Introduction to The Art of Literary Translation: Books

The Craft of Translation is a collection of essays offering new and uncommon insights into the understanding and craft of translation. The contributors not only describe the complexity of translating literature but also suggest the implications of the act of translation for critics, scholars, teachers, and students. The demands of translation require both comprehensive scholarship in preparing to translate a text and broad creativity in recreating the text in a new language. Translation, thus, becomes a model for the most exacting reading and the most serious scholarship.

Why Translation Matters argues for the cultural importance of translation and for a more encompassing and nuanced appreciation of the translator’s role. As the acclaimed translator Edith Grossman writes in her introduction, “My intention is to stimulate a new consideration of an area of literature that is too often ignored, misunderstood, or misrepresented.”

The Kitchen Table Translation issue of Aster(ix) Journal explores connections between translation and migration. Featuring the work of immigrant and diasporic translators, it brings personal, cultural, and political dimensions of translation together with literary and aesthetic aspects of the work, and compiles writing and translation from languages including Ahmaric, Arabic, French, Greek, Japanese, Korean, Malayalam, Mandarin, Ojibwe, Portuguese, Spanish, Telugu, Turkestani, Urdu, and Wolof.

Translation, before 9/11, was deemed primarily an instrument of international relations, business, education, and culture. Today it seems, more than ever, a matter of war and peace. In The Translation Zone, Emily Apter argues that the field of translation studies, habitually confined to a framework of linguistic fidelity to an original, is ripe for expansion as the basis for a new comparative literature.

In Voice-Overs, an impressive collection of writers, translators, and critics of Latin American literature address the challenges and triumphs of translation in the publishing industry, in teaching, and in the writing culture of the Americas. Through personal anecdotes as well as critical analyses, they engage important, ongoing debates over issues of language, exile, cultural identity, and literary markets.

This anthology features essays by some of the world's most skillful writers and translators discussing the process and possibilities of their art. These essays focus on a diverse group of languages, including Japanese, Turkish, Arabic, and Hindi, as well as frequently encountered European languages, such as French, Spanish, Italian, German, Polish, and Russian. Contributors speak on craft, aesthetic choices, theoretical approaches, and the politics of global cultural exchange, touching on the concerns and challenges that currently affect translators working in an era of globalization.

As a growing number of contemporary novelists write for publication in multiple languages, the genre's form and aims are shifting. Born-translated novels include passages that appear to be written in different tongues, narrators who speak to foreign audiences, and other visual and formal techniques that treat translation as a medium rather than as an afterthought. These strategies challenge the global dominance of English, complicate "native" readership, and protect creative works against misinterpretation as they circulate. They have also given rise to a new form of writing that confounds traditional models of literary history and political community.

The Translation Studies Reader provides a definitive survey of the most important and influential developments in translation theory and research, with an emphasis on twentieth-century developments. With introductory essays prefacing each section, the book places a wide range of seminal and innovative readings within their thematic, cultural and historical contexts.

Gregory Rabassa's influence as a translator is tremendous. His translations of Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude and Julio Cortázar's Hopscotch have helped make these some of the the most widely read and respected works in world literature. In If This Be Treason: Translation and Its Dyscontents, Rabassa offers a cool-headed and humorous defense of translation, laying out his views on the translator's art.

This collection of essays explores areas of concern such as Chinese and Western theories of translation, the limits of translatability, when is a translation not a translation, why cultures develop certain genres at certain times, and what is the relationship between Translation Studies and Cultural Studies.

Agents of Translation contains thirteen case studies by internationally recognized scholars in which translation has been used as a way of influencing the target culture and furthering literary, political and personal interests.

Niranjana draws on Benjamin, Derrida, and de Man to show that translation has long been a site for perpetuating the unequal power relations among peoples, races, and languages.

Two are the starting points of this book. On the one hand, the use of Doña Marina/La Malinche as a symbol of the violation of the Americas by the Spanish conquerors as well as a metaphor of her treason to the Mexican people. On the other, the role of the translations of Bartolomé de las Casas's Brevísima relación de la destrucción de las Indias in the creation and expansion of the Spanish Black Legend. The author aims to go beyond them by considering the role of translators and interpreters during the early colonial period in Spanish America and by looking at the translations of the Spanish chronicles as instrumental in the promotion of other European empires. The book discusses literary, religious and administrative documents and engages in a dialogue with other disciplines that can provide a more nuanced view of the role of translation, and of the mediators, during the controversial encounter/clash between Europeans and Amerindians.

This anthology features essays by some of the world's most skillful writers and translators discussing the process and possibilities of their art. These essays focus on a diverse group of languages, including Japanese, Turkish, Arabic, and Hindi, as well as frequently encountered European languages, such as French, Spanish, Italian, German, Polish, and Russian. Contributors speak on craft, aesthetic choices, theoretical approaches, and the politics of global cultural exchange, touching on the concerns and challenges that currently affect translators working in an era of globalization.

As a growing number of contemporary novelists write for publication in multiple languages, the genre's form and aims are shifting. Born-translated novels include passages that appear to be written in different tongues, narrators who speak to foreign audiences, and other visual and formal techniques that treat translation as a medium rather than as an afterthought. These strategies challenge the global dominance of English, complicate "native" readership, and protect creative works against misinterpretation as they circulate. They have also given rise to a new form of writing that confounds traditional models of literary history and political community.

Translation is intercultural communication in its purest form. Its power in forming and/or deforming cultural identities has only recently been acknowledged, given the attention it deserves. The chapters in this unique volume assess translation from Arabic into other languages from different perspectives: the politics, economics, ethics, and poetics of translating from Arabic; a language often neglected in western mainstream translation studies.

Translation has a powerful effect on the relationships between peoples, and between people and power. Translation affects initial contacts between cultures, some of them made with the purpose of spreading religion, some of them with the purpose of learning about the other. Translation is affected by contexts of power and differences between peoples, raising questions such as “What is translated?”, “Who does it?”, and “Why?”. Translation is an undeniable part of the global society, in which the retrieval and distribution of information becomes an institutional matter, despite the rise of English as a lingua franca.