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Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
Serie: Blackwell Companions to the Ancient World
Sprache: Englisch

Beschreibung

The first volume of its kind to integrate trends in Translation Studies with Classical Reception Studies

A Companion to the Translation of Classical Epic provides a comprehensive and wide-ranging account of key debates and case studies centered the translation of Greek and Latin epics. Rather than situating translation studies as a complementary field or an aspect of classical reception, the Companion offers a systematic framework for adapting and incorporating translation studies fully into classical studies. Its many chapters elaborate how translation is a central element in the epic's reception trajectories across the globe and addresses theoretical and methodological concerns arising from this conjunction.

The Companion does not just provide a comprehensive overview of the translation theories it covers, but also offers fresh insights into theoretical and methodological issues currently at the top of the interdisciplinary agenda of scholars studying the global routes of ancient epic. In its sections, leading classicists, translation theorists, classical reception scholars, and cultural historians from Europe and North and South America reconfigure questions this research faces today, highlighting methods for an integrated approach. It explores how this integrated perspective responds to key challenges in the study of the epic's reception, emphasizing topics of temporality, gender, agency, community, target-language politics, and material production. A special section also features detailed dialogues with active translators such as Emily Wilson, Stanley Lombardo, and Susanna Braund, who speak extensively and frankly about their work.

This is a key volume for all students and scholars who want to engage with research reflecting the contemporary agenda in classical reception, translation studies, and the study of epic in its global literary and cultural routes.

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Leseprobe

Cover

Table of Contents

Series Page

Title Page

Dedication Page

Notes on Contributors

Acknowledgements

CHAPTER 1: General Introduction

Introduction to the Companion Project

Translation: The Ancient Practices and Precedents

Epic as Genre

Tradition, Reception, Globalization

REFERENCES

PART I: Disciplinary Openings

CHAPTER 2: Introduction to Part I: Conceptual Openings In and Through Epic Translation Histories

REFERENCES

CHAPTER 3: Defying the Odds: How Classical Epics Continue to Survive in the Modern World

Encountering the Ancients

Appropriation and Translation

Piecing Together the Fragments

Democratization and the Ancient World

Reading the Modern Through the Ancient

Bringing the Ancient World Back to Life Today

Conclusion

REFERENCES

CHAPTER 4: Between Translation and Reception: Reading and Writing Forward and Backward in Translations of Epic

Performance

Formal Structures and Conventions

Language Choices

Coda

REFERENCES

CHAPTER 5: Entangling Historical Time In and Through the Epics’ Translated Presence

Translation’s Temporalities

A Transtemporal History of Translating Classical Epics

Homer’s Translated Presence

REFERENCES

PART II: Explorations in Reception

CHAPTER 6: Introduction to Part II

REFERENCES

CHAPTER 7: What Is Translation in the Ancient World?

Translation in the Ancient Mediterranean: A Very Brief History

The Uses of Translation

Conclusion

List of Illustrations

Chapter 18

Figure 18.1 The Poet addresses the dead of WWI (left); the Poet gathers the ...

Figure 18.2 Poster for a recent iteration of Yale University Art Gallery's r...

Guide

Cover Page

Table of Contents

Series Page

Title Page

Dedication Page

Notes on Contributors

Acknowledgements

Begin Reading

Index

Wiley End User License Agreement

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BLACKWELL COMPANIONS TO THE ANCIENT WORLD

This series provides sophisticated and authoritative overviews of periods of ancient history, genres of classical literature, and the most important themes in ancient culture. Each volume comprises approximately twenty‐five and forty concise essays written by individual scholars within their area of specialisation. The essays are written in a clear, provocative, and lively manner, designed for an international audience of scholars, students, and general readers.

Ancient History

A Companion to the Roman ArmyEdited by Paul Erdkamp

A Companion to the Roman RepublicEdited by Nathan Rosenstein and Robert Morstein‐Marx

A Companion to the Classical Greek WorldEdited by Konrad H. Kinzl

A Companion to the Ancient Near EastEdited by Daniel C. Snell

A Companion to the Hellenistic WorldEdited by Andrew Erskine

A Companion to Late AntiquityEdited by Philip Rousseau

A Companion to Ancient HistoryEdited by Andrew Erskine

A Companion to Archaic GreeceEdited by Kurt A. Raaflaub and Hans van Wees

A Companion to Julius CaesarEdited by Miriam Griffin

A Companion to ByzantiumEdited by Liz James

A Companion to Ancient EgyptEdited by Alan B. Lloyd

A Companion to Ancient MacedoniaEdited by Joseph Roisman and Ian Worthington

A Companion to the Punic WarsEdited by Dexter Hoyos

A Companion to AugustineEdited by Mark Vessey

A Companion to Marcus AureliusEdited by Marcel van Ackeren

A Companion to Ancient Greek GovernmentEdited by Hans Beck

A Companion to the Neronian AgeEdited by Emma Buckley and Martin T. Dinter

A Companion to Greek Democracy and the Roman RepublicEdited by Dean Hammer

A Companion to LivyEdited by Bernard Mineo

A Companion to Ancient ThraceEdited by Julia Valeva, Emil Nankov, and Denver Graninger

A Companion to Roman ItalyEdited by Alison E. Cooley

A Companion to the EtruscansEdited by Sinclair Bell and Alexandra A. Carpino

A Companion to the Flavian Age of Imperial RomeEdited by Andrew Zissos

A Companion to Science, Technology, and Medicine in Ancient Greece and RomeEdited by Georgia L. Irby

A Companion to the City of RomeEdited by Amanda Claridge and Claire Holleran

A Companion to Greeks Across the Ancient WorldEdited by Franco De Angelis

A Companion to Late Ancient Jews and Judaism ‐Third Century BCE ‐ Seventh Century CEEdited by Naomi Koltun‐Fromm and Gwynn Kessler

