The Borges essay “Some Versions of Homer” introduced me to translation studies. It made perfect sense to include the translator in the literary discussion. Since the 1932 publication of Borges’s brief essay, a lot of important work has transpired in translation studies, and what Angelica Duran, Islam Issa, and Jonathan R. Olson have put together for Milton in Translation proves that translation continues to serve an important role in the interpretation of literature. Duran, Issa, and Olson also make an important contribution to Milton studies, despite the exhaustive corpus of literary studies devoted to John Milton’s work. Even readers unfamiliar with translation theory will expand their views on the cultural relevance of John Milton and his works.

The text covers a lot of ground, twenty-eight chapters divided into six parts: first “Approaches” (part 1) and “Influential Translations” (part 2) and then various Continental regions, largely European and Asian, while combining Latin American translations with Western European. The total number of languages covered include English, Latin, German, French, Dutch, Estonian, Finnish, Icelandic, Italian, Portuguese, Spanish (on two different continents), Bulgarian, Czech, Hungarian, Polish, Serbian/Montenegrin, Illyrian, Arabic, Hebrew, Persian, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean.

The contributors to this volume demonstrate the inextricable connection between language and culture. The editors invited contributors “to provide (a) … historical and critical context, (b) a brief history of [each] translation … and (c) a case study” while encouraging the addition of unique linguistic and cultural discourse and individual perspectives (8). The resulting text demonstrates important cultural and linguistic influences Milton has had in other countries. It also demonstrates the cultural and linguistic influences translators have weaved into Milton’s works, sometimes successfully, as with the eighteenth-century German translations Curtis Whitaker discusses in his “Domesticating and Foreignizing the Sublime: Paradise Lost in German,” chapter 7 of the text. And sometimes that linguistic and cultural interweaving has fallen flat, as with earlier French translations that suppressed Milton’s anti-Catholic sentiments (most conspicuously “the poet’s apparent rejection of the Trinity” in PL 8.406–7 [141]), or the insistence upon the use of alexandrines and rhyming in others. These earlier French translations, however, paved the way for François-René de Chateaubriand’s highly praised 1836 prose translation.

The Eastern European and Asian translations reveal some of the greatest achievements and farthest reaches of Milton’s work and influence. These translations provide us the most current and some of the most insightful transferences of Milton into new cultures. The Hungarian translations, some directly influenced by the well-established French prose translation of Nicolas-François Dupré de Saint-Maur, demonstrate the positive and negative influences of further foreignizing the text but also recreating it as Árpád Tóth does with sound, especially in Lycidas, making Tóth’s translations “probably the most melodious of all Hungarian versions of Milton” (340). Islam Issa discovers Arabic translator Mohamed Enani relies heavily on his own literary translation theories. Enani strives for an “equivalent effect” to transfer “emotions and feelings” (402). Based on some of Issa’s close readings of Enani’s translation, it is exciting to see that the Arabic-speaking world has such beautiful “prose verse” (399).

Religious differences remain one of the primary obstacles, especially for Chinese translations of Paradise Lost and other poems. However, as Bin Yan explains in chapter 26, “Milton in China ‘Yet Once More,’” Areopagitica reigns over all of Milton’s works translated into Chinese, often “recommended reading for journalism and communication students” (455). Yan finishes her chapter reminding us of one of the basic and most important elements of translation studies, as I mentioned earlier: the act of translation is an act of interpretation.

For Gordon Campbell, who contributed the epilogue, “Multilingual and Multicultural Milton,” one of the most insightful cultural transferences of Milton happened in the 2012 Japanese performance of Samson Agonistes as a Noh play in an intersemiotic as opposed to interlingual translation (497). Hiroko Sano offers a case study of the performance in chapter 27. Overall, the editors and contributors provide an engaging look at Milton studies through translation studies and a text that will appeal to scholars and students in both areas.