Translating the Monster : : Volter Kilpi in Orbit Beyond (un)translatability.

• Superior document: Approaches to Translation Studies
• Author: Robinson, Douglas.
• Place / Publishing House: Boston : : BRILL,, 2022.; ©2023.
• Year of Publication: 2022
• Edition: 1st ed.
• Language: English
• Series: Approaches to Translation Studies
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (308 pages)

"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"-- Provided by publisher.

Table of Contents

Intro -- Contents -- Chapter 1 Overture -- Beyond (Un)translatability: Intuiting the Monster -- 1 The Case for (Un)translatability: Benjamin and Apter -- 2 Testing Untranslatability: The Case of Volter Kilpi -- 3 "Localist" Bourgeois Respectability and the Monster -- 4 The Structure of the Book -- 4.1 First Movement (tempestoso)The Storm Blowing from Paradise: Translating the Monster as the Future -- 4.2 Second Movement (clandestino)Objects as Women, Women as Objects: The Monster as a Gender-Fetish for Translators -- 4.3 Third Movement (spettatoriale)The Lectorial Monster: Translating for the Monster's Deaf Ear -- 4.4 FinaleVolter Kilpi in Orbit: The Monster as Kosmotheoros -- A note -- Chapter 2 First Movement (tempestoso) The Storm Blowing from Paradise: Translating the Monster as the Future -- 1 Alastalo and Time -- 1.1 Thesis: Literary Time as Structure -- 1.2 Antithesis: Cumulative Time as Force-on-Force -- 1.3 An Interstitial/Processual Sort of Synthesis: The Force-to-Own-Time -- 2 Walter Benjamin on the Future -- 2.1 What the Historical Materialist Knows (and Doesn't Know) -- 2.2 Walter Benjamin in the Fourth Dimension -- 3 Archaizing vs. Modernizing Translations -- 3.1 Francis Newman vs. Matthew Arnold -- 3.2 "The Time Is Out of Joint" -- 3.3 Benjamin on the "Angel of History" -- 4 The Monster of Literary-Historical Periodization -- Chapter 3 Second Movement (clandestino) Objects as Women, Women as Objects: Translating the Monster as a Gender Fetish -- 1 Härkäniemi's Tobacco Pipes and Coffee Cups as Gendered Monster-Fetishes -- 1.1 Chapter Three: Tobacco Pipes -- 1.2 The Other Chapter Three Fetish(es) That I'm Not Analyzing -- 1.3 Chapter Five: Coffee Cups -- 2 Naming/Objectifying the Monster -- 2.1 Nietzsche's Styles -- 2.2 The Seduction of the (Un)translatable Text -- 3 Fetishes as Stuff, Stuff as Fetishes -- 3.1 Origins of the Fetish.

3.2 Boscagli on Benjamin -- 3.3 Kilpi's Hints of Resistance -- 3.4 Benjamin's Women, Benjamin's Abjection -- 4 The Exosomatization of Objects as Quasi-Alive -- 5 Rethinging Translation -- 5.1 Translation in the Thing-World -- 5.2 Fetishes for Translators -- Chapter 4 Third Movement (spettatoriale) The Lectorial Monster: Translating for the Monster's Deaf Ear -- 1 Benjamin on the Reader-Monster -- 1.1 The Farmer and the Seaman -- 1.2 The Storytelling Duel -- 1.3 Boredom, Mother of Experience -- 1.4 Practical Advice: Is Alastalo a Novel? -- 1.5 The Monster Reading Kilpi -- 2 Translating the Monster -- 2.1 The Quasi-Shakespearean Reader-Monster -- 2.2 The Avant-Garde vs. Benjamin -- 3 The Translation Scholar's Reader-Monster -- 3.1 The Compliant Reader-Monster in Nida, House, and Berman -- 3.2 The Reader-Monster and the Untranslatable -- Chapter 5 Finale Volter Kilpi in Orbit: The Monster as Kosmotheoros -- 1 Orbit as the Monster -- 1.1 Beelzebub -- 2 Derrida's Exorbitant -- 3 The Kosmotheoros -- 3.1 Nancy's Kosmotheoros -- 3.2 Kilpi's Kosmotheoros -- 3.3 Derrida's Kosmotheoros -- 3.4 The Author/Narrator/Transcreator as Kosmotheoros -- 4 To Conclude -- 4.1 First Conclusion: The Monster as Kosmotheoros -- 4.2 Second Conclusion: The Wanderer's Orbit of the Monster of World Literature -- Appendix A Background to In the Alastalo Parlor -- Appendix B Finnish Room Nomenclature -- Appendix C Kilpi Translations -- Appendix D Engagements with Kilpi's Critics -- Works Cited -- Index.