Virgil and his Translators

Susanna Braund · Zara Martirosova Torlone

Oct 2018 · Oxford University Press

About this ebook

This is the first volume to offer a critical overview of the long and complicated history of translations of Virgil from the early modern period to the present day, transcending traditional studies of single translations or particular national traditions in isolation to offer an insightful comparative perspective. The twenty-nine essays in the collection cover numerous European languages - from English, French, and German, to Greek, Irish, Italian, Norwegian, Slovenian, and Spanish - but also look well beyond Europe to include discussion of Brazilian, Chinese, Esperanto, Russian, and Turkish translations of Virgil. While the opening two contributions lay down a broad theoretical and comparative framework, the majority conduct comparisons within a particular language and combine detailed case studies with in-depth contextualization and theoretical background, showing how the translations discussed are embedded in their own cultures and historical moments. The final two essays are written from the perspective of contemporary translators, closing out the volume with a profound assessment not only of the influence exerted by the major Roman poet on later literature, but also why translation of a canonical author such as Virgil matters, not only as a national and transnational cultural phenomenon, but as a personal engagement with a literature of enduring power and relevance.

About the author

Susanna Braund moved to the University of British Columbia in 2007 to take up a Canada Research Chair in Latin Poetry and its Reception after teaching previously at Stanford, Yale, London, Bristol, and Exeter. She received her BA and PhD from the University of Cambridge. She has published extensively on Roman satire, Latin epic poetry, and the passions in Roman thought, and has translated Lucan for the Oxford World's Classics series, Persius and Juvenal for the Loeb Classical Library, and also three of Seneca's tragedies. She was a Visiting Scholar at the Coll?ge de France in 2014 and won a Killam Research Fellowship in the 2016 national competition for her project 'Virgil Translated'. Zara Martirosova Torlone is a Professor in the Department of Classics at Miami University, Ohio. She received her BA in Classical Philology from Moscow University and her PhD in Classics from Columbia University. She is the author of Russia and the Classics: Poetry's Foreign Muse (Duckworth, 2009), Latin Love Poetry (co-authored with Denise McCoskey; I.B. Tauris, 2014), and Vergil in Russia: National Identity and Classical Reception (OUP, 2015), as well as articles on Roman poetry and the novel, the Russian reception of antiquity, Roman games, and textual criticism. Her most recent publication is the co-edited volume A Handbook to Classical Reception in Eastern and Central Europe (with Dana LaCourse Munteanu and Dorota Dutsch; Wiley-Blackwell, 2017), to which she also contributed.