TRANSLATION—THEORY AND PRACTICE
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TRANSLATION—
theory and practice:
ahistoricalreader
edited by
DANIEL WEISSBORT
and
ASTRADUR EYSTEINSSON
1
3
Great Clarendon Street, Oxford ox26dp
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PREFACE
The aim of this book is to illuminate the essential activity of translation from a number of
perspectives: historical and contemporary, theoretical and practical. At the same time, the
contents of the present volume speak in many modes and voices to literary and cultural
history, and to cross-cultural relations through the ages. The book draws on several
hundred texts, translations, and texts about translation, ranging from classical antiquity
to the present. Some are reprinted in their entirety, while others are excerpted, and the
editors have supplied notes and introductions. Many of the texts included also themselves
contain examples from translations under discussion, so that on the whole, this volume

pulls together a sizeable world of translation.
For the sake of coherence and due to obvious limits of magnitude, a large part of the
volume focuses on translation into English, although it contains several texts that discuss
translation in general terms, and others that were orginally written in (and concern
translation into) other languages. The volume should be useful for anyone interested in
the history and theory of translation, for what is true of the transfer from one speciWc
language and culture into another may ob viously be highly relevant—given important and
interesting diVerences—for other parallel situations.
When we Wrst started working on this project together, we had in mind to put together a
collection of foundational texts in translation studies, from Cicero to around the mid-
twentieth century, including several important prefaces by translators in the English
tradition. As work progressed, the concept started changing. We realized that we did
not want to limit the volume to a canon of a few statements of translation studies as a
theoretical discipline. There were three basic reasons for this.
First, we wanted to bring across to our readers how valuable reXections about transla-
tion took form in contexts of actual translation practice. Some of the most imp ortant texts
in the literary history of the English language, for instance the Bible and the Homeric
epics, are translated again and again through the centuries. Hence, it is the need for
translation, and the practice of translation, which opens the gateway between the present
and history. So the sense of translation practice had to be built into the volume, if only by
short examples of the main concern of many of those who have also made important
historical comments on translation.
Second, we wanted to end the historical survey with a collection of recent and
contemporary material in the Weld of translation. Ultimately, this material came to
constitute the largest chapter of the volume, one that was extremely diYcult to select,
since we wanted to provide our readers with an insight into both the vibrant and growing
Weld of translation theory, and at the same time to approach translation studies from a
broad angle, emphasizing, again, the connection between the critical discussion and the
practice of translation (even though we’ve had to restrain the length of examples from
translations).

Third, we felt that limiting our selection to relatively few texts, even though this had the
beneWt of allowing us to reprint most of them as a whole, did not convey the multifari-
ousness, or indeed the complexity, of translation studies as we understand that term. Yet,
the volume must not be allowed to become an oversized collection of short quotations. We
wanted to go for both breadth and depth and this is what we struggled with for a long
time. The Wnal product contains several texts that appear in their entirety, while we have
selected what we felt are the most salient parts of others. Many of the entries focus on a
single translator and/or critic, and some of them are presented in more extensive ‘collages’
(for instance Dryden, Pound, and Nabokov), a mode of selection and introduction we
have also used to cover the translation activity in certain periods.
We put some of these collages in charge of specialists in the respective Welds, and we
should very much like to thank these colleagues for their contributions. They are Jonathan
Wilcox, Jane Stevenson, David Hopkins, Ronnie Apter, Jenefer Coates, and Vinay
Dharwadker. Most of the entries were prepared jointly by the two editors in what was a
long-standing and enjoyable collaboration. In some cases, however, entries were largely
selected and introduced by one of us. Thus, Daniel Weissbort prepared ‘Classical
Latin and Early Christian Latin Translation’, ‘Late Tudor and Early Jacobean Translation’,
‘The Authorized (King James) Version of the Bible’, ‘Anne Dacier’, ‘Alexander Pope’,
‘Samuel Johnson’, ‘Five Nineteenth-Century Translators’, ‘Martin Buber and Franz
Rosenzweig’, ‘Ethnopoetics: Translation of the Oral and of Oral Performance’, ‘Transla-
tion of Verse Form’, and ‘Ted Hughes’; while Astradur Eysteinsson prepared ‘Renaissance
Latin Translation in England’, ‘Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’, ‘Friedrich Schleiermacher’,
‘Victorian Translation and Criticism’, ‘Walter Benjamin’, ‘Jir
ˇ
ı
´
Levy
´
’, ‘George Steiner’,
‘Mary Snell-Hornby’, ‘Gayatri Spivak’, ‘Talal Asad’, and ‘Eva HoVman’. However, the

