Metamorphoses

Translators are crucial to the constitution, dissemination, and adaptation of literatures, cultures, and ideas. However, their presence in the historical record often proves difficult to recognise or retrace. This volume places front and centre this key problem for historians of translation, as well as for historians of literature, culture, and ideas. It sheds new light on the much-debated (in)visibility of historical translators by investigating in what contexts and through what strategies translators sought to render themselves either (in)visible, and how critics and scholars can now trace these efforts. When and how does the visible metamorphose into the invisible, and vice versa?

The volume focuses on the long eighteenth century, a period which witnesses a metamorphosis in literature and culture that tells powerfully on translators. From relatively visible cultural actors, they are reduced to enforced invisibility as cultural products stabilised their meanings around singular authors. Tracing this shift across a swathe of products and practices, the book conducts its investigations across a range of genres, ranging from radical politics over philosophy to opera; taking in languages and cultures across Western Europe.

Chapters employ case studies to develop methodological and theoretical models that will empower scholars of translation history to recover translators, both from the direct evidence of their work and from the networks and tools that supported them.