Translation in Anthologies and Collections (19th and 20th Centuries)

Among the numerous discursive carriers through which translations come into being, are channeled and gain readership, translation anthologies and collections have so far received little attention among translation scholars: either they are let aside as almost ungraspable categories, astride editing and translating, mixing in most variable ways authors, genres, languages or cultures, or are taken as convenient but rather meaningless groupings of single translations. This volume takes a new stand, makes a plea to consider translation anthologies and collections at face value and offers an extensive discussion about the more salient aspects of translation anthologies and collections: their complex discursive properties, their manifold roles in canonization processes and in strategies of cultural censorship. It brings together translation scholars with different backgrounds, both theoretical and historical, and covering a wide array of European cultural areas and linguistic traditions. Of special interest for translation theoreticians and historians as well as for scholars in literary and cultural studies, comparative literature and transfer studies.

Roxana Birsanu, Romanian-American University, Bucharest, on Linguist List 25.2520 (2014):
Translation in Anthologies and Collections (19th and 20th centuries) has the great merit of approaching a field of research which has been largely ignored or poorly explored so far, i.e. anthologies. Long considered marginal, and, as such, underresearched by scholars, anthologies are studied from various stands and in distinct historical, cultural and literary contexts. The approach is all the more original and useful since it studies anthologies from a translation perspective. The editors’ purpose of presenting anthologies as “spaces for intercultural encounters, forms of creative rewriting, as domestic offers of a partial canon for a given area of a foreign culture, be it an author, nation, literary genre, specific domain or other” (Foreword, viii) is fully achieved, considering that the contributions cover a wide range of literary genres, intercultural perspectives and transnational translation and editorial policies. [...] The editors are to be thanked for bringing to the fore a neglected area of research in Translation Studies, thus enriching the bibliography on the topic, and broadening scholarly work on anthologies in terms of translations.