Description: Further DetailsTitle: If Babel Had a FormCondition: NewSubtitle: Translating Equivalence in the Twentieth-Century TranspacificISBN-10: 1531500196EAN: 9781531500191ISBN: 9781531500191Publisher: Fordham University PressFormat: PaperbackRelease Date: 04/05/2022Description: “The likeness of form between Chinese and English sentences,” writes the American Sinologist Ernest Fenollosa around 1906, “renders translation from one to the other exceptionally easy.” If Babel Had a Form asks not if his claim may be true, but what its phantasmic surprise may yet do. In twentieth-century intersections of China and Asia with the United States, translations did more than communicate meaning across politicized and racializing differences of language and nation. Transpacific translation breached the regulative protocols that created those very differences of human value and cultural meaning. The result, Tze-Yin Teo argues, saw translators cleaving to the sounds and shapes of poetry to imagine a translingual “likeness of form” but not of meaning or kind.At stake in this form without meaning is a startling new task of equivalence. As a concept, equivalence has been rejected for its colonizing epistemology of value, naming a broken promise of translation and false premise of comparison. Yet the writers studied in this book veered from those ways of knowing to theorize a poetic equivalence: negating the colonial foundations of the concept, they ignited aporias of meaning into flashpoints for a radical literary translation. The book’s transpacific readings glean those forms of equivalence from the writing of Fenollosa, the vernacular experiments of Boxer Scholar Hu Shi, the trilingual musings of Shanghai-born Los Angeles novelist Eileen Chang, the minor work of the Bay Area Korean American transmedial artist Theresa Cha, and a post-Tiananmen elegy by the exiled dissident Yang Lian. The conclusion returns to the deconstructive genealogy of recent debates on translation and untranslatability, displacing the axiom of radical alterity for a no less radical equivalence that remains—pace Fenollosa—far from easy or exceptional.Ultimately, If Babel Had a Form illuminates the demanding force of even the slightest sameness entangled in the translator’s work of remaking our differences.Language: EnglishCountry/Region of Manufacture: USItem Height: 229mmItem Length: 152mmAuthor: Tze-Yin TeoGenre: HistoryTopic: Literary Criticism, Philosophy & SpiritualityRelease Year: 2022 Missing Information?Please contact us if any details are missing and where possible we will add the information to our listing.
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Book Title: If Babel Had a Form
Title: If Babel Had a Form
Subtitle: Translating Equivalence in the Twentieth-Century Transpacific
ISBN-10: 1531500196
EAN: 9781531500191
ISBN: 9781531500191
Release Date: 04/05/2022
Release Year: 2022
Country/Region of Manufacture: US
Genre: History
Topic: Philosophy & Spirituality
Number of Pages: 256 Pages
Language: English
Publication Name: If Babel Had a Form : Translating Equivalence in the Twentieth-Century Transpacific
Publisher: Fordham University Press
Item Height: 0.7 in
Subject: Comparative Literature, Movements / Deconstruction, Asia / General, Linguistics / General
Publication Year: 2022
Type: Textbook
Item Weight: 12 Oz
Subject Area: Literary Criticism, Philosophy, Language Arts & Disciplines, History
Author: Tze-Yin Teo
Item Length: 8.9 in
Item Width: 6 in
Format: Trade Paperback
