Creative Classical Translation

This Element surveys transmissions of ancient Greek and Latin texts into anglophone literatures, often straddling boundaries between translational responsibility and adaptive, re-creative textual practices. Attention to manifestations of and reasons for versioning, retranslation, hybridity, and translation as experiment, compels an introductory discussion of evolving tendencies of classical reception; with particular dispositions relating to a sociocultural context such as that of the United States observed in Section 3. The role paratexts play in the dialogue between scholarship, literary art, and performance, is the focus of Section 4, while Section 2 presents readers with a range of English responses to Homer. Creativity through sites and positions of translation is a defining feature of the workings of literary traditions; and of antiquity and modernity, in constant dialogue. This Element explores numerous textual manifestations and reasons for invention, along with integrations of thinking on classical translation over the centuries, helping shape present-day translation studies. Cover 1 Title page 3 Copyright page 4 Creative Classical Translation 5 Contents 6 1 By Way of the Classics 7 Entanglements of Theory and Practice 7 Strains, Sites, Shades, and Settings 11 Theatrical Spaces and the Global Antigone 16 From the Many Lives of Versions 20 2 Conductors of Homer 25 Hearers and Readers 25 An Anglo-American Series 28 Forms of Delivery 32 Orality As Creativity 35 3 American Arrangements 38 The Classical and the Political 38 The Shade of Virgil 45 Versions, Subversions, Fusions, and Redirections 49 4 Paratextual Possessions 55 The Translation(s) in the Paratext 55 Force in Numbers 60 Classical Paratexts As Performance 65 References 71 Acknowledgements 86 About the Author 87