This chapter puts world literature and African print cultures into conversation by exploring a widely circulating tale of desire, deception and escape that was told all over pre-colonial Africa and then spread across the globe by slavery and imperialism. The Palm-Wine Drinkard brought the folktale known as the ‘complete gentleman’ story to an international audience in 1952, but the scale of this narrative phenomenon was already massive. Since 1860, more than 450 versions have been printed in over a hundred languages across the African continent and the Atlantic and Indian Ocean worlds. The story also inspired dozens of adaptations across a variety of media, including many by renowned creative writers. This chapter explores what this traveling tale can teach the study of world literatures and African print cultures. It includes an overview of the phenomenon, a discussion of methodology, and an analysis of adaptations by Amos Tutuọla, Efua Sutherland and Ousmane Socé.

Print creates frames and slots in which equivalences between genres, texts and languages become visible or imaginable. The iterative and segmented character of newspapers, in particular, lends itself to the perception of equivalences. In 1920s Lagos, the public culture of the literate elites was bilingual, and it was in the weekly bilingual newspapers that the interface between Yoruba and English was most consciously signalled and creatively explored. Contributors in both langauges deliberately enriched their texts by working across the linguistic interface — quoting, recycling, translating and answering back. The Yoruba-language writers were especially inventive. Taking as an example Yoruba obituaries and ‘In Memoriam’ pieces, this chapter shows how they fluidly combined elements of traditional orature, translations of sentimental Victorian verse, and local popular nicknames and anecdotes. In the formal print sphere this moment of creative intertwining has long passed, but today, comparable experiments can be seen in popular song genres

The aim of the translation is to provide an English text that is both scholarly and accessible. The referencing system resembles the familiar biblical chapters and verses; sections are provided with titles that identify their key theme and bring to light the structure of a work often regarded as diffuse and repetitive.

The significance of Russian culture for the Bloomsbury group and their role in its dissemination in Britain is the focus of this chapter. British fascination with Russian culture peaked in the 1910s and 1920s and, because this was precisely when members of the Bloomsbury group came to prominence in their respective fields, their interpretation of Russian culture had considerable influence. Particular attention is paid to Boris Anrep’s curation of the “Russian Section” for Roger Fry’s Second Post-Impressionist Exhibition (1912); the role of the Ballets Russes in Bloomsbury conceptions of “civilization”; the 1917 Club, founded by Oliver Strachey and Leonard Woolf; John Maynard Keynes’ and Leonard Woolf’s engagement in political debates about post-revolutionary Russia; and the significance of Russian literature to Virginia Woolf and the Hogarth Press.

Chaucer’s works were written during the late fourteenth century, a period which saw considerable changes in the functions of the English language as it came to replace French and Latin as the languages of written record. As well as being an important source for the scholarly understanding of late Middle English, Chaucer’s works shed light on the status of English and its variety of registers and dialects, enabling scholars to gain a deeper awareness of the sociolinguistic connotations of its different forms and usages. The Canterbury Tales, with its array of pilgrims drawn from a variety of professions, social classes and geographical regions narrating a series of tales reflecting a wide range of genres, is a valuable source of evidence for historical pragmatics. This chapter shows the way in which Chaucer’s text offers insights into the conventions of social interaction, including forms of address, politeness and verbal aggression, and the use of discourse markers.

The introduction sets the scene at the catacombs of San Gennaro in Naples, where our only early Christian fresco from the Shepherd of Hermas is painted on a tomb wall. I lay out the thesis and roadmap for the book, namely, that the Shepherd crafts obedient early Christian subjects within the ancient Mediterranean discourse of enslavement. A brief overview of the Shepherd’s content is provided, as well as regarding its popularity and transmission history across the ancient, late ancient, and medieval worlds. I especially note how the Shepherd became a pedagogical tool in late antiquity, and that the Shepherd’s teachings are even placed in Jesus’s own mouth by some late ancient writers, heightening the stakes for understanding how enslavement is utilized in a text used to shape Christian thought and practice for centuries after its composition. Also provided is a brief introduction to slavery in antiquity to situate the reader, as well as outline some of the major influences on my approach to reading the text, especially womanist translational theory and Chris de Wet’s concept of doulology.

This chapter focuses on the art of translation now that you have enough components inyour language to begin using it to express a variety of concepts and ideas. The first section introduces general translation practices, discussing the importance of translating an intended meaning rather than substituting one language’s words for another. The second section provides examples of how you can use translation as an exercise of language expansion, creating new vocabulary and constructions as needed to communicate a particular meaning. At the end of this chapter, you will be asked to translate a short text into your conlang and to write an original text in your language to showcase your language and its features.

