The Foreign Connection: Writings on Poetry, Art and Translation
Jamie McKendrick
Transcript 17•28 September 2020
- ‘This book might have been written for my pleasure. Many readers of this journal will surely feel the same.’ — Chris Miller, PN Review 28.3, January/February 2022
- ‘There is a natural clemency at work, throughout the entire volume, which has nothing to do with fuzzy-mindedness – quite the contrary, but it means that McKendrick will never deliver the frenzied hatchet-job some poets (whom he admires) can execute, apparently with sangfroid. This intelligence – by definition an ironic intelligence in that it can simultaneously entertain different positions – is what makes him such a trustworthy guide. One feels also that humour, that saving resource, is always within reach... His astute use of quotation to illustrate a point is a fiduciary of sound judgement. Above all, Jamie McKendrick reminds us that there is no substitute for patient looking and listening. This close attention, this authentic love of the art, is rare in our day. These writings are to be prized.’ — Stephen Romer, The London Magazine February/March 2022, 77-84
- ‘A welcome marker to remind us, if we needed reminding, of how much human beings need, and gain from, dialogue with other cultures and languages. The apparently foreign, as Jamie McKendrick demonstrates so well here, in fact shows us a threshold, a door.’ — Hilary Davies, Times Literary Supplement 19 May 2023, p. 8
- ‘What Jamie McKendrick so finely details about Tom Lubbock’s English Graphic is an entirely apt description for his own collection of brief reviews, introductions, and essays, on literature and art: ‘The constraints of the form proved exceptionally viable and liberating for his procedures. Providing a “wiry outline”, the form itself allowed for wit, aperçu, mental calisthenics, provocation, aphorism, meditation and surprisingly sustained argument’.’ — George Kalogeris, Essays in Criticism 73.1, 2023, 130-31 (full text online)
Plutarch in English, 1528–1603: Volume 1: Essays
Edited by Fred Schurink
Tudor and Stuart Translations 2/1 of 2•18 December 2020
- ‘The really significant contribution to scholarship is Schurink’s General Introduction. Here we see his command of the subject, and can trace the logic and the evidence that results in the inescapable conclusion that we really should take Plutarch more seriously... there is much about these two volumes that makes them important material for anyone seeking to understand English literature in the sixteenth and, indeed, the seventeenth centuries.’ — Freyja Cox Jensen, Translation and Literature 30, 2021, 384-390 (full text online)
Plutarch in English, 1528–1603: Volume 2: Lives
Edited by Fred Schurink
Tudor and Stuart Translations 2/2 of 2•18 December 2020
- ‘The really significant contribution to scholarship is Schurink’s General Introduction. Here we see his command of the subject, and can trace the logic and the evidence that results in the inescapable conclusion that we really should take Plutarch more seriously... there is much about these two volumes that makes them important material for anyone seeking to understand English literature in the sixteenth and, indeed, the seventeenth centuries.’ — Freyja Cox Jensen, Translation and Literature 30, 2021, 384-390 (full text online)
William Barker, Xenophon's 'Cyropædia'
Edited by Jane Grogan
Tudor and Stuart Translations 13•20 March 2020
- ‘Barker’s Cyropaedia can further our understanding of Xenophon, as well as its own literary and cultural moment. Grogan’s exemplary edition, marrying rigorous scholarship to a user-friendly text, will facilitate both.’ — Carla Suthren, Translation and Literature 30, 2021, 231-37 (full text online)
Thomas May, Lucan's Pharsalia (1627)
Edited by Emma Buckley and Edward Paleit
Tudor and Stuart Translations 18•7 December 2020
- ‘This edition of Thomas May’s translation of Lucan’s Pharsalia forms a very welcome addition to the excellent MHRA series of Tudor and Stuart Translations... this admirably well-conceived edition certainly opens up May’s version – and Lucan himself – for today’s readers.’ — David Norbrook, Translation and Literature 31, 2022, 92-94 (full text online)
Petrarch's Triumphi in English
Edited by Alessandra Petrina
Tudor and Stuart Translations 27•20 August 2020
Back to the Twenties: Modernism Then and Now
Edited by Paul Poplawski
Yearbook of English Studies 50•15 July 2020