The Poetry of Translation

Matthew Reynolds is author of The Realms of Verse (2001) and of Designs for a Happy Home: A Novel in Ten Interiors (2009). He has co-edited a book of translations, Dante in English (2005), revised the translation of Manzoni's The Betrothed (1997), and for several years chaired the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize. He writes frequently for the London Review of Books.

• I. TRANSLATION AND METAPHOR ; 1. The Scope of Translation ; 2. Translating Within and Between Languages ; 3. Translation and Paraphrase ; 4. Translating the Language of Literature ; 5. Words for Translation ; 6. Metaphors for Translation ; 7. The Roots of Translatorly Metaphors ; II. TRANSLATION AS 'INTERPRETATION,' AS 'PARAPHRASE,' AND AS 'OPENING' ; 8. Are translations interpretations? Gadamer, Lowell and some contemporary poem-translations ; 9. Interpretation and 'Opening:' Dryden, Chapman, and early translations from the Bible ; 10. 'Paraphrase' from Erasmus to 'Venus T--d' ; 11. Dryden, Behn and what is 'secretly in the poet' ; 12. Dryden's Aeneis: 'a thousand secret beauties' ; 13. Dryden's Dido: 'somewhat I find within' ; III. TRANSLATION AS 'FRIENDSHIP,' AS 'DESIRE,' AND AS 'PASSION' ; 14. Translating an Author: Denham, Katherine Philips, Dryden, Cowper ; 15. The Author as Intimate: Roscommon, Philips, Pope, Francklin, Lucretius, Dryden, FitzGerald, Untermeyer ; 16. Erotic Translation: Theocritus, Dryden, Ovid, Richard Duke, Tasso, Fairfax, Petrarch, Charlotte Smith, Sappho, Swinburne ; 17. Love again: Sappho, Addison, Ambrose Philips, Dryden, Petrarch, Chaucer, Wyatt, Tasso, Fairfax, Ariosto, Harington, Byron ; 18. Byron's Adulterous Fidelity ; 19. Pope's Iliad: The Hurry of Passion ; IV. TRANSLATION AND THE LANDSCAPE OF THE PAST ; 20. Pope's Iliad: a 'comprehensive View' ; 21. Some perspectives after Pope: Keats, Tennyson, Browning, Pound, Michael Longley ; 22. Epic Zoom: Christopher Logue's Homer (with Anne Carson's Stesichorus and Seamus Heaney's Beowulf) ; V. TRANSLATION AS 'LOSS,' AS 'DEATH,' AS 'RESURRECTION,' AND AS 'METAMORPHOSIS' ; 23. Ezra Pound: 'My job was to bring a dead man to life' ; 24. FitzGerald's Rubaiyat: 'a Thing must live' ; 25. The Metamorphoses of Arthur Golding (which lead to some Conclusions)

Wide-ranging and very readable ... He writes clearly, and the opening chapters offer friendly and careful negotiations of a fairly complex range of theoretical positions, accessibly introduced ... Reynolds does much to elucidate the relationship between the received wisdom about a text and the metaphors for translation that are applied to it.