ABSTRACT
The 1960s were formative years, when the prevailing cultural climate allowed unfettered access to world literature. Two factors were instrumental in creating this climate: the existence of a strong school of literary criticism and an equally strong translation movement, with its fountainhead in Lebanon. From the former we learned which classics of world literature we should read, while the latter made those works available to us in our mother tongue when our mastery of European languages was inadequate to capture the richness of this human legacy.
