Literary Translation and the Making of Originals

Literary Translation and the Making of Originals engages such issues as the politics and ethics of translation; how aesthetic categories and market forces contribute to the establishment and promotion of particular "originals"; and the role translation plays in the formation, re-formation, and deformation of national and international literary canons. By challenging the assumption that stable originals even exist, Karen Emmerich also calls into question the tropes of ideal equivalence and unavoidable loss that contribute to the low status of translation, translations, and translators in the current literary and academic marketplaces.

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

Acknowledgments Introduction: Difference at the "Origin," Instability at the "Source": Translation as Translingual Editing 1. "A message from the antediluvian age": The Modern Construction of the Ancient Epic of Gilgamesh 2. "Monuments of the Word": Translation and the Textualization of Modern Greek Folk Songs 3. On Manuscripts, Type-Translation, and Translation (Im?)proper: Emily Dickinson and the Translation of Scriptural Form 4. The Unfinished Afterlives of C. P. Cavafy 5. 'The Bone-Yard, Babel Recombined': Jack Spicer and the Poetics of Citational Correspondence Coda: Toward a Pedagogy of Iterability Bibliography Index