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Offering an original reconceptualization of literary translation, Clive Scott argues against traditional approaches to the theory and practice of translation. Instead he suggests that translation should attend more to the phenomenology of reading, triggering creative textual thinking in the responsive reader rather than testing the hermeneutic skills of the professional translator. In this new guise, translation enlists the reader as an active participant in the constant re-fashioning of the text's structural, associative, intertextual and intersensory possibilities, so that our larger understanding of ecology, anthropology, comparative literature and aesthetics is fundamentally transformed and our sense of the expressive resources of language radically extended. Literary translation thus assumes an existential value which takes us beyond the text itself to how it situates us in the world, and what part it plays in the geography of human relationships.
List of contents
Introduction; Part I. Thinking One's Way into Literary Translation: Concepts and Readings: 1. Cartesian reading; 2. Untranslatability; 3. Translation and music; 4. The language of translation; 5. Voice in translation; 6. Orality; 7. Multilingualism; 8. Frontiers; 9. Cultures; 10. Choice as work; 11. The temporal nature of text; 12. The notion of the future of the text; Part II. Translation among the Disciplines: 1. Understanding translation as an eco-poetics; 2. Translation as an agent of anthropological/ethnographic awareness; 3. Translation and the re-conception of comparative literature; 4. Translation in pursuit of an appropriate aesthetics; Part III. The Paginal Art of Translation: 5. Text and page: margin and rhythm; 6. Translation and situating the self: punctuation and rhythm; 7. Translation and vocal behaviour: typography and rhythm; 8. Translation as scansion: capturing the multiplicity of rhythm; Conclusion.
About the author
Clive Scott is Professor Emeritus of European Literature at the University of East Anglia and a Fellow of the British Academy. His previous publications include, Translating Baudelaire (2000), Channel Crossings: French and English Poetry in Dialogue 1550–2000 (2002), Translating Rimbaud's 'Illuminations', (2006), Street Photography: From Atget to Cartier-Bresson (2007), Literary Translation and the Rediscovery of Reading (Cambridge, 2012) Translating the Perception of Text: Literary Translation and Phenomenology (2012), and Translating Apollinaire (2014).
Summary
Clive Scott argues that translation should be more concerned with triggering creative textual thinking in the reader than testing the hermeneutic skills of the translater. Translation thus understood deepens our thinking about languages, ecology, cultures, textual relationships and aesthetics, and challenges us to creative re-imaginings of text.