A Companion to the Archaeology of Early Greece and the MediterraneanEdited by Irene S. Lemos and Antonios Kotsonas

A Companion to AssyriaEdited by Eckart Frahm

A Companion to SpartaEdited by Anton Powell

A Companion to Greco‐Roman and Late Antique EgyptEdited by Katelijn Vandorpe

A Companion to Ancient AgricultureEdited by David Hollander and Timothy HoweLiterature and Culture

A Companion to Greek and Roman MusicEdited by Tosca Lynch and Eleonora Rocconi

A Companion to Classical ReceptionsEdited by Lorna Hardwick and Christopher Stray

A Companion to Greek and Roman HistoriographyEdited by John Marincola

A Companion to CatullusEdited by Marilyn B. Skinner

A Companion to Roman ReligionEdited by Jörg Rüpke

A Companion to Greek ReligionEdited by Daniel Ogden

A Companion to the Classical TraditionEdited by Craig W. Kallendorf

A Companion to Roman RhetoricEdited by William Dominik and Jon Hall

A Companion to Greek RhetoricEdited by Ian Worthington

A Companion to Ancient EpicEdited by John Miles Foley

A Companion to Greek TragedyEdited by Justina Gregory

A Companion to Latin LiteratureEdited by Stephen Harrison

A Companion to Greek and Roman Political ThoughtEdited by Ryan K. Balot

A Companion to OvidEdited by Peter E. Knox

A Companion to the Ancient Greek LanguageEdited by Egbert Bakker

A Companion to Hellenistic LiteratureEdited by Martine Cuypers and James J. Clauss

A Companion to Vergil’s Aeneid and its TraditionEdited by Joseph Farrell and Michael C. J. Putnam

A Companion to HoraceEdited by Gregson Davis

A Companion to Families in the Greek and Roman WorldsEdited by Beryl Rawson

A Companion to Greek MythologyEdited by Ken Dowden and Niall Livingstone

A Companion to the Latin LanguageEdited by James Clackson

A Companion to TacitusEdited by Victoria Emma Pagán

A Companion to Women in the Ancient WorldEdited by Sharon L. James and Sheila Dillon

A Companion to SophoclesEdited by Kirk Ormand

A Companion to the Archaeology of the Ancient Near EastEdited by Daniel Potts

A Companion to Roman Love ElegyEdited by Barbara K. Gold

A Companion to Greek ArtEdited by Tyler Jo Smith and Dimitris Plantzos

A Companion to Persius and JuvenalEdited by Susanna Braund and Josiah Osgood

A Companion to the Archaeology of the Roman RepublicEdited by Jane DeRose Evans

A Companion to TerenceEdited by Antony Augoustakis and Ariana Traill

A Companion to Roman ArchitectureEdited by Roger B. Ulrich and Caroline K. Quenemoen

A Companion to Sport and Spectacle in Greek and

Roman AntiquityEdited by Paul Christesen and Donald G. Kyle

A Companion to PlutarchEdited by Mark Beck

A Companion to Greek and Roman SexualitiesEdited by Thomas K. Hubbard

A Companion to the Ancient NovelEdited by Edmund P. Cueva and Shannon N. Byrne

A Companion to Ethnicity in the Ancient MediterraneanEdited by Jeremy McInerney

A Companion to Ancient Egyptian ArtEdited by Melinda Hartwig

A Companion to the Archaeology of Religion in the Ancient WorldEdited by Rubina Raja and Jörg Rüpke

A Companion to Food in the Ancient WorldEdited by John Wilkins and Robin Nadeau

A Companion to Ancient EducationEdited by W. Martin Bloomer

A Companion to Ancient AestheticsEdited by Pierre Destrée & Penelope Murray

A Companion to Roman ArtEdited by Barbara Borg

A Companion to Greek LiteratureEdited by Martin Hose and David Schenker

A Companion to Josephus in his WorldEdited by Honora Howell Chapman and Zuleika Rodgers

A Companion to Greek ArchitectureEdited by Margaret M. Miles

A Companion to PlautusEdited by Dorota Dutsch and George Fredric Franko

A Companion to Ancient Near Eastern LanguagesEdited by Rebecca Hasselbach‐Andee

A Companion to Ancient Greece and Rome on ScreenEdited by Arthur J. Pomeroy

A Companion to EuripedesEdited by Laura K. McClure

A Companion to Ancient Near Eastern ArtEdited by Ann C. Gunter

A Companion to Ancient EpigramEdited by Christer Henriksén

A Companion to Late Antique LiteratureEdited by Scott McGill and Edward Watts

A Companion to Religion in Late AntiquityEdited by Josef Lössl and Nicholas Baker‐Brian

A Companion to AristophanesEdited by Matthew C. Farmer and Jeremy B. Lefkowitz

A Companion to the Translation of Classical EpicEdited by Richard H. Armstrong and Alexandra Lianeri

A COMPANION TO THE TRANSLATION OF CLASSICAL EPIC

Edited by

Richard H. Armstrong and Alexandra Lianeri

Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey.Published simultaneously in Canada.

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Library of Congress Cataloging‐in‐Publication Data Applied for:

Hardback ISBN:9781119094265

For Susan Bassnett,

for living and teaching translationas endless interaction.

Notes on Contributors

Leonardo Antunes is a professor at the Universidade Federal do Rio Grande do Sul, in Porto Algre, Brazil. He is a poet and translator and writes on poetic problems in the translation of Greek poetry. He has recently published a translation of the Iliad, A Ilíada de Homero em decassílabos duplos (Editora Zouk, 2022), of Anacreon’s extant fragments and the Anacreontea, Anacreonte: Fragmentos Completos (Editora 34, 2022), and of Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex, Édipo Tirano (Editora Todavia, 2018). He is currently finishing up a translation of the Odyssey, which should be published in 2025.

