Translators

The prolific Victorian translator who first brought most of the Russian canon into English.

A husband-and-wife team known for close, texture-preserving versions of the Russians.

His blank-verse Divine Comedy (1814) was the version that made Dante an English author; praised by Coleridge and Keats and public domain.

The most famous American poet of his age and a Harvard professor of modern languages; his 1867 Divine Comedy was the first complete American translation and remains a faithful public-domain standard.

Poet and translator whose mid-century Divine Comedy, with its accessible line and generous notes, was the American classroom standard for a generation.

A Dante scholar and a poet; their bilingual Inferno (2000) pairs a close verse rendering with an exhaustive commentary.

His free-verse Homer and Virgil became the late-20th-century standard for grandeur and drive.

Princeton comparatist whose free-verse Homer and Virgil became the best-selling modern English versions.

The great Augustan poet; his Homer is a masterpiece of English verse in its own right.

A Scottish writer and translator; his 1922–1930 rendering of Proust, titled Remembrance of Things Past, is one of the most celebrated literary translations into English and is public domain.

The first woman to publish an English Odyssey; a clear, quick iambic line, matched line-for-line to the Greek.

An acclaimed short-story writer and translator from the French; her versions of Flaubert and Proust are prized for their exactness. Won the 2013 Man Booker International Prize.

Dante scholar whose complete Comedy is widely taught with extensive commentary.

An American scholar of Russian literature whose translations of Dostoevsky and Turgenev are prized for clear, accurate, readable modern English.

Victorian novelist whose prose Odyssey and Iliad are free, readable, and public domain.

Poet and translator of both Virgil and the complete Divine Comedy.

His 2005 Penguin War and Peace is prized for plain, propulsive modern English.

A British translator from French and Italian; her 2013 Penguin Les Misérables is widely praised as the best modern complete English version.

A British poet and critic who further revised the Scott-Moncrieff/Kilmartin Proust in 1992 and retitled it In Search of Lost Time.

The leading modern translator of Spanish-language fiction; her 2003 Don Quixote became the standard English version.

Karl Marx’s youngest daughter, a writer and translator; her 1886 Madame Bovary was the first English version and is the standard public-domain text.

A British scholar and Flaubert biographer; his Penguin Classics Madame Bovary is valued for its fluency and its introduction.

The first complete English Homer, in fourteeners; the one Keats wrote a sonnet about.

Victorian classicist; his Meditations is the enduring public-domain version.

His 2002 Meditations is celebrated for spare, modern, intensely quotable English.

A translator of Russian fiction whose 1994 Oxford Brothers Karamazov is admired for its natural, idiomatic English and won a translation prize.

An American translator of French and Russian; her 1887 Les Misérables is complete, faithful, and the standard public-domain English text.

Oxford Professor of Poetry and a Virgil scholar; his 1885 prose Aeneid was written to carry the sense plainly for readers without Latin, and is public domain.

England’s first Poet Laureate; his 1697 Aeneid in heroic couplets was the standard English Virgil for two centuries and is public domain.

His 1885 Don Quixote, faithful and well annotated, was long the standard scholarly English version and is public domain.

An Oxford Hispanist whose Penguin Quixote is prized for its wit and readability.

An Australian translator known for bold, contemporary renderings; her 2008 Les Misérables is complete and heavily annotated.

English friends of Tolstoy; their versions were revised with his input and long considered the standard.

A leading translator of Russian prose; her 2014 Yale Anna Karenina deliberately preserves Tolstoy’s repetitions and rough edges.

Made the first English Meditations (1634); ornate seventeenth-century diction.

A Research Fellow at Oxford and translator of Russian prose; his 2014 Penguin Crime and Punishment is widely held to be the best modern English version.

A French-born translator whose lively 1700 Quixote, worked partly from the French, is famous for its comic energy and its liberties.

His 1951 Iliad set the modern standard for line-for-line fidelity to the Greek and was long the default in American classrooms.

Poet and Harvard professor; his Homer and Virgil translations were standards for a generation.

A U.S. Poet Laureate; his 1994 verse Inferno is prized for sustaining a genuine terza rima in readable modern English.

Translator of the Oxford World’s Classics Meditations, faithful and well annotated.

A British scholar and biographer of Tolstoy and Chekhov; her 2014 Oxford Anna Karenina is prized for accuracy and grace.

Classicist and poet; her Aeneid renders the Latin line for line in English iambic pentameter.

Professor of Classics at Chicago; her 2021 Aeneid is the most recent major English verse version.

Literary editor of The Observer; his 1981 revision corrected Scott-Moncrieff against a better French text.