Gulliver’s Voyage to Phantomimia. A transcreation by Douglas Robinson

Gulliver’s Voyage to Phantomimia. A transcreation by Douglas Robinson
Author: Volter KILPI
Publisher: Zeta Books
Total Pages: 356
Release:
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 6066971220

When the great Finnish modernist genius Volter Kilpi died in the summer of 1939 at the age of 64, he left behind an unfinished novel manuscript about Lemuel Gulliver’s fifth voyage—this one supposedly to the North Pole, though along the way the ship is sucked into a vortex near the Pole and hurtled two centuries ahead in time. He and three surviving shipmates end up in London in 1938, wondering how to get back to their time. In addition to translating what Kilpi wrote into Swiftian English, Douglas Robinson has here written the incomplete novel to the end, based on Kilpi’s report to his son on how he planned to return the men to 1738. Because Kilpi also playfully pretended to have “found” the original English manuscript, presumably written by Lemuel Gulliver himself, and “translated” it into Finnish, Robinson goes along with that pretense and pretends to have rediscovered and “edited” and “annotated” the original English manuscript—written, perhaps, not by Gulliver but (at least partly) by Jonathan Swift. The addition of Robinson’s English translation of Volter Kilpi’s “translator’s preface” and two fictional constructs—anonymous “random notes toward a vorticist manifesto” (1914) and an ersatz “reader’s report” by an imaginary Finnish Kilpi scholar named Julius Nyrkki—transforms the entire volume into a postmodern “critical edition” that would have tickled Volter Kilpi pink.

Translating the Monster

Translating the Monster
Author: Douglas Robinson
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 308
Release: 2022-10-24
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9004519939

What can Finland’s greatest and supposedly least translatable novel tell us about translation and world literature?

The Strange Loops of Translation

The Strange Loops of Translation
Author: Douglas Robinson
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 240
Release: 2021-12-16
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1501382446

One of the most exciting theories to emerge from cognitive science research over the past few decades has been Douglas Hofstadter's notion of “strange loops,” from Gödel, Escher, Bach (1979). Hofstadter is also an active literary translator who has written about translation, perhaps most notably in his 1997 book Le Ton Beau de Marot, where he draws on his cognitive science research. And yet he has never considered the possibility that translation might itself be a strange loop. In this book Douglas Robinson puts Hofstadter's strange-loops theory into dialogue with a series of definitive theories of translation, in the process showing just how cognitively and affectively complex an activity translation actually is.

Experimental Translation

Experimental Translation
Author: Lily Robert-Foley
Publisher: MIT Press
Total Pages: 325
Release: 2024-02-27
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1913380696

The history and future of an alternative, oppositional translation practice. The threat of machine translation has given way to an alternative, experimental practice of translation that reflects upon and hijacks traditional paradigms. In much the same way that photography initiated a break in artistic practices with the threat of an absolute fidelity to the real, machine translation has paradoxically liberated human translators to err, to diverge, to tamper with the original, blurring creation and imitation with cyborg collage and appropriation. Seven chapters reimagine seven classic “procedures” of translation theory and pedagogy: borrowing, calque, literal translation, transposition, modulation, equivalence, and adaptation, updating them for the material political and poetic concerns of the contemporary era. Each chapter combines reflections from translation studies and experimental literature with practical guides, sets of experimental translation “procedures” to try at home or abroad, in the classroom, the laboratory, the garden, the dance hall, the city, the kitchen, the library, the shopping center, the supermarket, the train, the bus, the airplane, the post office, on the radio, on your phone, on your computer, and on the internet.

Questions for Translation Studies

Questions for Translation Studies
Author: Douglas Robinson
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
Total Pages: 281
Release: 2023-08-15
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9027249466

This is a book in the classical Quaestiones genre, like the Tusculanae Quaestiones (“Tusculan questions”) of Cicero (around 45 BCE) and the Quæstiones disputatæ de Veritate (“disputed questions on truth”) of St. Thomas Aquinas (1256-1259). It seeks to ask seven series of questions about key theoretical approaches to the study of translation: three on equivalence theories (semantic equivalence, dynamic equivalence, and deverbalization), three on Descriptive Translation Studies (norms, Toury’s laws, and the translator’s narratoriality), and one on the translator’s visibility. Each “Question” (chapter) charts a circuitous course through past answers to new questions and new answers, drawing especially on the theoretical traditions of hermeneutics, phenomenology, and 4EA cognitive science. The book will guide both veteran and novice scholars of translation deep into the complexities besetting the seven keywords.

