Translation as Transformation in Victorian Poetry
Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture Series

Translation as Transformation in Victorian Poetry illuminates the dynamic mutual influences of poetic and translation cultures in Victorian Britain, drawing on new materials, archival and periodical, to reveal the range of thinking about translation in the era. The results are a new account of Victorian translation and fresh readings both of canonical poems (including those by Browning and Tennyson) and of non-canonical poems (including those by Michael Field). Revealing Victorian poets to be crucial agents of intercultural negotiation in an era of empire, Annmarie Drury shows why and how meter matters so much to them, and locates the origins of translation studies within Victorian conundrums. She explores what it means to 'sound Victorian' in twentieth-century poetic translation, using Swahili as a case study, and demonstrates how and why it makes sense to consider Victorian translation as world literature in action.

Introduction: Victorian translations, poetic transformations; 1. Discovering a Victorian culture of translation; 2. Idylls of the King, the Mabinogion, and Tennyson's faithless melancholy; 3. In poetry and translation, Browning's case for innovation; 4. The Rubáiyát and its compass; 5. The persistence of Victorian translation practice: William Hichens and the Swahili world; Epilogue: Victorian translators and 'the epoch of world literature'; Bibliography.

Annmarie Drury is Assistant Professor of English at Queens College, City University of New York. Many of her own poems have appeared in The Paris Review, Raritan, and the Western Humanities Review. She has also published translations of, and essays on, Swahili poetry. Her book Stray Truths: Selected Poems of Euphrase Kezilahabi (2015), offers translations of the Tanzanian writer's poetry.