Synopses & Reviews
This volume brings together eighteen substantial essays by distinguished scholars, critics and translators, and two interviews with eminent figures of British theatre, to explore the idea and practice of translation. The individual, but conceptually related, contributions examine topics from the Renaissance to the present in the context of apt exploration of the translation process, invoking both restricted and extended senses of translation. The endeavor is to study in detail the theory, workings and implications of what might be called the art of creative transposition, effective at the level of interlingual transcoding, dynamic rewriting, theatrical and cinematic adaptation, intersemiotic or intermedial translation, and cultural exchange. Many of the essays focus on aspects of intertextuality, the dialogue with text, past and present, as they bear on the issue of translation, attending to the historical, political or cultural dimensions of the practice, whether it illuminates a gendered reading of a text or a staging of cultural difference. The historic and generic range of the discussions is wide, encompassing the Elizabethan epyllion, Sensibility fiction, Victorian poetry and prose, modern and postmodern novels, but the book is dominated by dramatic or performance-related applications, with major representation of fresh investigations into Shakespeare (from A Midsummer Nights Dream to The Tempest) and foregrounding of acts of self-translation on stage, in the dramatic monologue and in fiction. Contributions from theatre practitioners such as Sir Peter Hall, John Barton and Peter Lichtenfels underscore the immense practical importance of the translator on the stage and the business of both acting and directing as a species of translation.
Synopsis
Brings together 18 essays by scholars, critics, and translators, plus two interviews with eminent figures of British theater, to explore the idea and practice of translation. Contributors examine topics from the Renaissance to the present in the context of exploration of the translation process, invoking both restricted and extended senses of translation. They study in depth the theory, workings, and implications of the art of creative transposition.
About the Author
Shirley Chew is Professor of Commonwealth and Postcolonial Literatures at the University of Leeds.
Table of Contents
Introduction -
Shirley Chew and Alistair SteadTranslations in A Midsummer Night's Dream - Stanley Wells
Elizabethan Translation: the Art of the Hermaphrodite - Jonathan Bate
From Stage to Page: Character through Theatre Practices in Romeo and Juliet - Lynette Hunter and Peter Lichtenfels
Translating the Elizabethan Theatre: the Politics of Nostalgia in Olivier's Henry V - Martin Butler
Tempestuous Transformations - David Lindley
'...tinap ober we leck giant': African Celebrations of Shakespeare - Martin Banham and Eldred Durosimi Jones
(Post)colonial Translations in V.S. Naipaul's The Enigma of Arrival - Shirley Chew
Sentimental Translation in Mackenzie and Sterne - David Fairer
Hazlitt's Liber Amoris; or, the New Pygmalion (1823): Conversations and the Statue - John Barnard
Translating Value: Marginal Observations on a Central Question - Geoffrey Hill
Browning's Old Florentine Painters: Italian Art and Mid-Victorian Poetry - Kelvin Everest
Thackeray and the 'Old Masters' - Leonée Ormond
William Morris and Translations of Iceland - Andrew Wawn
Aestheticism in Translation: Henry James, Walter Pater, and Theodor Adorno - Richard Salmon
Helena Faucit: Shakespeare's Victorian Heroine - Gail Marshall
'More a Russian than a Dane': the Usefulness of Hamlet in Russia - Peter Holland
Translation and Self-translation through the Shakespearean Looking-glasses in Joyce's Ulysses - Richard Brown
Self-Translation and the Arts of Transposition in Allan Hollinghurst's The Folding Star - Alistair Stead
Translation in the Theatre I: Directing as Translating - Sir Peter Hall in interview with Mark Batty
Translation in the Theatre II: Translation as Adaptation - John Barton in interview with Mark Batty
Notes on Contributors
Index