When, between dawn and about nine o’clock one October morning in 1816, John Keats composed ‘On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer’, he had parted from a night of poetic enthusiasm spent with his friend Charles Cowden Clarke in Clerkenwell. They had been looking into and reading out passages from a ca. 1614 edition of George Chapman’s translation of theIliadandOdyssey, which had been borrowed from Thomas Alsager (a friend of Leigh Hunt’s) by Cowden Clarke: ‘and to work we went, turning to some of the “famousest” passages, as we had scrappily known them in Pope’s version’.¹ Cowden Clarke...

Robert Frost’s is the most famous and widely diffused aphorism on translating, or not translating, poetry. He is reported to have said that ‘poetry is what gets left out in translation’¹ according to one authority, or what gets ‘lost’ in translation, more usually. The remark appears in variant forms on a number of Internet sites, though it appears not to have a source in Frost’s published prose writings.² The remark, quoted by Louis Untermeyer in 1964, is given as ‘Poetry is what is lost in translation. It is also what is lost in interpretation’ inThe Oxford Dictionary of Modern...

‘Bless thee, Bottom, bless thee. Thou art translated’,¹ exclaims Peter Quince inA Midsummer Night’s Dream. In the well-known scene, Bottom the Weaver, his head metamorphosed to that of an ass, encounters his fellow players. Here the word ‘translated’ might equally need translating into ‘transformed’.² Charles Nicholl translates a 1586 use of the word from the fashion trade reporting a payment for ‘translating [altering] & mending of an attyre for the hed’.³ Translators can do no other than alter, but unlike this headgear transformation and that of Bottom’s head, the translation of a poem or other verbal artifact will be...

In Mary Elizabeth Braddon’sAurora Floyd, the eponymous heroine’s cousin Lucy feels for Talbot, the man she loves, intuiting from his behaviour that Aurora has rejected his marriage proposal. Yet her feelings are themselves misunderstood, for Talbot ‘could read pity in that tender look, but possessed no lexicon by which he could translate its deeper meaning.’¹ Earlier the same man is described as falling in love with Aurora before he realizes it: ‘Lucy knew, in short, that which as yet Talbot did not know himself: she knew that he was fast falling over head and ears in love with her...

Remembering the murderous nineteen-thirties, Nadezhda Mandelstam reports her husband’s answer to a question about Acmeism, the poetic alliance he had belonged to in his youth, a group that included Anna Akhmatova and her husband Nicolay Gumilyov:

To the question: ‘What is Acmeism?’ M. once replied: ‘Nostalgia for world culture.’ This was in the thirties, either in the Press House in Leningrad or at the lecture he gave to the Voronezh branch of the Union of Writers — on the same occasion when he also declared that he would disown neither the living nor the dead. Shortly after this he wrote: ‘And...

‘I wonder if you read much foreign poetry?’ ‘Foreignpoetry? No!’¹ Philip Larkin’s reply to Ian Hamilton’s question has not only been taken as expressing an attitude to reading poetry written in other languages, but as a riposte which (in just three words) catches Larkin’s adopted posture of the little Englander. While it has not been difficult to show that his reply will mislead, if taken as conveying information about some of his reading experiences and their impact on his poetry, it has been less easy to relieve Larkin of the prejudicial in the formulation of that reply. The publication...

At the same moment Osip Mandestam described Acmeism as nostalgia for world culture, he declared, according to his widow, that ‘he would disown neither the living nor the dead.’¹ A final aspect of translation that I consider here is that performed by moving imaginatively across the boundary line Edmund Waller described in his farewell poem: ‘Leaving the old, both worlds at once they view, / That stand upon the threshold of the new.’² My chapter title’s wording comes from the 1662 AnglicanBook of Common Prayerversion of the Apostles’ Creed (‘from thence he shall come to judge the quick...