“Done into English”: 1,000 Years of Translation

15 Points Per Correct Answer - No time limit  

1. Some of the earliest translations into English were commissioned by a West Saxon king who also earned a reputation as a military commander. Who was he? Ethelred the Unready Alfred the Great Edward the Confessor Harold II

2. The “Roman de la Rose,” a 13th-century French love allegory, was translated into English by which of the following English poets? John Langland Edmund Spenser John Gower Geoffrey Chaucer

3. John Florio, a contemporary of Shakespeare, produced an English version of the essays of which French philosopher? Blaise Pascal Michel de Montaigne René Descartes François Rabelais

4. In the early seventeenth century, which English king commissioned an English translation of the Bible that was to establish itself as the virtually unchallenged Anglican version for some three hundred years? Charles I Edward VI James I (VI of Scotland) Henry VIII

5. One of the classic English versions of the works of Homer was completed in 1616, and was praised by John Keats in a sonnet two centuries later. Who was the translator? George Chapman George Herbert Ben Jonson John Milton

6. One of the great verse translations of Virgil’s Aeneid first appeared in 1684. Which English poet was the translator? John Dryden Thomas Shadwell Alexander Pope Nahum Tate

7. The Victorian writer Edward Fitzgerald would probably be forgotten today if he had not produced a famous translation of which Oriental work? The Tale of Genji The Thousand and One Nights The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam The Kama Sutra

8. In 1885 Sir Richard Burton produced a translation of a popular work, which the Edinburgh Review thought was fit only “for the sewers.” What was this work? The Satyricon The Decameron The Thousand and One Nights (Arabian Nights) Grimm's Fairy Tales

9. Thanks to C. K. Scott Moncrieff, monoglot English speakers with sufficient stamina can read which French “roman-fleuve”? “La Comédie Humaine” by Honoré de Balzac “Jean-Christophe” by Romain Rolland “Les Rougon-Macquart” by Émile Zola “À la Recherche du Temps Perdu” by Marcel Proust

10. Which twentieth-century writer of detective fiction also produced verse translations of the Old French “Song of Roland” and Dante’s “Divine Comedy”? Agatha Christie Ngaio Marsh Margery Allingham Dorothy L. Sayers