English Translation and Classical Reception

English Translation and Classical Reception is the first genuine cross-disciplinary study bringing English literary history to bear on questions about the reception of classical literary texts, and vice versa. The text draws on the author’s exhaustive knowledge of the subject from the early Renaissance to the present. The first book-length study of English translation as a topic in classical reception Draws on the author’s exhaustive knowledge of English literary translation from the early Renaissance to the present Argues for a remapping of English literary history which would take proper account of the currently neglected history of classical translation, from Chaucer to the present Offers a widely ranging chronological analysis of English translation from ancient literatures Previously little-known, unknown, and sometimes suppressed translated texts are recovered from manuscripts and explored in terms of their implications for English literary history and for the interpretation of classical literature

Preface vi Acknowledgements viii Note on Texts x 1. Making the Classics Belong: A Historical Introduction 1 2. Creative Translation 20 3. English Renaissance Poets and the Translating Tradition 33 4. Two-Way Reception: Shakespeare’s Influence on Plutarch 47 5 Transformative Translation: Dryden’s Horatian Ode 60 6. Statius and the Aesthetics of Eighteenth-Century Poetry 76 7. Classical Translation and the Formation of the English Literary Canon 93 8. Evidence for an Alternative History: Manuscript Translations of the Long Eighteenth Century 104 9. Receiving Wordsworth, Receiving Juvenal: Wordsworth’s Suppressed Eighth Satire 123 10. The Persistence of Translations: Lucretius in the Nineteenth Century 150 11. ‘Oddity and struggling dumbness’: Ted Hughes’s Homer 163 12. Afterword 180 References 183 Index of Ancient Authors and Passages 200 General Index 203