Nation, Language, and the Ethics of Translation

Sandra Bermann is Professor and Department Chair of Comparative Literature at Princeton University. She is the author of Sonnet over Time: A Study in the Sonnets of Petrarch, Shakespeare, and Baudelaire, and her translation of Allesandro Manzoni's Del romanzo storico appeared as On the Historical Novel. Michael Wood is Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Princeton University. He is the author of The Magician's Doubts: Nabokov and the Risks of Fiction (Princeton) and other books on literature and film.

• Introduction Sandra Bermann 1 PART I: TRANSLATION AS MEDIUM AND ACROSS MEDIA 11 The Public Role of Writers and Intellectuals Edward Said 15 Issues in the Translatability of Law Pierre Legrand 30 Simultaneous Interpretation: Language and Cultural Difference Lynn Visson 51 A Touch of Translation: On Walter Benjamin's "Task of the Translator" Samuel Weber 65 The Languages of Cinema Michael Wood 79 PART II: THE ETHICS OF TRANSLATION 89 Translating into English Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak 93 Tracking the "Native Informant": Cultural Translation as the Horizon of Literary Translation Henry Staten 111 Levinas, Translation, and Ethics Robert Eaglestone 127 Comparative Literature: The Delay in Translation Stanley Corngold 139 Translation as Community: The Opacity of Modernizations of Genji monogatari Jonathan E. Abel 146 Translation with No Original: Scandals of Textual Reproduction Emily Apter 159 PART III: TRANSLATION AND DIFFERENCE 175 Local Contingencies: Translation and National Identities Lawrence Venuti 177 Nationum Origo Jacques Lezra 203 Metrical Translation: Nineteenth-Century Homers and the Hexameter Mania Yopie Prins 229 Translating History Sandra Bermann 257 German Academic Exiles in Istanbul: Translation as the Bildung of the Other Azade Seyhan 274 DeLillo in Greece Eluding the Name Stathis Gourgouris 289 PART IV: BEYOND THE NATION 311 Translating Grief Francoise Lionnet 315 "Synthetic Vision": Internationalism and the Poetics of Decolonization Gauri Viswanathan 326 National Literature in Transnational Times: Writing Transition in the "New" South Africa Vilashini Cooppan 346 Postcolonial Latin America and the Magic Realist Imperative: A Report to an Academy Sylvia Molloy 370 Death in Translation David Damrosch 380 LIST OF CONTRIBUTORS 399 INDEX 403

"Sure to become required reading for students and scholars of the subject, ... this new volume presents a well-balanced view of the current state of the profession and contains an unusually large percentage of essays (fully half) that can be considered significant contributions to the field."--Susan Bernofsky, Modern Language Notes