Only in jurisdictions where copyright has expired. For most works, just assume that it is copyrighted somewhere and that you need to figure out how and where before you derive your own work (e.g., a translation) from it.
Project Gutenberg will give you some hints to its status, but it is not exhaustive:
> This etext was produced from Science Fiction Stories 1953. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.
That is, there is always a risk that some troll will pop up one day claiming it holds the copyrights for a certain work. If you are not backed by a publisher who can handle the legal stuff, than your safest bet it to stick with much older works (generally pre-1900, but weird exceptions seem to exist in some countries). If you are only concerned with US law, pre-1926 is safe.
