Includes bibliographical references and index.

Scope of translation -- Translating within and between languages -- Translation and paraphrase -- Translating the language of literature -- Words for translation -- Metaphors for translation -- Roots of translatorly metaphors -- Are translations interpretations? Gadamer, Lowell, and some contemporary poem-translations -- Interpretation and "opening" : Dryden, Chapman, and early translations from the Bible -- "Paraphrase" from Erasmus to "Venus T---d" -- Dryden, Behn, and what is "secretly in the poet" -- Dryden's Aeneis : "a thousand secret beauties" -- Dryden's Dido : "somewhat I find within" -- Translating an author : Denham, Katherine Philips, Dryden, Cowper -- Author as intimate : Roscommon, Philips, Pope, Thomas Francklin, Lucretius, Dryden, FitzGerald, Jean Starr Untermeyer -- Erotic translation : Theocritus, Dryden, Ovid, Richard Duke, Tasso, Fairfax, Petrarch, Charlotte Smith, Sappho, Swinburne -- Love again : Sappho, Addison, Ambrose Philips, Dryden, Petrarch, Chaucer, Wyatt, Tasso, Fairfax, Ariosto, Harington, Byron -- Byron's adulterous fidelity -- Pope's Iliad the "hurry of passion" -- Pope's Iliad : a "comprehensive view" -- Some perspectives after Pope : Keats, Tennyson, Browning, Pound, Michael Longley -- Epic zoom : Christopher Logue's Homer (with Anne Carson's Stesichoros and Seamus Heaney's Beowulf -- Ezra Pound : 'my job was to bring a dead man to life -- FitzGerald's Rubaiyat : "a thing must live" -- Metamporhoses of Arthur Golding (which lead to some conclusions).

This is a wide-ranging book which launches a new theory of poetry translation and pursues it through readings of poem-translations from across the history of English literature. It engages with the key debates in translation studies, and offers new interpretations of major works.