This chapter considers Michael Field’s Long Ago (1889), a volume of lyric poems inspired by the Ancient Greek poet Sappho. In these poems, Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper respond to Henry Thornton Wharton’s Sappho: Memoir, Text, Selected Renderings, and a Literal Translation (1885) by forging a creative-critical experiment, attempting to communicate the experience of reading Sappho by using Sapphic fragments (in Greek) as epigraphs and embedding them (in English) in original lyrics. The chapter analyses several poems from Long Ago to show how Michael Field enter into dialogue with Sappho’s voice, enabling them to express their admiration for Sappho’s work, but also to generate their own lyric voice and to forge subtle links between Hellenism and homosexuality, reflecting their own complex identity.

The modernist encounter with classical tragedy challenges received notions about tragic form and tragic sensibility: that it is incompatible with modernity (George Steiner) and that it is primarily a European/Eurocentric legacy. In engaging with classical Greek tragedy, modernist writers and theatre-makers (from T. S Eliot, W. B. Yeats, H. D., Ezra Pound, Edward Gordon Craig, and Isadora Duncan, to George Abyad, Tawfiq al-Hakim, Bertolt Brecht, Antonin Artaud, and the later postcolonial iterations of Wole Soyinka, Athol Fugard, John Kani, and Winston Ntshona) create a set of relationships that radically rewrite ideas of influence and tradition and gesture towards an understanding of tragedy as a form of theatricality rather than as a play-text. This theatricality, read in conjunction with primitivism and orientalism, is not a quest for authenticity or for the lost humanism of the classics but helps to construct an experimental laboratory in translation, in performance, and in adaptation. From the Cambridge Ritualists to the later postcolonial readings, modernism helps to revision tragedy as part of world theatre.

In a certain sense all theatre is an act of translation. We translate written and devised texts into stage action, characters are translated into beings, images are translated into physical spaces. In this essay, Adam Versényi explains how, because she was a playwright writing primarily in her second language throughout her career, María Irene Fornés was simultaneously writing and translating, with each practice inextricably linked to the other. Drawing upon his on own professional practice as a dramaturg and translator, Versényi argues that not only does an understanding of translation provide greater access to Fornés’s creative process but also that a careful reading of Fornés’s work informs the topic of translation itself. As example, Versényi explores how Fornés’s playwrighting method and the process of theatrical translation affect two notably distinct translations of Fornes’s The Conduct of Life (1985).

Chapter 2, Stereotyped Knowledge, examines irregular practitioners’ global trade in cheap manuals on venereal disease, sexual debility, and fertility problems. While previous scholarship has largely focused on these manuals’ lurid depictions of weakened male bodies, this chapter emphasizes their origins in respected publications: often calling themselves “consulting surgeons,” a term from hospital practice, irregular practitioners combined verbatim sections from textbooks and treatises aimed at medics with snippets from works in other genres to construct their own “popular treatises.” Some of these productions were issued in several different languages and circulated around the globe. At home and abroad, they offered readers an affordable means of acquiring modern information about sex reproduction, derived from the science of anatomy, and their authors a means of cultivating trust in their expertise and advertising more expensive products and services. Examining other medical practitioners’ responses, this chapter argues that these manuals and their makers were seen as both an economic and existential threat to regular medicine.

The introduction provides an overview of the volume, situating the chapters within some of the historical, social, and literary transformations of the past thirty years and providing an account of the different sections that organize the collection. Part I chronicles the new migrations, emerging literary institutions, conceptual shifts, and historical events that have transformed the field of Latinx literary studies since 1992. Part II focuses on genre, paying particular attention to how popular genres have fostered new racial imaginaries. Part III focuses on the different media that emerged as important vehicles for Latinx storytelling and literary expression, while the final part surveys important theoretical developments concerning race, sexuality, and literary form. The volume thus surveys a period that begins with historical recuperations of texts that were marginalized and ends with decolonial critiques that seek new ways of knowing.

This chapter looks at the interplay between Latinx literature written in Spanish or English, and discusses translanguaging and the complexities of translating an accented or bilingual text into either Spanish or English. The chapter also discusses the vicissitudes of self-translation and the global dimension of Latinx literatures as well as the translation of Latinx literature into languages other than English or Spanish, specifically into German. These aspects of translation promote a reading of Latinx literature beyond the merely representational, highlighting the critical roles of cultural production, distribution, and the literary marketplace instead.