Richard H. Armstrong is Associate Professor of Classical Studies at the University of Houston, Houston, Texas. His research areas are in classical receptions, specifically in the history of psychoanalysis and translation studies. He is author of A Compulsion for Antiquity: Freud and the Ancient World (Cornell UP, 2005). With Elizabeth Vandiver, he is co‐editor of Remusings: Essays on the Translation of Classical Poetry (Classical and Modern Literature [2007] 27.1). With Alexandra Lianeri he is coeditor of Classical Translation Studies: Transfigurations in Reception and Cultural History (forthcoming, Oxford UP). He is also a co‐editor of the Bloomsbury Handbook of Psychoanalysis and Classical Reception (forthcoming, Bloomsbury Academic). Recently he co‐curated the exhibition Freud's Antiquity: Object, Idea, Desire at the Freud Museum London with Miriam Leonard and Daniel Orrells.

Susan Bassnett is a writer and scholar of comparative literature and translation studies. She is Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Glasgow, and Professor Emerita at the University of Warwick. Author of over 20 books, her Translation Studies has been translated into many languages and is a book of global importance. Her most recent book is Debates in Translation, co‐edited with David Johnstone (2024). She is an elected Fellow of the Academia Europaea, the Institute of Linguists and the Royal Society of Literature. Since 2016 she has been President of the British Comparative Literature Association.

Alexander Beecroft is Jessie Chapman Alcorn Memorial Professor of Foreign Languages at the University of South Carolina. A comparativist and literary theorist, he is author of Authorship and Cultural Identity in Early Greece and China: Patterns of Literary Circulation (Cambridge UP, 2010), An Ecology of World Literature: From Antiquity to the Present Day (Verso, 2015), and is currently working on A Global History of Literature (Johns Hopkins UP).

Francesca D'Alessandro Behr is Professor of Italian and Classical Studies at the University of Houston. She specializes on Latin literature and women writers of the Italian Renaissance, and is author of Feeling History: Lucan, Stoicism, and the Poetics of Passion (Ohio State UP, 2007) and Arms and the Woman: Classical Tradition and Women Writers in the Venetian Renaissance. She is currently working on an edition and introduction to Lucrezia Marinella's discourse Rivolgimento amoroso dell’huomo verso la divina bellezza (1597) for the University of Toronto Press as well as further articles on Marinella's work.

Susanna Braund held a Canada Research Chair in Latin Poetry and its Reception at the University of British Columbia from 2007 until 2021 after teaching previously at Stanford University, Yale University, and the Universities of London, Bristol and Exeter. She has published extensively on Roman satire and Latin epic poetry among other aspects of Latin literature and has translated Lucan (Oxford World's Classics), Persius and Juvenal (Loeb Classical Library) and some works of Seneca. Her major project Translating Virgil: A Cultural History of the Western Tradition from the Eleventh Century to the Present will be published by Cambridge University Press in 2024.

Fiona Cox is Associate Professor of French and Comparative Literature and Head of Department at the University of Exeter. She is author of Aeneas Takes the Metro: Virgil's Presence in Twentieth Century French Literature (Legenda, 1999), Sibylline Sisters: Virgil's Presence in Contemporary Women's Writing (Oxford UP, 2011), and Ovid's Presence in Contemporary Women's Writing: Strange Monsters (Oxford UP, 2018). She is co‐editor of Homer's Daughters: Women's Responses to Homer in the Twentieth Century and Beyond (Oxford UP, 2019) as well as Ovid in French: Reception by Women from the Renaissance to the Present (Oxford UP, 2023).

Michael Cronin is 1776 Professor of French and Senior Researcher in the Trinity Centre for Literary and Cultural Translation at Trinity College Dublin. Among his recent published titles are Eco‐Translation: Translation and Ecology in the Age of the Anthropocene (2017), Irish and Ecology: An Ghaeilge agus an Éiceolaíocht (2019) and Eco‐Travel: Journeying in the Age of the Anthropocene (2022). He is a member of the Royal Irish Academy, the Academia Europaea, an Officier in the Ordre des Palmes Académiques and a Fellow of Trinity College Dublin.

Annmarie Drury is Professor of English at Queens College, City University of New York. She is the author of Translation as Transformation in Victorian Poetry (Cambridge UP, 2015), awarded the Sonya Rudikoff Award for a best first book in Victorian Studies, and editor of The Imaginative Vision of Abdilatif Abdalla's Voice of Agony (U Michigan P, 2024), as well as a translator and poet. She is writing a book about listening in Victorian poetry and culture.

Ramiro González Delgado is Professor of Greek Philology at the Universidad de Extremadura, Badajoz, Spain. His research focuses on Greek literature and mythology, the classical tradition and the history of Greco‐Roman literature in Spain. He is author of Orfeo y Eurídice en la Antigüedad: mito y literatura (Ediciones Clásicas, 2008) and Canta, musa, en lengua asturiana: estudios de traducción y tradición clásica (EAE, 2012), and co‐editor of La Historia de la Literatura Grecolatina durante la Edad de Plata de la cultura española (1868‐1936) (Universidad de Málaga, 2010), and La Historia de la Literatura Grecolatina en España: de la Ilustración al Liberalismo (1778‐1850) (Universidad de Málaga, 2013). He is translator of Poemas de amor efébico, Antología Palatina, libro XII (Akal, 2011).

Benjamin Haller is Associate Professor of Classics at Virginia Wesleyan University, where he has taught as a one‐person classics department since arriving in 2008. He has published on Homer, receptions of Greek and Roman poetry, and the Greek and Roman worlds in popular culture. His latest book is Greco‐Roman Literature and Culture in Virginia’s Tidewater Region, 1607‐1826 (Lexington Books, 2024). When he is not spending time with his wife Jessica, his son Keats, and his daughter Abigail, he is working on projects on the Homeric Hymn to Hermes, Latin Pedagogy (a textbook titled Laetabere!), and Ralph Ellison.

