Classical Translation Research Articles

Approaches to Teaching the Works of John Dryden ed. by Jayne Lewis and Lisa Zunshine

Reviewed by: Approaches to Teaching the Works of John Dryden ed. by Jayne Lewis and Lisa Zunshine David Alff Approaches to Teaching the Works of John Dryden, ed. Jayne Lewis and Lisa Zunshine. New York: MLA, 2013. Pp. x + 197. [End Page 87] $37.50; $19.75. This incisive essay collection sets out to tackle the greatest challenges confronting teachers of Dryden. Some of his most popular works presume familiarity with the cultural and partisan complexities of the Late Stuart Era. Dryden’s indebtedness to classical literary forms can baffle and bore students unversed in Homer and Virgil. Finally, the spread of Romantic aesthetic criteria that value poetry for its organic self-expression has done little to flatter the Stuart laureate and historiographer royal who used imaginative writing to announce political positions, gratify patrons, and libel opponents. Whose Dryden do we inherit? What do we enlist him to do? “Part One: Materials” reports on the state of Dryden in college curricula, drawing its data from a survey that asked twenty-two instructors to identify the editions they use, in what kinds of courses, and alongside what forms of secondary criticism and supplementary material. The bulk of this book belongs to “Part Two: Approaches.” Its twenty-one essays fall within overlapping sections: Poetry, Drama, and Prose and Translation. Foremost is the need for relevant historical context. One work-around entails using Dryden’s most user-friendly texts that are able to signify in the absence of scrupulous framing. Blair Hoxby suggests that All for Love can be “readily enjoyed even by students who have scant knowledge of the classics and have never heard of the Second Triumvirate.” Adam Potkay likewise endorses Dryden’s editions of Lucretius and Virgil, “perennially accessible and compelling” texts that introduce students to England’s “incandescent silver age” of classical translation. Dryden is most accessible in Fables, Ancient and Modern, according to Philip Smallwood, who uses these stories to teach the “values of Augustan poetry” (a welcome call for sound historical reading practices later marred by his tendentious scolding of undergraduates for knowing more about “feminist lore” and “domination subversion” than close reading). History is unavoidable in most works. Kirstin R. Wilcox approaches Absalom and Achitophel, where context “easily swamps . . . literary dimensions,” counterintuitively as a labor of close reading. “The goal,” she says, is to draw students into the poem “so that they actively experience its political significance” from inside. Her class reads the poem first without historical background, paraphrasing it “sentence by sentence” to clarify surface meaning. She divulges allegorical correspondences (“Jews/English,” “Jebusite /Catholic” for example) only when students have enough of an investment to hunger for them. Will Pritchard uses Marriage à la Mode to get students to “think about the ways in which works of art . . . do or do not take a position in a larger cultural debate,” in this case, over the virtue of marriage. He shows how Dryden’s interphilandering couples, Rhodophil and Doralice, Palamede and Melantha, upstage more earnest polemics. I wondered how the patently unmodish pastoral romance of Leonidas and Palmyra, not discussed, might complicate Dryden’s satire and imply new position-taking. Many contributors encourage students to see Dryden ambiguously, as a complex and self-revising thinker whose works often bucked the demands of Stuart panegyric and Catholic apologia. Anna Battigelli teaches Dryden’s Religio Laici as a covert attempt to deflate “polarized polemical combat” about religion, reminding her class that “[p]aradox and contradiction, not consistency, confessional alignment, or orthodoxy, are the hallmarks of his style.” [End Page 88] Christopher Johnson alerts students to moments in Absalom and Achitophel where the Monmouth plot diverges from 2 Samuel, and Dryden “problematically associates royal sexual aggression with rape and fratricide.” Pedagogical techniques can make physical the experience of reading Dryden. Though few essays explicitly credit performance studies as methodological inspiration, many present poetry as the work of lungs and tongues, and plays as creations that, as Thomas F. Bonnell and Katie Sullivan put it, “must be physically realized in three-dimensional space.” John Richetti performs “To the Memory of Mr. Oldham” from memory, walking around his class while “reciting it—or, as it were, talking it—to convey a sense...

