Literature as Translation/Translation as Literature

Literature as Translation/Translation as Literature PDF Author: Christopher Conti
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443857688
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 245

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Book Description
Broadly conceived, literature consists of aesthetic and cultural processes that can be thought of as forms of translation. By the same token, translation requires the sort of creative or interpretive understanding usually associated with literature. Literature as Translation/Translation as Literature explores a number of themes centred on this shared identity of literature and translation as creative acts of interpretation and understanding. The metaphor or motif of translation is the touchstone of this volume, which looks at how an expanded idea of translation sheds light not just on features of literary composition and reception, but also on modes of intercultural communication at a time when the pressures of globalization threaten local cultures with extinction. The theory of ethical translation that has emerged in this context, which fosters the practice of preserving the foreignness of the text at the risk of its misunderstanding, bears relevance beyond current debates about world literature to the framing of contemporary social issues by dominant discourses like medicine, as one contributor’s study of the growing autism rights movement reveals. The systematizing imperatives of translation that forcibly assimilate the foreign to the familiar, like the systematizing imperatives of globalization, are resisted in acts of creative understanding in which the particular or different finds sanctuary. The overlooked role that the foreign word plays in the discourses that constitute subjectivity and national culture comes to light across the variegated concerns of this volume. Contributions range from case studies of the emancipatory role translation has played in various historical and cultural contexts to the study of specific literary works that understand their own aesthetic processes, and the interpretive and communicative processes of meaning more generally, as forms of translation. Several contributors – including the English translators of Roberto Bolaño and Hans Blumenberg – were prompted in their reflections on the creative and interpretive process of translation by their own accomplished work as translators. All are animated by the conviction that translation – whether regarded as the creative act of understanding of one culture by another; as the agent of political and social transformation; as the source of new truths in foreign linguistic environments and not just the bearer of established ones; or as the limit of conceptuality outlined in the silhouette of the untranslatable – is a creative cultural force of the first importance.

Literature as Translation/Translation as Literature

Literature as Translation/Translation as Literature PDF Author: Christopher Conti
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
ISBN: 1443857688
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 245

Get Book Here

Book Description
Broadly conceived, literature consists of aesthetic and cultural processes that can be thought of as forms of translation. By the same token, translation requires the sort of creative or interpretive understanding usually associated with literature. Literature as Translation/Translation as Literature explores a number of themes centred on this shared identity of literature and translation as creative acts of interpretation and understanding. The metaphor or motif of translation is the touchstone of this volume, which looks at how an expanded idea of translation sheds light not just on features of literary composition and reception, but also on modes of intercultural communication at a time when the pressures of globalization threaten local cultures with extinction. The theory of ethical translation that has emerged in this context, which fosters the practice of preserving the foreignness of the text at the risk of its misunderstanding, bears relevance beyond current debates about world literature to the framing of contemporary social issues by dominant discourses like medicine, as one contributor’s study of the growing autism rights movement reveals. The systematizing imperatives of translation that forcibly assimilate the foreign to the familiar, like the systematizing imperatives of globalization, are resisted in acts of creative understanding in which the particular or different finds sanctuary. The overlooked role that the foreign word plays in the discourses that constitute subjectivity and national culture comes to light across the variegated concerns of this volume. Contributions range from case studies of the emancipatory role translation has played in various historical and cultural contexts to the study of specific literary works that understand their own aesthetic processes, and the interpretive and communicative processes of meaning more generally, as forms of translation. Several contributors – including the English translators of Roberto Bolaño and Hans Blumenberg – were prompted in their reflections on the creative and interpretive process of translation by their own accomplished work as translators. All are animated by the conviction that translation – whether regarded as the creative act of understanding of one culture by another; as the agent of political and social transformation; as the source of new truths in foreign linguistic environments and not just the bearer of established ones; or as the limit of conceptuality outlined in the silhouette of the untranslatable – is a creative cultural force of the first importance.

What Is World Literature?

