Full Description
Translation as Home is a collection of autobiographical essays by Ilan Stavans that eloquently and unequivocally make the case that translation is not only a career, but a way of life.
Born in Mexico City, Ilan Stavans is an essayist, anthologist, literary scholar, translator, and editor. Stavans has changed languages at various points in his life: from Yiddish to Spanish to Hebrew and English. A controversial public intellectual, he is the world's authority on hybrid languages and on the history of dictionaries. His influential studies on Spanglish have redefined many fields of study, and he has become an international authority on translation as a mechanism of survival.
This collection deals with Stavans's three selves: Mexican, Jewish, and American. The volume presents his recent essays, some previously unpublished, addressing the themes of language, identity, and translation and emphasizing his work in Latin American and Jewish studies. It also features conversations between Stavans and writers, educators, and translators, including Regina Galasso, the author of the introduction and editor of the volume.
Contents
Introduction
Room for Language: Moving into Translation
Regina Galasso
Part One: Language on Fire
We Are the Clarion: A Manifesto on Immigration
On Packing Up My Library
Retelling Popol Vuh - in Chinese
"English as She Spoke It": The Fallacy of American Studies (with Steven G. Kellman)
Olga Takarczuk's Messianic Critique
Does Literature Teach Us How to Die? (with Priyanka Champaneri)
The People's Tongue: Language as Character
Claudio Lomnitz's Vertigo
Rethinking the Classics (with Jenna Tang)
Pierre Menard: Retranslation and Approximation (with Youssef Boucetta)
Fernando Pessoa's Selves
On Borges's Blindness (with Max Ubelaker Andrade)
How Yiddish Changed America and How America Changed Yiddish (with Josh Lambert)
The Anxiety of Translation (with Robert Croll)
We Are All Drafts: The Erotics of Translation (with Peter Cole)
Part Two: Dictionaries as Confidants
Notes on Latino Philology
The Miasma of Order; or, Why Dictionaries Ought to Be Seen as Literature
Is American Spanish Healthy?
On Decidophobia (with Haoran Tong)
"Clean, Fix, and Grant Splendor": The Making of Diccionario de autoridades
Pablo Neruda's "Ode to the Dictionary"
Letter to a Young Translator
How Dictionaries Define Us (with Margaret Boyle)
Part Three: Translation as Home
Sor Juana in Nahuatl
On Memes as Semiotic Hand-Grenades (with Mª Carmen África Vidal Claramonte)
Peter Brook's Space
On Translating the Disappearance into Yiddish (with Beruriah Wiegand)
Is I Me, or Who Is I? Conversation with Jim
Petrarch's Sonnet #132
A Lover Alone in Prison (with Sara Khalili)
Roberto Bolaño's Tantrums
Jevel Katz in Yingleñol
Matching Socks in the Dark; or, How to Translate from Languages You Don't Know
Self-Translation como survival mecanismo
Simply Gimpl
Homestead: "La casa pairal" from the Manuscript of Reus (with Regina Galasso)
Translation as Home (with Regina Galasso)
Immigrants in Quarantine (with Jhumpa Lahiri and Eduardo Halfon)
Coda: The Hermeneutics of Translation
Reading the Talmud in Mexico: A Confession
Contributors
Index