Hermenéutica y existencia en el Cuarto Evangelio

In this paper we aim to justify the presence of an existencial hermeneutics in one of the foundational texts of Christian, or Judeo-Christian tradition: the Prologue to the Gospel of John. To this end, we raise a critic interpretation of the classical translations of the text and try to verify that the Saint John’s eschatology does not meet a chronological emplacement but a spatial one. Throughout this work we examine the use of prepositions in the Prologue and the First Letter in order to remark the signifying and existential function of the Incarnation Starting from this hypothesis we aim to defend that the Prologue to the Gospel of John states a foundational, albeit chronologically distant, precedent of one of the most relevant philosophical frameworks in the 20th century continental philosophy: the hermeneutics of existence.

Derrida and Comparative Philosophy

This article argues that Derrida’s thinking is relevant to comparative philosophy. To illustrate this, at various stages classical Daoism is compared with Derrida’s thought, to highlight Derrida’s “applicability” and to see how using Derrida can contribute to new interpretations of Daoism. The article first looks into Derrida’s engagement (or lack thereof) with non-Western thought, and then proceeds to his extensive work regarding language and translation, comparing this with views on classical Chinese language and translation of key Daoist characters. It then explores Derrida’s efforts at opening up philosophy to its outside, and argues that he was very much concerned with other ways of thinking and their possible influence on Western thought. The final section argues both that Derrida’s abiding concern with otherness and alterity forms a fertile background from which to reinvestigate traditional interpretations of classical Daoism and that employing his way of thought can lead us to interesting new perspectives on Daoism.

(Self-)censorship and the translator-author relationship: the case of full translation, partial translation and non-translation in the Chinese context

This paper studies the translator-author relationship against the backdrop of governmental and non-governmental (publishing, editorial and the translator’s own) censorship in present-day China. I distinguish three types of translator-author relationship affected by censorship and/or self-censorship, resulting in three categories of translations, i.e. full translations, partial translations and non-translations. The several relationships described will adhere to the traditional concepts of translatorial “faithfulness”, “partial faithfulness” or “unfaithfulness”. Full translatorial “faithfulness” results when the translator is fully committed to his/her author and represents the author as faithfully as s/he possibly can. In this case, the work being translated falls entirely within the category of “translatable/importable” foreign literature, defined in turn as being “harmonious” in relation to existing Chinese constitutional laws. (This category includes translations of all major Western classics from ancient to modern times.) The second type of relationship culminates in “partial translations”, whereby omissions, shifts of meaning or the modulation of overall author-tone necessarily change the intentions of the author, so as to avoid potential conflict with government censors. Typical examples in this second category include the partly censored PRC versions of Hillary Clinton’s Living History and Henry Kissinger’s On China. The final category of translator-author relationship involves prolepsis, i.e. the translator’s anticipatory relationship with a work that has not been – and may not be – translated under existing conditions. Whether or not, in fact, such a “non-/zero translator-author” relationship eventually can emerge, thus converting non-translations into translations or partial translations, is worthy of further research. On this basis, the paper offers a theoretical framework for discussions about how various types of (self-)censorship impact the translator-author relationship and the activity of translation within the context of the PRC.

Another translation: spiritual world translation and classical spiritual world translation

Another translation: spiritual world translation and classical spiritual world translation

Refinement types for Haskell

SMT-based checking of refinement types for call-by-value languages is a well-studied subject. Unfortunately, the classical translation of refinement types to verification conditions is unsound under lazy evaluation. When checking an expression, such systems implicitly assume that all the free variables in the expression are bound to values . This property is trivially guaranteed by eager, but does not hold under lazy, evaluation. Thus, to be sound and precise, a refinement type system for Haskell and the corresponding verification conditions must take into account which subset of binders actually reduces to values. We present a stratified type system that labels binders as potentially diverging or not, and that (circularly) uses refinement types to verify the labeling. We have implemented our system in L IQUID H ASKELL and present an experimental evaluation of our approach on more than 10,000 lines of widely used Haskell libraries. We show that L IQUID H ASKELL is able to prove 96% of all recursive functions terminating, while requiring a modest 1.7 lines of termination-annotations per 100 lines of code.

David Simpson Romanticism and the Question of the StrangerRomanticism and the Question of the Stranger. David Simpson. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013. Pp. x+271.

