Richard Armstrong

Alexandra Lianeri

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.

A Companion to the Translation of Classical Epic

Vanda Zajko

This collection of 18 essays, including one by Nobel Prize winning author J.M. Coetzee, explores the fascinating and nuanced relationship between translation and the classic text.

Identity as Change in the History of Culture

Translation and the Classic

From the early modern period, Greek historiography has been studied in the context of Cicero's notion historia magistra vitae and considered to exclude conceptions of the future as different from the present and past. Comparisons with the Roman, Judeo-Christian and modern historiography have sought to justify this perspective by drawing on a category of the future as a temporal mode that breaks with the present. In this volume, distinguished classicists and historians challenge this contention by raising the question of what the future was and meant in antiquity by offering fresh considerations of prognostic and anticipatory voices in Greek historiography from Herodotus to Appian and by tracing the roots of established views on historical time in the opposition between antiquity and modernity. They look both at contemporary scholarly argument and the writings of Greek historians in order to explore the relation of time, especially the future, to an idea of the historical that is formulated in the plural and is always in motion. By reflecting on the prognostic of historical time the volume will be of interest not only to classical scholars, but to all who are interested in the history and theory of historical time.

Knowing Future Time In and Through Greek Historiography

Contemporary translation studies have explored translation not as a means of recovering a source text, but as a process of interpretation and production of literary meaning and value. Translation and the Classic uses this idea to discuss the relationship between translation and the classic text. It proposes a framework in which 'the classic' figures less as an autonomous entity than as the result of the interplay between source text and translation practice and examines the consequences of this hypothesis for questioning established definitions of the classic: how does translation mediate the social, political and national uses of 'the classics' in the contemporary global context of changing canons and traditions? The volume contains a total of eighteen original essays, plus an introduction, written by scholars working in classics and classical reception, translation studies, literary theory, comparative literature, theatre and performance studies, history and philosophy and makes a potent contribution to pressing debates in all of these areas.

Alexandra Lianeri

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