Research Catalog

Title

Translating the monster : Volter Kilpi in orbit beyond (un)translatability / by Douglas Robinson.

Author

Robinson, Douglas, 1954-

Publication

Leiden ; Boston : Brill, [2023]

Items in the Library & Off-site

Details

Description

ix, 298 pages; 25 cm.

Summary

"One of the hottest battles emerging out of the theoretical and methodological collisions between Comparative Literature and Translation Studies-especially on the battleground of World Literature-has to do with translatability and untranslatability. Is any translation of a great work of literature not only a lamentable betrayal but an impossibility? Or is translation an imperfect but invaluable tool for the transmission of works and ideas beyond language barriers? Both views are defensible; indeed both are arguably commonsensical. What Douglas Robinson argues in Translating the Monster, however, is that both are gross oversimplifications of a complex situation that he calls on Jacques Derrida to characterize as "the monster." The Finnish novelist Robinson takes as his case study for that monstrous rethinking is Volter Kilpi (1874-1939), regarded by scholars of Finnish literature as Finland's second world-class writer-the first being Aleksis Kivi (1834-1872). Kilpi's modernist experiments of the 1930s, especially his so-called Archipelago series, beginning with his masterpiece, In the Alastalo Parlor (1933), were forgotten and neglected for a half century, due to the extreme difficulty of his narrative style: he reinvents the Finnish language, to the extent that many Finns say it is like reading a foreign language (and one contemporary critic called it the "Mesopotamian language ... of a half-wit"). That novel has been translated exactly twice, into Swedish and German. Translating the Monster also gives the English-speaking reader an extended taste of the novel in English-en route to a series of reframings of the novel as allegories of translation and world literature"--

Series Statement

Approaches to translation studies, 0169-0523 ; volume 51

Uniform Title

Approaches to translation studies ; v. 51.

Subject

• Kilpi, Volter, 1874-1939
• Kilpi, Volter, 1874-1939 > Translations
• Untranslatability
• Translations

Genre/Form

Literary criticism.

Bibliography (note)

• Includes bibliographical references and index.

Processing Action (note)

• committed to retain

ISBN

• 9789004519923
• 9004519920
• 9789004519930 (canceled/invalid)

LCCN

2022038798

OCLC

• on1350444109
• SCSB-14542656

Owning Institutions

Princeton University Library