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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Translating the Monster: Volter Kilpi in Orbit Beyond (Un)Translatability

Translating the Monster: Volter Kilpi in Orbit Beyond (Un)Translatability

Robinson, Douglas

Hardcover

Series: Approaches to Translation Studies, Book 51

Literary CriticismGeneral ReferenceWriting Instruction

Currently unavailable to order

ISBN10: 9004519920
ISBN13: 9789004519923
Publisher: Brill Academic Pub
Published: Oct 5 2022
Pages: 308
Language: English
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.

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