The publication of this volume in Oxford's ‘Classical Presences’ series suggests that it will focus on the modern reception and translation of classical texts. In fact this is somewhat misleading. Of the essays (seventeen numbered chapters, together with an elaborate superstructure of prologue, introduction, proemion, conclusion and epilogue), only about half are significantly concerned with ‘classical’ (i.e. Greek or Latin) material, and less than half with translation in the literal, verbal sense.

Derived from the intersection of two research groups, one (led by P.) working on translation and the other (led by M.) on ‘tradition and the modern’, the book has a wider and more complex focus on the relationship between the three key terms of the title. It interprets ‘translation’ in a broad metaphorical sense which ‘embraces travel between cultures and between times; embraces personal experience and active transformation of self by a text’ (P., p. 17). ‘Tradition’ is seen as a process of continual challenge and contestation, rather than of simple acceptance, and as a process that works in two directions: in T.S. Eliot's words, ‘the past [can] be altered by the present as much as the present is directed by the past’ (p. 16). ‘Trauma’, the slipperiest of the three terms, may embrace variously the inherently painful nature of many classical texts (Greek tragedy is a central genre in the book), the accidental painfulness which they acquire as a result of historical processes of loss and betrayal, and the painful ways in which the texts themselves may be transformed or deformed in their reception: as P. puts it epigrammatically, ‘what is found – new wrought – as well as lost – new wrenched, damaged and damaging – in translation’ (p. 21). A number of the essays return as a touchstone to Walter Benjamin and in particular to his image of the Angel of History (Paul Klee's drawing is on the cover), staring back in horror at the ruins of history as they pile up at his feet.

The book thus juggles a complex set of ideas and covers an extraordinary range of topics; it is hard to imagine another collection which could take in both D. Hopkins on ‘Pope's Trojan Geography’ and G. Rousseau on the origins of the psychiatric concept of trauma. At times the juxtapositions are illuminating (as in the various discussions of ‘lament’ in Part 3, or W.-C. Ouyang's essay on the relations between modernist and classical Arabic poetry, which has fascinating resonances with the ancient/modern nexus in western literature). At other times the yoking together of heterogeneous ideas leads to a sense of strain or over-abstraction.

I will focus in this review on the essays that are specifically related to classical literature. These are mainly concentrated in Part 1 (‘Handing On, Making Anew, Refusing the Classic’). F. Ahl's ‘Proemion’ ironically proposes that ‘A translator's first concern in translating a famous Classical poem is not loyalty to original wording, but conformity with the consensus interpretation’ (p. 35). He demonstrates this problem persuasively with reference to his own difficulties in marketing an anti-Augustan translation of the Aeneid, and much less persuasively with reference to his heterodox reading of Sophocles' Oedipus (Ahl's argument that an innocent Oedipus was framed by a villainous Cleon reminds me of Rayner Heppenstall's tongue-in-cheek proposition that the tragedy of Hamlet was caused by Fortinbras masquerading as the Ghost). L. Hardwick's ‘Fuzzy Connections’ takes up the problem that contemporary reception theory ‘place[s] readers … as dominant agents in a process of which they are mostly or even totally unaware’ (p. 42), and suggests the usefulness of Deleuze and Guattari's ‘rhizome’ model of decentred underground connections between texts; she applies this to a close and sensitive reading of the relationship between Homeric echoes in three Irish poets, Kavanagh, Heaney and Longley.

The other essays in this part deal with ‘translation’ in less literal ways. D. Hopkins suggests that Pope's concern for the precise topography of the Trojan War has been wrongly mocked by later archaeologists and critics, who failed to realise that it functioned purely as a literary device to create a sense of ‘reality’ in the reader's mind. P. Easterling looks at Sophocles' images of the journey, especially in Oedipus at Colonus, suggesting that they function as metaphors for ‘a process of learning … of dealing with the past in order to cope with the present and the future’ (p. 84), and can also work as metaphors for the process of tradition and translation. M. Fox meticulously shows how the dominant eighteenth-century images of Cicero as (English) gentleman and as archetypal rhetorician tended to cut him off from his historical context and privilege his style over substance. ‘The process of reading is always a process of translation, but that does not mean we cannot focus upon the places where our own metaphors let us down’ (p. 106). If Fox warns against misreading, R. Armstrong positively celebrates it: Fellini's Satyricon is read as ‘a kind of allegory of reception’ (p. 111) in which the filmmaker, inspired by the irrecoverably damaged state of Petronius' ancient text, has ‘dismembered and devoured his auctor’ (p. 124). Finally R. Bowlby criticises Freud's reading of Sophocles' Oedipus as based on anachronistic notions of the nuclear family, and suggests new twenty-first century approaches foregrounding adoption, fostering and cross-generational families, a symptom of how the play's ‘meanings change all the time’ in response to new cultural situations (p. 140).

The classical theme goes underground in Part 2, with essays (by C. Prendergast, J. Monroe, I. Patterson and Ouyang) dealing with issues of modernity and literary modernism in relation to tradition and nostalgia. It resurfaces in Part 3, ‘The Time of Memory, the Time of Trauma’. Three of the seven essays here develop a closely-linked conversation about suffering and lament in Greek tragedy. G. Holst-Warhaft draws comparisons between the communal ‘mourning voice’ in Irish and Greek laments, Athenian tragedy and the modern Greek poetry of Cavafy, Seferis and Ritsos. J. Montgomery Griffiths focuses on the image of the suffering body in Sophocles' Electra, both that of the character and the actor playing her, and the necessary and disturbing fusion between them ‘at the “phenomenological seam” … where performance and reception meet’ (p. 231). P. builds on this in a brilliant comparison between the ‘pathos’ of Euripides' (and Shakespeare's) Hecuba, arousing sympathetic identification with a universal image of suffering, and the painful ‘trauma’ of Electra's suffering, distanced from us by the metatheatricality of the scene and hence having no easy emotional outlet: ‘Unlike for Hecuba, there is no mourning for Electra’ (p. 260).

M.'s conclusion is unfortunately the weakest of the essays: attempting to draw the book's large themes into an appropriately resonant conclusion, it lapses into cloudy abstraction, portentous rhetorical questions and at times sheer tautology (‘We remember what we remember, and not what we do not’ [p. 340]). But D. Attridge's brief epilogue provides a more satisfying ending, using passages from Coetzee's novels and essays as touchstones for the paradoxical nature of classical reception: ‘Our translations, elaborations, rewritings, critical accounts, stagings do justice to [the classics] precisely in their failure to do justice to them; if it were possible to be wholly faithful to them, they would cease to be classics and become inert historical artefacts’ (p. 351). I am not convinced that this volume offers a coherent overall argument about the relationship between its three terms, but one does not necessarily look to a collection of critical essays to provide such an argument; it nevertheless contains a number of excellent, enlightening and provocative essays.