Likenesses: Translation, Illustration, Interpretation

The themes raised by Matthew Reynolds' Likenesses: Translation,
Illustration, Interpretation will be discussed by Dr Jason Gaiger
(Ruskin School), Dr Adriana Jacobs (Oriental Studies) and Dr Nick
Halmi (English). Translation, illustration and interpretation have
at least two things in common. They all begin when sense is made in
the act of reading: that is where illustrative images and
explanatory words begin to form. And they all ask to be understood
in relation to the works from which they have arisen: reading them
is a matter of reading readings. Likenesses explores this
palimpsestic realm, with examples from Dante to the contemporary
sculptor Rachel Whiteread. The complexities that emerge are
different from Empsonian ambiguity or de Man's unknowable infinity
of signification: here, meaning dawns and fades as the hologrammic
text is filled out and flattened by successive encounters.
Likenesses follows on from the argument of Reynolds's The Poetry of
Translation (2011), extending it through other translations and
beyond into a wide range of layered texts. Browning emerges as a
key figure because his poems laminate languages, places, times and
modes of utterance with such compelling energy. There are also
substantial, innovative accounts of Dryden, Stubbs, Goya, Turner,
Tennyson, Ungaretti and many more. Matthew Reynolds teaches at
Oxford where he is a Fellow of St Anne's College and The Times
lecturer in the English Faculty. It has been said of him that 'the
best critics, like the best poets (in Browning's words) impart the
gift of seeing to the rest: Reynolds has this gift of seeing and
imparting' (TLS). His earlier books are The Poetry of Translation,
The Realms of Verse 1830-1870, the novels The World Was All Before
Them and Designs for a Happy Home(/i), and editions of Dante in
English and of Manzoni.