Empire without end': Virgil, translation, nationalism and transnationalism

“Translation of high prestige texts such as Virgil’s poems has had a significant role in creating literary language in European vernaculars and hence has sometimes served nationalistic agendas. In my paper, I shall first examine some examples of the appropriation of cultural authority for the ‘writing of empire’; through translation of Virgil, for example into French and Russian; I’ll then talk more briefly about the Aeneid in Portuguese, Welsh and Ukrainian, the last of which yields a bizarre situation. Finally, I shall explore issues of transnational identity that arise in the phenomenon of translations into Hebrew (nineteenth century) and Esperanto (twentieth century).”