ABSTRACT
I summarise here the main findings. French poets translate more fiction from English; English poets more from German; and Italian poets more from French, with shifts also depending on historical period. Likewise, if we cast our eyes on translated theatrical works, the leading source language swings from Ancient Greek (English poets) to French (Italian poets) to English (French poets). Meanwhile, when we turn to poetry, French may be the hegemonic language for both English and Italian poets, but the authors and poetic movements effectively translated are much different: so, Italian poets translated 22 books of symbolist poetry by Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Rimbaud, Valery, and Verlaine, compared to English poets who translated only five; likewise, there were vastly more translations of canonical 20th-century French poets—Apollinaire, Char, Éluard, and Prévert—by Italian poets (21) than by English poets (three). In contrast, Spanish was the leading language for French poets, such as Jacques Ancet, Claude Esteban, Guy Lévis Mano, Roger Munier, and Silvia Baron Supervielle, all of whom translated much more poetry from Spanish than from English or any other language. I then consider the European poet-translators still living in our corpus and what to expect from them.
