Translated Poe

Few, if any, U.S. writers are as important to the history of world literature as Edgar Allan Poe, and few, if any, U.S. authors owe so much of their current reputations to the process of translation. Translated Poe brings together 31 essays from 19 different national/literary traditions to demonstrate Poes extensive influence on world literature and thought while revealing the importance of the vehicle that delivers Poe to the worldtranslation. Translated Poe is not preoccupied with judging the quality of any given Poe translation nor with assessing what a specific translation of Poe must or should have done. Rather, the volume demonstrates how Poes translations constitute multiple contextual interpretations, testifying to how this prolific author continues to help us read ourselves and the world(s) we live in. The examples of how Poes works were spread abroad remind us that literature depends as much on authorial creation and timely readership as on the languages and worlds through which a piece of literature circulates after its initial publication in its first language. This recasting of signs and symbols that intervene in other cultures when a text is translated is one of the principal subjects of the humanistic discipline of Translation Studies, dealing with the products, functions, and processes of translation as both a cognitive and socially regulated activity. Both literary history and the history of translation benefit from this books focus on Poe, whose translated fortune has helped to shape literary modernity, in many cases importantly redefining the target literary systems. Furthermore, we envision this book as a fountain of resources for future Poe scholars from various global sites, including the United States, since the cases of Poes translationsboth exceptional and paradigmaticprove that they are also levers that force the reassessment of the source text in its native literature.