It may well be symptomatic of the present state of translation studies—a discipline busy pulling itself up by its own bootstraps—that the preface to a reference work of this size and scope should still open on a defensive note, with an assertion of the importance of literary translation for literary history and a reminder that although translated literature is necessarily "du second degré" it is not therefore "de second ordre". An alternative explanation would be that even the obvious needs restating every now and again.