What Is World Literature? PDF Author: David Damrosch
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691188645
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 324

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Book Description
World literature was long defined in North America as an established canon of European masterpieces, but an emerging global perspective has challenged both this European focus and the very category of "the masterpiece." The first book to look broadly at the contemporary scope and purposes of world literature, What Is World Literature? probes the uses and abuses of world literature in a rapidly changing world. In case studies ranging from the Sumerians to the Aztecs and from medieval mysticism to postmodern metafiction, David Damrosch looks at the ways works change as they move from national to global contexts. Presenting world literature not as a canon of texts but as a mode of circulation and of reading, Damrosch argues that world literature is work that gains in translation. When it is effectively presented, a work of world literature moves into an elliptical space created between the source and receiving cultures, shaped by both but circumscribed by neither alone. Established classics and new discoveries alike participate in this mode of circulation, but they can be seriously mishandled in the process. From the rediscovered Epic of Gilgamesh in the nineteenth century to Rigoberta Menchú's writing today, foreign works have often been distorted by the immediate needs of their own editors and translators. Eloquently written, argued largely by example, and replete with insightful close readings, this book is both an essay in definition and a series of cautionary tales.

Children’s Literature in Translation

Children’s Literature in Translation PDF Author: Jan Van Coillie
Publisher: Leuven University Press
ISBN: 9462702225
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 281

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Book Description
For many of us, our earliest and most meaningful experiences with literature occur through the medium of a translated children’s book. This volume focuses on the complex interplay that happens between text and context when works of children’s literature are translated: what contexts of production and reception account for how translated children’s books come to be made and read as they are? How are translated children’s books adapted to suit the context of a new culture? Spanning the disciplines of Children’s Literature Studies and Translation Studies, this book brings together established and emerging voices to provide an overview of the analytical, empirical and geographic richness of current research in this field and to identify and reflect on common insights, analytical perspectives and trajectories for future interdisciplinary research. This volume will appeal to an interdisciplinary audience of scholars and students in Translation Studies and Children’s Literature Studies and related disciplines. It has a broad geographic and cultural scope, with contributions dealing with translated children’s literature in the United Kingdom, the United States, Ireland, Spain, France, Brazil, Poland, Slovenia, Hungary, China, the former Yugoslavia, Sweden, Germany, and Belgium.

Sympathy for the Traitor

Sympathy for the Traitor PDF Author: Mark Polizzotti
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262537028
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 201

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Book Description
An engaging and unabashedly opinionated examination of what translation is and isn't. For some, translation is the poor cousin of literature, a necessary evil if not an outright travesty—summed up by the old Italian play on words, traduttore, traditore (translator, traitor). For others, translation is the royal road to cross-cultural understanding and literary enrichment. In this nuanced and provocative study, Mark Polizzotti attempts to reframe the debate along more fruitful lines. Eschewing both these easy polarities and the increasingly abstract discourse of translation theory, he brings the main questions into clearer focus: What is the ultimate goal of a translation? What does it mean to label a rendering “faithful”? (Faithful to what?) Is something inevitably lost in translation, and can something also be gained? Does translation matter, and if so, why? Unashamedly opinionated, both a manual and a manifesto, his book invites usto sympathize with the translator not as a “traitor” but as the author's creative partner. Polizzotti, himself a translator of authors from Patrick Modiano to Gustave Flaubert, explores what translation is and what it isn't, and how it does or doesn't work. Translation, he writes, “skirts the boundaries between art and craft, originality and replication, altruism and commerce, genius and hack work.” In Sympathy for the Traitor, he shows us how to read not only translations but also the act of translation itself, treating it not as a problem to be solved but as an achievement to be celebrated—something, as Goethe put it, “impossible, necessary, and important.”

Fictional Translators

Fictional Translators PDF Author: Rosemary Arrojo
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317574575
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 318

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Book Description
Through close readings of select stories and novels by well-known writers from different literary traditions, Fictional Translators invites readers to rethink the main clichés associated with translations. Rosemary Arrojo shines a light on the transformative character of the translator’s role and the relationships that can be established between originals and their reproductions, building her arguments on the basis of texts such as the following: Cortázar’s "Letter to a Young Lady in Paris" Walsh’s "Footnote" Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray and Poe’s "The Oval Portrait" Borges’s "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote," "Funes, His Memory," and "Death and the Compass" Kafka’s "The Burrow" and Kosztolányi’s Kornél Esti Saramago’s The History of the Siege of Lisbon and Babel’s "Guy de Maupassant" Scliar’s "Footnotes" and Calvino’s If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler Cervantes’s Don Quixote Fictional Translators provides stimulating material for reflection not only on the processes associated with translation as an activity that inevitably transforms meaning, but, also, on the common prejudices that have underestimated its productive role in the shaping of identities. This book is key reading for students and researchers of literary translation, comparative literature and translation theory.

