Richard Todd, born in London, UK, in 1949. Ph.D. from the University of London. Associate Professor of English Literature at the VU University, Amsterdam.
Fellow (1 September 1998 – 30 June 1999)
My project “Constantijn Huygens as translator of John Donne” was too extensive to be realised in its totality in one year. However the aims I set myself for 1998/99 were, with some minor adjustments as the research proceeded, satisfactorily realised. I wrote a substantial article (16,500 words) on the disparate copytext of the first four translations of August 1630, which has been accepted for publication by English Manuscript Studies 1500-1700. Together with Dr. Ad Leerintveld (The Royal Library, The Hague) and Dr. Nanne Streekstra (Department of Netherlandic Language and Literature, University of Groningen) I co-authored an English language clearing the decks article of 9,000 words in which we announce our intention to produce a facsimile English language edition of all 19 of Huygens’ translations of Donne: this is due to appear in Quaerendo in the last issue of 1999 or the first of 2000. The three of us transcribed afresh the first four translations, and contributed a collated (non-eclectic) text of the two of them that are to appear in the forthcoming Elegies volume of The Variorum Edition of the Poetry of John Donne (Bloomington: University of Indiana, 2000). I was appointed assistant textual editor to this project by its general editor Professor Gary Stringer (University of Southern Mississippi at Hattiesburg) with particular responsibility for the remaining seventeen poems translated by Huygens, which have still to be collated and edited for the Donne Variorum (DV) project. I entered some 50 versions of the poems in question into the DV collation program (the first time these have been added to a corpus that will eventually amount to between 4,000 and 5,000 individual ms. and print versions of about 220 individual poems), and learned much more than I had hitherto known about secretary hand and IT skills. The groundwork on the first four poems (apart from the facsimile edition itself) is as good as complete, and I made a start on the fifteen poems translated between August and October 1633.