Tradition, Trauma, Translation is concerned with how Classic texts – mainly Greek and Latin but also Arabic and Portuguese – become present in later cultures and how they resonate in the modern. A distinguished international team of contributors and responders examine the topic in different ways. Some discuss singular encounters with the Classic – those of Heaney, Pope, Fellini, Freud, Ibn Qutayba, Cavafy and others – and show how translations engage with the affective impact of texts over time and space. Poet-translator contributors draw on their own experience here. Others offer images of translation: as movement of a text over time, space, language, and culture. Some of these images are resistant, even violent: tradition as silencing, translation as decapitation, cannibalistic reception. Others pose searching questions about the interaction of modernity with tradition: what is entailed in ‘The Price of the Modern’? Drawing, as it does, on Classical, Modernist, Translation, Reception, Comparative Literary, and Intercultural Studies, the volume has the potential to suggest critiques of practice in these disciplines but also concerns that are common to all these fields.

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