Sympathy for the traitor A translation manifesto

Mark Polizzotti

Book - 2018

"This is at once a manual, handbook, and a manifesto on translation in all its literary, business, scientific, machine, and Biblical forms: what some regard as being the "poor cousin of literature" and a "necessary evil"; what others consider to be "the royal road to cross-cultural understanding and literary enrichment." Mark Polizzotti, himself a celebrated translator, avoids the historically entrenched standpoints of "traduttore, traditore" as well as the notion that there is something inherently noble in the practice. Discarding translation theory, Polizzotti instead approaches translation as a practice and looks to sensitize readers--both those informed and those with little knowiedge of the ...subject--to both the large but also to the more detailed matters at hand by way of concrete examples of translations. The book addresses the history of translation--the "bearing across" of a saint to heaven that it started as in the 12th century in Englsh; it looks at the ethics and culture of translation (and when adaptation can become imperialist appropriation); it draws from personal case studies from the author's own translation work to show the impact that different renderings of a text can have on what the text says; it also looks at the limits of translation, when sounds compete with meaning which in turn competes with cultural context and impossible choices are faced (as in the cases of Surrealist champion Raymond Roussel, or self-described "Schizo" Louis Wolfson, who wrote in French and transmosed any piece of English to hit his ear into phonetic amalgamations of other tongues)"-- more