The Philosophy of Literary Translation
Dialogue, Movement, Ecology

A bold exploration of the existential and ecological values that literary translation can embody in its perceptual transformation of texts.

Clive Scott (Author)

9781009389952, Cambridge University Press

Hardback, published 30 November 2023

320 pages
28 x 19 x 2.4 cm, 0.689 kg

'The Philosophy of Literary Translation has the rare virtue of synthesizing deep knowledge of historical thought about language with the insights and recursive questions that emerge from the author's own vibrant translation practice. Clive Scott's foregrounding of the polyglot reader, his empathetic accounts of the experience and drama of reading, and the facility with which he sets theorists in dialogue with one another across time and place generate a lucid and engrossing intellectual journey into creative practice. This is an important, beautifully argued book.' Annmarie Drury, Queens College, City University of New York

While reading transforms texts through memories, associations and re-imaginings, translation allows us to act out our reading experience, inscribe it in a new text, and engage in a dialogic and dynamic relationship with the original. In this highly original new study, Clive Scott reveals the existential and ecological values that literary translation can embody in its perceptual transformation of texts. The transfer of a text from one language into another is merely the platform from which translation launches its larger ambitions, including the existential expansion and re-situation of text towards new expressive futures and ways of inhabiting the world. Recasting language as a living organism and as part of humanity's ongoing duration, this study uncovers its tireless capacity to cross perceptual boundaries, to multiply relations between the human and the non-human and to engage with forms of language which evoke unfamiliar modes of psycho-perception and eco-modelling.

I. Positions and Propositions: 1. Reading
2. Translation and Language
3. Translation and Interpretation
4. What the Translation of Poetry Is
II. Dialogue, Movement, Ecology: 5. Dialogue and Dialectic in the Translational Act
6. Movement, Duration, Rhythm
7. The Ecological Reach and Promise of Literary Translation Coda.

Subject Areas: Literary theory [DSA]