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Iberian and Translation Studies: Literary Contact Zones offers fertile reflection on the dynamics of linguistic diversity and multifaceted literary translation flows taking place across the Iberian Peninsula. Drawing on cutting-edge theoretical perspectives from a comparative standpoint and on a historically diverse body of case studies, the volume’s sixteen chapters explore the key role of translation in shaping interliterary relations and cultural identities within Iberia. Mary Louise Pratt’s contact zone metaphor is used as an overarching concept to approach Iberia as a translation(al) space where languages and cultural systems (Basque, Catalan, Galician, Portuguese, and Spanish) set up relationships either of conflict, coercion, and resistance or of collaboration, hospitality, and solidarity. In bringing together a variety of essays by multilingual scholars whose conceptual and empirical research places itself at the intersection of translation and literary Iberian studies, the book opens up a new interdisciplinary field of enquiry: Iberian translation studies. This allows for a renewed study of canonical authors such as Joan Maragall, Fernando Pessoa, Camilo José Cela, and Bernardo Atxaga, and calls attention to emerging bilingual contemporary voices. In addition to addressing understudied genres (the entremez and the picaresque novel) and the specific phenomena of self-translation, indirect translation, and collaborative translation, the book provides fresh insights into Iberian cultural agents, mediators, and institutions such as publishing houses and theatre companies. Iberian and Translation Studies: Literary Contact Zones is indispensable reading for those interested in Iberian studies, translation studies, in particular the history of translation in the Iberian Peninsula, and comparative literature.

The first sustained exegesis of a neglected masterpiece of twentieth-century literature, Samuel Beckett’s How It Is. This book maps out the novel’s complex network of intertexts, sources and echoes, interprets its highly experimental writing and explains the work’s great significance for twentieth-century literature. It offers a clear pathway into this remarkable bilingual novel, identifying Beckett’s use of previously unknown sources in the history of Western philosophy, from the ancient and modern periods, and challenging critical orthodoxies. Through careful archival scholarship and attention to the dynamics of self-translation, the book traces Beckett’s transformation of his narrator’s ‘ancient voice’, his intellectual heritage, into a mode of aesthetic representation that offers the means to think beyond intractable paradoxes of philosophy. This shift in the work’s relation to tradition marks a hiatus in literary modernism, a watershed moment whose deep and enduring significance may now be appreciated.

With over 6000 languages in the world today, media speak is far from universal, yet the complexities of translation are rarely acknowledged by the industry, or by audiences and scholars. Redressing this neglect, Speaking in Subtitles aregues that the oddities and idiosyncrasies of translation are vital to screen media’s global address. Examining a range of examples from crowdsourced subtitling to avant-garde dubbing to the growing field of ‘fansubbing’, Tessa Dwyer proposes that film, television and video are fundamentally ‘translational’ media. The case studies in this book explore areas of practice that lie beyond the parameters of professional, ‘quality’ practice and are consequently identified as ‘improper’, such as anime fandom, crowdsourced translation, censorship and media piracy. They demonstrate that in many contexts, issues of speed, access, commerce and control take precedence over considerations of quality. These errant modes of screen translation are becoming increasingly paradigmatic of the current translation and media environments, as they become less controlled and more communal in response to new digital technologies and the decentralising impulses of globalisation. By focusing on lines of ‘errancy’ rather than fidelity, this monograph highlights elements of screen translation that are regularly passed over by other studies in order to re-conceptualise questions of cultural value.

Yehuda Amichai (1924-2000) was the foremost Israeli poet of the 20th century and an internationally influential literary figure. The Full Severity of Compassion is a modular retrospective of Amichai's poetic project. It depicts the poet's life-long struggle against all hierarchical systems of privilege and exclusion, and his search for an alternative “language of love,” as he calls it. The book explores Amichai's fierce avant-garde egalitarianism at it is expressed in a commitment to both accessibility and daring experimentation. Through a series of close readings, the book discusses issues in contemporary literary studies, always theorizing from, rather than into, Amichai's poetry.

This volume examines how, why and with what success smaller European literatures – written in less well-known languages from less familiar traditions – endeavour through translation to reach international readers. It argues that prevailing nation- and world-centred theoretical approaches have failed to provide an adequate understanding of the international circulation of these literatures, and instead advocates and models a comparative, interdisciplinary approach that consistently tests theory against concrete experience and practice, and combines literary, historiographical and translation methodologies to produce a far more precise analysis of the strategies, motivations, obstacles and patterns that emerge as these literatures strive to be heard. Through case studies drawn from over thirteen national contexts from Scandinavia and the Low Countries to the Mediterranean and Central and Eastern Europe, the volume analyses how the international perceptions of these literatures are disadvantaged and distorted in theory, reception and industry practice, evaluates successes and failures as these literatures, through state and third-sector intervention and individual innovation, attempt to overcome their marginalization, and charts how the mould of our perception of these literatures might be broken.

This book considers the global responses Woolf’s work has inspired and her worldwide impact. The 23 chapters address the ways Woolf is received by writers, publishers, academics, reading audiences, and students in countries around the world; how she is translated into multiple languages; and how her life is transformed into global contemporary biofiction. The 24 authors hail from regions around the world: West and East Europe, the Middle East/North Africa, North and South America, East Asia and the Pacific Islands. They write about Woolf’s reception in Ireland, France, Italy, Germany, Poland, Estonia, Russia, Egypt, Kenya, Mexico, Argentina, Uruguay, Brazil, the United States, China, Japan and Australia. The Edinburgh Companion is dialogic and comparative, incorporating both transnational and local tendencies insofar as they epitomise Woolf’s global reception and legacy. It contests the ‘centre’ and ‘periphery’ binary, offering new models for Woolf global studies and promoting cross-cultural understandings.

This is a study of the translation and reception of the Roman historian Livy in early-modern England. The work examines the four Tudor translations of Livy’s history of Rome, the Ab Urbe Condita, into the English vernacular during the sixteenth century and their engagements with the most pressing political and cultural debates of the day, from Henrician appropriations of Hannibal to arguments over the status of women. The first chapter examines Livy’s initial reception into print in Europe, outlining the attempts of his earliest editors to impose a critical order onto his enormous work. The subsequent chapters consider the respective translations undertaken by Anthony Cope, William Thomas, William Painter, and Philemon Holland, situating them among the wider trends in Classical Reception during the early-modern era. Each translation is compared in detail with the Latin original, highlighting the changes Livy’s history experienced in the process of translation. The study considers how these translations responded to and were shaped by the most recent developments in European scholarship on Livy’s history and classical historiography more generally. So too the study examines Livy’s impact on more popular forms of English literature during the Renaissance, especially the works of Shakespeare. Ultimately this research demonstrates that Livy played a fundamental though underexplored role in the development of vernacular literature, historiography, and political thought in early-modern England.