shaping and presentation of many other entries, as well as the editing of the volume as
whole, was our joint eVort.
This is not only a book about translators—it is also one in which we had to rely on the
help of a number of translators who provided valuable texts: special thanks go to Louis
Kelly, but also to Stavros Deligiorgis, Jennifer Tanner, Norma Rinsler, and Gottskalk
vi preface
Jensson. We thank Gardar Baldvinsson for scanning and other assistance in the
preparation of the manuscript, Susan Benner for helping us with the preparation of
some texts, Agnes Vogler for her work on the index, and Theo Hermans for his advice
concerning the inclusion of material regarding Renaissance Latin translation in England.
We are, last but not least, deeply grateful to our wives,Valentina Polukhina and Anna
Johannsdottir, for all their help, advice, and encouragement in the preparation of this
book.
D.W. and A.E.
preface vii
CONTENTS
General Introduction 1
Babel 8
PART I. FROM ANTIQUITY TO MODERN TIMES
1.From Cicero to Caxton 17
1.1. Introduction 17
1.2. Classical Latin and Early Christian Latin Translation 20
1.3. Old English Translation (Jonathan Wilcox) 34
1.4. John of Trevisa 47
1.5. William Caxton 51
2.From the Reformation and the Renaissance
to the Eighteenth Century 55
2.1. Introduction 55
2.2. Martin Luther 57
2.3. William Tyndale 68

2.4. Estienne Dolet 73
2.5. Joachim du Bellay 77
2.6. Late Tudor and Early Jacobean Translation 81
2.7. Renaissance Latin Translation in England 100
2.8. The Catholic Bible in England 110
2.9. The Authorized (King James) Version of the Bible 115
2.10. Sir John Denham 121
2.11. Abraham Cowley 124
2.12. Women Translators from the Sixteenth to the Eighteenth Century
(Jane Stevenson) 128
2.13. John Dryden (David Hopkins) 144
2.14. Anne Dacier 160
2.15. Alexander Pope 166
2.16. Samuel Johnson 174
2.17. William Cowper 183
2.18. Alexander Fraser Tytler 188
3.The Nineteenth Century 195
3.1. Introduction 195
3.2. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe 198
3.3. Friedrich Schleiermacher 205
3.4. Victorian Translation and Criticism 210
3.5. Six Nineteenth-Century Translators 241
3.6. James Fitzmaurice-Kelly 258
PART II: THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
4.From Pound to Nabokov 271
4.1. Introduction 271
4.2. Ezra Pound (Ronnie Apter) 274
4.3. Constance Garnett 290
4.4. Walter Benjamin 297
4.5. Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig 310

4.6. Jorge Luis Borges 323
4.7. Roman Jakobson 330
4.8.Jir
ˇ
ı
´
Levy
´
337
4.9. Eugene A. Nida 346
4.10. Robert Lowell 352
4.11. Stanley Burnshaw 360
4.12. Laura Bohannan 366
4.13. Vladimir Nabokov (Jenefer Coates) 376
contents ix
5.Recent and Contemporary Writings 393
5.1. Introduction 393
5.2. George Steiner 396
5.3. James S Holmes 406
5.4. Itamar Even-Zohar 429
5.5. Andre
´
Lefevere 435
5.6. Mary Snell-Hornby 443
5.7. Ethnopoetics: Translation of the Oral and of
Oral Performance—Dennis Tedlock and Jerome Rothenberg 452
5.8. Louis and Celia Zukofsky 458
5.9. Translation of Verse Form 460
5.10. A. K. Ramanujan (Vinay Dharwadker) 476
5.11. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak 486

