Chapter 1 develops the book’s theoretical frame as well as provides initial experiential examples. In the author’s practice, theatrical translationality has inspired reconsiderations of actor-training practices, rehearsal processes, and artist-audience expectations, and it has modified her approaches to translation and direction. To illustrate, the chapter first turns to the author’s decades-long working relationship with Argentinian dramatist Ricardo Monti and the collaborative process in translating and publishing ten of his lyrical and imagery-rich texts into English, and her experience in directing the English-language translation of his play Visit with US actors. The chapter then shifts to a scholarly perspective to apply a theory of translationality to the radical revisionary processes at work in Argentinian playwright-director Daniel Veronese’s “Chekhov Project,” a multi-production endeavor that involved not only his versions of Three Sisters and Uncle Vanya but also an original play, Mujeres soñaron caballos (Women Dreamt Horses). The chapter concludes with the author’s reflections on translating Veronese’s original play for a New York theatre festival, interpreting its success as largely the result of a translational collaboration between text, author, translator, director, cast, and producer. A theory of translationality accommodates and encourages these interlinked theatrical and performance elements, experiences, and participants.

This chapter considers the impact of Greek on Latin Literature. Unlike the expectations of modern post-colonial theory, the imperial Romans were captured by Greek culture. Latin literature’s relation to Greek becomes a key moment in the cultural self-definition of Rome. This cultural history is explored first through Cato the Elder as a figure who publicly was scornful of the impact of Greek culture on Rome, and who became thus for later Romans an icon of conservative opposition to cultural change. The chapter then considers how much Latin Greek writers might be presumed to know and, conversely, how Romans explicitly paraded their adaption and adaption of Greek material and Greek language in their writings. Third, the chapter considers the politics of code-switching between Greek and Latin. Fourth, the chapter looks at how this cultural conflict becomes a matter of Christian ideology as part of a politics of translation between Hebrew, Greek and Latin: what changes when God’s word is transformed between languages? Finally, the chapter asks what is known by Latin literature that Greek does not know (and vice versa)? What boundaries should we place between Greek and Latin literature?

This chapter traces key moments and motifs in the history of the translation of Greek texts primarily into English. It highlights how Greek translation becomes paradigmatic for translation tout court, informing both translation rhetoric and practice, and then tackles the model cases of Homer and Sappho, the former diachronically, the latter synchronically through several case studies from the first half of the twentieth century. It homes in on modernist writers’ particular understanding of translation as poised between critical scholarship and creative practice in order to argue that poets such as H.D. or Ezra Pound evade or even subvert existing modes of conceptualizing both ‘Greece’ and translation, thus opening the way for the plethora of approaches that characterize Greek translation today. The chapter concludes with a cautionary note as it examines the programmatic resistance to Greek translation displayed by Virginia Woolf and Yorgos Seferis.

Starting with the observation that the word translation has its etymological roots, as does metaphor, in notions of space, this chapter attempts to revivify the relevance of the notion of space in translation, by relating it to the space that typically is occupied by textual editors. It takes the example principally of Samuel Beckett: looking at examples from his own translation practice as well as his attitudes towards that practice; looking at the work of scholarly editing that went into the four-volume edition of his letters; and questioning the role of the editor who has traditionally been seen as ideally invisible and authoritative. The various stages that go into the making of such an edition – transcription, translation, selection, annotation – are revealed to be reluctant to conform to the notional ideal of the editor’s transparency.