Bloomsbury Literary Translation and the Making of Originals (Literatures, Cultures, Translation)

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. Review Karen Emmerichs study gives sustained attention to a topic so central to translation yet largely neglected in translation research. To treat editing as an interpretive act that constructs texts for further use redefines basic concepts like the source text, authorship, even translation itself. This book promises to direct the field into productive new directions. --Douglas Robinson, Professor of English, Hong Kong Baptist University, Hong KongBy combining textual studies with translation practice, Emmerich confronts a number of inconvenient facts about translation that lead to some convenient conclusions, which have not often been acknowledged. These include the fact that source texts in the original language are unstable and have often been revised or damaged in republication; the fact that translations, just like originals, are subject to contingencies of publication; and, most important, the fact that while the translation is supposed to be the same work as the original, it is always in fact one hundred percent different from the original. A translation is both the same and different from ... from what? Emmerich asks. Textual instability dogs both original and translation, which are simultaneously the same but different and are subject to the play of personalities and production contingencies. Translation is newly creative, entailing gain as well as loss. --Lawrence Venuti, Professor of English, Temple University, USANot since For Your Own Good: The Roots of Violence in Childrearing have I encountered a book that politicises familial violence and provides routes into and out of the traumatic and traumatising arrangements of forces, which are routinely part of family lives. The Poetics of Transgenerational Trauma is a feminist experiment and encounter, staging literary testimonies of trauma and relational violence at the dynamic intersection of affect and trauma studies, and subject, text and society. It is inventive, urgent, important and highly original. Meera Atkinson helps to define a new genre of writing that transfigures the lived experience of violence captured in literary testimonies into an urgent political category that captivates and allows the proliferation of new visibilities and intelligibilities. --Peter Shillingsburg, Former Svaglic Chair in Textual Studies, Loyola University Chicago, USA About the Author Karen Emmerich is Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at Princeton University, USA, and a translator of modern Greek poetry and prose. She has published ten books of Greek literature in translation; her academic work has appeared in journals such as Arion, Translation Studies, and the Journal of Modern Greek Studies.