Translation: Theory and Practice: A Historical Reader / Edition 1

by Daniel Weissbort, Astradur Eysteinsson

Overview

Translation: Theory and Practice: A Historical Reader responds to the need for a collection of primary texts on translation, in the English tradition, from the earliest times to the present day. Based on an exhaustive survey of the wealth of available materials, the Reader demonstrates throughout the link between theory and practice, with excerpts not only of significant theoretical writings but of actual translations, as well as excerpts on translation from letters, interviews, autobiographies, and fiction.

The collection is intended as a teaching tool, but also as an encyclopaedia for the use of translators and writers on translation. It presents the full panoply of approaches to translation, without necessarily judging between them, but showing clearly what is to be gained or lost in each case. Translations of key texts, such as the Bible and the Homeric epic, are traced through the ages, with the same passages excerpted, making it possible for readers to construct their own map of the evolution of translation and to evaluate, in their historical contexts, the variety of approaches. The passages in question are also accompanied by ad verbum versions, to facilitate comparison.

The bibliographies are likewise comprehensive. The editors have drawn on the expertise of leading scholars in the field, including the late James S. Holmes, Louis Kelly, Jonathan Wilcox, Jane Stevenson, David Hopkins, and many others. In addition, significant non-English texts, such as Martin Luther's "Circular Letter on Translation," which may be said to have inaugurated the Reformation, are included, helping to set the English tradition in a wider context. Related items, such as the introductions to their work by Tudor and Jacobean translators or the work of women translators from the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries have been brought together in "collages," marking particularly important moments or developments in the history of translation.

This comprehensive reader provides an invaluable and illuminating resource for scholars and students of translation and English literature, as well as poets, cultural historians, and professional translators.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780198712008
Publisher:	Oxford University Press, USA
Publication date:	10/28/2006
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	672
Product dimensions:	9.70(w) x 7.30(h) x 1.40(d)

About the Author

Daniel Weissbort was educated at St. Paul's School, London and Cambridge University. With Ted Hughes he founded the journal Modern Poetry in Translation, now published by King's College London. In the early 1970s he went to America to direct the Translation Workshop and MFA Program in Translation at the University of Iowa. His anthologies of Russian and East European poetry are well known and he has also published many collections of his own poetry. He is or has been on various boards, including the Poetry International Committee (UK), the American Literary Translators Association board, the Columbia Translation Center board, the Stephen Spender Memorial Trust, and the British Centre for Literary Translation board. He is Professor (Emeritus) of English and Comparative Literature, University of Iowa, Research Fellow in the English Department, King's College London, and Honorary Professor in the Centre for Translation and Comparative Cultural Studies at the University of Warwick. Astradur Eysteinsson was born in Akranes, Iceland, in 1957. He studied at the universities of Iceland, Warwick, and Cologne, before completing a PhD in Comparative Literature at the University of Iowa. He has been Professor and Chair of Comparative Literature at the University of Iceland, and Visiting Professor in Translation Studies at the universities of Iowa and Copenhagen. He has been a practising translator since 1981.

Table of Contents

1. Preface and Acknowledgements
2. General Introduction
3. Babel
Part One: Section 1
4. Introduction
5. Classical Latin and Early Christian Latin Translation
6. Old English Translation, Jonathan Wilcox
7. John of Trevisa
8. William Caxton
Part One: Section 2
9. Introduction
10. Martin Luther
11. William Tyndale
12. Estienne Dolet
13. Joachim du Bellay
14. Late Tudor and Early Jacobean Translation
15. Renaissance Latin Translation in England
16. The Catholic Bible in England
17. The Authorized (King James) Version of the Bible
18. Sir John Denham
19. Abraham Cowley
20. Women Translators from the Sixteenth to the Eighteenth Century, Jane Stevenson
21. John Dryden, David Hopkins
22. Anne Dacier
23. Alexander Pope
24. Samuel Johnson
25. William Cowper
26. Alexander Fraser Tytler
Part One: Section 3
27. Introduction
28. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
29. Friedrich Schleiermacher
30. Victorian Translation and Criticism
31. Six Nineteenth-Century Translators
32. James Fitzmaurice-Kelly
Part Two: Section 1
33. Introduction
34. Ezra Pound, Ronnie Apter
35. Constance Garnett
36. Walter Benjamin
37. Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig
38. Jorge Luis Borges
39. Roman Jakobson
40. Jiri Levý
41. Eugene A. Nida
41. Robert Lowell
43. Stanley Burnshaw
44. Laura Bohannan
45. Vladimir Nabokov, Jenefer Coates
Part Two: Section 2
46. Introduction
47. George Steiner
48. James S. Holmes
49. Itamar Evan-Zohar
50. André Lefevere
51. Mary Snell-Hornby
52. Ethnopoetics: Translation of the Oral and of Oral Performance
53. Louis and Celia Zukofsky
54. Translation of Verse Form
55. A.K. Ramanujan, Vinay Dharwadker
56. Gayatri Spivak
57. Talal Asad
58. Eva Hoffman
59. Gregory Rabassa
60. Suzanne Jill Levine
61. Ted Hughes
62. Douglas Robinson
63. Lawrence Venuti
64. Susan Bassnett
65. Everett Fox
66. John Felstiner
67. W.S. Merwin
68. Edwin Morgan
69. Seamus Heaney
Postface, Daniel Weissbort