Essays in the Art and Theory of Translation

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Pages:420
ISBN:0-7734-8421-3
978-0-7734-8421-4
Price:$259.95 + shipping
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The essays in this volume (a tribute to Walter Arndt) comprise a strikingly broad range of case studies in translation. The authors study ethical situations in which language fails; translations that simultaneously mime and undermine the hegemony of a prestige language, and close readings of particular authors, whose despairing translations inevitably make the target language look impoverished. English lacks the expressive particles of German and Russian, the levels of style which Arabic commands, and the inflection system that makes dactylic rhymes a far easier business in Russian than in English. The volume also examines two examples of cultural misprision: Russia's refracting and fractured adaptation of contemporary popular cultural symbols from the West, and America's politicizing and misinterpretation of Russian literary criticism.

Reviews

"Each of the articles, taken on its own, is interesting, well-written, and valuable, but the reader, guided by John Kopper's deft preface, will find that the whole adds up . . . to be greater than a mere sum of the parts. . . I would recommend it highly to anyone interested in language, literature, or translation." - William Mills Todd III, Curt Hugo Reisinger Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures, Harvard University

"These essays provide a fitting tribute to the impressively broad transcultural writings of Walter Arndt. They treat not only his many languages - Russian, German, English, Turkish, Greek, Polish, and a few more thrown in for good measure - but also his overarching concern for language in its aesthetic function and translation in its most catholic sense: from language to language, genre to genre, culture to culture, and medium to medium." - Michael Heim

Table of Contents

Essays include:
Honoring Walter Arndt (Richard Sheldon
Walter Arndt: A Bibliography
Section I: Translation, Culture and Translatability
Kraut und Rüben, Choux et navets, Kaposzta és répak (Marianne Hirsch)
S(t)imulating Chic: The Aestheticization of Post-Soviet Russia (Helena Goscilo)
Formal Dress Not Required: The American Academy's Translation of Russian Formalism (John M. Kopper)
Translating the Untranslatable (Lenore A. Grenoble)
Matters of Non-equivalence: Egyptianizing French Literature (Carol Bardenstein)
Section II: Translation, Literature and Writers
Reminiscences of a Translator from the Modern Greek (Peer Bien)
Recasting K.: A Translator Approaches The Castle (Mark Harman)
When Physicists are Lyricists: On Translating the Strugatskys' Monday Starts on Sunday (Yvonne Howell)
A Source for Pushkin's The Snowstorm (Antonia Glasse)
Problems in the English Translations of Anna Karenina (Richard Sheldon)
Section III: Translation and Poetics
Wine and Vinegar - On the Translatability of Poetry (Efim Etkind)
Apocalypse and the Poetics of the Name 'John' in the Little Tragedies (Nathan Longan)
Marina Tsvetaeva in English: Notes of a Verse Translator (Robin Kemball)
To and from Autumn: Pasternak's Translations of Keats (Barry P. Scherr)
Mandelshtam and Celan on Poetic Address (Henry Pickford)

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