The Oxford History of Literary Translation in English ─ 1550-1660

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.

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.