Table of Contents

Acknowledgments Introduction: A Culture of Translation, by Esther Allen and Susan Bernofsky Part I: The Translator in the World 1. Making Sense in Translation: Toward an Ethics of the Art, by Peter Cole 2. Anonymous Sources (On Translators and Translation), by Eliot Weinberger 3. Fictions of the Foreign: The Paradox of "Foreign-Soundingness", by David Bellos 4. Beyond, Between: Translation, Ghosts, Metaphors, by Michael Emmerich 5. Translation as Scholarship, by Catherine Porter 6. Translation: The Biography of an Artform, by Alice Kaplan 7. The Will to Translate: Four Episodes in a Local History of Global Cultural Exchange, by Esther Allen Part II: The Translator at Work 8. The Great Leap: Cesar and the Caesura, by Forrest Gander 9. Misreading Orhan Pamuk, by Maureen Freely 10. On Translating a Poem by Osip Mandelstam, by Jose Manuel Prieto, translated by Esther Allen 11. Are We the Folk in This Lok?: Translating in the Plural, by Christi A. Merrill 12. Choosing an English for Hindi, by Jason Grunebaum 13. As Translator, as Novelist: The Translator's Afterword, by Haruki Murakami, translated by Ted Goossen 14. Haruki Murakami and the Culture of Translation, by Ted Goossen 15. Translating Jacopone da Todi: Archaic Poetries and Modern Audiences, by Lawrence Venuti 16. "Ensemble discords": Translating the Music of Sceve's Delie, by Richard Sieburth 17. Translation and the Art of Revision, by Susan Bernofsky 18. The Art of Losing: Polish Poetry and Translation, by Clare Cavanagh

Promotional Information

A very strong addition to the field of translation qua writing, as well as the more specialized field of translation studies, with its scholarly connections to language and literary study, the study of English transnational literature, literary theory, and the history of belles lettres. -- Russell Valentino, editor in chief of The Iowa Review

About the Author

Esther Allen teaches at Baruch College, City University of New York. She has translated a number of books from French and Spanish, including the Penguin Classics anthology Jose Marti: Selected Writings. A former fellow at the Cullman Center for Scholars and Writers at the New York Public Library, she was named a Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French government for her work promoting a culture of translation in English. Susan Bernofsky is a leading translator from the German. Her translations of works by Robert Walser, Jenny Erpenbeck, Hermann Hesse, and others have been honored with the Helen and Kurt Wolff Translation Prize, the Calw Hermann Hesse Translation Prize, and fellowships from the NEA, NEH, PEN Translation Fund and Lannan Foundation. Chair of the PEN Translation Committee, she teaches in the MFA program at Columbia University and blogs about translation at www.translationista.org.

Reviews

In Translation promises to be an essential part of any translation library. Allen and Bernofsky have assembled a collection of thoughtful essays by a wide-ranging group of translators whose opinions about the knotty art of translation are varied, fascinating, and eminently intelligent -- Edith Grossman, Translator, author of Why Translation Matters In Translation is an essential addition to the canon of translation studies, offering fascinating insights about the role and the work of the translator. Anyone interested in the making of literature will want this book. -- John Biguenet, coeditor of The Craft of Translation and Theories of Translation Serious and witty by turns, and sometimes both at once, these informative essays illuminate what matters in translation and why translation matters. -- Motoyuki Shibata, University of Tokyo A panoramic view of the craft of translation. An impressive gathering of the expertise of the finest translators working in English today from a wide range of languages and literatures. -- Peter Constantine, winner of the Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator's Prize for Benjamin Lebert's novel, The Bird Is a Raven The essays in In Translation, exploring both the larger, complex questions of translation's role and function in the world of literature and the more detailed, word-by-word dilemmas faced by every translator, are consistently stimulating, engaging, and eye-opening, not to speak of eloquent and occasionally even dramatic and/or funny. I came away from reading them with a host of new ideas and insights. -- Lydia Davis, translator of Swann's Way and Madame Bovary A strong introduction to the field. Publishers Weekly Knowledgeable and articulate... the book raises and clarifies a variety of significant issues about the many decisions translators must contend with. Kirkus Reviews An obvious choice for writers and readers interested in translation; challenging but also accessible to the nonacademic reader. Library Journal I loved this book. I felt I was introduced to a new universe, and not only translation, but language itself, will never look the same again. San Francisco Book Review Translators, academics, students, editors, and publishers will want torecommend In Translation to anyone with a curiosity about who translators are,what translators do, how they do it, and why. Publishing Research Quarterly

The last decade has seen significant growth in the study of literary translation, including the MLA's increased readiness to set standards for evaluating translations. With this anthology, editors Bernofsky (Foreign Words: Translator-Authors in the Age of Goethe) and Allen (translator and editor of The Selected Writings of Jose Marti) hope to educate current and prospective translators to see their work as "a particularly complex ethical position" rather than a "'problematic necessity.'" The book is divided between theory and practice, though all essays focus on the experience of translators. The 18 translators included-among them Eliot Weinberger (translator of Bei Dao, Jorge Luis Borges, and Octavio Paz), David Bellos (Georges Perec), and Haruki Murakami (whose afterword to his Japanese translation of The Great Gatsby is itself translated into English reprinted here)-offer memorable anecdotes. Maureen Freely describes the "intense and volatile exchanges" with Orhan Pamuk that followed her first translation of the author's work; Jose Manuel Prieto explains the historical context, phrase by phrase, that made Osip Mandelstam's "Epigram Against Stalin" into "the sixteen lines of a death sentence." Literary translation is specialized enough that many authors reference the same canonical texts, and the chapters occasionally blur together. Overall, the book makes for a strong introduction to the field. (May) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

Translations are a fixture in America's literary landscape, responsible for introducing writers whose work may have otherwise been unknown in this country. Editors Allen (languages and literature, Baruch Coll.; To Be Translated or Not To Be) and Susan Bernofsky (writing program, Columbia Univ.; Foreign Words) have assembled an anthology of essays written by translators on the task of translating. There are both well-known names (e.g., Haruki Murakami) and the lesser known (e.g., Jacopone da Todi, anyone?) representing the two sides of the translating equation-from this language into that language and vice versa. The two parts of the book, "The Translator in the World" and "The Translator at Work," address the necessity of literary translation as both a subject for theory studies and as practice in the craft of writing. Much as Edith Grossman's Why Translation Matters maintained the importance of translation as an expression of humanity, Allen and Bernofsky's compilation advocates for a "culture of translation" to strengthen the world's cultural pluralism. VERDICT An obvious choice for writers and readers interested in translations; challenging but also accessible to the nonacademic reader.-Elizabeth Heffington, Lipscomb Univ. Lib., TN (c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.