Translating the Monster : : Volter Kilpi in Orbit Beyond (un)translatability.
"One of the hottest battles emerging out of the theoretical and methodological collisions between Comparative Literature and Translation Studies-especially on the battleground of World Literature-has to do with translatability and untranslatability. Is any translation of a great work of literat...
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Superior document: | Approaches to Translation Studies |
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Place / Publishing House: | Boston : : BRILL,, 2022. ©2023. |
Year of Publication: | 2022 |
Edition: | 1st ed. |
Language: | English |
Series: | Approaches to Translation Studies
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Physical Description: | 1 online resource (308 pages) |
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Summary: | "One of the hottest battles emerging out of the theoretical and methodological collisions between Comparative Literature and Translation Studies-especially on the battleground of World Literature-has to do with translatability and untranslatability. Is any translation of a great work of literature not only a lamentable betrayal but an impossibility? Or is translation an imperfect but invaluable tool for the transmission of works and ideas beyond language barriers? Both views are defensible; indeed both are arguably commonsensical. What Douglas Robinson argues in Translating the Monster, however, is that both are gross oversimplifications of a complex situation that he calls on Jacques Derrida to characterize as "the monster." The Finnish novelist Robinson takes as his case study for that monstrous rethinking is Volter Kilpi (1874-1939), regarded by scholars of Finnish literature as Finland's second world-class writer-the first being Aleksis Kivi (1834-1872). Kilpi's modernist experiments of the 1930s, especially his so-called Archipelago series, beginning with his masterpiece, In the Alastalo Parlor (1933), were forgotten and neglected for a half century, due to the extreme difficulty of his narrative style: he reinvents the Finnish language, to the extent that many Finns say it is like reading a foreign language (and one contemporary critic called it the "Mesopotamian language ... of a half-wit"). That novel has been translated exactly twice, into Swedish and German. Translating the Monster also gives the English-speaking reader an extended taste of the novel in English-en route to a series of reframings of the novel as allegories of translation and world literature"-- |
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ISBN: | 9789004519930 |
Hierarchical level: | Monograph |