Though Johnson has been translated into many languages – twenty-five at last count – his cross-linguistic afterlife attracted very little attention until the early twenty-first century. Among the many works of scholarship that link Johnson’s name to the likes of the law, science, and history, there is as yet no Samuel Johnson and the Continent, Samuel Johnson and Europe, Samuel Johnson and Translation (though he was himself a translator), or Samuel Johnson without English. “The John Bull of Spiritual Europe,” “a British superstition,” Johnson seemed perversely ill-suited to re-creation in the medium of another language, to taking root in and being transformed by other cultures. Accordingly, translations of his works have seldom been sought or studied by anglophone scholars. The study of Johnson in translation therefore retains the charm or thrill of the chance find – a single Rambler essay in the Marathi language, for instance, published in Mumbai in 1879 by Benjamin Shimshon Ashtamker – without the historiographical sophistication with which one might approach Shakespeare in German, Edgar Allan Poe in French, or Charles Dickens in Catalan.

Two observations on Johnson in translation recur in the scant but suggestive recent scholarship that touches on the question, and they seem likely to frame further inquiry for some time. The first is that Johnson’s writings in translation were seldom preceded by his reputation; instead they circulated, often anonymously, unencumbered by Samuel Johnson the historical construct, and their agency was not tainted by the use of Johnson’s name as shorthand for a politics, a poetics, or a national character. (In fact they continue to be mistaken for, and studied as, works native to the languages in which they appeared.) The second is that the advent of English studies as a globalized discipline has quickened the pace of translation, especially into such major languages as Spanish and Chinese. In the twenty-first century, more of Johnson is now, and will be, available to more readers than ever before.