Book Review: Susana Bayó Belenguer, Eiléan Ní Chuilleanáin, & Cormac Ó Cuilleanáin, editors, assisted by Giulia Zuodar (2013). TRANSLATION RIGHT OR WRONG. Four Courts Press, Dublin.Hardback 304pp. June 2013; ISBN:978-1-84682-372-5

Abstract

This collection of essays published in 2013 has its origins in an international conference held in Trinity College Dublin in 2009. The three editors (assisted by Ph.D. student Giulia Zuodar), are Susana Bayo Belenguer, Eilean Ni Chuilleanain and Cormac O Cuilleanain, members of faculty at Trinity College where they teach Spanish, English and Italian respectively, as well as lecturing on the MA in literary translation there. The title of the collection could possibly cause some unease, seeming to hark back, as it does, to the traditional tendency of commentators over millennia to view translation as a question of success or failure rather than of endless possibilities. To once again try to approach translation from a right versus wrong perspective could possibly seem a retrograde step but any fear in that regard in relation to this volume is unfounded. The anachronistic ring to the title is deliberate and provocative but in reality there is nothing at all predictable, rehashed or a wearisome about this truly exciting collection of essays. Somewhat unusually, the work starts with a substantial introduction of almost 30 pages, in which the editors resist the temptation to limit themselves simply to short summaries of the chapters that follow and opt instead to launch into an invigorating and far-ranging discussion of the rights and wrongs of translation across civilisations and centuries in a wholly success effort to bring “new perspectives to bear on a long-lived and sometimes controversial issue”. Here you can find references to Sappho, St Jerome and Luther, on one page and, Milan Kundera, and translation theorist, James Holmes, on the next. One chapter explains the subtleties of fan-translation in contemporary pop culture while another deals with the Quechua language of the Andes. Refreshingly, the work includes output from a more diverse range of scholars and topics than would typically be represented at a single conference or in a single publication. Over the last 20 or so years, the growth of interest in translation studies has been such that there is frequently a tendency for scholarship on, say, literary translation to be accommodated in one type of conference, journal or book where research on audiovisual translation, for example, would be unlikely to appear side-by-side. Here, however, subtitles are discussed in one breath and literary classics in the next.