David Simpson Romanticism and the Question of the StrangerRomanticism and the Question of the Stranger. David Simpson. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013. Pp. x+271.

From norms to macro-norms? The translation of classics seen in a global, diachronic framework

Abstract – Recently, Descriptive Translation Studies has been busying itself with single case studies rather than general surveys, with individual translations rather than normative tendencies. Ostensibly, this has been done in an attempt at avoiding the pitfalls of excessive ‘globalism’, and in order to shift the focus from the pressures exerted by society to the contributions given by translators, each according to his/her habitus . While recognizing the value of these ‘localizing’ studies, the present article argues that there is still scope within the discipline for developing universal concepts capable of connecting different forms of behaviour. Whenever the translation scholar aims at describing a field rather than an individual effort, it may be useful, and indeed necessary, to extend Toury’s concept of ‘translation norms’ both synchronically and diachronically. In the field of classical translation, in particular, the significance of single contributions may be lost if it is not seen in the context of international tendencies with deep historical roots – what the author proposes to call ‘macro-norms’. Keywords : Descriptive Translation Studies, classics, comparative literature, norms, macro-norms

On One Hundred Years of Solitude: Some Notes on Translation

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Additional informationNotes on contributorsGregory Rabassa Here the renowned translator of numerous classics by Latin American authors including Julio Cortázar, Machado de Assis, José Lezama Lima, and Gabriel García Márquez, reflects on his experience of rendering the late García Márquez's masterpiece into English. Rabassa's translation was commissioned by the Center for Inter-American Relations (now the Americas Society) as part of its translation subvention program; the now world-famous One Hundred Years of Solitude was first published by Harper & Row in 1970. Further reflections on his translation of this and other works may be found in his literary memoir If This Be Treason (2005).

Introduction to Special Issue: China and the West in Dialogue

The origins of the articles in this issue of Literature and Theology lie in a series of international seminars held in Renmin University of China in Beijing between 2012 and 2014. These were gatherings of scholars and students from China, Hong Kong, the USA, Canada, and Scotland whose concern was to further intellectual understanding between the cultures of East and West through reflections on issues in the study of literature and religion, translation, and hermeneutics. In addition to the contemporary critical context in hermeneutical thinking and the adoption in China of what has become known as ‘scriptural reasoning’ (a term first found in the early 1990s amongst a group of Jewish scholars engaged in comparative readings of the Christian Bible and the Jewish Tanakh), these articles here refer back to the 19th century and in particular to the work of James Legge, the first Professor of Chinese Literature and Language in the University of Oxford and for 30 years a missionary/scholar in China who produced numerous translations of the Chinese Classics and made them known to English readers. Legge’s rendering of biblical stories in the form of Chinese novels and his appreciation of Confucianism and Daoism are important, and too often forgotten, moments in the eventual development of the studies of comparative religion and comparative literature—the articles in this issue will offer some reflections on these questions. Balance is always hard to maintain in such intercultural negotiations, and it is for that reason that this issue of the journal has two editors, one Chinese and one British.

Cladding waveguides realized in Nd:YAG ceramic by direct femtosecond-laser writing with a helical movement technique

Circular cladding waveguides were realized in a 5.0-mm long, 1.1-at.% Nd:YAG ceramic by direct femtosecond-laser writing using a scheme in which the laser medium is moved on a helical trajectory along its axis and parallel to the writing direction. Laser emission was obtained under the pump with a fiber-coupled diode laser. A 100-μm diameter waveguide delivered laser pulses at 1.06 μm with 3.4-mJ energy for the pump with pulses of 13.1-mJ energy, at 0.30 slope efficiency; laser pulses at 1.3 μm with 1.2-mJ energy were obtained from the same device. Comparison with a waveguide of the same dimension that was inscribed by the classical translation method of the laser medium is made. Efficient integrated lasers based on cladding waveguides that are pumped by fiber-coupled diode lasers could be realized by this writing method.

Words Apart, Worlds Apart: Peritexts from Islamized Translations of World Classics in Children’s Literature

This article examines the political polarization between Republicans and Islamists in Turkey as reflected in the peritexts of recent translations of world children’s literature. This is reflected in terms of van Dijk’s notions of an us vs them binarism, where a positive in-group is opposed to a negative out-group representation. In this way, the construction of an anti-Western (and pro-Islamist) ideology can be seen, regardless of the content of the actual literary works themselves.