5.12. Talal Asad 494
5.13.EvaHoV man 502
5.14. Gregory Rabassa 507
5.15. Suzanne Jill Levine 512
5.16. Ted Hughes 521
5.17. Douglas Robinson 534
5.18. Lawrence Venuti 546
5.19. Susan Bassnett 558
5.20. Everett Fox 562
5.21. John Felstiner 569
5.22. W. S. Merwin 582
5.23. Edwin Morgan 585
5.24. Seamus Heaney 597
Postface Daniel Weissbort 609
Acknowledgements 617
Select Bibliography 625
x contents
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NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS
Editors:
Daniel Weissbort (b. 1935) is Emeritus Professor of Comparative Literature at the
University of Iowa; Honorary Professor in the Centre for Translation and Compara-
tive Cultural Studies, University of Warwick; Research Fellow, English Department,
King’s College, London University. He has published poetry of his own and transla-
tions of poetry, primarily from Russian. Publications include a number of anthologies,
most recently An Anthology of Contemporary Russian Women’s Poetry (with Valentina
Polukhina; University of Iowa Press and Carcanet, 2006) and a translational memoir
of Joseph Brodsky, From Russian with Love (Anvil, 2004). His Selected Translations of
Ted Hughes (Faber) is to appear in 2006 and a book on Ted Hughes and translation is
forthcoming from OUP. With the late Ted Hughes he founded the magazine, Modern

Poetry in Translation, which he edited from 1965 to 2003.
Astradur Eysteinsson (b. 1957) is Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of
Iceland (Reykjavik). His publications include co-translations of works by Franz Kafka
and Max Frisch into Icelandic, several articles in the general area of literary, cultural,
and translation studies, various editorial projects, and three books: The Concept of
Modernism (Cornell UP 1990), Tvimœli (on translation and translation studies,
University of Iceland Press 1996) and Umbrot (on literature and modernity, University
of Iceland Press 1999).
Scholars who provided the editors with new translation s or who edited some of the
individual sections of the volume:
Ronnie Apter is Professor of English at Central Michigan University. Her publications
include 20 performable opera translations and the books Digging for the Treasure:
Translation after Pound (1984; 1987) and a bilingual edition of the Love Songs of
Bernart de Ventadorn in Occitan and English: Sugar and Salt (1999).
Jenefer Coates teaches literary translation and comparative literature at Middlesex Uni-
versity, London. She has edited various journals including In Other Words for the
Translators Association. Besides translating from French and Russian, she also writes
on literary subjects, and is completing a book on intertextuality in Vladimir Nabokov,
focusing on his use of medieval sources.
Stavros Deligiorgis, a University of Iowa professor emeritus, has published articles on the
pre-Socratics, on the Hellenistic and Byzantine romances, and on Chaucer and
Boccaccio. Deligiorgis has Englished contemporary Greek fiction (by Thanassis
Valtinos; with Jane Assimakopoulos), Romanian poetry by Tristan Tzara, Eugene
Ionesco, and Paul Celan, and has regularly participated in performance and inter-
media art projects. Currently, he teaches in the Graduate Translation Studies Program
of the University of Athens, Greece.
Vinay Dharwadker is Professor of Languages and Cultures of Asia at the University of
Wisconsin-Madison, where he teaches Indian literatures, literary studies, and modern
theory. A poet, painter, and scholar, he translates poetry from Hindi, Marathi,
Sanskrit, Punjabi, and Urdu into English. His publications include The Oxford

