Art Of Translating Prose

This book by Burton Raffel, one of the greatest living translators of works of verbal art into English, presents for both the specialist and non-specialist the core strategies that he employs to translate a variety of important prose texts. In the process he delineates a coherent program or theory that can inform each act of translation. Raffel considers and effectively illustrates the fundamental features of prose, those features that most clearly and idiomatically define an author's style. He ties together theory and practice to establish sound standards for the valuation of prose translations, and he provides examples in considerations of versions of Madame Bovary, Germinal, and Death in Venice.

Performing Without a Stage is a lively and comprehensive introduction to the art of literary translation for readers of foreign fiction and poetry who wonder what it takes to translate, how the art of literary translation has changed over the centuries, what problems translators face in bringing foreign works into English and how they go about solving these problems. This book will also be of interest to translators, writers, editors, critics, and literature students, dealing as it does, often controversially, with such matters as the translator's fidelity to the author, the publishing and reviewing of translations, the nearly nonexistent public image of the stageless translator, and the value for writers and scholars of studying and practicing translation.

Jirí Levý's seminal work, The Art of Translation, considered a timeless classic in Translation Studies, is now available in English. Having drawn on adjacent disciplines, the methodology of Czech functional sociosemiotic structuralism and the state-of-the art in the West, Levý synthesized his findings and experience in the field presenting them in a reader-friendly book, which combines the approaches of a theoretician, systemic analyst, historian, critic, teacher, practitioner and populariser. Although focused on literary translation from theoretical, descriptive and historical perspectives, it presents a conceptualization of a general theory, addressing a number of issues discussed today. The 'practical' mission of the book as a theory extending to practice is based on the same historical-dialectic affinity of methods, norms, functions and values, accounting for the translator's agency and other contextual agents involved in the communication process. The book will be useful to translators, researchers, students and teachers in Translation and Literary Studies.

The cultural agenda of Philippe de Vigneulles, translator of the Lorraine epic cycle into Middle French prose. Over fifty chansons de geste were reworked into prose between the fourteenth and sixteenth centuries for patrons and audiences who demanded updated, de-rhymed versions of heroic songs. While most prose translations were commissioned by noble patrons, Philippe de Vigneulles (1471-1527), a cloth merchant of Metz, operated outside the system of patronage on self-imposed projects with a pronounced civic bias. His translation of the monumental Lorraine epic cycle into Middle French prose afforded him an opportunity to reconfigure the city's legendary past and validate the concerns of a prosperous merchant class. The craft of mise en prose is examined in the context of the author's larger cultural agenda as he weaves the epic legend into his civic, personal and aesthetic preoccupations. This perspective illuminates a previously neglected sphere of medieval literary production, revealing fundamental assumptions about the epic tradition and the power of prose in urban culture. CATHERINE M. JONES is Associate Professor of French and Provençal at the University of Georgia.

“I try to follow the rule laid down by perhaps the greatest translator of all, John Dryden, who maintained that a translator should – and I paraphrase – make the version as entertaining as possible, while at the same time remaining as faithful as possible to the spirit of the original” – Ranjit Bolt. In this book, Ranjit Bolt takes what is essentially a practitioner's view of the art of literary translation. His observations are born of a quarter of a century's experience of translating for a living, especially for the theatre. While rooted in practice, however, this survey does not shy away from theory, but is packed with allusion to great translation theorists such as Walter Benjamin and John Dryden, as well as adumbrating Bolt's own theoretical stance.