Translation and the Languages of Modernism

Book excerpt: This study examines the practice and functions of literary translation in Anglo-American Modernism. Rather than approaching translation as a trans-historical procedure for reproducing semantic meaning between different languages, Yao discusses how Modernist writers both conceived and employed translation as a complex strategy for accomplishing such feats as exploring the relationship between gender and poetry, creating an authentic national culture and determining the nature of a just government, all of which in turn led to developments in both poetic and novelistic form. Thus, translation emerges in this study as a literary practice crucial to the very development of Anglo-American Modernism.