Anthology of Modern Indian Poetry (co-edited, 1994), The Collected Essays of A. K.
Ramanujan (general editor, 1999), and Kabir: The Weaver’s Songs (2003; 2005).
David Hopkins is Professor of English Literature at the University of Bristol. His chief
research interests are in the English poetry of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,
and in the reception of Classical literature in England. Among his recent publications
are (ed., with Paul Hammond) The Poems of John Dryden (5 vols., Longman Anno-
tated English Poets) and (ed. with Stuart Gillespie) The Oxford History of Literary
Translation in English, Vol. 3: 1660–1790.
Gottskalk Jensson is a lecturer in Comparative Literature at the University of Iceland.
He is a specialist in Classical Literature (Greek and Roman) and his publications
include The Recollections of Encolpius: The Satyrica of Petronius as Milesian Fiction
(2004).
Louis Kelly is Emeritus Professor of Translation History and Theory at the University of
Ottawa and Senior Member of Darwin College, Cambridge. His publications include
Twenty-five Centuries of Language Teaching (1969) and The True Interpreter (1979).
Norma Rinsler is Emeritus Professor of French at King’s College London, and was
Managing Editor of Modern Poetry in Translation, 1992–2003. She is currently collab-
orating on the 5-volume translation of Paul Vale
´
ry’s Cahiers/Notebooks (2000 –).
Jane Stevenson is Professor of Latin at the University of Aberdeen. She has written
extensively about early modern women Latinists. Her publications include Women
notes on contributors xiii
Latin Poets: Language, Gender, and Authority, from Antiquity to the Eighteenth Century
(2005).
Jennifer Tanner has a B.A. in German Literature from Oberlin College and a M.F.A. in
Literary Translation from the University of Iowa. She is currently working as a
freelance translator of German and Russian.
Jonathan Wilcox is Professor of English at the University of Iowa. He is a specialist in
Anglo-Saxon Language and Literature and his publications include Ælfric’s Prefaces

(1994; 1996) and Wulfstan Texts and Other Homiletic Materials (2000), along with
numerous essays on Anglo-Saxon literature and culture.
But clearly there are many more contributors to this book, from Babel to present-day
Britain.
xiv notes on contributors
GENERAL INTRODUCTION
Astradur Eysteinsson and Daniel Weissbort
How do works of literature and scholarship acquire international status? How have ideas
and theories, learning and religion, historical and practical knowledge, traversed the globe?
How have various transactions between groups and nations with diVerent customs and
conditions been facilitated? How do we learn of what has transpired in distant places?
To a large extent by building linguistic bridges across the channels that divide language
spheres and cultural regions, whether by the rewriting of messages and works in another
tongue, or through other interventions by individuals who possess knowledge in more
than one language and can therefore act as cultural mediators.
In the empires of Antiquity, interpreters were essential intermediaries in trade and the
various matters of state. With the onset of printing, some of this work was transferred to
translators, who also came to play a key role in disseminating, and passing on to later
generations, the documents that were to form the canons of literature, learning, and
religion, works such as the Homeric epics, the Bible, and Greek drama, philosophy, and
history, to mention obvious examples in the Western tradition.
Translation has been instrumental in the formation of writing and literary culture in
every European language (‘European’ here refers to more than the geographical area of
Europe, as deWned today). Indeed, the history of international contact and cultural
development, within and beyond Europe, can be traced by noting the routes of transla-
tion. Translation is still of the utmost importance in the aVairs of a world that has gone
through the rapid technological development called modernization, which furthermore
has enhanced international relations to the point where people feel they can legitimately
talk of ‘globalization’. While this development is far from having reached all parts of the
world in equal measure, it is true that science, media, entertainment, commerce, and the

many forms of international relations embrace the globe so extensively now, that transla-
tion becomes an almost overwhelming issue, indeed a ‘problem’ (the notion of the
‘problem of translation’ has a long and colourful history). Many see a possible solution
in the adoption of a single global language, and it seems that English is well on its way to
taking on this international role, as Latin did in the ver y diVerent circumstances of the
Late Middle Ages and Renaissance.
But the notion of a global culture in a single language is not a promising prospect;
indeed, it is, perhaps fortunately, virtually inconceivable. Vital cultural expressions always
involve both the local and the global; the problem of translation is inherent in them, and
therefore also in their dispersion and historical delivery. In the world of literature, and in
many domains of knowledge and culture, the need for translation is as great as ever. It is a
need for trails of understanding between cultures that express themselves in diVerent
tongues. The blazing of such trails also facilitates understanding within cultures which
may be more internally divisive than is apparent. The discovery of the other within
ourselves is another by-product of translation.
The aim of this volume is to illuminate translation from a number of perspect ives: historical
and contemporary, theoretical and practical. The texts are drawn from a long stretch of
Western history; from Homeric and biblical texts, via the translation of these and other texts
at various times, via numerous commentaries on translation by Wgures like Cicero, King
Alfred, John Dryden, and George Eliot, to translations as well as critical discussions by
contemporary authors. The main focus of the anthology is on literary translation, and hence
on the art as well as the craft of translation. But this does not imply that we are insisting upon
hard and fast lines between liter ary and other forms of transla tion, be they scholarly, technical,
or pragmatic in any other sense. Literary transla tion—as much as literature itsel f—draws on
experience from diverse Welds of human experience, and its discursive operations overlap with
those of other kinds of translation. Literature combines cultural and aesthetic values, and
this makes its translation so diYcult and challenging, but also so urgent. It is because of this
concentrated linguistic expression that poetry has so often been seen as the test case of
translation—to the point where it has been deWned as that which is not translatable. Yet, a
great deal of poetry has been and continues to be translated, and it is important to emphasize

