Literary Translation and the Making of Originals [Hardcover]

Literary Translation and the Making of Originalsengages such issues as the politics and ethics of translation; how aesthetic categories and market forces contribute to the establishment and promotion of particular originals; and the role translation plays in the formation, re-formation, and deformation of national and international literary canons. By challenging the assumption that stable originals even exist, Karen Emmerich also calls into question the tropes of ideal equivalence and unavoidable loss that contribute to the low status of translation, translations, and translators in the current literary and academic marketplaces.Karen Emmerichis Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at Princeton University, USA. She has published eleven books of Greek literature in translation and her academic work has appeared in journals such asComparative Literature,Arion,Translation Studies, and theJournal of Modern Greek Studies.

Emmerichs engaging essays demonstrate how editorial choices help construct texts as monuments: allegedly permanent, enduring artifacts that demand preservation and honor, not interpretation or discussion about their fraught histories as oral texts or written documents. Public Books

Literary Translation and the Making of Originalsshould be essential reading for literary translators, translation scholars, and professors, especially those who teach literary translation. It will also be of interest to devotees of translated literature. -World Literature Today

Acknowledgments
Introduction: Difference at the Origin, Instability at the Source: Translation as Translingual Editing
1. A message from the antediluvian age: The Modern Construction of the AncientEpic of Gilgamesh
2. Monuments of the Word: Translation and the Textualization of Modern Greek Folk Songs
3. On Manuscripts, Type-Translation, and Translation (Im?)proper: Emily Dil£;