Bermann Sandra, Wood Michael (eds.) Nation, Language, and the Ethics of Translation

Princeton University Press, 2005. — 413 p.In recent years, scholarship on translation has moved well beyond the technicalities of converting one language into another and beyond conventional translation theory. With new technologies blurring distinctions between “the original” and its reproductions, and with globalization redefining national and cultural boundaries, “translation” is now emerging as a reformulated subject of lively, interdisciplinary debate. Nation, Language, and the Ethics of Translation enters the heart of this debate. It covers an exceptional range of topics, from simultaneous translation to legal theory, from the language of exile to the language of new nations, from the press to the cinema; and cultures and languages from contemporary Bengal to ancient Japan, from translations of Homer to the work of Don DeLillo.
All twenty-two essays, by leading voices including Gayatri Spivak and the late Edward Said, are provocative and persuasive. The book’s four sections — “Translation as Medium and across Media,” “The Ethics of Translation,” “Translation and Difference,” and “Beyond the Nation” — together provide a comprehensive view of current thinking on nationality and translation, one that will be widely consulted for years to come.Sandra Bermann. Introduction.
Translation as Medium and Across Media.
Edward Said. The Public Role of Writers and Intellectuals.
Pierre Legrand. Issues in the Translatability of Law.
Lynn Visson. Simultaneous Interpretation: Language and Cultural Difference.
Samuel Weber. A Touch of Translation: On Walter Benjamin’s “Task of the Translator”.
Michael Wood. The Languages of Cinema.
The Ethics of Translation.
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Translating into English.
Henry Staten. Tracking the “Native Informant”: Cultural Translation as the Horizon of Literary Translation.
Robert Eaglestone. Levinas, Translation, and Ethics.
Stanley Corngold. Comparative Literature: The Delay in Translation.
Jonathan E. Abel. Translation as Community: The Opacity of Modernizations of Genji monogatari.
Emily Apterэ Translation with No Original: Scandals of Textual Reproduction.
Translation and Difference.
Lawrence Venuti. Local Contingencies: Translation and National Identities.
Jacques Lezra. Nationum Origo.
Yopie Prins. Metrical Translation: Nineteenth-Century Homers and the Hexameter Mania.
Sandra Bermann. Translating History.
Azade Seyhan. German Academic Exiles in Istanbul: Translation as the Bildung of the Other.
Stathis Gourgouris. DeLillo in Greece Eluding the Name.
Beyond the Nation.
Françoise Lionnet. Translating Grief.
Gauri Viswanathan. “Synthetic Vision”: Internationalism and the Poetics of Decolonization.
Vilashini Cooppan. National Literature in Transnational Times: Writing Transition in the “New” South Africa.
Sylvia Molloy. Postcolonial Latin America and the Magic Realist Imperative: A Report to an Academy.
David Damrosch. Death in Translation.
List of contributors.