In this volume, eminent poet, scholar and translator Willis Barnstone explores the history and theory of literary translations as an art form. Arguing that literary translation goes beyond the transfer of linguistic information, Barnstone emphasizes that the translation contains as much imaginative originality as the source text.
The present book is a bold attempt at revealing the complex and diversified nature of the field of translated literature in Turkey during a period of radical socio-political change. On the broad level, it investigates the implications of the political transformation experienced in Turkey after the proclamation of the Republic for the cultural and literary fields, including the field of translated literature. On a more specific level, it holds translation under focus and explores the discourse formed on translation and translators while it also traces the norms (not) observed by translators throughout the 1920s-1950s in two case studies. The findings of the study suggest that the concepts of translation both affected and were affected by cultural processes in the society, including ideological and poetological ones and that there was no uniform way of defining or carrying out translations during the period under study. The findings also point at the segmentation of readership in early republican Turkey and conclude that the political and poetological factors governing the production and reception of translations varied for different segments of readers.
ABC of Translation is an expanded version of a few pages that first appeared in Willis Barnstone's The Poetics of Translation: History, Theory, Practice. This book of aphorisms and meditations on translation is by one of the modern masters of the art of translation. Illustrated by the author. Translation is friendship between two poets, an intimate union that demands love, art and working with a foreign word. Know François Villon's song in French and the cello of his ballad will haunt you for life. Book jacket.
Selected by Choice magazine as an Outstanding Academic Book Cheyfitz charts the course of American imperialism from the arrival of Europeans in a New World open for material and rhetorical cultivation to the violent foreign ventures of twentieth-century America in a Third World judged equally in need of cultural translation. Passionately and provocatively, he reads James Fenimore Cooper and Leslie Marmon Silko, Frederick Douglass, and Edgar Rice Burroughs within and against the imperial framework. At the center of the book is Shakespeare's "Tempest," at once transfiguring the first permanent English settlement at Jamestown and prefiguring much of American literature. In a new, final chapter, Cheyfitz reaches back to the representations of Native Americans produced by the English decades before the establishment of the Jamestown colony.
In the aftermath of Iran’s 2009 election, a woman undertakes a search for the statues disappearing from Tehran’s public spaces. A chance meeting alters her trajectory, and the space between fiction and reality narrows. As she circles the city’s points of connection—teahouses, buses, galleries, hookah bars—her many questions are distilled into one: How do we translate loss into language? Melding several worlds, perspectives, and narrative styles, trans(re)lating house one translates the various realities of Tehran and its inhabitants into the realm of art, helping us remember them anew.
Translation is a vital method of not just reading but writing and forms the basis of an exciting range of critical, artistic, and literary opportunities. Combining close readings of literary texts alongside astute critical observations from works by Avital Ronell and Walter Benjamin, amongst others, The Poetics of Translation re-examines key translation studies concepts, challenging our sometimes pragmatic understanding of translation and asking what it is that the discipline can make visible. By highlighting the possibilities of translation as an art form in contemporary innovative writing practices, Geneviève Robichaud reveals translation’s creative and critical potential, arguing that even those literary works that are not exactly translations gain in being apprehended as such. The Poetics of Translation values oblique, even unfinished sources of meaning, dwelling in the speculative spaces of texts and drawing attention to translation as poiesis, as creating that which is tangible and valuable. Situated at the juncture of translation poetics and literary studies, the book celebrates the uncertainty of translation, the plasticity of language and ideas, and the desire to interpret rather than reiterate.
In it, Aristotle offers an account of what he calls "poetry" (a term which in Greek literally means "making" and in this context includes drama - comedy, tragedy, and the satyr play - as well as lyric poetry and epic poetry). They are similar in the fact that they are all imitations but different in the three ways that Aristotle describes: 1. Differences in music rhythm, harmony, meter and melody. 2. Difference of goodness in the characters. 3. Difference in how the narrative is presented: telling a story or acting it out. In examining its "first principles," Aristotle finds two: 1) imitation and 2) genres and other concepts by which that of truth is applied/revealed in the poesis. His analysis of tragedy constitutes the core of the discussion. Although Aristotle's Poetics is universally acknowledged in the Western critical tradition, "almost every detail about his seminal work has aroused divergent opinions."