the Greek Anthology and Sappho. It traces Pound’s skeptical, ambivalent, and often self-contradictory use of Greek in the 1910s as he tries to articulate his poetics of the image, tracking the differing prisms (Provençal lyric, Bengali poetics, Chinese ideograms, Primitivism, Vorticism) through which he interprets the value of Greek as his own artistic alliances shift between 1908 and 1918. It contrasts Pound’s varying approaches, whether outlined in his prose writings on prosody and the visual arts or actually followed in his early poems based on Greek lyric to H.D.’s already highly sophisticated and well-developed perspective, as seen in her translations also from the Greek Anthology and Sappho – translations which are the basis of some of her best-known poems. The author argues, moreover, that H.D.’s engagement with Greece even at this early stage is more deeply textual, self-conscious, and historically aware than has been recognized. Nonetheless, she show that despite striking differences in tone and some distinction in approach, Pound and H.D.’s poetics were subtly evolving in similar ways.

This chapter investigates the crucial significance of Lucian for early modern Italian literature and culture. From the late fourteenth century, Lucian’s writings were employed by Italian humanists to learn Greek and contributed considerably towards sparking a remarkable interest in the ancient Greek-speaking world. From Italy, Lucian’s fame travelled to the rest of Europe. During the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Lucian’s fictional dialogues and paradoxical encomia deeply informed the oeuvre of many prominent writers, among them Leon Battista Alberti, Erasmus of Rotterdam, and Lodovico Ariosto. Moreover, this study aims to shed light on the variety of different roles played by Lucian within the Renaissance. By taking into account unexplored matters, such as the impact of vernacular translations, it is possible to distinguish between a ‘didactic-moral’, a ‘useful and delightful’, and a ‘heterodox-heretical’ understanding of Lucian in early modern Italy. On the one hand, such differentiation allows to finesse the connections between the reception of his oeuvre and the political, cultural, as well as religious transformations of that time (e.g. the printing revolution and the Counter-Reformation). On the other hand, it shows that some features of Lucian’s poetics – especially humour, satire, and parrhesia – acted throughout the Renaissance as frameworks that influenced the early modern comprehension of fundamental issues, such as literary imitation and fictionality.

The period c.1780–c.1830, covered by this book, was a high point in the ‘fruitful age of musical translations’ (Beethoven). This trend was driven partly by the social and political circumstances, which made private and semi-private music-making particularly feasible and appealing, creating a demand for chamber music that was within the reach of the enthusiastic amateur. But the vogue for arrangements was also a function of the music publishing trade and its governance (or lack of it) around 1800. This chapter explores the vogue for opera in Vienna from the perspectives of composers, then through the lens of publishers’ catalogues, considering which types of opera and which composers were most liked, and how opera (in various ‘musical translations’) infiltrated into Viennese homes around 1800.

This chapter will discuss a Latin translation of an Arabic text on the pharmacological uses of the individual body parts of animals. De sexaginta animalibus is placed in the context of its original Arabic genre of works on the useful or occult virtues of animals, minerals, and plants. This is the first detailed scholarly treatment of this text, which has been mentioned in passing by other scholars. It argues that it is a translation of a work on the properties of the body parts of animals by the eleventh-century physician ʿUbaydallāh ibn Bukhtīshūʿ, by comparing the text with the manāfiʿ (usefulness) section from an Arabic Ibn Bukhtīshūʿ bestiary. Other issues covered include the copious use of transliterated Arabic terminology, particularly in regard to the names of the numerous animals themselves and confusion in their identification, the order of the animals (which aids identification of partial copies of the manuscript), cited authorities, and ascribed authorship. The chapter also argues for the existence of two recensions of the text in the manuscript tradition, with a comparison of an entry found in both recensions with the Ibn Bukhtīshūʿ text and ʿĪsā ibn ʿAlī’s Book on the Useful Properties of Animal Parts.

This chapter presents some of the most significant studies in the history of intercultural pragmatics (IP) research that have applied the methodology of corpus pragmatics (CP). In fact, the use of corpora has been an essential contribution to IP in crucial areas such as formulaic language, context and common ground, or politeness research, among others, with the conviction that CP has redefined the conceptualization of pragmatic competence in a globalized world. The chapter follows a topical structure in which critical areas of research from an intercultural and corpus pragmatic perspective are addressed, like the role of the lingua franca; the use of academic, professional, and scientific language; cross-cultural studies; prosody, multimodality, and computer-mediated communication and learner's corpora. In all these areas, the chapter highlights the significant research concerns and achievements that have helped to shape IP as an essential discipline in current linguistic theory. A final section with conclusions and ideas for further research will ensue.

