Translation as Transformation in Victorian Poetry

by Annmarie Drury

Overview

Translation as Transformation in Victorian Poetry illuminates the dynamic mutual influences of poetic and translation cultures in Victorian Britain, drawing on new materials, archival and periodical, to reveal the range of thinking about translation in the era. The results are a new account of Victorian translation and fresh readings both of canonical poems (including those by Browning and Tennyson) and of non-canonical poems (including those by Michael Field). Revealing Victorian poets to be crucial agents of intercultural negotiation in an era of empire, Annmarie Drury shows why and how meter matters so much to them, and locates the origins of translation studies within Victorian conundrums. She explores what it means to 'sound Victorian' in twentieth-century poetic translation, using Swahili as a case study, and demonstrates how and why it makes sense to consider Victorian translation as world literature in action.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781107079243
Publisher:	Cambridge University Press
Publication date:	05/05/2015
Series:	Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture , #99
Pages:	309
Product dimensions:	6.22(w) x 9.25(h) x 0.79(d)

About the Author

Annmarie Drury is Assistant Professor of English at Queens College, City University of New York. Many of her own poems have appeared in The Paris Review, Raritan, and the Western Humanities Review. She has also published translations of, and essays on, Swahili poetry. Her book Stray Truths: Selected Poems of Euphrase Kezilahabi (2015), offers translations of the Tanzanian writer's poetry.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Victorian translations, poetic transformations; 1. Discovering a Victorian culture of translation; 2. Idylls of the King, the Mabinogion, and Tennyson's faithless melancholy; 3. In poetry and translation, Browning's case for innovation; 4. The Rubáiyát and its compass; 5. The persistence of Victorian translation practice: William Hichens and the Swahili world; Epilogue: Victorian translators and 'the epoch of world literature'; Bibliography.

Editorial Reviews

'This book captures some of the many reasons why it's an exciting time to be a scholar of the British nineteenth century. … An important contribution to our emerging understanding of historical poetics. I hope other scholars consider [Annmarie Drury's] methods and continue the work of making Victorian poetry a more complex and world-conscious field of study.' Jason Rudy, Review 19 (www.nbol-19.org)

'… Annmarie Drury’s welcome book, a patiently transformative study of the transformative power of translation.' Matthew Reynolds, Review of English Studies

'… a welcome addition to our resources for understanding the multi-layered negotiations embedded within the Anglophone lyric.' Rhian Williams, English Studies

'Drury’s book is also perforce engaged with political questions about imperial subjugation and the global distribution of power, as expressed in linguistic terms. One of the valuable aspects of Drury’s book is its attention not just to Victorian translation practice but also to the theories of translation, implicit and explicit, that were developed and enacted in this era, predominantly in the periodical press.' William A. Cohen, Victorian Literature and Culture

From the Publisher