Proteus, his lies, his truth

We depend on translations for all that we know of other cultures, yet most of us are unaware of the translator's problems. What can we hope to get and what must we expect to miss in a literary translation? Is a translation successful simply because it is colloquial, lively, and "modern"'? Robert M. Adams helps us toward answers to these questions--as only a distinguished professor of comparative literatures and a practicing translator could do. Because the theory changes, like the sea god Proteus, with each new situation, Adams gives us practical examples to contemplate critically. We see Samuel Beckett translating himself; we watch a French translator struggling with William Faulkner; we compare the many versions of Homer and the Bible. We scrutinize Gide's Hamlet; Baudelaire's and Mallarmé's Poe; Ezra Pound's and Robert Lowell's "imitations." No reader of this book will approach a new translation without some insight into the bargain the translator strikes between his author and his audience.--From publisher description.