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)"--

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Subjects
Published
Cambridge, MA : The MIT Press [2018]
Language
English
Main Author
Mark Polizzotti (author)
Physical Description
182 pages ; 21 cm
Bibliography
Includes bibliographical references (pages 171-175) and index.
ISBN
9780262037990
  • Introduction: ground rules
  • Is translation possible (and what is it, anyway)?
  • Saints, martyrs, and spies
  • Pure language
  • Beautifully unfaithful
  • The silences between
  • Sympathy for the traitor
  • Verse and controverse
  • On the fringe
  • Talking to ourselves, or does translation matter?.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

With impressive breadth and scrupulous detail, translator Polizzotti (Revolution of the Mind) offers a manifesto about what translation is, what it should be, and why it is important. His primary claim is that "literary translation serves a purpose somewhat adjacent to the roles of cultural reeducation or global unity that we tend to assign to it." Instead, he suggests, translation should "safeguard those distances it supposedly is meant to bridge," not by "keeping cultures apart" but by making sure "the contact produces sparks rather than suffocation." His book functions as a short but representative introduction to the millennia-long debate about whether a translation should be absolutely equivalent to the source text or take liberties with the original phrasing to capture the work's "spirit." Polizzotti's examples include St. Jerome's translation of the Bible from Hebrew to Latin, Walter Benjamin's critical essay on the craft of translation, and various historical instances of mistranslations with major geopolitical ramifications (such as Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev's famous boast "My vas pokhoronim," translated by his personal interpreter as "We will bury you," which historians have since suggested might more accurately be rendered as "We will outlast you"). Polizzotti's book is suffused with expertise and displays his decades of experience in incisively capturing the nuances of an esoteric discipline, while also offering a passionate defense of his trade's larger value. (Apr.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.


Review by Library Journal Review

Polizzotti (publisher & editor in chief, Metropolitan Museum of Art; Revolution of the Mind: The Life of André Breton) is credited with more than 50 translations, including works by Gustave Flaubert, Marguerite -Duras, and Nobel Laureate Patrick -Modiano. The title of this book presents a twined allusion-to the Rolling Stones' "Sympathy for the Devil" and to the Italian patronym "traduttore, traditore" (translator, traitor). Purists maintain that translation is a linguistic and cultural betrayal and appropriation of the original. Polizzotti admits that translations are inherently tainted and biased, but he rejects the conservative practice of slavish fidelity to original style, cadence, and rhetoric. His manifesto proclaims that translation, borne of linguistic, historical, and cultural empathy for context, must be an interpretation and representation of the initial work, resulting in a felicitous and creative rendering of that text. His argument is reinforced with numerous examples from translated works and commentary on the controversies of translation practice, including machine translation, the ethics of translation, and political correctness. VERDICT An important contribution to the craft of translation.--Lonnie Weatherby, McGill Univ. Lib., Montreal © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.