A preeminent medievalist presents a wonderful catalog of real and fanciful beasts, including the manticore, griffin, phoenix, amphivius, jaculus, and many other exotic animals. White's witty, erudite commentary on scientific and historical aspects enhances this survey of proto-zoology on which science is based and pre-scientific perceptions of the earth's creatures. 128 black-and-white illustrations.

This book, written by a team of experts from many countries, provides a comprehensive account of the ways in which translation has brought the major literature of the world into English-speaking culture. Part I discusses theoretical issues and gives an overview of the history of translation into English. Part II, the bulk of the work, arranged by language of origin, offers critical discussions, with bibliographies, of the translation history of specific texts (e.g. the Koran, the Kalevala), authors (e.g. Lucretius, Dostoevsky), genres (e.g. Chinese poetry, twentieth-century Italian prose) and national literatures (e.g. Hungarian, Afrikaans).

Table Talk was the title Pushkin gave, following the example of William Hazlitt or Samuel Taylor Coleridge, to the collection of historical anecdotes jotted down in the years 1830-1836. Pushkin had in his library the T able Talk of both Hazlitt and Coleridge. The question which book prompted his own title has been much discussed. There can be no doubt that Coleridge occupies a very important position in the list of literary sources which Puskhin utilized. It is curious that in the fall of 1830 at Boldino, hence at the period of his greatest literary activity, when he composed a number of his most splendid masterpieces, Puskhin had Coleridge's works with him; not only had his works, but read them anew. Among the Boldino master pieces was also, as we know, the famous "little tragedy" Mozart and Salieri, of which the ultimate psychological-moral peripeteia revolves about Mozart's remark that "genius and crime are two incompati ble things"--"geny i zlodeystvo dve veschi nesovmestnye ..." When I looked through Coleridge's Table Talk I was struck with the following observation, under the date of the 29th of August, 1827: "genius may co-exist with wildness, idleness, folly, even with crime: but not long, believe me, with selfishness, and the indulgence of an envious disposition. Envy is kdkistos kai dikai6tatos the6s, as I once saw expressed some where in a page of Stobaeus: it dwarfs and withers its worshippers.