How French Poems Become English

JCB Fellow Myron McShane (University of Toronto, R. David Parsons Fellow) presents "How French Poems Become English." Recently, scholars have become increasingly interested in studying how travel literature is translated. Similarly, one aspect of translation studies and book history that has also attracted current attention is the analysis of prefaces to texts, commonly referred to as paratexts. Yet, the frequent presence of verse paratexts in Early Modern travel accounts, and the way in which they are translated, has generally been neglected. The "How French Poems Become English: A Translation of an Early Modern Account of Brazil" talk will examine the paratexts to Thomas Hacket’s version of André Thevet’s Les Singularitez de la France Antarctique (1557), on the French colony in Brazil, by investigating how French poems prefacing Thevet’s work are transformed in Hacket’s translation, entitled The New found worlde, or Antarticke (1568).