Before Greece became portable: versioned mediation and translator credit in Auden's The Portable Greek Reader

Abstract The Portable Greek Reader (1948), edited by W. H. Auden, presents ancient Greece as a coherent cultural object in English translation, although Greece became the subject of the project only after several redesigns. This article asks how the function of translation changed through these revisions and how successive textual and production decisions made a culture portable. It reconstructs proposals from 1944 to 1948 and reads two examples from the introduction by Auden alongside the translation of Xenophanes by John Burnet in the Reader. It also examines translator credits in the current online contents record published by Penguin Random House for the 1977 paperback and traces the republication of the introduction as “The Greeks and Us.” Translation first defined the projected anthology, then provided a method for comparing English versions, and eventually became the medium of a broad cultural survey. The examples discussed by Auden show how metre and register alter the historical relation between Greek and English. The Xenophanes selection further shows how translated diction and editorial headings can work together: the scriptural English used by Burnet appears under “The True God” within “Cosmogonies and Cosmologies.” Project redesign, classification, attribution, proof-stage cutting, and republication each changed the resulting cultural object in a different way. Versioned mediation describes this cumulative relation between textual versions and project states. The concept connects the cultural authority of translated materials with the distinct textual, editorial, and material processes through which they are assembled and circulated.