During World War II, publishing was an important element of the war effort for both the Allies and the Axis powers. Wartime propaganda and cultural diplomacy relied primarily on books, magazines and the daily press. The exiled governments in London, including the Polish government, undertook a major effort to translate, publish and promote numerous books and pamphlets that would appeal to British readers and thereby help to sway public opinion. This paper focuses on translation as an important aspect of wartime publishing that has not yet received much scholarly attention. It offers a contribution to research into the role and place of translations in wartime publishing by discussing the Polish government-in-exile's translation and publishing campaign. Drawing on various archival sources, it demonstrates that publishing translations was an important part of wartime cultural diplomacy and led to the development of extensive state-private networks that brought together exiled governments and British publishers. By analysing this material in a broad cultural context, the paper highlights the historical, ideological and political relevance of translation studies research to wartime publishing and censorship.

This article contrasts two English translations of Heinrich Heine's Shakspeares Mädchen und Frauen (1838), produced by Charles Godfrey Leland (1891) and Ida Benecke (1895), which are now regularly (though randomly) quoted in Shakespeare scholarship. The comparison sheds light on different strategies involved in translating a text as an independent document or as part of a ‘Collected Works’ series. The discrepancies between publication contexts are correlated with differences between domesticating and foreignizing approaches, and with the diverging appreciations of Heine's place within Shakespeare criticism that such choices entail. The translators' gender politics are also shown to affect their renderings of Heine's text on female characters in Shakespeare, which was itself indebted to a book by Anna Jameson (1832). Finally, cultural transfer theory and histoire croisée are used to explore a ‘re-transfer’ that involved British Shakespeare critics, an atypical Jewish-German writer who drew on their work, and Heine's ‘English’ translators. The article highlights the necessary imbrication of translation studies and book history in the analysis of complex transcultural forms of textual production, of which Shakespeare criticism is paradigmatic.

"Introduction: Salvage/Triage: Out of the Flames." Comparative Critical Studies, 15(supplement), pp. 3–4

André Lefevere highlights the central role of translations in the creation of literary fame, that is, in ‘the general reception and survival of works of literature among non-professional readers’. Through translations, the image of an author is shaped and projected in different national, historical and cultural contexts. The analysis of the selection of poems translated, and the introduction, notes and annotations that usually accompany those translations, can provide us with a preliminary overview of the presence of an author in a specific country of reception. This is especially true in the case of the reception of William Blake in Spain. The part played by translations, especially the earliest ones, is remarkable because some not only made Blake's work available to a Spanish readership but also provide readers with long introductions that constituted the first and, for a long time, sole critical approach to the British poet in Spanish. This article traces the progressive creation of Blake's literary canon and fame in Spain through the comprehensive analysis of the existing translations, both in Spanish and Catalan.

Reprinted in 1801, Vico's New Science (originally published 1744) had a profound impact on Bourbon Restoration culture, particularly in Italy and France, where it touched post-revolutionary readers profoundly. The reasons for Vico's revival in the early nineteenth century relate closely to the trauma of the political and social changes of that era. Vico's readership seems to have had significant peaks during periods of rapid social transformation: nineteenth-century readers reread the New Science in an attempt to find the reasons for revolutionary failure, and to relate the terror, the sense of displacement, failure and trauma to recognizable laws, promising that, after a crisis, a period of renaissance must necessarily follow. This article analyses the hermeneutic practices of some post-revolutionary readers of Vico (Carlo Cattaneo, Vincenzo Cuoco, Giuseppe Ferrari, Ugo Foscolo, Francesco Lomonaco) and suggests a comparison with the practices of readers during the Second World War (Eric Auerbach, Carlo Levi, Mario Fubini). By doing so, I propose an interpretation of Vico's New Science as a ‘posthumous’ book, acquiring special shades of significance when its readers experience the feeling that nothing will ever be like before, and meditate upon it in isolation, in fear, in exile, upon return from the front, and in prison.