that the lessons of literary translation are of course also relevant to other kinds of translation,
although there they may of ten be downplayed by pressing contextual and practical
concerns—these, of course, may also operate with regard to literary translation. Literary
translation, as much as any other translation activity, takes place in concrete socio-cultural
contexts, wh ere a suYcient need has been felt to transport a linguistic product from one
language to another. As George Steiner has pointed out, arguments against verse translation
are arguments against all translation.
1
1
‘Attacks on the translation of poetry are simply the barbed edge of the general assertion that no language can be
translated without fundamental loss. Formally and substantively the same points can be urged in regard to prose.’
2 general introduction
But literary texts of course also demand particular attention to language itself, its
resonances and references, its historical depth as well as its personal relevance, and this
gives an extra dimension to the ‘problem’ of the translation. This is obviously not only true
of literature in the narrow sense, but also in a broader one, not excluding religious,
mythological, and oratorical discourse, or various texts of philosophy, history, and other
humanistic discipli nes. Translation has to attend to the language and cultural heritage of
such works, for it also has the function of extending that heritage, of lending it another
kind of historical depth, of transforming it into a cross-cultural tradition.
‘Translation’ is a concept that is missing in Raymond Williams’s useful book Keywords.It
would, quite appropriately, have come right after ‘Tradition’. However, it is, to an extent,
embodied in Williams’s entry on ‘tradition’, a word that ‘came into English in C14 from fw
tradicion, oF [Old French], traditionem, L[atin], from rw tradere, L—to hand over or
deliver. The Latin noun had the senses of (i) delivery, (ii) handing down knowledge,
(iii) passing on a doctrine, (iv) surrender or betrayal’.
2
Translation, too, hands over or
delivers, and it is instrumental in passing on and handing down documents deemed
worthy of such delivery. Interestingly, the notion of betrayal is also very much a part of the

history of the concept of translation, the proverbial truth being that the translator is a traitor
(‘traduttore traditore’), that he or she is constitutionally incapable of delivering the original.
In a recent report, for instance, in the Guardian newspaper (Saturday, 12 June 2004,p.4),
on the dropping of Latin and Greek by the largest examination board in the UK, a teacher
of Classics, no less, is quoted as saying—quite casually one feels, and not fearing contra-
diction: ‘And it is not enough to trust those who translate, for he who translates, not only
explains but corrupts.’ Williams says of the ‘ceremony, duty and respect’ often associated
with tradition: ‘Considering only how much has been handed down to us, and how various
it actually is, this, in its own way, is both a betrayal and a surrender.’
3
Yet, as Williams points out elsewhere, tradition is always ‘selective’,
4
this also being true
of translation. Moreover, the selection process, in other words canon-formation, that
forms the basis of literary traditions, is—unless we are working strictly within national
borders—dependent upon translations, which secure the ‘survival’ of the work and attend
to its ‘ripening’ process, as Walter Benjamin puts it in his well-known article ‘Die Aufgabe
George Steiner, After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation,(3rd edn.: Oxford and New York: Oxford University
Press, 1998), 255.
2
Raymond Williams, Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society (London: Fontana, 1976), 268–9.
3
Ibid. 269.
4
Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 115.
general introduction 3
des U
¨
bersetzers’ (‘The Task of the Translator’).
5

