This groundbreaking five-volume history runs from the Middle Ages to the year 2000. It is a critical history, treating translations wherever appropriate as literary works in their own right, and reveals the vital part played by translators and translation in shaping the literary culture of the English-speaking world, both for writers and readers. It thus offers new and often challenging perspectives on the history of literature in English. As well as examining the translations and their wider impact, it explores the processes by which they came into being and were disseminated, and provides...

This book, written by a team of experts from many countries, provides a comprehensive account of the ways in which translation has brought the major literatures of the world into English-speaking culture. Part I discusses theoretical issues and gives an overview of the history of translation into English. Part II, the bulk of the work, arranged by language of origin, offers critical discussions, with bibliographies, of the translation history of specific texts (e.g. the Koran, the Kalevala), authors (e.g. Lucretius, Dostoevsky), genres (e.g. Chinese poetry, twentieth-century Italian prose)...