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Abstract

In those days, this nymph was more than a voice.-Ted Hughes 1 Blow, bugle, blow, set the wild echoes flying, And answer, echoes, answer, dying, dying, Lord Tennyson 2 This present volume is indebted to an illuminating keynote lecture given in 2018 by the writer and translator Jhumpa Lahiri, for the Society for Italian Studies Biennial conference at the University of Edinburgh. Her lecture drew a sustained and insightful parallel between the mythical figure of Echo and the perils and potentials of literary translation, lingering on the intellectual depth of the echo as a concept. This depth is reflected in the many ways that the authors of this volume have chosen to engage with the theme. They draw on ideas of translation, but also on personal identity, memory, tropes, and trauma. They share with Lahiri's lecture an emphasis on the (mis)communication of the echo, an idea befitting the multilingual remit of Working Papers in the Humanities. With essays on literature and culture in French, English, German, Italian, and Spanish; and spanning from the work of Boccaccio in the fourteenth century, to Leïla Slimani in the twenty-first century, we hope that readers find compelling threads between these diverse ideas and perspectives.A salient feature of the echo is its dislocation, both in terms of place and time. This distance recalls a persistent temporal thread in last year's volume, entitled 'Reframing Exoticism in European Literature'. The contributors to the aforementioned volume often described a Western culture that conceived of the East in terms of an idealized, unreachable past. The echo is identified as a diminished present relative to a more complete past; but drawing on the critical theory of Exoticism we can question the truth of this original wholeness.