Translation as Citation

Erscheinungsjahr 2013
ISBN: 978-0-19-881253-1
Verlag: Oxford University Press (UK)

Buch, Englisch, 164 Seiten, Format (B × H): 161 mm x 240 mm, Gewicht: 417 g

Reihe: Global Asias

This volume examines translation from many different angles: it explores how translations change the languages in which they occur, how works introduced from other languages become part of the consciousness of native speakers, and what strategies translators must use to secure acceptance for foreign works.

Haun Saussy argues that translation doesn't amount to the composition, in one language, of statements equivalent to statements previously made in another language. Rather, translation works with elements of the language and culture in which it arrives, often reconfiguring them irreversibly: it creates, with a fine disregard for precedent, loan-words, calques, forced metaphors, forged pasts, imaginary relationships, and dialogues of the dead. Creativity, in this form of writing, usually
considered merely reproductive, is the subject of this book.

The volume takes the history of translation in China, from around 150 CE to the modern period, as its source of case studies. When the first proponents of Buddhism arrived in China, creativity was forced upon them: a vocabulary adequate to their purpose had yet to be invented. A Chinese Buddhist textual corpus took shape over centuries despite the near-absence of bilingual speakers. One basis of this translating activity was the rewriting of existing Chinese philosophical texts, and especially
the most exorbitant of all these, the collection of dialogues, fables, and paradoxes known as the Zhuangzi. The Zhuangzi also furnished a linguistic basis for Chinese Christianity when the Jesuit missionary Matteo Ricci arrived in the later part of the Ming dynasty and allowed his friends and
associates to frame his teachings in the language of early Daoism. It would function as well when Xu Zhimo translated from The Flowers of Evil in the 1920s. The chance but overdetermined encounter of Zhuangzi and Baudelaire yielded a 'strange music' that retroactively echoes through two millennia of Chinese translation, outlining a new understanding of the translator's craft that cuts across the dividing lines of current theories and critiques of translation.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Saussy, Haun

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Sprachwissenschaft Übersetzungswissenschaft, Translatologie, Dolmetschen
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Weltgeschichte & Geschichte einzelner Länder und Gebietsräume Geschichte einzelner Länder Asiatische Geschichte
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Klassische Literaturwissenschaft
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literaturwissenschaft

Über Autor(innen)

Haun Saussy is University Professor at the University of Chicago, a former Guggenheim Fellow and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His books and articles mainly concern literature, translation, poetics and hermeneutics across a broad comparative spectrum. He has translated the poetry of Jean Métellus and the plays of Tino Caspanello as well as authors from dynastic and contemporary China. Among his current projects is an international
history of East Asian literatures from 3000 BCE to the present.