"Done into English": 1,000 Years of Translation Quiz

Answer: Alfred the Great

The works translated by King Alfred's team of translators included the Psalms and theological and philosophical works by St Augustine, Boethius and Pope Gregory I. Some people think that Alfred himself had a hand in the translations, but this cannot be proved or disproved. Alfred aimed to restore the standard of scholarship which had prevailed in England in the days of the Venerable Bede, but had decayed during the Viking invasions.

Answer: Geoffrey Chaucer

The "Roman de la Rose" falls into two parts. The first part, written by Guillaume de Lorris probably in the 1230s, is a high-flown allegory of courtly love. The second, written by Jean de Meung about half a century later, is more satirical in tone with many digressions. Chaucer's translation consists mainly of Guillaume de Lorris's work.

The Chaucer text is in three parts: according to many scholars, only the first part is Chaucer's work.

Answer: Michel de Montaigne

Florio was the son of a Protestant refugee from Italy. He worked as a tutor to the 3rd Earl of Southampton (one of Shakespeare's early patrons) and later secured posts at the court of James VI & I. He produced an Italian-English dictionary and other works about the Italian language, but it is for his version of Montaigne that he is remembered. Florio's is a very free version and its style is very different from Montaigne's own "parler simple et naïf." It was largely eclipsed by later translations until the late nineteenth century: since then it has re-established itself as one of the classics of English translation and has been republished several times.

Answer: James I (VI of Scotland)

The sixteenth century had seen a series of English versions of the Bible. Some were translated not from the original Hebrew and Greek, but from the Latin Vulgate or Luther's German. When James came to the throne in 1603, the most popular version among the people at large was probably the Geneva Bible, produced by English exiles in Geneva during the reign of Mary I, and first printed in 1560.

The King James version is traditionally known in Britain as the "Authorized Version". However, unlike the Book of Common Prayer, it has never enjoyed any statutory authority. In fact, it took a couple of generations for this translation to supplant the Geneva Bible as the popular favourite. From the mid-seventeenth century onwards, however, it was simply "the Bible" to most monoglot English speakers.

Answer: George Chapman

Chapman was a popular poet and dramatist in his day, but his fame now rests on his translation of Homer. In his sonnet Keats recalls how he

"....heard Chapman speak out loud and bold.
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez, when with eagle eyes
He star'd at the Pacific ...."

Chapman's translation is still available in paperback, though after four centuries it will not be to everyone's taste.

Answer: John Dryden

Thirteen years after the publication of his translation of the Aeneid, Dryden produced his version of Virgil's complete works. Some of his phrases and rhymes (as he acknowledged in footnotes) were borrowed from other translators. As a whole, however, Dryden's Virgil is, as the "Oxford Guide to English Literature in Translation" says, "one of the few great creative translations of any poet in the language."

Answer: The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam

Fitzgerald's translation first appeared anonymously in 1859 and was not an immediate success. It was Dante Gabriel Rossetti who popularized it by bringing it to the notice of Robert Browning, John Ruskin and Algernon Swinburne, all of whom championed it enthusiastically. Fitzgerald has been criticized in some quarters for allegedly taking literally what are said to be allegorical elements in the original, but other critics exonerate him.

Answer: The Thousand and One Nights (Arabian Nights)

The tales of the Thousand and One Nights were first popularized in Europe in a French translation by Antoine Galland in the early eighteenth century, which was very soon translated into English. Galland's version bowdlerized the original to some extent and could safely be put in the hands of children:

In the nineteenth century several scholars produced translations direct from the Arabic, though this task was complicated by the existence of a number of widely differing Arabic texts. Edward Lane, a distinguished Arabist, published a version between 1838-1842. In the early 1880s John Payne produced a limited subscription edition including passages which earlier translators had omitted on grounds of decency. Soon afterwards Burton produced his "Plain and Literal Translation of the Arabian Nights Entertainments."

The influential Edinburgh Review thought that the appropriate places for the best known translations were "Galland for the nursery, Lane for the library, Payne for the study and Burton for the sewers." The condemnation was probably inspired not by the translation itself (which is full of bizarre archaisms), but by the footnotes and "Terminal Essay," which go into detail about the sexual culture of parts of the world that Burton knew intimately.

Answer: "À la Recherche du Temps Perdu" by Marcel Proust

The successive volumes of Proust's work appeared in various editions between 1913 and 1927. Scott Moncrieff began publishing his translation in 1922, and by his death in 1930 had translated all but the final section ("Le Temps Retrouvé"/"The Past Recaptured").

Answer: Dorothy L. Sayers

Ms Sayers, the creator of Lord Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane, produced her translations towards the end of her life. Indeed, the last volume of her Divine Comedy was not published until about five years after her death.

She retains the verse forms of the originals. Her Dante is in "terza rima" form, though this requires some imperfect rhymes in English. Her "Roland", like the Old French original, is divided into "laisses" of unequal length, in which the lines end with words that share the same stressed vowel but do not strictly rhyme.