Ever since Odysseus heard tales of his own exploits being retold among strangers, audiences and readers have been alive to the complications and questions arising from the translation of myth. How are myths taken and carried over into new languages, new civilizations, or new media? An international group of scholars is gathered in this volume to present diverse but connected case studies which address the artistic and political implications of the changing condition of myth – this most primal and malleable of forms. ‘Translation’ is treated broadly to encompass not only literary translation, but also the transfer of myth across cultures and epochs. In an age when the spiritual world is in crisis, Translating Myth constitutes a timely exploration of myth’s endurance, and represents a consolidation of the status of myth studies as a discipline in its own right.
1 Indian Myth: Postcolonial Transmissions 2 Accommodating the Primordial: Myths as Pictorial Storytellings 3 The Anima at the Gate of Hell: Middle Eastern Imagery in Milton’s Paradise Lost 4 The Evolution of Blake’s Myth: Urizen’s Multiple Identities 5 Unweaving the National Strand of the ‘Golden String’ of Jerusalem: Blake’s British Myth and its (Polish) Translation 6 America — No Second Troy: A Study of Early American Epic 7 The Power of Narrative: Hawthorne’s A Wonder-Book for Girls and Boys 8 Of Marble Women and Sleeping Nymphs: Louisa May Alcott’s A Modern Mephistopheles 9 ‘I have no speech but symbol’: Nationality and History in Yeats’s Poetics of Myth and Myth-making 10 The Faust Myth: Fernando Pessoa’s Fausto and C. G. Jung’s The Red Book 11 ‘Pius Seamus’: Heaney’s Appropriation of Aeneas’s Descent to the Underworld 12 Another Oedipus: Leloup’s Guéidô 13 Translating Myths, from Sita to Sati 14 (Re)writing and (Re)translating the Myth: Analysing Derek Walcott’s Italian Odyssey
Biography
The editors, Ben Pestell, Pietra Palazzolo and Leon Burnett, serve on the executive committee of the Centre for Myth Studies at the University of Essex.
