Translation and the Classic

Through a range of accessible and innovative chapters dealing with a spectrum of genres, authors, and periods, this volume seeks to examine the complex relationship between translation and the classic, and how translation makes and remakes (and sometimes invents) classic works for new audiences across space and time.

Translation and the Classic is the first volume in a two-volume series examining how classic works fare in translation, how translation is different when it engages with classic texts, and how classic texts can be shaped, understood in new ways, or even created through the process of translation. Although other collections have covered some of this territory, they have done so in partial ways or with a focus on Greek, Roman, and Arabic texts or translations. This collection alone takes the reader from 1000 BCE up to the digital age in a sequence of chapters that encompass areas including philosophy, children’s literature, and pseudotranslation. It asks us to consider translation not just as a mechanism of distribution, but as one of the primary ways that the classic is created and understood by multiple audiences.

This book is essential reading for those taking Translation Studies courses at the senior undergraduate and postgraduate level, as well as courses outside Translation Studies such as Comparative Literature and Literary Studies.

Paul F. Bandia is Professor of Translation Studies in the Department of French at Concordia University, Montreal, Canada, and Associate Fellow, W.E.B. Du Bois Institute at the Hutchins Center, Harvard University. His key publications include Translation as Reparation: Writing and Translation in Postcolonial Africa (Routledge), Orality and Translation (Routledge), and Writing and Translating Francophone Discourses.

James Hadley is Ussher Assistant Professor in Literary Translation at the Trinity Centre for Literary Translation and the School of Languages, Literatures, and Cultural Studies at Trinity College Dublin. His key publications include Systematically Analysing Indirect Translations (Routledge), Using Technologies for Creative-Text Translation (Routledge), and A Gap in the Clouds.

Siobhán McElduff is Associate Professor of Latin Language and Literature at the University of British Columbia. Her key publications include Roman Theories of Translation (Routledge), Cicero: In Defence of the Republic, and she is co-editor of Complicating the History of Western Translation (Routledge).