Full Description
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.
Contents
Contents
1 Overture
Beyond (Un)translatability: Intuiting the Monster
1 The Case for (Un)translatability: Benjamin and Apter
2 Testing Untranslatability: The Case of Volter Kilpi
3 "Localist" Bourgeois Respectability and the Monster
4 The Structure of the Book
A Note
2 First Movement (tempestoso)
The Storm Blowing from Paradise: Translating the Monster as the Future
1 Alastalo and Time
2 Walter Benjamin on the Future
3 Archaizing vs. Modernizing Translations
4 The Monster of Literary-Historical Periodization
3 Second Movement (clandestino)
Objects as Women, Women as Objects: Translating the Monster as a Gender Fetish
1 Härkäniemi's Tobacco Pipes and Coffee Cups as Gendered Monster-Fetishes
2 Naming/Objectifying the Monster
3 Fetishes as Stuff, Stuff as Fetishes
4 The Exosomatization of Objects as Quasi-Alive
5 Rethinging Translation
4 Third Movement (spettatoriale)
The Lectorial Monster: Translating for the Monster's Deaf Ear
1 Benjamin on the Reader-Monster
2 Translating the Monster
3 The Translation Scholar's Reader-Monster
5 Finale
Volter Kilpi in Orbit: The Monster as Kosmotheoros
1 Orbit as the Monster
2 Derrida's Exorbitant
3 The Kosmotheoros
4 To Conclude
Appendix A: Background to In the Alastalo Parlor
Appendix B: Finnish Room Nomenclature
Appendix C: Kilpi Translations
Appendix D: Engagements with Kilpi's Critics
Works Cited
Index
