Literary Translation and the Making of Originals

by Karen Emmerich, Brian James Baer (Editor), Michelle Woods (Editor)

Literary Translation and the Making of Originals engages such issues as the politics and ethics of translation; how aesthetic categories and market forces contribute to the establishment and promotion of particular “originals”; and the role translation plays in the formation, re-formation, and deformation of national and international literary canons. By challenging the assumption that stable originals even exist, Karen Emmerich also calls into question the tropes of ideal equivalence and unavoidable loss that contribute to the low status of translation, translations, and translators in the current literary and academic marketplaces.

Genres: Nonfiction

234 pages, Hardcover

Published September 21, 2017

Reviews

[Owlseyes]

“There’s Value in Translating All Kinds of Things”: An Interview with Dr. Karen Emmerich

in: http://blog.pshares.org/index.php/the...

[World Literature Today]

"Emmerich adroitly argu[es], “The commonplace insistence of an ideal of translational ‘fidelity’ means that promiscuity is for originals alone; the last thing we want is for a translation to go messing around with an unstable text, much less with several at once.”

This is but one of many salvos Emmerich fires in her book, which, according to the author, “has the perhaps immodest goal of challenging the time-honored tradition—long upheld by readers, reviewers, publishers, literary scholars, even many translators and scholars of translation—of referring to the objects of literary translation as if each were a known quantity, a singular entity whose lexical context is stable or fixed: the ‘original,’ ‘the Arabic original,’ ‘the original French text,’ ‘the source text,’ ‘Kafka’s German,’ and so on.” - George Henson

This book was reviewed in the Mar/Apr 2018 issue of World Literature Today magazine. Read the full review by visiting our website:

https://www.worldliteraturetoday.org/...