Virgil and His Translators

This is the first volume to offer a critical overview of the long and complicated history of translations of Virgil from the early modern period to the present day, transcending traditional studies of single translations or particular national traditions in isolation to offer an insightful comparative perspective. The twenty-nine essays in the collection cover numerous European languages - from English, French, and German, to Greek, Irish, Italian, Norwegian, Slovenian, and Spanish - but also look well beyond Europe to include discussion of Brazilian, Chinese, Esperanto, Russian, and Turkish translations of Virgil. While the opening two contributions lay down a broad theoretical and comparative framework, the majority conduct comparisons within a particular language and combine detailed case studies with in-depth contextualization and theoretical background, showing how the translations discussed are embedded in their own cultures and historical moments. The final two essays are written from the perspective of contemporary translators, closing out the volume with a profound assessment not only of the influence exerted by the major Roman poet on later literature, but also why translation of a canonical author such as Virgil matters, not only as a national and transnational cultural phenomenon, but as a personal engagement with a literature of enduring power and relevance.

List of contents

• 0: Susanna Braund and Zara Martirosova Torlone: Introduction. The Translation History of Virgil: The Elevator Version


• Part 1: Virgil Translation as Cultural and Ideological Capital


• 1: Craig Kallendorf: Successes and Failures in Virgilian Translation


• 2: Richard Armstrong: Dante's Influence on Virgil: Italian Volgarizzamenti and Enrique de Villena's Eneida of 1428


• 3: Stephen Rupp: Epic and the Lexicon of Violence: Gregorio Hernández de Velasco's Translation of Aeneid 2 and Cervantes's Numancia


• 4: Alison Keith: Love and War: Translations of Aeneid 7 into English (From Caxton to Today)


• 5: Gordon Braden: The Passion of Dido: Aeneid 4 in English Translation to 1700


• 6: Fiona Cox: An Amazon in the Renaissance: Marie de Gournay's Translation of Aeneid 2


• 7: Susanna Braund: Virgil after Vietnam


• 8: Geoffrey Greatrex: Translations of Virgil into Esperanto


• 9: Michael Paschalis: Translations of Virgil into Ancient Greek


• 10: Sophia Papaioannou: Sing it Like Homer: Evgenios Voulgaris' Translation of the Aeneid


• 11: Marko Marincic: Farming for the Few: Jozef Subic's Georgics and the Early Slovenian Reception of Virgil


• 12: Ekin Öyken and Çigdem Dürüsken: Reviving Virgil in Turkish


• 13: Mathilde Skoie: Finding a Pastoral Idiom: Norwegian Translations of Virgil's Eclogues and the Politics of Language


• 14: Séverine Clément-Tarantino: The Aeneid and 'Les Belles Lettres': Virgil's Epic in French between Fiction and Philology, from Veyne back to Perret


• 15: Jinyu Liu: Virgil in China


• Part 2: Poets as Translators of Virgil: Cultural Competition, Appropriation, and Identification


• 16: Richard F. Thomas: Domesticating Aesthetic Effects: Virgilian Case Studies


• 17: Hélène Gautier: The Translation of Books Four and Six of Du Bellay's Aeneid: Rewriting as Poetic Reinvention?


• 18: Stephen Scully: Aesthetic and Political Concerns in Dryden's Aeneis


• 19: Marco Romani Mistretta: Translation Theory into Practice: Jacques Delille's Géorgiques de Virgile


• 20: Giampiero Scafoglio: 'Only a poet can translate true poetry': The Translation of Aeneid 2 by Giacomo Leopardi


• 21: Philip Hardie: Wordsworth's Translation of Aeneid 1 3 and the Earlier Tradition of English Translations of Virgil


• 22: Zara Martirosova Torlone: Epic Failures: Vasilii Zhukovskii's 'Destruction of Troy' and Russian Translations of the Aeneid


• 23: Paulo Sérgio de Vasconcellos: Virgílio Brasileiro: A Brazilian Virgil in the Nineteenth Century


• 24: Ulrich Eigler: Between Voß and Schröder: German Translations of Virgil's Aeneid


• 25: Jacqueline Fabre-Serris: Reflections on Two Verse Translations of the Eclogues in the Twentieth Century: Paul Valéry and Marcel Pagnol


• 26: Ulrich Eigler: 'Come tradurre?':

  About the author

  Susanna Braund moved to the University of British Columbia in 2007 to take up a Canada Research Chair in Latin Poetry and its Reception after teaching previously at Stanford, Yale, London, Bristol, and Exeter. She received her BA and PhD from the University of Cambridge. She has published extensively on Roman satire, Latin epic poetry, and the passions in Roman thought, and has translated Lucan for the Oxford World's Classics series, Persius and Juvenal for the Loeb Classical Library, and also three of Seneca's tragedies. She was a Visiting Scholar at the Collège de France in 2014 and won a Killam Research Fellowship in the 2016 national competition for her project 'Virgil Translated'.
  
  Zara Martirosova Torlone is a Professor in the Department of Classics at Miami University, Ohio. She received her BA in Classical Philology from Moscow University and her PhD in Classics from Columbia University. She is the author of Russia and the Classics: Poetry's Foreign Muse (Duckworth, 2009), Latin Love Poetry (co-authored with Denise McCoskey; I.B. Tauris, 2014), and Vergil in Russia: National Identity and Classical Reception (OUP, 2015), as well as articles on Roman poetry and the novel, the Russian reception of antiquity, Roman games, and textual criticism. Her most recent publication is the co-edited volume A Handbook to Classical Reception in Eastern and Central Europe (with Dana LaCourse Munteanu and Dorota Dutsch; Wiley-Blackwell, 2017), to which she also contributed.

  Summary

  Transcending traditional studies of single translations or particular translation traditions in isolation, this is the first volume to offer a critical overview of Virgil's influence on later literature through the translation history of his poems, from the early modern period to the present day, and throughout Europe and beyond.

  Additional text

  Virgil and his Translators needs no conceptual justification. It is a hugely rewarding collection of essays, full of analysis, perception and insights into the translation of Virgil over the ages.

  Report

  this lucid and entertaining collection will serve as a helpful introduction to the complex ideological phenomena which motivate the translation of classical texts. George Brocklehurst, International Journal of the Classical Tradition

Product details

• Authors: Susanna (Professor of Latin Poetry and Its Braund
• Assisted by: Susanna Braund (Editor), Susanna (Professor of Latin Poetry and its Reception Braund (Editor), Zara Martirosova Torlone (Editor), Zara Martirosova (Professor of Classics Torlone (Editor), Torlone Zara Martirosova (Editor)
• Publisher: Oxford University Press
• Languages: English
• Product format: Hardback
• Released: 30.09.2018
• EAN: 9780198810810
• ISBN: 978-0-19-881081-0
• No. of pages: 532
• Series: Classical Presences; Classical Presences
• Subjects: Fiction > Narrative literature; Humanities, art, music > Linguistics and literary studies > Classical linguistics / literary studies; Latin, LITERARY CRITICISM / Poetry, POETRY / Ancient & Classical, LITERARY COLLECTIONS / Ancient & Classical, LITERARY CRITICISM / Modern / 19th Century, Translation & interpretation, Literary studies: classical, early & medieval, Literary studies: poetry & poets, Literary studies: ancient, classical and medieval, Literary studies: poetry and poets, Translation and interpretation