Why Translation Matters
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Why Translation Matters argues for the cultural importance of translation and for a more encompassing and nuanced appreciation of the translator’s role. As the acclaimed translator Edith Grossman writes in her introduction, “My intention is to stimulate a new consideration of an area of literature that is too often ignored, misunderstood, or misrepresented.”
For Grossman, translation has a transcendent importance: “Translation not only plays its important traditional role as the means that allows us access to literature originally written in one of the countless languages we cannot read, but it also represents a concrete literary presence with the crucial capacity to ease and make more meaningful our relationships to those with whom we may not have had a connection before. Translation always helps us to know, to see from a different angle, to attribute new value to what once may have been unfamiliar. As nations and as individuals, we have a critical need for that kind of understanding and insight. The alternative is unthinkable.”
Throughout the four chapters of this bracing volume, Grossman’s belief in the crucial significance of the translator’s work, as well as her rare ability to explain the intellectual sphere that she inhabits as interpreter of the original text, inspires and provokes the reader to engage with translation in an entirely new way.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Invoking Ralph Manheim's metaphor, Grossman compares the translator's art to that of the actor transforming a playwright's words in performance. Thus asserts award-winning translator Grossman, who has worked with some of Latin America's greatest authors and most recently translated Don Quixote. The art of translation expands our ability to explore through literature the thoughts and feelings of people from another society or another time. Grossman believes that U.S. and U.K. publishers, who limit the number of translations to 2% 3% of their lists, are not meeting their ethical and cultural responsibility to literature. After discussing her method for translating poetry, Grossman offers tuition in poetic forms and fascinating examples from the 16th century to the present. Based on lectures Grossman gave at Yale, this book provides a succinct argument for the importance of those who bring a text over from another language and make it accessible to a wider audience.