Description
Book SynopsisHow can untranslatability help us to think about the historical as well as the cultural and linguistic dimensions of translation? For the past two centuries, theoretical debates about translation have responded to the idea that translation overcomes linguistic and cultural incommensurability, while never inscribing full equivalence. More recently, untranslatability has been foregrounded in projects at the intersections between translation studies and other disciplines, notably philosophy and comparative literature. The critical turn to untranslatability re-emphasizes the importance of translation''s negotiation with foreignness or difference and prompts further reflection on how that might be understood historically, philosophically, and ethically. If translation never replicates a source exactly, what does it mean to communicate some elements and not others? What or who determines what is translatable, or what can or cannot be recontextualized? What linguistic, political, cultural, or
Table of ContentsIntroduction: Reinventing Babel: Translation and Untranslatability in Medieval French Texts 1: Cultivating Difference: Translation and 'Remainder' in Wauchier de Denain's L'Histoire des Moines d'Egypte 2: Spiritual Translatio in the French Lives of Saint Catherine of Alexandria: Gender and Hagiographic Translation 3: Translation, Memory, and the Limits of Translatability in the Writing of Marie de France 4: Translatio and the Afterlives of Translation in Chrétien de Troyes' Cligés 5: Monolingualism, Absolute Translation, and Linguistic Mastery in Franco-English Jargon Texts: Jehan et Blonde and Renart teinturier 6: Translating Nature in French Verse Bestiaries: Translation and/as Ontology Conclusion
