Tradition, Translation, Trauma

The Classic and the Modern

Edited by Jan Parker and Timothy Mathews

Classical Presences

Explores the relevance of traditional notions of canon, classical tradition, translation, and modernity
Presents the experiences of translation studies as a model for interdisciplinary thought and critical writing in the Humanities
Contextualized and theorized close readings and case studies show the engagement with texts to be an engagement with ideas
Includes specially written Prologue by Susan Bassnett, and Epilogue by Derek Attridge

Tradition, Translation, Trauma

The Classic and the Modern

Edited by Jan Parker and Timothy Mathews

Description

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.

Tradition, Translation, Trauma

The Classic and the Modern

Edited by Jan Parker and Timothy Mathews

Classical Presences

Prologue, Susan Bassnett
Introduction: Images of Tradition, Translation, Trauma . . ., Jan Parker
I. Handing on, Making Anew, Refusing the Classic
Proemion: Translating a Paean of Praise, Frederick Ahl
1. Fuzzy Connections: Classical Texts and Modern Poetry in English, Lorna Hardwick
2. Pope's Trojan Geography, David Hopkins
3. Sophoclean Journeys, Pat Easterling
4. Cicero: Gentleman and Orator: Metaphors in Eighteenth Century Reception, Matthew Fox
5. Eating Eumolpus: Fellini Satyricon and Dreaming Tradition, Richard Armstrong
6. After Freud. Sophocles's Oedipus in the Twenty-First Century, Rachel Bowlby
II. Modernity and its Price: Nostalgia and the Classic
7. The Price of the Modern: Walter Benjamin and Counterfactuals, Christopher Prendergast
8. Composite Cultures, Chaos Wor(l)ds: Relational Poetics, Textual Hybridity, and the Future of Opacity, Jonathan Monroe
9. Time, Free Verse and the Gods of Modernism, Ian Patterson
10. Lost in Nostalgia: Modernity's Repressed Other, Wen-Chin Ouyang
III. The Time of Memory, the Time of Trauma
11. No Consolation: The Lamenting Voice and Public Memory, Gail Holst-Warhaft
12. The Abject Eidos: Trauma and the Body in Sophocles' Electra, Jane Montgomery Griffiths
13. What's Hecuba to him . . . that he should weep for her?, Jan Parker
14. Modernism's Nostalgics, Nostalgia's Modernity, George Rousseau
15. Mediating Trauma: How Do We Read the Holocaust Memoirs?, Piotr Kuhiwczak
16. History as Traumatic Memory: Das Africas, Helena Buescu
17. Reading the Invisible with Cess Nooteboom, Walter Benjamin and Alberto Giacometti, Timothy Mathews
Conclusion: Can Anyone Look in Both Directions at Once?, Timothy Mathews
Epilogue, Derek Attridge

Tradition, Translation, Trauma

The Classic and the Modern

Edited by Jan Parker and Timothy Mathews

Classical Presences

Author Information

Jan Parker is Senior Research Fellow, Institute of Education Technology, Open University

Timothy Mathews is Professor of French and Comparative Criticism, University College, London

Contributors:

Frederick Ahl, Cornell University
Richard Armstrong, University of Houston
Derek Attridge, University of York
Susan Bassnett, University of Warwick
Rachel Bowlby, University College London
Helena Buescu, University of Lisbon
Pat Easterling, University of Cambridge
Matthew Fox, University of Glasgow
Jane Montgomery Griffiths, Monash University
Lorna Hardwick, The Open University
Gail Holst-Warhaft, Cornell University
David Hopkins, University of Bristol
Piotr Kuhiwczak, University of Warwick
Timothy Mathews, University College London
Jonathan Monroe, Cornell University
Wen-Chin Ouyang, SOAS, University of London
Jan Parker, The Open University
Ian Patterson, University of Cambridge
Christopher Prendergast, University of Cambridge
George Rousseau, University of Oxford