Recent studies in English translation, c.1520-c.1590

The essay opens with general studies in issues of translation, a busy field over the past twenty or thirty years. But even historically based "translatogy" has not much impinged on the writing of English literary history, at least not in the English-speaking world. For the most part, (non-biblical) works translated into English are only seldom analyzed with regard to issues of translation. The essay is organized around source languages and source authors; Classical Latin and Greek are taken together, as are German and Dutch. Issues of secondary translation (the proximate texts for Greek authors are likely to be Latin or French) are left aside. In this period, by far the greater number of translated works, even early modern ones, are in Latin; Italian, French, and Spanish (in that order) follow far behind. This bias is reflected in the secondary scholarship on English translations of them. (R.C.