From World To World: An Armamentarium

Book excerpt: In this book one of the old traditions of translation studies is revived: the tradition of the comparative study of translation and original. The aim of the author is to develop an armamentarium, a set of analytical instruments and a procedure, for the systematic study of poetic discourse in translation. The armamentarium provides the means to describe the ‘translational interpretation’, that is: the interpretation of the original as it emerges from the translation and may be constructed in the course of a comparison between the two texts. The practical result of this study is based on a solid theoretical foundation. This study most of all reflects on the possibilities of translation comparison and description per se. It is one of the few books in which an in-depth study is undertaken into the principles of translation comparison itself, into its limits and possibilities, and into its central concepts (‘shift’, ‘unit of comparison’ etcetera). Before presenting his own proposal for a comparative procedure, the author critically evaluates several existing methods, particularly those of Toury, Van Leuven-Zwart and the German transfer-oriented approach. The theoretical considerations in this book are amply illustrated by analyses of translated works of poets as Rutger Kopland and Robert Lowell. The book also contains an extensive case study into the translations, by the German poet Paul Celan, of a selection of William Shakespeare’s sonnets.