Chapter 10 studies the broad contours of Plutarch’s place in political argument in English and Irish thinkers of the later seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. This includes the significance of the translation headed by John Dryden (1631–1700) and the work of Jonathan Swift (1667–1745).

This chapter analyses the position of crime fiction in the global publishing industry. Drawing on bestseller data from nine countries across all continents, it confirms that crime fiction is prominent in the commercial top segment everywhere, but to varying degrees. The genre is most dominant in countries with strong domestic crime fiction traditions, such as the UK and the USA, and least visible in non-Western markets (e.g. Brazil and India). Data from the UK and the USA show very few bestselling crime novels in translation, unlike other book markets where bestselling translations are more common – primarily translations from English, but to a notable extent also from the Scandinavian languages. Discussion focusses on the power dynamics of global publishing, the increasingly important sector of rights sales and adaptations, author branding and serialization, and the rapid structural changes that are currently taking place in the book trade, including the increased interest in digital formats like streamed audiobooks.

Translation was often an extended arm of writing commentaries in the Indian Ocean littoral. In the eighteenth to the twentieth centuries, translating Shāfiʿī texts gave many jurists the best ways to vernacularise Islam and its laws, while for many others it provided a tool to understand the laws of the people their states had subjugated. There were similarities as much as differences among these two streams. Processes of cultural translations united the two, while vernacularisation and colonisation divided them. This chapter identifies four stages of translations that advanced the Shāfiʿī textual longue durée: two Afrasian and two European. It demonstrates their nuances in and around the Indian Ocean in an integrated perspective in which Asian, African and European fuqahā estates appear as interpreters, translators and colonisers to meet their specific needs and necessities of their audience, state, language and law. This chapter takes all the major texts we have discussed in the book to analyse the contemporaneous processes of translations in Afro-Eurasian terrains.

The chapter will dwell on the history of translation, teaching and reception of Ralph Ellison’s works in the USSR and post-Soviet countries and on the curious fact of Ralph Ellison’s “invisibility” there: his masterpiece, Invisible Man, still remains untranslated – and yet studied – in Russia and other formerly Soviet states. Soviet/post-Soviet Ellisoniana includes several editions of Ellison’s short stories and chapters, and a dozen critical studies. Trying to explain this paradox, one has to turn to the characteristics of Soviet editing policy and of the post-Soviet “literary field,” including economics of literature, university teaching practices, literary criticism, academic research, and the way these factors shaped Ellison’s image.

This essay is a narrative of my work on Elizabeth Bishop, beginning with my Ph.D. dissertation (1976) and detailing my choices in the three landmark volumes I edited: Elizabeth Bishop and Her Art (University of Michigan Press, 1983) – the first collection of critical work on Bishop, which includes a section of her previously uncollected writing; Elizabeth Bishop: Poems, Prose, and Letters (Library of America, 2008), the first volume to include almost all of her published and major posthumously published and unpublished work; and Elizabeth Bishop: Prose (FSG, 2011), the first substantially complete independent collection of her prose works published to celebrate her centennial, which includes her significant correspondence with poet Anne Stevenson and the closest possible restoration of her book Brazil to what she originally intended, before the editors of Life rewrote it. The chapter ends with the “rescue” of one of her major unpublished poems.

Different approaches to past mathematical texts are reviewed. The question addressed is: should we stress the continuity of past mathematics with the mathematics practiced today, or should we emphasize its difference, namely what makes it a product of a distant mathematical culture?

Provides brief details about translations of the CANFOR scales that have been completed along with brief details of those that have been published.

Drawing extensively on archival material, this chapter analyses Seamus Heaney’s involvement with the Field Day Theatre Company through the lens of his long friendships with two of the company’s other directors, Brian Friel (who co-founded Field Day in 1980 with actor Stephen Rea) and Seamus Deane. In addition to serving on Field Day’s board of directors, Heaney wrote two works specifically for the company: the verse pamphlet An Open Letter (1983), which protested the use of the adjective 'British' as applied to himself, and The Cure at Troy (1990), a Hiberno-English version of a late play by Sophocles. Heaney’s membership in the Field Day collective gave him a sense of camaraderie, the opportunity to address himself to his country’s urgent needs at a critical point in its history, and the challenge to do things he would not have done otherwise.

What should we do about the fact that reading Chaucer is hard? The “immersion theory” of learning Middle English, rooted in nineteenth-century philological approaches, is no longer really functional or well-suited to attract our wider and more diverse contemporary audience of students; we might return, productively if paradoxically, to an earlier appreciation of textual difficulty (and reward), which we actually share with our Modernist colleagues. In this we can make translations our allies rather than our antagonists. Moreover, the stereotypes about the Middle Ages that we have traditionally railed against, from “dark-ages” dismissals to pre-Raphaelite romanticizations, may no longer be the ones our twenty-first-century students carry with them these days.