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The Oxford History of Literary Translation in English, Volume 4: 1790-1900 (review)

Under the general editorship of Peter France and Stuart Gillespie, Oxford University Press has embarked upon the production of a comprehensive five-volume history of literary translation in English from its beginnings to the end of the last millennium. The aim announced in the Editors’ Foreword is ‘to present for the first time a critical and historical overview of the development of this art or craft in the English-speaking world’. Already in this succinct statement of account one is faced with a familiar hesitation, part caveat and part aporia, about the very status of translation as techne. This is a critical and historical project, though, and theoretical niceties of definition do not detain the editors and the other contributors for long. Accordingly, the vexed question of what defines a literary translation is solved with a Gordian cut: ‘we use the word “literary” in the broad old sense which it has still not completely lost, to encompass something like the full range of non-technical work which has made up the reading of the literate public’ (also from the General Editors’ Foreword). Literary translation, then, is a techne, an art or craft as the dictionary defines it, but one that concerns itself exclusively with the ‘non-technical’. There is evidence here – in the clashing senses of what constitutes technique – of linguistic process, the arc of erasure and inscription that the evolution of a living language entails: growth, but also shrinkage, ‘the broad old sense ... still not completely lost’. Loss is a concept that has dogged the course of translation in recent times, the more so the more ‘literary’ a translation has claimed itself to be, but in the reference to the ‘broad old sense’ one detects a defensiveness, a retrenchment, in the face of an opponent that approaches from a new direction. The name of the opposition is Translation Studies, which in the past decade or two has extended its territorial reach and hegemonic control over ‘literary translation’ at the expense of Comparative Literature, which had earlier assumed it owned Reviews