The 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.

This book by a well-known translator and critic is divided into two parts, the first dealing with the linguistic and other more technical aspects of translating poetry, the second involved with more practice-oriented matters. The chapters in Part One examine the specific constraints of language and the unavoidable linguistic bases of translation; the constraints of specific languages; forms and genres; and prosody and comparative prosody. Part Two looks at the subjective element in translation; collaborative translation; the translation of oral poetry; and the translator's responsibility. Languages discussed include Indonesian, Japanese, Chinese, Old and Middle English, French, German, Spanish, Italian, Persian, Russian, Latin, and Greek. The book argues, inter alia, that literal translation is impossible; that no translation can fully create the original but that good literary translation can create a usable approximation; that translation is secondary not only to the original work being translated but also to the linguistic (and literary) nature of the language being translated into; that the literary translator's primary responsibility is to the work he is translating; that there is nothing ever definitive about any translation; that the poetry translator must be a poet and poems should not be translated into prose; and that there must be a subjective identification between translator and translated work. This is the first attempt to systematize linguistic information about the translation of poetry. It is also the first book to range widely over the languages and literatures of the past and the present, and European and Asian languages and literatures as well. Raffel is the first author to combine in one study linguistic and scholarly knowledge and extensive experience of translation.