Mind the Gap: Some Issues in Poetic Translation and Literary History

• In Event: Translating Epic and Lyric

Abstract

This talk examines certain gaps in the history of England’s literary appropriations via translation; what isn’t translated, and what doesn’t work in translation, is almost as illuminating in literary history as what is. Although poetic translation was acknowledged and encouraged as a chief means of building national literatures, and although poets duly practiced a muscular, flexible, creative imitatio, there are significant gaps between the poetic practices of one nation and another, particularly in the history of lyric translation. These gaps appear at every level (meter, form, and genre, as well as whole movements). Attention to what is missing (and to what misses) between ca. 1440–1633—e.g. the absence of French farce translations in Tudor England, or the long-delayed arrival of the formal ode in English—reveals otherwise invisible contours of developing English poetic styles, generic tastes, and formal habits. Specific examples will come mostly from lyric poets in France and England.

Author

• Anne E. B. Coldiron, University of St Andrews