Ideas such as ‘Western tradition’,
‘European literature’, not to mention ‘World Literature’, are unthinkable in the absence
of translation, and, indeed, of the tradition of translation. More practically: one does well
to remember that most readers of most if not all the best-known works of Western
literature read these works in translation.
The present anthology exempliWes the history and tradition of translation, for instance
by highlighting key texts that have been handed down in Western literature through the
eVorts of translators undeterred by the fact that these texts have been translated many
times before. Indeed, many of them are eager to attempt precisely those texts, to remake
them, as it were, in the shape and texture of their own age.
Such translation—along with the translation of more recent or even contemporary
foreign literature—is obviously a challenge to original writing and is bound to make an
impression on its literary culture. Yet this crucial interaction, and the resulting hybrid
character of literary history, tends to be left out of documented literary histories or dealt
with in a cursory fashion, mostly because they so often work within natio nal borders,
identifying national canons and traditions. Still, the situation is changing as a result of a
less exclusive concern with one’s own culture and of the eVorts of many translation
activists, such as the late James S Holmes, who titled a talk given to the Translation
Programme at the University of Iowa: ‘Studying Translations, an underdeveloped Country
in the World of Literary Scholarship’. Literary history, as we know it, has been very much a
prodigy of Romanticism, cultivating and elevating national legacies.
The historical spectrum of this book, therefore, even though it dwells extensively on a
number of canonical texts, challenges canonical literary history in most of its documented
forms. The historical focus, as we move out of the Classical period, is on the English
language tradition. But when this tradition is viewed from the present perspective, even
Shakespeare is no longer as obviously central as he often seems to be—or at least not in the
same way. Rather he appears as a writer of transcendent genius who rides a wave of
creativity in the English language itself, as it was beginning to beneWt from an age of
proliWc translation. And of course he makes his mark on an English literary culture, which
will avidly continue, however, to seek the best way of bringing Homer, Ovid, Virgil,

Dante, Beowulf, the Bible, into the living language. The more one familiarizes oneself
with this tradition, the clearer it becomes that English possesses a rich history of transla-
tion, or what may be called a strong legacy of translation culture, one that has buttressed
and inspired a great deal of linguistic creativity through the centuries. The poet and
5
Walter Benjamin’s essay is included in Sect. 4.4, below.
4 general introduction
translator Charles Tomlinson, in his introduction to The Oxford Book of Verse in English
Translation, draws attention to ‘a largely forgotten literature’.
6
Fourteen years before,
George Steiner, in his innovative Penguin Book of Modern Verse Translation, focuses on
the work of translators, without whom, as he puts it, ‘we would live in arrogant parishes
bordered by silence’.
7
It is beyond our capacity to do justice to the multiform nature of English, a world language
or related world languages or group of related languages. It might even be said that English
has become a language pre-eminently of translation, that is, of diVusion and international
communication. (Latin was a means of international communication, but did not have the
strong basis of a Wrst language that English has.) In a number of countries English exists in
a close relationship with another language (Canada, South Africa, India). These are very
important sites of translation touched upon in this book only in the case of India. Edwin
Morgan’s translations into Scots, rather than ‘standard’ English, has to stand for a range of
such possibilities, now that the very notion of a standard English has become problem-
atical, this in its turn allowing for a renewed and non-pedantic, so to speak, interest in
foreignizing rather than the more traditional domesticating translation. The book also
contains a number of important texts from other languages, from Classical times to the
present, which have proved important for the translation debate in English. While a
universal textbook might be desirable, this too is simply beyond our means.
A further word about English as the global lingua franca for many purposes, sch olarly,

