The Work of Literary Translation

Clive Scott

• Publisher: Cambridge University Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781108426824
• eBook ISBN: 9781108646130
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: European Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

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.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title page
• Title page
• Copyright page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• A Note on the Text
• Introduction
• Part I Thinking One’s Way into Literary Translation: Concepts and Readings
• Part II Translation among the Disciplines
• Part III The Paginal Art of Translation
• Conclusion
• Notes
• References
• Index