The Philosophy of Literary Translation: Dialogue, Movement, Ecology

Translation is an essential part of reading, as it allows us to engage with the original text in a new way and to explore its existential and ecological values. Clive Scott's study shows that translation can transcend perceptual boundaries, multiply relations between the human and the non-human, and evoke unfamiliar modes of psycho-perception and eco-modelling.

Format: Hardback
Length: 320 pages
Publication date: 10 August 2023
Publisher: Cambridge University Press

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 that evoke unfamiliar modes of psycho-perception and eco-modelling.

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 that evoke unfamiliar modes of psycho-perception and eco-modelling.

Weight: 606g
Dimension: 158 x 236 x 21 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781009389952