scientiWc, commercial, political. There are, of course, many Englishes today, which, however,
are similar enough not yet to require by and large the work of translators to ensure their
mutual intelligib ility, ev en if the possibilities of misunderstanding are considerable. It is partly
because of its multiform character that English, with its tendency to regard itself as self-
suYcient, is also suVering from a paucity of translations into it, whereas, as noted, the
language’s richness in, say, the R enaissance was largely due to the voluminous importations
via translation. As Ezra Pound comments, in his essay on ‘Elizabethan Classicists’, (1917):
‘A great age of literature is perhaps always a great age of translation; or follows it.’
8
The present
volume argues, by its very existence, for an inclusive approach to the literary legacies of the
world, for greater interaction between them, especially in respect to the dominant language,
English. Cross-cultural communication involves translation; translation implies cross-
6
Charles Tomlinson, ‘Introduction: The Poet as Translator’, The Oxford Book of Verse in English Translation,
chosen and edited by C. Tomlinson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), p. xvii.
7
Steiner, ‘Introduction’, in The Penguin Book of Modern Verse Translation, ed. by George Steiner (Harmonds-
worth: Penguin, 1966), p. 25.
8
Cf. the Ezra Pound ‘collage’ in Sect. 4.2, below.
general introduction 5
cultural communication; and translation is the principal aren a in wh ich di Verences may be
explored, apprecia ted, and interpreted or understood. The fact that English seems almost self-
suYcient at this time disguises the fact that it is also permeated with other language traditions.
The present volume, thus, ce ntres on English not in a spirit of chauvinism, but ra ther the
reverse, seeing it as a language of translation.
The link between theory or reXection on translation and the actual practice of it has been
emphasized throughout. But valuable insights into the nature and act of translation can
also be found in various texts that approach the crossing from one language to another in a

more parabolic or allegorical manner, texts that would not be placed under the rubric of
translation criticism in any conventional sense. The biblical story of the Tower of Babel is
one such text. In attempting to make room for this extra dimension of translation ‘studies’,
we have included a few texts (by Borges, Laura Bohannan, and Eva HoVman) that
illustrate the joys and anxieties of moving across language borders, of striving to represent
something from one culture within another.
The primary writers on translation, historically, have been the translators themselves. As
noted by Peter France, editor of The Oxford Guide to Literature in English Translation:
‘until quite recently, with few exceptions, it [i.e. theory] was the work of practitioners, some
of them eminent ones. Many of the most famous texts are not so much academic treatises
as short personal statements.’
9
These statements often take the form of more or less
authoritative prefatorial comments. We have also attempted, with the twentieth century,
to represent work of writers who might be described as primarily theorists or critics. Even
in these cases, though, the theoretical comments were in part drawn from or accompanied
by actual translation. Thus Walter Benjamin’s pivotal essay ‘The Task of the Translator’
featured Wrst as an introduction to his 1923 translations of Baudelaire’s ‘Tableaux parisiens’
into German. More recently, both Lawrence Venuti, whose comments on the post-
colonial developments in translation thought have been inXuential, and Douglas
Robinson, an equally proliWc writer on the subject, are also translators of prose and poetry,
the one from Italian the other primarily from Finnish. James S Holmes, who was among
the pioneers in the emerging discipline of translation studies, was also a major poetry
translator (from Dutch). In view of the intimate relationship between theory and practice
in so many cases, we have sought to provide excerpts from actual translations (e.g.
Benjamin’s translation of a Baudelaire poem into German) as well as more general
statements on the translation process or the aims of translation.
9
Peter France, ‘Theoretical Issues’, in France (ed.), The Oxford Guide to Literature in English Translation
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 4.

6 general introduction
Since canonical works are constantly retranslated, we have selected signiWcant passages
and represented them in several translations: for instance, from Genesis, the story of the
Tower of Babel, the informing myth of translation, and the passage from Homer’s
Odyssey, used by Ezra Pound to introduce his Cantos; also excerpts from Aeschylus’
Agamemnon, from Seneca, Juvenal, Ovid, Beowulf, Racine’s Phe
`
dre, and so forth. Com-
mon ground is thus established between individual translators, such as Chapman, Pope,
Dryden, Johnson, Browning, Pound, Hughes, and so between diVerent periods of literary
history. A history of translation could indeed be written in terms of translations of Homer
from Chaucer to, Logue, say—as indeed, George Steiner in eVect does in his Penguin
Homer in English (1996). Considerations of space have obliged us to be highly selective and
to abbreviate many documents, but the grouping of related translators in ‘collages’ will we
hope help contextualize their work, drawing attention to the ambience, the cultural-
political conditions under which certain developments took place, certain contradictions
became apparent. The numerous entries—both the ‘collages’ and the sections highlighting
a single translator and/or translation critic—vary a great deal, both in their content,
structure, and introductory material. This variety, so the editors hope, will facilitate the
reader’s appreciation of the rich mosaic of the tradition of translation which is so much a
part of literary and cultural history.
general introduction 7
Babel
The Hebrew Bible and Translation
The Bible is the single most important and most translated text in Western history and
culture. Seen as a unifying work and functioning as the basis of organized religion in the
West, its translation has often manifested cultural and ideological diversity. The very idea
of translating the Bible, ‘the Word of God’, from the source languages into the vernacular
languages has of course led to extensive even deadly controversy. The translation into Latin
by St Jerome, known as the Vulgate, was for centuries the oYcial text of the Catholic

