A Century of Translating Poetry

This paper examines the huge gender disparity in contemporary literary translation from Greek

and Roman texts into English, despite the fact that more women than men receive PhD's in

classical studies (IHE 2017), and identifies two main causes.

The first is a failure of institutions (academy, press, publishing industry) to support and nurture

women translators. At the same time, readers, scholars and students enable the unexamined

gender biases of male translators. Translation is undervalued in the elite academy: we are

Literary translations of the Classics constitute a very powerful cultural practice, which is

capable of repositioning the ancient texts in the current canon of poetical texts. Literary

translations are also open to different possibilities of performance, especially when the

materiality of the poetic results is focused and enhanced by experiments on the stage, be

it in theatrical, musical or experimental ways. Here I intend to discuss and analyze the

relationship between literary translation and performance through the examples of

In this talk, I argue that modern English translations of Catullus aim to create poetry that appeals to diverse audiences and reads as distinctly contemporary at the expense of the preservation or representation of the source text. To illustrate my argument, I focus on the deployment of two practices in particular: euphemism and dysphemism.

Recalling the attitude toward literary translations of classical texts that prevailed when he was a young academic, Moses Hadas (1900-1966)

This paper discusses an almost forgotten set of early Modernist translations of classical texts: The Poets’ Translation Series, published in 1915-16 and 1919-20. The paper analyzes the Series’ stated goals and the unstated assumptions about translation theory that those goals imply, and argues that these unassuming little pamphlets delineated and engaged with issues that would become crucial in 20th-century translation.