The Translator's Art: Essays in Honour of Betty Radice

by William Radice (Editor), Barbara Reynolds (Editor)

Essays on translation cover Chinese poetry, early Irish tales, Latin prose, Ouid's love poetry, Sanskrit myths, Greek tragedy, and Japanese poetry

281 pages, Paperback

First published February 2, 1988

About the author

William Radice was a British poet, writer and translator. He was also the senior lecturer in Bengali in the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. His research area is in Bengali language and literature. He translated several Bengali works, and works by Rabindranath Tagore and Michael Madhusudan Dutt.
Radice adapted the text Debotar Grash by Rabindranath Tagore as an opera libretto, which was set to music by Param Vir as Snatched by the Gods. He wrote the libretto for a children's opera Chincha-Chancha Cooroo or The Weaver's Wedding with music by Bernard Hughes.
He published nine volumes of poetry ranging from Eight Sections (1974), Strivings (1980), Louring Skies (1985) and Gifts (2002) to his latest two books This Theatre Royal (2004) and Green, Red, Gold, a novel in 101 sonnets (2005) which were hailed by A.N. Wilson in The Daily Telegraph as stunning. He has also fore-worded the a collection of translated Tagore poems, Soaring High, written by Mira Rani Devi.
In 2002, he published the voluminous (784 pages) Myths and Legends of India, a collection of 112 of his own retellings with selections from P. Lal's ongoing transcreation of the Mahabharata. Along with the major Hindu myths, he included legends and folk tales from Muslim, Buddhist, Jain, Syrian Christian and tribal sources.
His mother was the editor and translator Betty Radice.

Reviews

[Simon · Rating 5 out of 5]

Whenever I translate from ancient languages, my focus has been to try to understand what the ancient author was saying, and to render this into good but accurate English, so as to show clearly how my words are derived from the original text. It had never occurred to me to explore the theory of translation and its practice by others, so that I have found this collection of short essays in honour of Betty Radice, both interesting and inspirational. The book begins with a lengthy tribute by her son, William, to Betty Radice, the legendary editor of Penguin Classics, until her sudden death in 1985. In the process it provides a thorough and informative history of the Penguin Classics series of paperbacks. The subsequent essays are written by a wide selection of translators employed by Betty Radice to popularise the classics of ancient literature. I was delighted to find that many of these translations have been shelved in my study since I first bought them newly published in the 1960s and 1970s. As a result, reading these essays has not only been interesting, but has reconnected me with my reading as a young man. I have explored my shelves to rediscover the very translation that the writer is discussing. It soon became clear that a translator for popular publication has very different problems to my own. His/her translation must not only be accurate and in good English, but must be accessible by and appeal to the general reader, who may have little or no knowledge of or interest in the original language and its cultural milieu. This book has opened my eyes to the possibilities available to me in my translating, and, though almost forty years old, feels just as relevant today as it was all those years ago.