Lorna Hardwick is Professor Emerita of Classical Studies at the Open University, UK. She is (with Professor James Porter) co‐editor of the Classical Presences series (Oxford UP) and was the founding editor of the Classical Receptions Journal. She has published extensively on Homer, Athenian cultural history, Greek Tragedy and Poetry and its modern receptions, and on translation theory and practice. Books include: Translating Words, Translating Cultures (Bloomsbury, 2000), Reception Studies (Oxford UP, 2003), and the co‐edited volumes Classics in Post‐Colonial Worlds (with Carol Gillespie, Oxford UP, 2007), Companion to Classical Receptions (with Christopher Stray, Wiley, 2007), Classics in the Modern World: A ‘Democratic Turn’? (with Stephen Harrison, Oxford UP, 2013). She is joint editor, with Elizabeth Vandiver and Stephen Harrison, of the Oxford Classical Reception Commentaries (OCRC, Oxford UP), with whom she has co‐authored two books in the series: Greek and Roman Antiquity in First World War Poetry: Making Connections, and Rupert Brooke, Charles Sorley, Isaac Rosenberg (Oxford UP, 2024) and Wilfred Owen: Classical Connections (Oxford UP, 2024).

Julie Candler Hayes is Professor Emerita of French at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, where she served as Chair and later Dean of the College of Humanities and Fine Arts. She is author of Translation, Subjectivity, and Culture in France and England, 1600‐1800 (Stanford UP, 2009), Reading the French Enlightenment: System and Subversion (Cambridge UP, 1999), and Identity and Ideology: Diderot, Sade, and the Serious Genre (John Benjamins, 1991). She is also co‐editor of Emilie Du Châtelet: Rewriting Enlightenment Philosophy and Science (Voltaire Foundation, 2006) and Using the Encyclopédie: Ways of Knowing, Ways of Reading (Voltaire Foundation, 2002).

Thomas E. Jenkins is Professor of Classical Studies at Trinity University, San Antonio, Texas. He is author of Antiquity Now: The Classical World in the Contemporary American Imagination (Cambridge UP, 2015) and Intercepted Letters: Epistolarity and Narrative in Greek and Roman Literature (Lexington Books, 2006). He has penned numerous articles and chapters on classical reception, including that of Lucian’s Mimes of the Courtesans, which won the inaugural Paul Rehak award for LGBTQ+ studies in classics. As a theater practitioner, he has adapted both Plautus’s Haunted House and Aeschylus’ Agamemnon for the modern stage.

Herbert Jordan received his BA in English at Princeton University (1960) and went on to Harvard Law School (JD, 1972). After working in federal litigation in Manhattan, he relocated to a farm in the Catskill Mountains in 1978, where he and his wife Randlett Walster Jordan operated a maple syrup production business for fifteen years. In 1982, he and his wife founded the Rural Legal Rights Foundation, a charitable legal rights organization, for which the Jordans served as staff attorneys for over twenty‐five years. Jordan took to translating the Iliad late in life in 1999 and published his translation with the University of Oklahoma Press in 2008, followed by a translation of the Odyssey in 2014.

George Kazantzidis is Assistant Professor of Latin Literature at the University of Patras, Greece. He is especially interested in the history of emotions and mental illness in Graeco‐Roman antiquity. His book latest book is Lucretius on Disease: The Poetics of Morbidity in De rerum natura (De Gruyter, 2021).

Alexandra Lianeri is assistant professor at the classics department of the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki. Her research focuses on the intellectual and cultural trajectories of Greek and Roman classics in modern and contemporary European thought. She is editor (with V. Zajko) of Translation and the Classic (2008); The Western Time of Ancient History (2011); Knowing Future Time in and through Greek Historiography (2016); Dēmokratia's Translation Time: Conceptual Translation and Historical Futurity in Nineteenth‐Century Britain (forthcoming) and (with R. Armstrong) Classical Translation Studies (forthcoming).

Stanley Lombardo, Professor Emeritus of Classics at the University of Kansas, is one of the first professional classical scholars to make a career entirely out of translations from ancient texts. He has translated Parmenides, Empedocles, Aratus, Plato, Callimachus, Hesiod, Sappho, Statius, Horace, in addition to Homer (Iliad, 1997; Odyssey, 2000), Virgil (Aeneid, 2005), Dante (Inferno, 2008; Purgatorio, 2016; Paradiso, 2017), the Epic of Gilgamesh (2019), and the Bhagavad Gita (2019), all with Hackett Publishing. A Zen Master, he has also translated Lao Tzu: Tao te Ching (with Stephen Addiss, 1993) and collaborated on the Zen Source Book (with Stephen Addiss and Judith Roitman, 2008). Recently he collaborated with William Levitan and a team of translators to make the first English verse translation of Nonnus's Dionysiaka (Tales of Dionysus, U Michigan P, 2022).

Siobhán McElduff is Associate Professor in the Department of Ancient Mediterranean and Near Eastern Studies at the University of British Columbia. She is the author of Roman Theories of Translation: Surpassing the Source (Routledge, 2013) and several articles on Roman translation theory and practice, and co‐editor of Complicating the History of Western Translation: The Ancient Mediterranean in Perspective (St. Jerome, 2011), Translation and the Classic (Routledge, 2024) and Translation Classics in Context (Routledge, 2024). She is currently working on a digital edition of Irish ballads with classical references, as well as a monograph on classical reception among the laboring classes in Ireland, England, and Scotland in the 18th and 19th centuries.

