Seruya, Teresa, D’hulst, Lieven, Assis Rosa, Alexandra and Moniz, Maria Lin, eds. (2013): Translation in Anthologies and Collections (19th and 20th Centuries). Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 287 p.

Anthologies and collections, considered by some scholars a genre and by others just a format, contain a vast cumulus of information on source and target cultures, publishing policies, authors, editors and translators (sometimes even readers), socio-historical contexts and coercive forces featuring polysystems. So far, anthologies have been an object of creativity rather than of analysis. Literary critics, authors, translators, editors and cultural agents, have become occasional anthologists, but not many scholars have devoted their academic efforts to scrutinizing anthologies from a multifocal perspective, as this volume does. The systematic interest in the anthological genre is, as the editors state, very recent, with landmarks like Korte (2000) and Odber de Baubeta (2007). Their borderline condition, between engaged literature, committed selection based on different criteria (quality, theme, chronology, geographic area, etc.) and cultural policy/propaganda, turns anthologies into problematic products, suffering from multiple overlapping personalities and touching on the very sensitive chord of representativeness within the source literary framework and via selection and translation also within the target one. Apart from the novelty of its research object, this volume presents interesting methodologies, as well as original viewpoints (see Gombár’s comparison between translation propaganda in Hungary and Portugal) and extrapolations (such as Uribarri’s insight into the philosophy collections published in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries in Spain, or Martha Cheung’s introspective exercise, making a critique of her own critique of Chinese Discourse on Translation in her anthology which she considers a “therapeutic project”). The book is structured in three balanced sections (each of five or six chapters) devoted to 1) discursive issues (both textual and paratextual) as well as anthologizing practices; 2) editorial policies with a special focus on canonization image building and the role played by anthologies in these purposeful actions; 3) censorship in its various forms and strategies, including blacklisting and even “whitelisting” i.e., recommending books, as we see in Lombez’s study on the Otto and Matthias lists in occupied France. Equally valuable is the coverage of two complicated centuries for Europe: the nineteenth, with its social changes, upheavals and fall of empires, and the twentieth, with its wars, dictatorships and the end of colonial systems, with their tragic aftermaths, the effects of which are still being felt today. In their Introduction, the editors start from Greek and Latin etymological definitions to distinguish between anthology and collection, and to observe that this genre is in line with the postmodern atmosphere of fragmentation of (personal and communal) identities in Western cultures. This “anthropological object” can be defined according to D’hulst (p. 8) in linguistic, geocultural, generic, historical or thematic terms, whereas its features are physical, institutional, formal, semantic and functional. From a functionalist viewpoint, the skopos of anthologies is to offer pleasure, structure, accessibility or profit, and to educate, preserve and disseminate values, innovate and protect cultural heritage (p. 5). Since they represent a recontextualized structured selection, they can be representative for a theme, genre, author, period or artistic movement. Translated anthologies add to this classification the categories of: one or several source languages, national or regional authors, and translator or publisher as an anthologist. The first section opens with the study by Lieven D’hulst, who surveys the anthologies of translated texts published in France in the nineteenth century and concludes that these do not differ so much in concepts and terms from those of so-called original works, since they both depend on auctorial and editorial decisions, they share discursive and institutional strategies, as well as aims such as the reproduction of classical canons, literary renewal and the revival of the national cultural heritage. Thus, since they do not belong to national …