Toward a Translation Criticism : John Donne

Franoise Massardier-Kenney's translation of Antoine Bermans Toward a Translation Criticism makes available for the first time in the English-speaking world one of the twentieth century's foundational texts in translation studies. Berman's book, published posthumously in France, develops an original concept of "criticism of translation" and a methodology to anchor the practice of this criticism. He demonstrates how the work of translation is a critical process as well as a creative one. Moving away from nonsystematic evaluative approaches that study the cultural and literary systems into which the translations are inserted, Berman applies the notion of ethics he developed in his earlier works, calling for a translation that is nonethnocentric and stipulating that the creativity required by translation be focused on the re-creation of the original in the other language without being overdetermined by the personal poetics of the writer-translator. Berman achieves a rare combination of hermeneutic and stylistic analysis, of commentary on the original and analysis of its translations, giving the reader access both "to the language of the original-to the way in which poetry and thought are deployed-and to the actual work of translation."

Antoine Berman (1942-1991) was the author of well-known works on translation (La Traduction et la lettre ou l'auberge du lointain, L'Epreuve de I'tranger [The Experience of the Foreign], Culture et traduction dans I'Allemagne romantique, Pour une critique des traductions, L'ge de la traduction). He was the coeditor of Les tours de Babel with poet and translator Henri Meschonnic and the first director of the Collge International de Philosophic founded by Jacques Derrida and others. Franoise Massardier-Kenney is professor of French and Director of the Institute for Applied Linguistics at Kent State University.