Defining Moments in Anna Karenina

This essay returns to F. R. Leavis’s 1965 essay on Anna Karenina as its point of departure, arguing that the novel is ultimately more tragic in its effect than Leavis allows. Beginning with an account of some representative moments which define the unbridgeable gaps between certain major characters, it moves to consider the differences between the new Penguin and the Maudes’ World’s Classics translation of a passage which is seen as embodying Tolstoy’s consistent attempt to imagine life as always lived in time. The essay then proceeds to consider the three ‘defining moments’ which together provide the rationale for its title. These related moments - Koznyshev’s aborted proposal to Varenka, Anna’s suicide and the death of Frou-Frou in the famous horse race – are at the heart of this essay’s claim for the tragic status of Anna Karenina .

Dialoguer avec l’Antiquité. Cadre sociolinguistique et pragmatique pour la traduction des textes antiques

Every translation task raises a slew of complex methodological issues. For ancient languages, these questions are even more outstanding due to the time lag ; this is why we consider their discrete exploration to be crucial. This paper identifies the specificities of translation from ancient languages into modern languages, defines the particular challenges arising and suggests theoretical and methodological leads to tackle them. Considering that every translation recreates a communication situation, we analyze the specificity of the translation of ancient texts in the light of sociolinguistic and pragmatic theories. From linguistic to extralinguistic features, we review the different elements of R. Jakobson’s interpretation process with regard to the translation of classics. We explore how the characteristics of the original communication situation and those of the situation recreated for the translation can be considered to determine a translation strategy. This interdisciplinary approach lays the foundations for a theoretical and methodological thought about ancient texts translation in the French speaking academic world.

Translating the Bible to Raise the Fallen: John Dennis’s Psalm 18

Translating the Bible to Raise the Fallen:John Dennis’s Psalm 18 Sarah B. Stein (bio) John Dennis, the influential literary critic of the early eighteenth century, is primarily read today as an important theorist of the sublime and a stock proponent of neoclassicism in poetics.1 Throughout his critical oeuvre Dennis struggles to unite these two seemingly opposed forces through a theory of poetry which could be passionately sublime and simultaneously adhere to strict rules. As noted by numerous critics, the attempt to combine passion and rule causes Dennis considerable trouble.2 What has not been noted before is that Dennis himself attempts to provide a solution to the contradictions in his theory: translation. Although he devotes considerable effort to the development of a theory of biblical translation in his two most influential essays, The Advancement and Reformation of Modern Poetry (1701) and The Grounds of Criticism in Poetry (1704), scholarship has paid little attention to the central role that translation plays in Dennis’s work. The contribution of this article will be to present a new outlook on Dennis—as a biblical translator. Through a reading of Dennis’s translation of Psalm 18 in The Grounds, the article will argue that the traditional reading of Dennis as a theorist of both the sublime and the neoclassical can best be understood through his attempt to harmonize these two (opposing) forces through the process of translation. The poetry that he reveals as truly sublime is based on biblical text but translated into English according to [End Page 4] his version of neoclassical poetic rules in order to combine biblical passion with neoclassical reason and order. By means of translation, he attempts to unite contrary forces in order to return poetry to what he viewed as its original, harmonious state. Dennis’s understanding of translation developed from the work of John Denham and John Dryden. Both Denham’s and later Dryden’s theories of translation, based on a reading of Horace, provided the model for eighteenth-century translation. In 1656, John Denham’s The Destruction of Troy argues for a free approach to translation. Similarly, Dryden’s 1680 preface to Ovid’s Epistles follows Denham’s lead in calling for a move away from literal translation.3 This understanding of translation as a process of domesticating imitation became the norm of translation throughout the eighteenth century.4 In The Translator’s Invisibility: The History of Translation Lawrence Venuti argues that eighteenth-century translations which focused on the free hand of the translator served to erase the signification of the foreign in translated texts, changing them in order to claim them as domestic works.5 In this narrative, the investment in free translation as a means of incorporating foreign texts continued unabated throughout the century, being taken up by both the Earl of Roscommon in his 1685 An Essay on Translated Verse and by Alexander Pope in his translation of Homer.6 Dennis was certainly greatly influenced by the work of Dryden and promotes domestication in translation in his critical work. In fact, Dennis goes so far as to claim that Virgil “is now, by Mr. Dryden’s Translation, to be reckon’d among our own Poets; and so comes within the compass of my Design.”7 By way of translation poetry can come into the English language, but also, in Dennis’s estimation, into the English tradition. By turning away, however, from the focus on classical translation found in Denham, Dryden, and Roscommon, and towards the Bible, Dennis also promotes a more radical understanding of translation as a means of personal and communal redemption.8 Dennis’s psalm translation serves to radicalize the neoclassical notion of translation, investing it with the religious connotation of translation as the means of moving from earth to heaven.9 His writing reveals a passionate voice calling for the reform of literature and society through a process of biblical translation. Dennis’s theory of harmonizing translation is, thus, both firmly within the conventional Denham-Dryden-Pope trajectory of eighteenth-century translation history and opposed to it in key ways. While Dennis supports the notion of translation as the reclamation of a classical or biblical tradition...

