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Language Arts & Disciplines Translating & Interpreting

Second Finding

A Poetics of Translation

by (author) Barbara Folkart

Publisher
University of Ottawa Press
Initial publish date
Sep 2007
Category
Translating & Interpreting, Poetry
  • eBook

    ISBN
    9780776618487
    Publish Date
    Sep 2007
    List Price
    $19.99
  • Paperback / softback

    ISBN
    9780776606286
    Publish Date
    Sep 2007
    List Price
    $40.00

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Description

The translation of poetry has always fascinated the theorists, as the chances of "replicating" in another language the one-off resonance of music, imagery, and truth values of a poem are vanishingly small. Translation is often envisaged as a matter of mapping over into the target language the surface features or semiotic structures of the source poem. Little wonder, then, that the vast majority of translations fail to be poetry in their own right. These essays focus on the poetically viable translation - the derived poem that, while resonating with the original, really is a poem. They proceed from a writerly perspective, eschewing both the theoretical overkill that spawns mice out of mountains and the ideological misappropriation that uses poetry as a way to push agendas. The emphasis throughout is on process and the poem-to-come.

About the author

Barbara Folkart studied medieval linguistics, literature and philology at the École Pratique des Hautes Études (Sorbonne) and the Université de Montréal. Her hands-on experience in working with medieval manuscripts, establishing manuscript genealogies and preparing scientific critical editions of medieval texts has given her a strong sense of how texts get corrupted when they are transcribed and transmitted, and has very definitely influenced her views on the transmission of information and esthetic values during the process of translation.

Barbara Folkart's profile page