Description
Book SynopsisDouglas Robinson is Chair Professor of English at Hong Kong Baptist University, Hong Kong, and is one of the world's leading experts on translation. He is the author of path-breaking publications in translation studies, including
The Translator's Turn (1991),
Translation and Taboo (1996),
Translation and the Problem of Sway (2011), and
The Dao of Translation (2015). He is also author of important works on postcoloniality, from
Translation and Empire (1997) to
Displacement and the Somatics of Postcolonial Culture (2013).
Trade ReviewWhile the introduction and legitimation of CTS (Critical Translation Studies) to plain old TS (Translation Studies) frames
Exorcising Translation, its significance for readers outside of Translation Studies is considerably deeper. In short, out of Sakai’s notion of the “civilizational spell," Robinson builds a critical apparatus that can explain Orientalism and its less discursively-defined other Occidentalism, critiquing renowned scholars and philosophers for being spellbound to “ethnocentric misunderstandings of other cultures and other civilizations”. … [Robinson] builds a framework for a more ambitious Translation Studies. * symploke *
Exorcising Translation is a cogent and innovative problematisation of the unnecessarily inevitable and highly influential dichotomy that confronts universalist and relativist ideologies in translation studies, in theory and in comparative cultural studies. Doug Robinson’s work exemplifies maturing trends in postcolonial and postmodernist studies. * Sean Golden, Full Professor of East Asian Studies, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain *
In his very compelling
Exorcising Translation, Douglas Robinson draws heavily from the work of Sakai Naoki, a plethora of figures in translation studies, and several intriguing case studies from Chinese writing, to create a kind of dialogue between “East” and “West.” He explores some of the conundrums that have arisen within translation studies and the impasse between the deconstruction of the many cliché oppositions still taken for granted and the labels of “ethnocentrism” and “appropriation” when theorists attempt to cross these oppositions. With the kind of creativity and novelty usually exhibited in Robinson’s work, he provides a new kind of vocabulary to examine the borders between binary oppositions from the point of view of the “leakage” across them that, while not eliminating difference, at least help us “demystify” it. * Ben Van Wyke, Assistant Professor of Spanish and Translation Studies, Indiana University – Purdue University Indianapolis, USA *
This book presents a very thought-provoking critical exposition of the nature of translation by driving it into its crucial foundations in philosophies in East and West. From this powerful
Exorcising, translation emerges beyond temporal and spatial boundaries not just as a bridge between cultures or ideologies but, most fundamentally, between human minds over the troubled water of (mis)understanding under the spell of civilizational biases – an insight meaningful for anyone interested in translation and cultural studies. * Chunshen Zhu, Professor of Translation Studies, City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong *
Table of ContentsPreface 0.1 Panicked Eurocentrism 0.2 The Structure of the Book 0.3 Acknowledgments
Chapter 1: Sakai Naoki on Translation 1.1 Sakai’s Model 1.2 Implications for Civilizational Spells
Chapter 2: The Casting of Civilizational Spells: Nietzsche as Precursor, Bloom as Ephebe 2.1 Nietzsche 1: Slave Morality as a Civilizational Spell 2.2 Nietzsche 2: The Mnemotechnics of Pain 2.3 Bloom 1: The Western Canon as a Tug-of-War Between Civilizational Spells 2.4 Bloom 2: The Canon as Memory as Pain 2.5 Nietzsche 3: Guilt and Debt 2.6 Nietzsche 4: The Desomatization of Somatic Codes 2.7 Bloom 3: The Western Canon, Universalized 2.8 Cofiguration?
Chapter 3: East and West: Towards an Intercivilizational Turn 3.1 An East-to-West Countertradition as a Cofigurative Regime of Translation 3.2 The Occidentalist Attack on “Immature, Self-Centered Western Minds” 3.2.1 Kirkland on Distortions of Daoism 3.2.2 Problems in Kirkland’s Attack 3.3 Three Historical Stages of
Laozi Translation 3.3.1 Christianity 3.3.2 Esotericism 3.3.3 Romanticism 3.4 First Conclusion: Civilizational Spells, Again 3.5 Second Conclusion: Eurocentrism, Decentered 3.6 Third Conclusion: An Intercivilizational Turn? References Endnotes Index