Theodore Papanghelis read classics at the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki and at St John’s College, Cambridge. His main academic concerns lie in the area of classical Latin Poetry. He has published modern Greek translations of Ovid’s Ars amatoria, Virgil’s Aeneid and Lucretius’ De rerum natura and has just completed a translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. He is Emeritus Professor of Latin at the Aristotle University and ordinary member of the Academy of Athens.

Veronica Ricotta is Associate Professor in History of Italian Language at the University for Foreigners in Siena. Her main research interests focus on texts and questions of Italian linguistic history from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance, especially on recipe books, the language and lexicon of the arts, of food and of authors like Dante and Boccaccio, also in a lexicographical perspective. She has collaborated with important institutions (like Scuola Normale Superiore, Accademia della Crusca, etc.), working on some important lexicographical projects (DiVO ‐ Dizionario dei volgarizzamenti; Vocabolario Dantesco, etc.). She has published the first critical edition with linguistic commentary of Cennino Cennini's Libro dell’arte (Milano, FrancoAngeli, 2019). Her latest book is I Banchetti, compositioni di vivande e apparecchio generale di Cristoforo Messi Sbugo. Edizione e commento linguistico (Firenze, Olschki, 2023).

Dr. Benjamin E. Stevens works in two main areas: classical receptions, with focuses on underworlds and afterlives, science fiction/fantasy/horror, and film; and Latin literature, which he has studied for cultural histories of the senses and ideas about language, including silence. He is the author of Silence in Catullus (Wisconsin, 2013) and co‐editor of Classical Traditions in Science Fiction (Oxford UP, 2015) and Classical Traditions in Modern Fantasy (Oxford UP, 2017), Frankenstein and its Classics (Bloomsbury, 2018), and Once and Future Antiquities (Bloomsbury, 2018); he is also a published translator of French and Spanish. He has taught at institutions including Trinity University and Bard College, and is currently a Lecturer in English at Howard University in Washington, DC.

Giulio Vaccaro is a research professor of history of the Italian language and Italian dialectology at the Università degli Studi di Perugia and associate member of the Istituto di Storia dell'Europa Mediterranea (ISEM‐CNR) in Cagliari. He was visiting researcher at the Deutsches Historisches Institut in Rom. His research focuses on vernacular translations (volgarizzamenti) of Latin classics and medieval Latin texts (Plutarch, Seneca, Vegetius), the material study of manuscripts for the history of textual traditions, the relations between Italy and Spain in the Middle Ages, medieval chronicles, and the history of the Roman dialect. He has collaborated on various online database projects, such as the Edizione Nazionale degli Antichi Volgarizzamenti dei classici latini nei volgari italiani (ENAV) and the Dizionario dei Volgarizzamenti (DiVo).

Emily Wilson is Professor of Classical Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Author of the monographs Mocked with Death: Tragic Overliving from Sophocles to Milton (John Hopkins, 2004), The Death of Socrates: Hero, Villain, Chatterbox, Saint (Profile Books, 2007), and The Greatest Empire: A Life of Seneca (Oxford UP, 2014), she is also the translator and editor of the Norton Critical Editions of Oedipus Tyrannos and The Odyssey, and the first volume of the Norton Anthology of World Literature. She is a well‐known translator of Senecan tragedy (Six Tragedies of Seneca [Oxford World’s Classics, 2010]), Euripides (Bacchae, Helen, Electra, and The Trojan Women, in The Greek Plays [Random House, 2016]), and Homer. Her translation of the Odyssey (Norton, 2017) received wide attention, and was followed by her Iliad (Norton, 2023).

Acknowledgements

First and foremost, we would like to acknowledge our many contributors, who have stayed with us on this project over what became an inordinate period of time, in part due to COVID, family emergencies, political upheavals, and other delays. Our desire to make this a more international volume that includes target languages other than English also required more time, but we feel certain it has paid off. Special thanks to Emily Wilson and Fiona Cox for a last‐minute updating of Chapter 25, and to Susanna Braund for updating Chapter 26; these revisions helped to keep the volume current in the exciting, fast‐evolving world of epic translation.

This project began as a dialogue with Wiley‐Blackwell, and we are grateful that the various editors we have dealt with over the years remained open to a volume conceptualized in very different terms from the ones usually appearing in this series. A crucial period of direct collaboration between the co‐editors was made possible by a joint fellowship at the Center for Hellenic Studies in Washington DC (2018), and we thank especially Gregory Nagy, the Senior Fellows, Lanah Koelle and the other staff of that time for their generous support.

Richard thanks his Houston colleagues Casey Dué Hackney (for endless help on Homeric philology) and Francesca Behr (also a contributor to this volume) for their friendship and collegial encouragement; Alexandra Lianeri for pushing him deeper into the complexities of translation theory; and his wife Dawn, for being supportive of his untimely obsessions. Alexandra would like to thank Susan Bassnett and Theo Hermans for a long‐lasting and insightful dialogue on the plural sides of translation; Bob Fowler, Charles Martindale, Richard Armstrong, and Peter Burke for sharing their perspicacious entanglement of the study of classics, cultural history, and translation studies; Kostas Vlassopoulos and Eftychia Bathrellou for their precious friendship and astute discussions on history, philology, and the interspace between the two; her colleagues at the University of Thessaloniki for invaluable engagement and support; and her family, especially Alcibiades, that made all things possible.

Lorna Hardwick has been a source of wisdom and inspiration for both of us over the years on the matter of translation and reception, and we are delighted to have her join us on this project. Susan Bassnett has similarly lit the way for decades in translation studies, and in honor of her many contributions to the field, both through her own writing and her personal contacts and interventions, we gladly dedicate this volume.