Translation as a Form

Translation as a Form
Author: Douglas Robinson
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 285
Release: 2022-07-05
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1000589714

This is a book-length commentary on Walter Benjamin’s 1923 essay "Die Aufgabe des Übersetzers," best known in English under the title "The Task of the Translator." Benjamin’s essay is at once an immensely attractive work for top-flight theorists of translation and comparative literature and a frustratingly cryptic work that cries out for commentary. Almost every one of the claims he makes in it seems wildly counterintuitive, because he articulates none of the background support that would help readers place it in larger literary-historical contexts: Jewish mystical traditions from Philo Judaeus’s Logos-based Neoplatonism to thirteenth-century Lurianic Kabbalah; Romantic and post-Romantic esotericisms from Novalis and the Schlegels to Hölderlin and Goethe; modernist avant-garde foreclosures on "the public" and generally the communicative contexts of literature. The book is divided into 78 passages, from one to a few sentences in length. Each of the passages becomes its own commentarial unit, consisting of a Benjaminian interlinear box, a paraphrase, a commentary, and a list of other commentators who have engaged the specific passage in question. Because the passages cover the entire text of the essay in sequence, reading straight through the book provides the reader with an augmented experience of reading the essay. Robinson’s commentary is key reading for scholars and postgraduate students of translation, comparative literature, and critical theory.

Avant-Garde Translation

Avant-Garde Translation
Author: Alexandra Lukes
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 270
Release: 2023-09-20
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9004681809

Avant-Garde Translation is a playful ensemble that celebrates creativity in all things translation by taking you on a journey to the cutting edge of translation practice and theory. Through a refreshing mix of essay forms, from scholarly study to practical translation toolkits, Avant-Garde Translation explores territories as diverse as children’s picturebooks, multilingual poems, and visual artworks, and proposes various translation strategies such as audio-visual collages, ninja invisibility, and collaboration with invented translators. The spirited and provocative contributions intervene in the field of translation studies to shake up the status quo: by highlighting the critical and creative connections between thought and practice, the book shows how literary translation can be an exploratory playground for radical transformation.

Translating the Nonhuman

Translating the Nonhuman
Author: Douglas Robinson
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 177
Release: 2024-10-17
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN:

Extends the field of translation studies and theory by examining three radical science-fiction treatments of translation. The so-called "fictional turn" in translation studies has staked out territory previously unclaimed by translation scholars – territory in which translators are portrayed as full human beings in their social environments – but so far no one has looked to science fiction for truly radical explorations of translation. Translating the Nonhuman fills that gap, exploring speculative attempts to cross the yawning chasm between human and nonhuman languages and cultures. The book consists of three essays, each bringing a different theoretical orientation to bear on a different science-fiction work. The first studies Samuel R. Delany's 1966 novel, Babel-17, using Peircean semiotics; the second studies Suzette Haden Elgin's 1984 novel, Native Tongue, using Austinian performativity and Eve Sedwick's periperformative corrective; and the third studies Ted Chiang's 1998 novella, “Story of Your Life,” and its 2016 screen adaptation, Arrival, using sustainability theory. Themes include the 1950s clash between Whorfian untranslatability and the possibility of unbounded (machine) translatability; the performative ability of a language to change reality and the reliance of that ability on the periperformativity of “witnesses”; and alienation from the familiar in space and time and its transformative effect on the biological and cultural sustainability of human life on earth. Through these close readings and varied theoretical approaches, Translating the Nonhuman provides a tentative mapping of science fiction's usefulness for the study of human-(non)human translation, with translators and interpreters acting as explorers of new ways to communicate.

Lessons Experimental Translators Can Learn from Finnegans Wake

Lessons Experimental Translators Can Learn from Finnegans Wake
Author: Douglas Robinson
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 147
Release: 2024-11-11
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1040155588

Inspiring translators by making specific experimental writing strategies available to them, this book reimagines experimental translation through close readings of Finnegans Wake. Robinson’s engagement with translational aspects of Finnegans Wake provides rich and useful insights into experimental translation that encourage new approaches to translation theory and practice. The author analyses Joyce’s serial homophonic translations, portmanteau words, and heteronyms along translational lines (following Fritz Senn, Clive Hart, Patrick O’Neill, and others), and offers a showcase translation of Walter Benjamin’s “Task of the Translator” using all three experimental techniques borrowed from the Wake. The book will be a valuable addition to any postgraduate course in translation theory, literary theory, and Joycean literature. Translation scholars, students, and researchers will find this text a compelling read.

Translator, Touretter: Avant-Garde Translation and the Touretter Sublime

Translator, Touretter: Avant-Garde Translation and the Touretter Sublime
Author: Douglas Robinson
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 154
Release: 2024-06-27
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9004689400

Experimental translation has been surging in popularity recently—with avant-garde translation at the combative forefront. But how to do it? How to read it? Translator, Touretter plays on the Italian dictum traduttore, traditore—“translator, traitor”—to mobilize the affective intensity of Tourettic tics as a practical guide to making and reading avant-garde translations. It smashes the theoretical literature on the sublime from Longinus to Kant into Motherless Brooklyn, both the 1999 novel by Jonathan Lethem and its 2019 screen adaptation by Edward Norton, in order to generate out of their collision a series of models—visual, aural/oral, and kinesthetic—for avant-garde literary translation.