The topic of competition starts with translators’ incorporation of others’ versions into their own texts, then moves on to translators’ prefaces where they situate themselves in relation to particular predecessors, such as Leopardi’s relationship with Caro’s sixteenth-century Eneide. I examine in depth the self-positioning and self-fashioning in the paratexts in the English tradition of Aeneid translations from Caxton down to Wordsworth. The second section deals with the phenomenon of ‘retranslation’, which has two manifestations: when translators lift elements from preceding translations and when they revisit their own earlier versions and modify them. Then I consider competition with Virgil himself, starting with the challenge to Paul Valéry to translate the Eclogues. The chapter concludes with brief consideration of parody and travesty of Virgil as special forms of retranslation, with examples from a seventeenth-century Dutch collaboration on the Eclogues, a seventeenth-century parody of Eclogue 1 by an Irishman and an eighteenth-century travesty of the Aeneid in German.

I consider whether particular translators are situated inside or outside the hegemonic culture of their society. Salient factors include religious affiliation, level of education, class and gender. I offer in-depth analysis of the first translations of the Aeneid into English, down to Dryden, and then two cases from continental Europe, one in French, one in German, where the religious affiliations of translators affect the fate of their translations. Two cases of translations of the Georgics written on the margins of empire (in Tunisia and Singapore) challenge notions of centre and periphery. In the final section, I address the question of gender, noting that there have been remarkably few female translators of Virgil: I consider two sixteenth-century French translators and two early nineteenth-century translators of the Aeneid. Then I turn to modern translations of the Georgics, where women are unusually well represented but often marginalized. I conclude the chapter with discussion of the only female translator of the Eclogues I have identified.