Church and continued often to be the preferred source for Catholic translators, taking
precedence even over the original languages (Hebrew, Aramaic, Greek). The ongoing
translation of the Bible, whether directly from the source languages or from the Vulgate—
later, Luther’s German translation served virtually as an ‘original’ for some Bible
translators—inevitably reXected cultural and ling uistic diversity.
The story of this process is, in a sense, contained within the Bible itself, in the Genesis
account of the Tower of Babel (Genesis 11: 1–9). This may be regarded as, perhaps, the key
myth of translation; clearly, if there were only one human language, there would be no
need for translation to facilitate communication between human beings variously located.
Of course, since it is God who divides humanity by creating a multiplicity of languages,
the attempt to overcome the resulting divisions through translation is evidence of an
understandable but sacrilegious desire to return to a condition in which it is practical to
consider building a tower! Hence the sense of taboo-breaking that, according to some
writers on the subject, is attendant on any act of translation, and hence also the sense of
unifying humanity, even in its rich diversity, through the act of translation.
The Babel story is a kind of leitmotif of this volume, and it seems Wtting to present it in
several translations. The source text, in Hebrew, is given below with an interlinear
translation into English (Hebrew, it should be remembered, is read from right to left and
the interlinear version, of course, is also to be so read). This is followed by an ancient Greek
version, which is part of the Wrst and very important translation, into Greek, of the Jewish
Bible, a translation known as the Septuagint. Our readers, thus thrown headlong into the
world of translation, are also given two English renderings of the Septuagint Babel story;
a mid-nineteenth-century one by Sir Lancelot Brenton, and a new, previously unpublished
one by Stavros Deligiorgis, who has also written an introductory note to his translation.
An account of the Septuagint, according to which seventy-two scholars produced iden-
tical versions, certain indication of divine intervention, can be found in the entry on Philo
Iudaeus (p. 23–4). The Vulgate (Latin) version of the Babel stor y may be found on p. 113–14,
along with the Catholic Douay-Reims translation, which is to a large extent based on the
Latin. Other versions may be found on pp. 43–6, 66–7, 72, 119–20, 321–2, 351, and 568.
8 babel

Genesis 11: 1–9: The Interlinear Literal Translation of the Hebrew Old Testament, trans.
and ed. George Ricker Berry (Genesis and Exodus) (Hinds and Noble Edition, 1897)
babel 9
The Greek text: Genesis 11: 1–9, ed. and trans. Sir Lancelot C. L. Brenton, The
Septuagint with Apocrypha: Greek and English (London: Bagster and Sons, 1851)
And all the earth was one lip, and there was one language to all.
2
And it came to pass as
they moved from the east, they found a plain in the land of Senaar, and they dwelt there.
3
And a man said to his neighbour, Come, let us make bricks and bake them with Wre.
And the brick was to them for stone, and their mortar was bitumen.
4
And they said,
Come, let us build to ourselves a city and tower, whose top shall be to heaven, and let us
make to ourselves a name, before we are scattered abroad upon the face of all the earth.
5
And the Lord came down to see the city and the tower, which the sons of men built.
6
And
the Lord said, Behold, there is one race, and one lip of all, and they have begun to do this,
and now nothing shall fail from them of all that they may have undertaken to do.
7
Come,
and having gone down let us there confound their tongue, that they may not understand
each the voice of his neighbour.
8
And the Lord scattered them thence over the face of all
the earth, and they left oV building the city and the tower.
9

On this account its name was
called Confusion, because there the Lord confounded the languages of all the earth, and
thence the Lord scattered them upon the face of all the earth.
10 babel