CHAPTER 1General Introduction

Richard H. Armstrong

Introduction to the Companion Project1

This Companion volume reflects the remarkable development of classical reception, genre, and translation studies since A Companion to Ancient Epic, which appeared in this series in 2005 under the editorship of the late John Miles Foley. I contributed a chapter to that volume, “Translating Ancient Epic,” which was an early attempt to do more than list and periodize translations as was so often done in classical and translation handbooks of the time. That chapter was a part of a large section on Issues and Perspectives, which was followed by three further sections on Near Eastern, Ancient Greek, and Roman epic. Sometime later, Wiley‐Blackwell contacted me in the interests of developing a Companion volume on the translation of Greek and Latin literature, a project I deemed unworkable after years of experience at the American Philological Association’s annual meetings where I co‐organized colloquia on translation with Elizabeth Vandiver, only to find that each genre would attract quite different scholars, topics, and audiences. Sensing this needed to be an international effort, I contacted Alexandra Lianeri in an effort to pursue a jointly edited volume that would speak better to the complex interfield translation studies had become worldwide, while also connecting it vitally to classical studies at a time when reception had become a major part of the field and was transforming the scope and texture of classical scholarship.

This transformation is certainly borne out by two Companion volumes in this series that followed Ancient Epic in close order: A Companion to the Classical Tradition, edited by Craig Kallendorf (2007) and A Companion to Classical Receptions (2008), edited by Lorna Hardwick and Christopher Stray. We see one volume still using the comfortable phrase “the classical tradition” (which in fact is seen as many in the volume) while the other deploys an already plural “classical receptions” and contests the tendency for reception to be a topic fully separated from the analysis of classical texts save for some chapters stuck at the end (Hardwick and Stray 2008, 4).2 In both cases, however, the editors admit the difficulty of organizing the material, and while the Companion to the Classical Tradition is divided into sections on periods, places, and contemporary themes, the Companion to Classical Receptions has nine thematic sections, including four papers on translation. It begins with a chapter addressing “Reception and Tradition,” which acknowledges the shift away from “tradition” as an elitist notion, since “Especially in Britain, reception is sometimes thought to be the less problematic concept of the two,” though it argues convincingly for rehabilitation of the term “tradition” within reception studies (Budelmann and Haubold 2008, 14). Despite the sense of upheaval in the Classical Receptions volume, its editors announced at the conclusion of their introduction, “There are exciting times ahead,” and today these words still ring true (Hardwick and Stray 2008, 9). Since that time, countless edited volumes and monographs on reception and whole new publication series dedicated to it have arisen in Europe and North America. Recently we have even seen nine eminent classical scholars cowrite a book with the controversial title Postclassicisms, a concept‐based and radical discussion of the current discipline of classics as a whole (Postclassicisms Collective 2020). However, despite all this change, the thorough integration of translation and classical studies – and not just classical reception studies – remains a work in progress, and it seems telling that translation was not one of the concepts the Postclassicisms Collective sought to address, despite its perennial importance to the field. The two editors of the present Companion are among those committed to seeing translation put more to the fore in reception studies, as the topic is both essential to and seemingly inexhaustible for classical studies. In fact, we could consider this Companion a product of “classical translation studies,” a subfield we feel more than justifies itself as an area of research, given that Greek and Latin literatures are among the most translated in the world (Armstrong and Lianeri forthcoming).

The decision to limit this Companion exclusively to epic comes down to some fairly simple and practical reasons. (i) The primacy of the epic genre itself merits sustained interest, as it alone represents the most continuously translated genre in ancient literature, though not all authors receive the same attention. Just how one might think of “classical epic” as a genre is addressed below in more detail (Section 1.3) but suffice it to say the field of texts is much broader than we often think – so broad, in fact, that it was not deemed possible to cover all possible texts with individual chapters. (ii) As a form of long narrative poetry with plenty of dialogue and speeches, epic poses different problems from other genres in terms of its translation, particularly compared to drama, lyric, philosophical dialogues, historiography, or essays, each of which would certainly merit a translation Companion of their own. However, as many substantive discussions of translation in the Western tradition have been tied specifically to epic, it makes sense to begin at what is conventionally thought of as “the beginning” of Western literature, typically identified as Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey. These texts already enjoyed a rich reception and translation history in antiquity (see Section 1.2), and they not only possess a long translation history in English and many other languages but continue to enjoy such attention in the new millennium. Epic thus provides a remarkable line of continuity for the diachronic study of translation. (iii) In order to extend the conversation to various target cultures distributed in time and space, a focus on a single genre has certain heuristic advantages. In fact, expanding the target or receiving cultures under discussion is a major concern of both reception and translation studies these days, but this again makes any attempt at total coverage impossible, since the number of potential modern languages is vast. Besides world languages such as English, Spanish, French, Portuguese, Arabic, Mandarin, Korean, Japanese, Hindi/Urdu, and Russian, there are many other languages and even dialects that are worth consideration from the standpoint of translation and reception. A case in point is Moshe Ha‐Elion’s translations of the Odyssey (2011, 2014) and Iliad (2016, 2021) into Ladino or Judeo‐Spanish, now considered a dying language, which he undertook in his 80s long after surviving the annihilation of the Jewish population of his native Thessaloniki during the Holocaust (Armstrong 2025b). While the potential readership for such work is small (they were published with a facing Modern Hebrew translation), the historical implications of these translations are massive, as Ha‐Elion has effectively monumentalized the language of his liquidated community. He forged a new Ladino hexameter verse to render the texts of his Greek Gymnasium education, part of a national curriculum he undertook in his youth, though denied inclusion in the nationality.3 Here again, in this project, we had to concede the difficulty of finding competent scholars to address the full panoply of options, so our approach is necessarily selective. (iv) The seeming unity of the genre of classical epic is illusory, and we wished to avoid the facile victory of merely declaring for a narrow canon of authors since epic proves a far more varied and variable phenomenon even when we look just to the literatures of Greece and Rome. So even with the generic limits put in place, this volume was never meant to be exhaustive, but rather suggestive in its overall design, just as the Companion to Classical Receptions was. The truth is this is an exciting time to be thinking about epic and translation, and how the topics can advance the dialogue between classical reception studies, translation studies, and cultural history. It has been our hope that the student or colleague consulting this work will treat it far more as an invitation than a bible or handbook.

