Translating Totality in Parts offers an annotated translation of two of preeminent Chinese Tang dynasty monk Chengguan’s most revered masterpieces. With this book, Chengguan’s Commentaries to the Avatamsaka Sutra and The Meanings Proclaimed in the Subcommentaries Accompanying the Commentaries to the Avatamsaka Sutra are finally brought to contemporary Western audiences. Translating Totality in Parts allows Western readers to experience Chengguan’s important contributions to the religious and philosophical theory of the Huayan and Buddhism in China.
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 late poet and memoirist Czeslaw Milosz wrote, "I am enchanted. This book is graceful and profound." Since its publication in 1989, many other readers across the world have been enchanted by Lost in Translation: A Life in a New Language, a classic of exile and immigrant literature, as well as a girl’s coming-of-age memoir. Lost in Translationmoves from Hoffman's childhood in Cracow, Poland to her adolescence in Vancouver, British Columbia to her university years in Texas and Massachusetts to New York City, where she becomes a writer and an editor at the New York Times Book Review. Its multi-layered narrative encompasses many themes: the defining power of language; the costs and benefits of changing cultures, the construction of personal identity, and the profound consequences, for a generation of post-war Jews like Hoffman, of Nazism and Communism. Lost in Translation is, as Publisher's Weekly wrote, "a penetrating, lyrical memoir that casts a wide net," challenges its reader to reconsider their own language, autobiography, cultures, and childhoods. Lost in Translation was first published in the United States in 1989. Hoffman’s subsequent books of literary non-fiction include Exit into History, Shtetl, After Such Knowledge, Time and two novels, The Secret and Appassionata. "Nothing, after all, has been lost; poetry this time has been made in and by translation." — Peter Conrad, The New York Times "Handsomely written and judiciously reflective, it is testimony to the human capacity not merely to adapt but to reinvent: to find new lives for ourselves without forfeiting the dignity and meaning of our old ones." — Jonathan Yardley, Washington Post "As a childhood memoir, Lost in Translation has the colors and nuance of Nabokov'sSpeak, Memory. As an account of a young mind wandering into great books, it recalls Sartre's Words. … As an anthropology of Eastern European émigré life, American academe and the Upper West Side of Manhattan, it's every bit as deep and wicked as anything by Cynthia Ozick. … A brilliant, polyphonic book that is itself an act of faith, a Bach Fugue." — John Leonard, Harper’s Magazine
In the years 1884-1897 Rudolf Steiner edited Goethe's scientific writings for the series "German National Literature" of the publisher Kürschner. In Goethe's works, each individual experience is not an end in itself, but serves to substantiate a single, great idea: the unceasing harmonious becoming of the universe, revealed in this volume. "The dominant influence in Steiner's life was that of Goethe. In 1833 he was invited to edit Goethe's scientific writings for the planned canonical edition, and his first publications, dating from 1866, are on Goethe. In 1890 he left Vienna and for six years went to work at the Goethe Archives in Weimar, strong not only in an orthodox culture that the following year would earn him a degree in philosophy at Rostock, but also in a very large body of general knowledge about all known disciplines." James Webb
Apart from the Tractatus, Wittgenstein did not write whole manuscripts, but composed short fragments. The current volume reveals the depths of Wittgenstein's soul-searching writings - his "new" philosophy - by concentrating on ordinary language and using few technical terms. In so doing, Wittgenstein is finally given the accolade of a neglected figure in the history of semiotics. The volume applies Wittgenstein's methodological tools to the study of multilingual dialogue in philosophy, linguistics, theology, anthropology and literature. Translation shows how the translator's signatures are in conflict with personal or stylistic choices in linguistic form, but also in cultural content. This volume undertakes the "impossible task" of uncovering the reasoning of Wittgenstein's translated texts in order to construct, rather than paraphrase, the ideal of a terminological coherence.
In the age of big data, evidence keeps suggesting that small, elusive and infrequent details make all the difference in our appreciation of humanistic texts—film, fiction, and philosophy. This book argues, from a cross-disciplinary perspective, that expertise in humanistic translation is precisely the capacity to capture those details that are bigger than they seem. In humanistic translation, the expert handling of big details usually serves audiences and the original, but mala fide translation also works the details for subtle manipulation and audience deception. A focus on textual detail is therefore characteristic of humanistic translators but also compatible with central claims of the cultural turn in translation studies. This book, written by a scholar and teacher of literary, essayistic, and audiovisual translation, endeavors to articulate a seemingly dual interest—on textual detail and cultural analysis—as a single one. It theorizes connections between micro and macro analysis, between translation as detail and translation as culture, thus hoping to build bridges between humanistic translators and translation scholars. It acknowledges tensions between practice and theory and proposes a way forward: practitioners and scholars share ways of thinking—varieties of "part-whole thinking"—that machines can never acquire.
