“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? Geoffrey Chaucer John Gower John Langland Edmund Spenser

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

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? Edward VI Charles I Henry VIII James I (VI of Scotland)

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? John Milton Ben Jonson George Chapman George Herbert

6. One of the great verse translations of Virgil’s Aeneid first appeared in 1684. Which English poet was the translator? Alexander Pope John Dryden Thomas Shadwell 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 Thousand and One Nights The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam The Kama Sutra The Tale of Genji

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”? “Jean-Christophe” by Romain Rolland “La Comédie Humaine” by Honoré de Balzac “À la Recherche du Temps Perdu” by Marcel Proust “Les Rougon-Macquart” by Émile Zola

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