So, in the interests of clarity, let us state the overall aims of this Companion as reflected in its chapters. First, in terms of what this Companion is not: it is neither a “how to” manual explaining what translation of epic should be nor a handbook or survey listing the known translations of classical authors (though such things are extremely useful, see, e.g. Philip Young’s The Printed Homer [2003], Craig Kallendorf’s Bibliography of the Early Printed Editions of Virgil 1469–1850 [2012]). It does not claim to be a history of the translation of epic divided into discrete epochs or traditions, though again such historical projects are worthy endeavors, as the five‐volume Oxford History of Literary Translation into English (2005–) amply illustrates, or Susanna Braund and Zara Torlone’s Virgil and His Translators (2018) shows in more specific detail. This Companion is not a handbook on translation theory, though the reader will find intersections with translation theory throughout, and again, such books are indeed helpful and can readily be found, such as Jeremy Munday’s Introducing Translation Studies (fifth edition, 2022); Mona Baker and Gabriela Saldanha’s Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies (third edition, 2020); and Edwin Gentzler’s Contemporary Translation Theories (second edition, 2001) and Translation and Rewriting in the Age of Post‐Translation Studies (2017). Along with many scholars these days, we consider translation to be a “cluster concept” (Tymoczko 2014, 25–26), more of a spectrum of practices that range from the word‐for‐word trot or interlinear gloss to the more conventional translation text standing by itself, to the looser adaptation or rifacimento and the transmediation onto the stage or the screen (and now, even the video game). Consequently, while some essays will highlight very specific passages and wordings in traditional philological fashion, others will deal more with the situation of translators, the post‐translation effects of a given translation, or other concerns.4 We can summarize our Companion’s basic organization as follows:

Part 1

“Disciplinary Openings” (three chapters) seeks to orient any reader to the task at hand with general considerations of the fields of translation studies, reception studies, and epic. These are essays by leading scholars, percolations of many years of engagement, so though they are in a sense introductory, they are not elementary but rich in their implications and suggestions.

Part 2

“Explorations in Reception” is a collection of essays broken into five thematic subsections clustered around: (i) “philology, textuality, and ‘transformission’,” traditional concerns of classical studies (four chapters); (ii) “agency,” which explores the work of women translators and readers (three chapters); (iii) “edges and communities,” which addresses how translations constitute, challenge, and affect their intended audience (four chapters); (iv) “medium and performance,” which looks at the various ways translation moves across media, from modern book to stage to film (two chapters); and (v) “transvaluations and transgressions,” which looks more broadly at the passage of the source text into the new context of the target‐ or receiving culture (three chapters).

Part 3

“Dialogues with Translators” comprises discussions or interviews that approach from a more personal and practical angle what the translation of epic entails today for five translators. This section aims to focus on the agency and subjectivity of the translator against what has been decried as the “translator’s invisibility” (Venuti

2018

Part 4

“Future Prospects” is an essay by Alexandra Lianeri by way of envoi, looking toward the future of this area of study.

Our hope is that the variety of approaches represented here will excite the interest of the reader, opening unforeseen avenues for further study. Short introductions to each section (Chapters 2, 6, and 23) will help the reader navigate from section to section, so I forego any deeper synopsis of the volume in this introduction, though I end below in this essay with a description of its main thrust. In what follows, I wish to address three major subjects by way of thematic introduction: (i) Where does the translation of classical epic begin and how should that shape our understanding of it? (ii) How does the concept of genre affect or inform our understanding of translation? (iii) How might we think about translation in relation to reception studies as currently practiced and as the field of classical studies entertains a shift toward “global classics” and world literature?

Translation: The Ancient Practices and Precedents

We live in an age when most people have at first or exclusively encountered ancient epic poetry in translation. For some, this encounter leads to the study of Greek and Latin, and eventually the reading of the ancient source texts. But for most people, ancient epic literature is fundamentally a fact of translation; it exists in a field of translated texts, the size and composition of which varies from country to country and language to language, as does its place within the reader’s literary culture. It would be easy to assume this is just the condition of modern times when most people no longer study Greek and Latin sufficiently to have an intimate familiarity with these source texts. But it would be misleading to assume that translation was not already an issue in antiquity, or that the ancients had an effortless possession of their epic genre. This is most obviously false in the case of the Romans, who imported the genre entirely from Greece to begin with, and – among the social elite at least – enjoyed a bilingual literary culture where Greek epic remained fundamental (one thinks of Scipio Africanus quoting Homer in Greek at the destruction of Carthage).5 One of the first Latin literary texts was a rendition of Homer’s Odyssey by Livius Andronicus into Latin verse (mid‐third century BCE), which is often used to characterize Latin literature at birth as fundamentally shaped by processes of translation and adaptation from Greek literature (MacElduff 2013, ch. 2). The fact remains that translation, adaptation, and emulation are fundamental features of Roman literary culture that have been passed on to Western literature and inform its translation practices as well as its poetics (see Armstrong 2008).

However, Greek culture also had its processes of translation in relation to epic, but within the same language, something of which most general readers are not aware. For example, centuries of modern critical reflection on Homer and Virgil led to assumptions in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that Homeric poetry is something primary, radically “original,” and even naïve or “natural” in ways that Virgil’s carefully written poetry could not be, as if the ancient Greeks possessed Homer as effortlessly as sunshine. In the words of Gian Biagio Conte.

