Sympathy for the Traitor : A Translation Manifesto Paperback / softback
by Mark (Publisher and Editor-in-Chief, The Metropolitan Museum of Art) Polizzotti
Part of the The MIT Press series
Paperback / softback
Description
An engaging and unabashedly opinionated examination of what translation is and isn't. For some, translation is the poor cousin of literature, a necessary evil if not an outright travesty-summed up by the old Italian play on words, traduttore, traditore (translator, traitor).
For others, translation is the royal road to cross-cultural understanding and literary enrichment.
In this nuanced and provocative study, Mark Polizzotti attempts to reframe the debate along more fruitful lines.
Eschewing both these easy polarities and the increasingly abstract discourse of translation theory, he brings the main questions into clearer focus: What is the ultimate goal of a translation?
What does it mean to label a rendering "faithful"? (Faithful to what?) Is something inevitably lost in translation, and can something also be gained?
Does translation matter, and if so, why? Unashamedly opinionated, both a manual and a manifesto, his book invites usto sympathize with the translator not as a "traitor" but as the author's creative partner. Polizzotti, himself a translator of authors from Patrick Modiano to Gustave Flaubert, explores what translation is and what it isn't, and how it does or doesn't work.
Translation, he writes, "skirts the boundaries between art and craft, originality and replication, altruism and commerce, genius and hack work." In Sympathy for the Traitor, he shows us how to read not only translations but also the act of translation itself, treating it not as a problem to be solved but as an achievement to be celebrated-something, as Goethe put it, "impossible, necessary, and important."
Information
-
Available to Order - This title is available to order, with delivery expected within 2 weeks
- Format:Paperback / softback
- Pages:200 pages
- Publisher:MIT Press Ltd
- Publication Date:29/01/2019
- Category:
- ISBN:9780262537025
Information
-
Available to Order - This title is available to order, with delivery expected within 2 weeks
- Format:Paperback / softback
- Pages:200 pages
- Publisher:MIT Press Ltd
- Publication Date:29/01/2019
- Category:
- ISBN:9780262537025