Reynolds, Dr Matthew

Job Title: Times Lecturer, CUF Lecturer and Tutorial Fellow
College: St Anne's
Period/ Subject: Literary Language; Comparative Literature and Translation; C19th-20th-21st

Email address: matthew.reynolds@ell.ox.ac.uk

Research Interests:

I am interested in literary form and style; in translation as a creative process; in comparative literature, especially as it involves Italian, French and the classics; in the grounds and purposes of the discipline of literary criticism; in writing about visual art; and in the practice of fiction. I am most at home in the 19th & 20th & 21st centuries but my work has ranged back as far as the Renaissance.

My first book, The Realms of Verse (2001) explored interactions between aesthetic and political unity during the mid-nineteenth century. Poems by the Brownings, Tennyson, Clough and their contemporaries are often oddly disunited: I showed how this feature relates to ideas about artistic form, in the wake of Coleridge’s idea of the imagination as a ‘unifying power’, and to concerns about national unity which were, in that period, especially focused on the Italian Risorgimento. My book discovered ‘a politics of form … very different form that which prevails in most criticism’ (Studies in English Literature).

I then become interested in modes of un-Englishness in literary writing, for instance when the writing is set abroad and the language used in foreign-seeming ways. This led me to focus on translation and ‘versioning’ as creative practices: I wrote essays about several poet-translators and co-edited a collection of English responses to Dante. The award of a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship allowed me to develop this work into The Poetry of Translation: From Chaucer & Petrarch to Homer& Logue (2011). This book shows that the idea of translation as a carrying-across of meaning is inadequate to all translation and especially to the translation of poetry. Different metaphors are needed to describe the work- across-languages that occurs in poetic translation: it can be a process of  ‘opening’ the source text, of pursuing desire, or succumbing to passion, or taking a view, or zooming in, or dying, metamorphosing, or bringing to life. These are the metaphors that have most informed the history of poetry translation into English: I go on to show that they are given shape by the texts that are being translated. Source-texts therefore turn out out have a major influence on what is done to them. This is what I call ‘the poetry of translation’: I explore instances from Wyatt’s Petrarch, through Dryden’s Virgil, Pope’s Homer, Byron’s Dante, various translations by Pound, and others, to a range of contemporary poem-translations.  

I am now at work on another – shorter – book about translation which will pay attention especially to the way novels travel across cultures, and to the consequent changes in the fictional worlds they imagine. Why is it that some novels become international successes and others, much admired in their originary cultures, don’t? What does that show us about the sort of place an imagined world is and can be?

My work on translation is metamorphosing into a larger interest about the grounds and purposes of those other kinds of re-writing, criticism and interpretation.  I am beginning to move towards composing a book focused on criticism by creative writers (Brooke-Rose, Woolf, Proust, James, Leopardi and others). I have always written as a critic as well as a scholar, and as a critic of art as well as of literature: I am compiling a selection of my essays designed to explore the connections and disparities between these kinds of work. I am also interested in the differences between practices of criticism in different national cultures: I am beginning to think about how to get a handle on some of the questions they raise.

I am committed to the practice of fiction. Designs for a Happy Home: A Novel in Ten Interiors came out in 2009; another novel, The World Was All Before Them will appear in 2012/13. My creative work explores space, belonging, languages, intention, trust, comprehension, and the failure of it, in ways that have some points of contact with my criticism and scholarship.   

Teaching Areas:

To undergraduates, I teach 19th-20th-21st century literature, the English language, and critical theory. To graduates, I have given classes on literary translation and on language and style. I have supervised theses on translation and illustration in the 19th and 20th centuries, Victorian poetry, C20th literary criticism, C20th poetry, and nonsense.

Some Recent Publications:

The Poetry of Translation: From Chaucer & Petrarch to Homer & Logue. OUP, 2011.

Designs for a Happy Home: A Novel in Ten Interiors. Bloomsbury, 2009.

'Review Article' and 'On Judging the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize,' Translation and Literature vol. 17 no. 1, 2008.

'Varifocal Translation in Ciaran Carson's Inferno,' in Twentieth-Century Poetic Translation, eds Caselli & La Penna. Continuum, 2008.

'Semi-Censorship in Browning and Dryden,' in Modes of Censorship and Translation, ed. Billiani. St Jerome, 2007.

‘Principles and Norms of Translation’, in The Oxford History of Literary Translation in English, vol 4, 2006.

Dante in English (co-edited with Eric Griffiths). Penguin, 2005.

‘Browning and Translationese’, in Essays in Criticism, vol 53 no.2, April 2003.

The Realms of Verse 1830-1870: English Poetry in a Time of Nation-Building. OUP 2001; paperback 2005.

I write about literature for the London Review of Books: recent essays have been on E. L. Doctorow, David Mitchell, Browning, Dryden, Douglas Coupland, Don Paterson, Ungaretti, Pavese, Dante, and translation from Italian. And I write about literary criticism, adaptation and the visual arts for the Times Literary Supplement : recent essays have discussed Spuybroek, Burne-Jones, watercolour, Sargent, Millais, Poussin, Goya, Dickens, anonymity, plagiarism, leisure, apes, Turner, Browning, Victorian gardening and Rachel Whiteread.

Other Information

At St Anne's College, I organise the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize and direct the Art Gallery. I have served on the editorial boards of Translation and Literature and British and Irish Contemporary Poetry; I now devote those energies to the executive committee of the British Comparative Literature Association. I held a Leverhulme Major Research Fellowship 2006-9.

College page

Back to Faculty Members<-->