Literary Translation and the Making of Originals

Karen Emmerich is Assistant Professor of Comparative Literature at Princeton University, USA. She has published eleven books of Greek literature in translation and her academic work has appeared in journals such as Comparative Literature, Arion, Translation Studies, and the Journal of Modern Greek Studies.

• AcknowledgmentsIntroduction: Difference at the “Origin,” Instability at the “Source”: Translation as Translingual Editing1. “A message from the antediluvian age”: The Modern Construction of the Ancient Epic of Gilgamesh2. “Monuments of the Word”: Translation and the Textualization of Modern Greek Folk Songs3. On Manuscripts, Type-Translation, and Translation (Im?)proper: Emily Dickinson and the Translation of Scriptural Form4. The Unfinished Afterlives of C. P. Cavafy5. ‘The Bone-Yard, Babel Recombined’: Jack Spicer and the Poetics of Citational CorrespondenceCoda: Toward a Pedagogy of IterabilityBibliography Index

Emmerich’s engaging essays demonstrate how editorial choices help construct texts as monuments: allegedly permanent, enduring artifacts that demand preservation and honor, not interpretation or discussion about their fraught histories as oral texts or written documents.