




































Delos


Preface

Are there great and famous prefaces to literary works, including translations? 
A clever way of answering this question and in the process turning it into a 
substantial anthology of famous prefaces and one of the Harvard Classics is 
by James Spedding, who in 1910 produced a volume entitled Prefaces and 
Prologues to Famous Books. Interestingly, only two of his seventeen titles— 
one from French, Victor Hugo’s preface (fifty pages!) to his play Cromwell 
(1827), and the other from German, Goethe’s preface to his journal Propyläen 
(1798)— were not drawn from English literature. Overall the prefaces fall into 
two groups: the shorter ones are advertisements and the longer ones are man-
ifestos. Goethe’s preface merely advertises the contents of his journal, but 
Hugo’s preface is a true manifesto for French romanticism. Hugo points to 
the concept of the grotesque as the key to romantic literature.

Another famous manifesto is William Wordsworth’s Preface to the Lyrical 
Ballads (1798). Part of its fame and importance lies simply in its date of publi-
cation in 1798, often referred to as the beginning of British romanticism. The 
poems by Wordsworth in the Lyrical Ballads, as well as the only one by his 
friend and collaborator Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “The Rime of the Ancient 
Mariner,” are a gold mine for comparatists and translators, because of the many 
influences of and allusions to the works of poets and thinkers of continental 
Europe. Wordsworth’s preface is also famous for reclaiming the importance of 
the language of common people. He puts it this way:

The majority of the following poems are to be considered as 
experiments. They were written chiefly with a view to ascertain 
how far the language of conversation in the middle and lower 
classes of society is adapted to the purposes of poetic pleasure.

Wordsworth’s preface includes two resonant contradictions. One is the rec-
ommendation to avoid distinction between prose and poetry and to avoid 
“poetic diction”; but in his own practice a clear and distinct poetic diction is 
present. Secondly, he defines good poetry as “the spontaneous overflow of 
powerful feelings,” but at the same time “emotions recollected in tranquility;” 

Delos Vol. 34, No. 2, pp. v–vii. Copyright © 2019 Unversity of Florida Press. 
doi: 10.5744/delos.2019.1016



vi    Preface

in other words, somehow poems are to be spontaneous as well as meditative 
products.

As translators and editors of Delos, we take prefaces of famous or not so 
famous literary works to be sources of inspiration. But in its actual, practical 
form, we take a more modest path in our prefaces, including this one, more 
advertisement of content than manifesto.

The present issue, as was last year the case for the Fall issue, has no official 
theme. Still, the contents are such that few readers will see only one work that 
interests them. For lovers of Russian poetry, we welcome back translators 
Dmitri Manin and Alex Cigale, but are also pleased with two new contribu-
tors, Nina Kossman and J. Kates.1 Altogether we have poems by Baratynsky, 
Gumilev, Kedrin, Vaginov, and Pryakhin. Mr. Kates’s contribution includes 
poems of Petrarch and Nerval on a related theme. For lovers of short stories, 
we have another one from the Dominican writer José Alcántara Almánzar and 
two by the Greek author Vassilis Alexakis, who writes these remarkable prose 
puzzles in French. From French also comes the “Boy’s Eye View of May ’68” 
by Claude Arnaud, a reflective narrative which might be interesting to read 
alongside Yoshida Mitsuru’s vivid and immediate 1946 account of the sinking 
of the Yamato, of which Christopher Smith presents an excerpt.

The history of translation is commented on by Christopher Wickham in his 
presentation of a new translation of a short essay by Kleist, and indirectly by 
Stephen Rojcewicz as he looks intensely at an oft- translated passage of Homer 
and an oft- discussed sign in Shakespeare’s Othello. One may also look to the 
reviews for discussions of translating works whose originals present special 
challenges.

Leading off the issue is a collaboration between the two poets Lola Haskins 
and Andrea Pham, both of Gainesville, Delos’s home town. Here we have 
Vietnamese poetry translated into English— and English poetry into Viet-
namese. In next Fall’s issue, we hope to present an analysis of Vietnamese 
metrics by Dr. Pham, based on this “conversation.”

For the Spring 2020 issue of Delos, with a special theme of “Performance 
and Translation,” Ralf Remshardt, professor of theatre at the University of 
Florida, will be our guest editor. He is the author of Staging the Savage God: 
The Grotesque in Performance (2004) and Intermedial Performance and 
Politics in the Public Sphere (2018). He has directed plays by Euripides, 

1 Mr. Kates in fact published in Delos in its late- 90s and early 2000s series, edited at the 
University of Florida by Harold Hanson.



Preface    vii

Shakespeare, Brecht, Beckett, Stoppard, Dürrenmatt, Bernard- Marie Koltès, 
and Roland Schimmelpfennig for university and professional theaters. Most 
recently he directed The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night- Time, a play 
by Simon Stephens, based on the novel by Mark Haddon, for a run at the Hip-
podrome in Gainesville, Florida in August– September 2019.

Hal H. Rennert
Judy Shoaf


