English Translation and Classical Reception: Towards a New Literary History

This first book–length study of English translation as a topic in classical reception engages with the dialogues generated between individual translations and their source–texts, but also with the wide and deep tradition of which they form a part. English Translation and Classical Reception is organised as a mix of surveys and case studies, yet structured to create a continuous discursive thread from Shakespeare to the twentieth century. As lead editor of the first history of English literary translation, Gillespie has been a major force in recovering the remarkable and extensive history of English writers’ engagements with the classics over the centuries. This book focuses on the implications of this history both for English and classical scholarship. In addition to this, Gillespie unveils a new level of historical rediscovery in his analysis of a range of forgotten, unpublished, and suppressed classical translations by English writers. This important text will mark a change in the way in which the English reception of classical literature is viewed and studied.

Preface. Acknowledgements. Note on Texts. 1. Making the Classics Belong: A Historical Introduction. 2. Creative Translation. 3. English Renaissance Poets and the Translating Tradition. 4. Two–Way Reception: Shakespeare’s Influence on Plutarch. 5. Transformative Translation: Dryden’s Horatian Ode. 6. Statius and the Aesthetics of Eighteenth–Century Poetry. 7. Classical Translation and the Formation of the English Literary Canon. 8. Evidence for an Alternative History: Manuscript Translations of the Long Eighteenth Century. 9. Receiving Wordsworth, Receiving Juvenal: Wordsworth’s Suppressed Eighth Satire. 10. The Persistence of Translations: Lucretius in the Nineteenth Century. 11. ‘Oddity and struggling dumbness’: Ted Hughes’s Homer. 12. Afterword. References. Index of Ancient Authors and Passages. General Index.

Stuart Gillespie is Reader in English Literature at the University of Glasgow, Scotland. His recent publications include Shakespeare’s Books: A Dictionary of Shakespeare Sources (2001), Shakespeare and Elizabethan Popular Culture , edited with Neil Rhodes (2006), and The Cambridge Companion to Lucretius , edited with Philip Hardie (2007). He edits the journal Translation and Literature and is co–editor of The Oxford History of Literary Translation in English series.

“Stuart Gillespie’s English Translation and Classical Reception is a beneficiary of this ferment, supplemented by the author’s comprehensive knowledge of translation history, translation theory, and the growing bibliography in his field.”  ( Modern Philology , 1 August 2014) "Overall, this volume will be a key resource for the study of creative translation of classical texts in English, and thoroughly succeeds in emphasising its importance in the history of English literature. Its author′s unmatched grasp of the range of the source material is a great benefit...." (Bmcreview, 8 February 2012) “Taken together, the various case studies of the book express an energetic engagement with the rich inheritance of classical literature and its complex role in and through English translation.”  ( CJ–Online , 5 September 2012)