Literary Translation and the Making of Originals - (Literatures, Cultures, Translation) by Karen Emmerich (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

Literary Translation and the Making of Originals engages such issues as the politics and ethics of translation; how aesthetic categories and market forces contribute to the establishment and promotion of particular "originals"; and the role translation plays in the formation, re-formation, and deformation of national and international literary canons. By challenging the assumption that stable originals even exist, Karen Emmerich also calls into question the tropes of ideal equivalence and unavoidable loss that contribute to the low status of translation, translations, and translators in the current literary and academic marketplaces.

Review Quotes

"Emmerich's engaging essays demonstrate how editorial choices help construct texts as monuments: allegedly permanent, enduring artifacts that demand preservation and honor, not interpretation or discussion about their fraught histories as oral texts or written documents." - Public Books

"Literary Translation and the Making of Originals should be essential reading for literary translators, translation scholars, and professors, especially those who teach literary translation. It will also be of interest to devotees of translated literature." - World Literature Today

About the Author

Karen Emmerich is Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at Princeton University, USA. She has published eleven books of Greek literature in translation and her academic work has appeared in journals such as Comparative Literature, Arion, Translation Studies, and the Journal of Modern Greek Studies.