Sympathy for the Traitor
A Translation Manifesto
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- 19,99 €
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- 19,99 €
Publisher Description
An engaging and unabashedly opinionated examination of what translation is and isn't.
For some, translation is the poor cousin of literature, a necessary evil if not an outright travesty—summed 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 celebrated—something, as Goethe put it, “impossible, necessary, and important.”
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
With impressive breadth and scrupulous detail, translator Polizzotti (Revolution of the Mind) offers a manifesto about what translation is, what it should be, and why it is important. His primary claim is that "literary translation serves a purpose somewhat adjacent to the roles of cultural reeducation or global unity that we tend to assign to it." Instead, he suggests, translation should "safeguard those distances it supposedly is meant to bridge," not by "keeping cultures apart" but by making sure "the contact produces sparks rather than suffocation." His book functions as a short but representative introduction to the millennia-long debate about whether a translation should be absolutely equivalent to the source text or take liberties with the original phrasing to capture the work's "spirit." Polizzotti's examples include St. Jerome's translation of the Bible from Hebrew to Latin, Walter Benjamin's critical essay on the craft of translation, and various historical instances of mistranslations with major geopolitical ramifications (such as Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev's famous boast "My vas pokhoronim," translated by his personal interpreter as "We will bury you," which historians have since suggested might more accurately be rendered as "We will outlast you"). Polizzotti's book is suffused with expertise and displays his decades of experience in incisively capturing the nuances of an esoteric discipline, while also offering a passionate defense of his trade's larger value.
