On Translation: Reflections and Conversations

by Edmund Keeley

Translation:
is it a craft?
is it an art?
is it something in between?
Novelist, translator, and critic Edmund Keeley has been translating and studying the Modern Greek poets for over forty-five years. He began thinking of translation as a craft but: "in the hands of its best practitioners, [translation is] a form of art that deserves to abide on equal terms with all other literary arts" .
Key features:
the commerce of translation
collaboration in translation, with wife Mary, Philip Sherrard and George Savidis, and with several of the poets he has translated
how the poetry of Cavafy, Elytis, Ritsos, Seferis, and Sikelianos became internationally known and admired in the English-speaking world.

159 pages, Hardcover

Published January 1, 2000

About the author

Edmund Keeley was an American novelist, translator, poet, and essayist, as well as a longtime professor of English at Princeton University. Renowned for his expertise in modern Greek literature, he translated and promoted the works of C. P. Cavafy, George Seferis, Odysseas Elytis, and Yannis Ritsos. His extensive body of work spans fiction, poetry, and scholarship, often inspired by Greece and its culture. He served as president of both the Modern Greek Studies Association and PEN American Center, and received numerous awards and honors, including the Rome Prize, Guggenheim Fellowships, and the PEN/Ralph Manheim Medal for Translation.

Reviews

[Robert Wechsler · Rating 4 out of 5]

I befriended Keeley, who recently died, back in the 80s, when I was a literary journalist in central New Jersey, where he taught. I also studied literary translation in a workshop with him, and included his brilliant approach to teaching translation in my Performing Without a Stage: The Art of Literary Translation (not an ad; you can read it for free). Keeley's collection of essays looks at the nuts & bolts of literary translation, the translator's place in literature, and modern Greek poetry, which Keeley translated throughout his life.

Keeley was also a novelist. I especially recommend A Wilderness Called Peace, which is sadly out of print.