Thematic progression in English–Chinese translation of argumentative classics: a quantitative study of Francis Bacon's ‘Of Studies’ and its 11 Chinese translations

By way of a quantitative study of the patterns of thematic progression of the argumentative essay ‘Of Studies’ and its 11 Chinese translations, we attempt to demonstrate the degree of relevance of these patterns to translation studies. Our study reveals that these patterns and their shifts in translation display certain regularity in their frequency and density, which in turn may shed light on many issues in the English–Chinese translation of argumentative classics, such as the constitution of the ‘interlingua’ and the degree of correspondence between the source text and the target text(s).

Уильям Блейк, <i>Песни невинности и опыта</i>: William Blake, <i>Songs of Innocence and of Experience</i>

In 2009 one of the largest Russian museums, the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts, joined with the Tate and the British Council to begin to organize a Russian exhibition of Blake’s works for the first time ever; it opened in November 2011. The British Council also suggested that a new translated edition of Songs of Innocence and of Experience should be published on the occasion. The Russian State Library for Foreign Literature partnered with the council to organize the workshop of translators and publish the book. The publication is unusual for Russia in that it is based on an earlier boxed small-format edition issued by the Folio Society (1992), later republished unboxed by Tate Publishing in 2006 and 2009. For the first time in Russia, this edition reproduces the illuminated prints of the Songs, and all translations are new, the result of a competition among members of the translation workshop. The translations judged most successful were included alongside the images, with introductions by Richard Holmes and Gregory Kruzhkov as well as critical commentary by Sasha Dugdale. The translations presented in the book represent a modern vision of Blake and successfully compete with a number of classical translations of Blake into Russian, such as those by S. Ya. Marshak, S. Stepanov, and others.

English Juvenal translations in Bodleian library manuscripts

The manuscript copies of Juvenal translations in the Bodleian Library, University of Oxford, form a cross-section of English versions of Juvenal for the period c. 1630–1760. Some manuscript translations were copied from existing printed texts. Others were themselves the basis of printed texts. Others again have never been printed (or investigated) at all. Taken as a group, they help to reveal how, why, in what forms, and with what emphases Juvenal was being read, reproduced, and circulated in Britain in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Such a body of material can also help us understand, more generally, what kinds of classical translation and imitation went on at this time, in what contexts, and for what purposes; who composed translations; and to some extent who consumed them.

A Study on Chinese Classics Translation Methodology in Consideration of Chinese Grammar

A Study on Chinese Classics Translation Methodology in Consideration of Chinese Grammar

Book Review: Ghislain Lafont and the Continuing Quest for an Adequate Ecclesiology (A Review Article in Commemoration of Vatican II's 50th Anniversary): Confucius Sinarum philosophus (1687): The First Translation of the Confucian Classics

Book Review: Ghislain Lafont and the Continuing Quest for an Adequate Ecclesiology (A Review Article in Commemoration of Vatican II's 50th Anniversary): Confucius Sinarum philosophus (1687): The First Translation of the Confucian Classics