Literature Translation And The Politics Of Meaning

This book features essays and discussions from writers, translators, and individuals who play both roles at once, from around the world. It evolved from an international conference sponsored by Canada's Literary Translators' Association which took place in Montreal in 1986.

This book deals mostly with American avant-garde literature of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and the present-day practice and politics of its translation into Polish, trying to answer the following questions: What are the meaning and the limits of avantgardism? What is the rationale of literary translations and what is their life-cycle in receiving literary polysystems? Furthermore: What is the importance of translation in shaping the politics of meaning – our collective textual practices determining our epistemological perspectives in literature and beyond? And finally: What are the consequences of implementing foreign modes of thinking and making politics in the receiving culture, both in the social sphere and in writing?

The Routledge Handbook of Translation and Politics presents the first comprehensive, state of the art overview of the multiple ways in which ‘politics’ and ‘translation’ interact. Divided into four sections with thirty-three chapters written by a roster of international scholars, this handbook covers the translation of political ideas, the effects of political structures on translation and interpreting, the politics of translation and an array of case studies that range from the Classical Mediterranean to contemporary China. Considering established topics such as censorship, gender, translation under fascism, translators and interpreters at war, as well as emerging topics such as translation and development, the politics of localization, translation and interpreting in democratic movements, and the politics of translating popular music, the handbook offers a global and interdisciplinary introduction to the intersections between translation and interpreting studies and politics. With a substantial introduction and extensive bibliographies, this handbook is an indispensable resource for students and researchers of translation theory, politics and related areas.

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak is one of the most pre-eminent postcolonial theorists writing today and a scholar of genuinely global reputation. This collection, first published in 1993, presents some of Spivak’s most engaging essays on works of literature such as Salman Rushdie's controversial Satanic Verses, and twentieth century thinkers such as Jacques Derrida and Karl Marx. Spivak relentlessly questions and deconstructs power structures where ever they operate. In doing so, she provides a voice for those who can not speak, proving that the true work of resistance takes place in the margins, Outside in the Teaching Machine.

What if meaning were the last thing that mattered in language? In this essay, Henri Meschonnic explains what it means to translate the sense of language and how to do it. In a radical stand against a hermeneutical approach based on the dualistic view of the linguistic sign and against its separation into a meaningful signified and a meaningless signifier, Henri Meschonnic argues for a poetics of translating. Because texts generate meaning through their power of expression, to translate ethically involves listening to the various rhythms that characterize them: prosodic, consonantal or vocalic patterns, syntactical structures, sentence length and punctuation, among other discursive means. However, as the book illustrates, such an endeavour goes against the grain and, more precisely, against a 2500-year-old tradition in the case of biblical translation. The inability of translators to give ear to rhythm in language results from a culturally transmitted deafness. Henri Meschonnic decries the generalized unwillingness to remedy this cultural condition and discusses the political implications for the subject of discourse.

Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability argues for a rethinking of comparative literature focusing on the problems that emerge when large-scale paradigms of literary studies ignore the politics of the “Untranslatable”—the realm of those words that are continually retranslated, mistranslated, transferred from language to language, or especially resistant to substitution. In the place of “World Literature”—a dominant paradigm in the humanities, one grounded in market-driven notions of readability and universal appeal—Apter proposes a plurality of “world literatures” oriented around philosophical concepts and geopolitical pressure points. The history and theory of the language that constructs World Literature is critically examined with a special focus on Weltliteratur, literary world systems, narrative ecosystems, language borders and checkpoints, theologies of translation, and planetary devolution in a book set to revolutionize the discipline of comparative literature.

This volume invites the reader to participate in a discussion about how to conceptualize the mediation of difference in localities of diversity and transcultural spaces via the analytical lenses of 'translation' as a social practice. The contributions to the volume explore, discuss, and theorize 'translation' as a pre-institutionalized strategy of conflict resolution and conflict transformation as well as a driving force of cultural and social change and as a means of knowledge production. In addition to mistranslations and untranslatabilities, the authors analyze the politics of literary translation and translation as research-creation. Contributors: Alex Demeulenaere (Trier), Stefan Dixius (Trier), Jean Friesen (Winnipeg), Ute Heidmann (Lausanne), Julia Charlotte Kersting (Saarbrücken), Judith Lamberty (Saarbrücken), Ursula Lehmkuhl (Trier), Laurence McFalls (Montréal), Geneviève Robichaud (Montréal), Robert Schwartzwald (Montréal), Madeleine Stratford (Gatineau).