
- English
- ePUB (mobile friendly)
- Available on iOS & Android
About this book
For some, translation is the poor cousin of literature, a necessary evil if not an outright travestyâsummed 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 celebratedâsomething, as Goethe put it, "impossible, necessary, and important."
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Table of contents
- Cover
- Also by Mark Polizzotti
- Title page
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Epigraph
- Table of Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: Ground Rules
- 1âIs Translation Possible (and What Is It, Anyway)?
- 2âSaints, Martyrs, and Spies
- 3âPure Language
- 4âBeautifully Unfaithful
- 5âThe Silences Between
- 6âSympathy for the Traitor
- 7âVerse and Controverse
- 8âOn the Fringe
- 9âAdamâs Apricot, or Does Translation Matter?
- Selected Bibliography
- Index