Literary Translation

Literary Translation PDF Author: Clifford E. Landers
Publisher: Multilingual Matters
ISBN: 1847695604
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 228

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Book Description
In this book, both beginning and experienced translators will find pragmatic techniques for dealing with problems of literary translation, whatever the original language. Certain challenges and certain themes recur in translation, whatever the language pair. This guide proposes to help the translator navigate through them. Written in a witty and easy to read style, the book’s hands-on approach will make it accessible to translators of any background. A significant portion of this Practical Guide is devoted to the question of how to go about finding an outlet for one’s translations.

The Oxford History of Literary Translation in English:

The Oxford History of Literary Translation in English: PDF Author: Peter France
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0199246238
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 612

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Book Description
Translation has played a vital part in the history of literature throughout the English-speaking world. Offering for the first time a comprehensive view of this phenomenon, this pioneering five-volume work casts a vivid new light on the history of English literature. Incorporating critical discussion of translations, it explores the changing nature and function of translation and the social and intellectual milieu of the translators.

Why Translation Matters

Why Translation Matters PDF Author: Edith Grossman
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 0300163037
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 108

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Book Description
"Why Translation Matters argues for the cultural importance of translation and for a more encompassing and nuanced appreciation of the translator's role. As the acclaimed translator Edith Grossman writes in her introduction, "My intention is to stimulate a new consideration of an area of literature that is too often ignored, misunderstood, or misrepresented." For Grossman, translation has a transcendent importance: "Translation not only plays its important traditional role as the means that allows us access to literature originally written in one of the countless languages we cannot read, but it also represents a concrete literary presence with the crucial capacity to ease and make more meaningful our relationships to those with whom we may not have had a connection before. Translation always helps us to know, to see from a different angle, to attribute new value to what once may have been unfamiliar. As nations and as individuals, we have a critical need for that kind of understanding and insight. The alternative is unthinkable"."--Jacket.

Retracing the History of Literary Translation in Poland

Retracing the History of Literary Translation in Poland PDF Author: Magda Heydel
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000415260
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 309

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Book Description
This book, the first of its kind for an English-language audience, introduces a fresh perspective on the Polish literary translation landscape, providing unique insights into the social, political, and ideological underpinnings of Polish translation history. Employing a problem-based approach, the book creates a map of different research directions in the history of literary translation in Poland, highlighting a holistic perspective on the discipline’s development in the region. The four sections explore topics of particular interest in current translation research, including translation and cultural borderlands, the agency of women translators, translators as intercultural mediators, and the intersection of translation research and digital methods. The 15 contributions demonstrate the ways in which Polish culture has represented translated work in its own way, informed and shaped by socio-political changes in Polish history. At the same time, the volume situates Polish research in translation within the growing body of work on Central and Eastern European translation studies, as well as looking at them against the backdrop of the international development of the discipline. This collection offers a valuable addition to existing research on Western literary canons, making it key reading for scholars in translation studies, comparative literature, cultural studies, and Slavonic studies.

Perspectives on Literature and Translation

Perspectives on Literature and Translation PDF Author: Brian Nelson
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134521944
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 258

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Book Description
This volume explores the relationship between literature and translation from three perspectives: the creative dimensions of the translation process; the way texts circulate between languages; and the way texts are received in translation by new audiences. The distinctiveness of the volume lies in the fact that it considers these fundamental aspects of literary translation together and in terms of their interconnections. Contributors examine a wide variety of texts, including world classics, poetry, genre fiction, transnational literature, and life writing from around the world. Both theoretical and empirical issues are covered, with some contributors approaching the topic as practitioners of literary translation, and others writing from within the academy.