Translating Life Studies in Transpositional Aesthetics

by Chew, Shirley; Stead, Alistair

• ISBN13: 9780853236740
• ISBN10: 0853236747
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2000-01-01
• Publisher: Liverpool University Press

Summary

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 endeavour 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 Night's 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.

Table of Contents

Introduction	1	(15)
Shirley Chew
Alistair Stead
Translations in A Midsummer Night's Dream	15	(18)
Stanley Wells
Elizabethan Translation: the Art of the Hermaphrodite	33	(20)
Jonathan Bate
From Stage to Page: Character through Theatre Practices in Romeo and Juliet	53	(22)
Lynette Hunter
Peter Lichtenfels
Translating the Elizabethan Theatre: the Politics of Nostalgia in Olivier's Henry V	75	(24)
Martin Butler
Tempestuous Transformations	99	(22)
David Lindley
`... tinap ober we leck giant': African Celebrations of Shakespeare	121	(16)
Martin Banham
Eldred Durosimi Jones
(Post)colonial Translations in V.S. Naipaul's The Enigma of Arrival	137	(24)
Shirley Chew
Sentimental Translation in Mackenzie and Sterne	161	(20)
David Fairer
Hazlitt's Liber Amoris; or, the New Pygmalion (1823): Conversations and the Statue	181	(18)
John Barnard
Translating Value: Marginal Observations on a Central Question	199	(16)
Geoffrey Hill
Browning's Old Florentine Painters: Italian Art and Mid-Victorian Poetry	215	(18)
Kelvin Everest
Thackeray and the `Old Masters'	233	(20)
Leonee Ormond
William Morris and Translations of Iceland	253	(24)
Andrew Wawn
Aestheticism in Translation: Henry James, Walter Pater, and Theodor Adorno	277	(20)
Richard Salmon
Helena Faucit: Shakespeare's Victorian Heroine	297	(18)
Gail Marshall
`More a Russian than a Dane': the Usefulness of Hamlet in Russia	315	(24)
Peter Holland
Translation and Self-translation through the Shakespearean Looking-glasses in Joyce's Ulysses	339	(22)
Richard Brown
Self-Translation and the Arts of Transposition in Allan Hollinghurst's The Folding Star	361	(26)
Alistair Stead
Translation in the Theatre I: Directing as Translating	387	(10)
Sir Peter Hall
Mark Batty
Translation in the Theatre II: Translation as Adaptation	397	(16)
John Barton
Mark Batty
Notes on Contributors	413	(4)
Index	417