Homer was nature, he was spontaneous poetry, he was like a state of innocence, but also the touchstone for all the poetry that followed him. The mistake of the early Romantics was an error of history rather than of psychology: they were arguing in terms of natural substance, not of cultural product. (1999, 18)

But the twentieth century did much to overturn such notions with the realization that Homeric poetry is couched in a particular Kunstsprache or art‐language, which, according to influential scholars beginning with Milman Parry and Albert Lord, derives from oral epic performance long predating Greek literacy.6 The consequences of such an idea require us to reset how we think of translation as well as other notions like “originality” or “authorial intention” or even “literature” itself (on what this means for “tradition,” see especially Haubold 2007). The epic Kunstsprache was a divergent register of ancient Greek, a stylized and evolving literary dialect that was no one’s native language, yet came to be a powerful means of forging a common identity and culture among Greeks. Throughout antiquity, the Homeric poems were the basis of early education, learned reflection, and imitation, which made the peculiarities of its language both a regular hurdle on the way to enculturation and a signal to the initiated of cultural inclusion. Stephen Colvin characterizes the impression this dialect would make on an Athenian in these terms.

To an Athenian of the late fifth century it would have sounded predominantly Ionic, but dotted with forms that were reminiscent of Aeolic, and marked by the occasional word whose meaning was not at all clear, but which was nevertheless very familiar because he had heard it since early childhood. A substantial part of the vocabulary would have sounded “archaic” or “poetic,” that is, comprising words (or grammatical forms) which were not used in contemporary spoken Greek (or even the formal written Greek of prose texts). At the same time, like the language of the bible or of Shakespeare in the nineteenth‐century English‐speaking world, Greeks were saturated in the diction from their earliest years: not only from hearing and learning the poems, but also because their diction penetrated all later poetry (including Greek tragedy) and was part of a reservoir of sayings and proverbs. (2014, 117)

Initiation into this literary culture therefore involved two basic processes of translation: the glossing of archaic or difficult words and the paraphrasing of textual content. In fact, one of the comic poet Aristophanes’ first plays from around 427 BCE includes a scene where a father quizzes a son on the meaning of specific Homeric expressions like korumba “upper most point,” amenēna karēna “strengthless heads [of the dead],” and opuein “to wed” (fr. 233 PCG). Aristotle thought such rare or difficult words (glōttai) were best suited to the genre of epic since the iambic verse of drama is more like common speech and should eschew them (Poetics 1459a9‐10). The explication of individual words and expressions is a tradition that we can trace to at least the sixth century BCE and is a stable if piecemeal translational process that continued in various ways for over a thousand years in the form of interlinear or marginal glosses to the Homeric text, or in separate glossaries organized either in order of the words’ appearance or in alphabetical order. This glossographic material forms what Markus Dubischar called a kind of basso continuo of Greek literary scholarship in antiquity (2015, 582). In fact, glossaries of Homeric words are the most common form of Homeric papyrus after the texts themselves (Montanari 2012, 3).7 Our modern editions of Homer are based upon medieval Byzantine manuscripts, written by Greek scribes and scholars who had access to the ancient traditions of commentary and glosses, and who often preserve parts of these in scholia, marginal, or interlinear comments systematically placed alongside the Homeric texts.8 But many of these manuscripts also contain continuous prose Greek paraphrases, either interlineated (as in the Genavensis Graecus 44 manuscript, thirteenth century CE) or written on a facing page (as in the Escolialensis Ω.I.123 manuscript, eleventh century CE), in a form of literary Greek that mitigates the Homeric text’s more difficult language for the sake of comprehension.9 While classical scholars have pored over the Homeric texts in these manuscripts for decades, the paraphrases themselves have been largely neglected until recently, despite there being 57 manuscripts with paraphrases just for the Iliad alone (Vassis 1991, 16). The new philology of the internet may well change this as these medieval manuscripts become digitized and published online, like the recent digital edition of the Genavensis Graecus 44 manuscript that allows the user to see the Homeric text and paraphrase in parallel.10 The resulting change in approach may help us to see more readily that, as Anthony Makrinos says, “Homeric paraphrases are a long and continuous link in the history of the literary and linguistic tradition of the Homeric text” (2011, 626).

The point is that the constant appearance of glosses and paraphrases with the Homeric texts is something obscured by the modern print editions of Homer in the paradigmatic Oxford Classical Texts or Teubner series, which gives the impression of a “naked text” unmediated by any process of translation or explication. To a large extent, translation was always already a part of the epic tradition when we attend to the material and cultural features of its reception, beginning with the Greek rhapsodes of the late Archaic period (ca. sixth century BCE), who explained obscure expressions to their audiences.11 The peculiar mixture of Aeolic and Ionic dialects in the epic Kunstsprache may suggest oral performers long before the rhapsodes were already shifting their performances as the material crossed dialect zones in a kind of “code‐switching” that is common in areas of dialectal diversity (Bakker 2020, 75). Thus translation, we might say, is an inherent consequence of the genre itself, since the epic language in Greece was a special register that emerged from dialectal diversity and metrical and poetic conventions, which over time needed more and more explication, not just because Greek became an international language with the coming of the Hellenistic and Roman Imperial Ages and more non‐Greeks were learning it (e.g. in Egypt, see Morgan 1998, 74–89). Another linguistic factor was the increasing condition of diglossia that native Greek speakers came to experience for many centuries, whereby their daily spoken language and the language of high literacy diverged ever more (Browning 1982). In fact, the continued reverence for the Homeric texts throughout antiquity and into the Byzantine era can be credited to this tradition of internal, intralingual translation. Without it, the Homeric poems might have fallen into a scenario of neglect and obscurity as happened with Beowulf, a text already unintelligible in Chaucer’s day, which was only gradually reintroduced into English literature in the nineteenth century.

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