This book deals mostly with American avant-garde literature of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and the present-day practice and politics of its translation into Polish, trying to answer the following questions: What are the meaning and the limits of avantgardism? What is the rationale of literary translations and what is their life-cycle in receiving literary polysystems? Furthermore: What is the importance of translation in shaping the politics of meaning – our collective textual practices determining our epistemological perspectives in literature and beyond? And finally: What are the consequences of implementing foreign modes of thinking and making politics in the receiving culture, both in the social sphere and in writing?

This volume concerns the role and nature of translation in global politics. Through the establishment of trade routes, the encounter with the ‘New World’, and the circulation of concepts and norms across global space, meaning making and social connections have unfolded through practices of translating. While translation is core to international relations it has been relatively neglected in the discipline of International Relations. The Politics of Translation in International Relations remedies this neglect to suggest an understanding of translation that transcends language to encompass a broad range of recurrent social and political practices. The volume provides a wide variety of case studies, including financial regulation, gender training programs, and grassroot movements. Contributors situate the politics of translation in the theoretical and methodological landscape of International Relations, encompassing feminist theory, de- and post-colonial theory, hermeneutics, post-structuralism, critical constructivism, semiotics, conceptual history, actor-network theory and translation studies. The Politics of Translation in International Relations furthers and intensifies a cross-disciplinary dialogue on how translation makes international relations.

Translation is everywhere, and matters to everybody. Translation doesn't only give us foreign news, dubbed films and instructions for using the microwave: without it, there would be no world religions, and our literatures, our cultures, and our languages would be unrecognisable. In this Very Short Introduction, Matthew Reynolds gives an authoritative and thought-provoking account of the field, from ancient Akkadian to World English, from St Jerome to Google Translate. He shows how translation determines meaning, how it matters in commerce, empire, conflict and resistance, and why it is fundamental to literature and the arts. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.

Frederic C. Schaffer challenges the assumption often made by American scholars that democracy has been achieved in foreign countries when criteria such as free elections are met. Elections, he argues, often have cultural underpinnings that are invisible to outsiders. To examine grassroots understandings of democratic institutions and political concepts, Schaffer conducted fieldwork in Senegal, a mostly Islamic and agrarian country with a long history of electoral politics. Schaffer discovered that ideas of "demokaraasi" held by Wolof-speakers often reflect concerns about collective security. Many Senegalese see voting as less a matter of choosing leaders than of reinforcing community ties that may be called upon in times of crisis.By looking carefully at language, Schaffer demonstrates that institutional arrangements do not necessarily carry the same meaning in different cultural contexts. Democracy in Translation asks how social scientists should investigate the functioning of democratic institutions in cultures dissimilar from their own, and raises larger issues about the nature of democracy, the universality of democratic ideals, and the practice of cross-cultural research.

This study examines the practice and functions of literary translation in Anglo-American Modernism. Rather than approaching translation as a trans-historical procedure for reproducing semantic meaning between different languages, Yao discusses how Modernist writers both conceived and employed translation as a complex strategy for accomplishing such feats as exploring the relationship between gender and poetry, creating an authentic national culture and determining the nature of a just government, all of which in turn led to developments in both poetic and novelistic form. Thus, translation emerges in this study as a literary practice crucial to the very development of Anglo-American Modernism.

Mireille Gansel grew up in the traumatic aftermath of her family losing everything—including their native languages—to Nazi Germany. In the 1960s and 70s, she translated poets from East Berlin and Vietnam. Gansel’s debut conveys the estrangement every translator experiences by moving between tongues, and muses on how translation becomes an exercise of empathy between those in exile.

Part-essay and part-memoir, 'This Little Art' is a manifesto for the practice of literary translation.

An engaging and unabashedly opinionated examination of what translation is and isn't. For some, translation is the poor cousin of literature, a necessary evil if not an outright travesty—summed up by the old Italian play on words, traduttore, traditore (translator, traitor). For others, translation is the royal road to cross-cultural understanding and literary enrichment. In this nuanced and provocative study, Mark Polizzotti attempts to reframe the debate along more fruitful lines. Eschewing both these easy polarities and the increasingly abstract discourse of translation theory, he brings the main questions into clearer focus: What is the ultimate goal of a translation? What does it mean to label a rendering “faithful”? (Faithful to what?) Is something inevitably lost in translation, and can something also be gained? Does translation matter, and if so, why? Unashamedly opinionated, both a manual and a manifesto, his book invites usto sympathize with the translator not as a “traitor” but as the author's creative partner. Polizzotti, himself a translator of authors from Patrick Modiano to Gustave Flaubert, explores what translation is and what it isn't, and how it does or doesn't work. Translation, he writes, “skirts the boundaries between art and craft, originality and replication, altruism and commerce, genius and hack work.” In Sympathy for the Traitor, he shows us how to read not only translations but also the act of translation itself, treating it not as a problem to be solved but as an achievement to be celebrated—something, as Goethe put it, “impossible, necessary, and important.”

Gender in Translation is a broad-ranging, imaginative and lively look at feminist issues surrounding translation studies. Students and teachers of translation studies, linguistics, gender studies and women's studies will find this unprecedented work invaluable and thought-provoking reading. Sherry Simon argues that translation of feminist texts - with a view to promoting feminist perspectives - is a cultural intervention, seeking to create new cultural meanings and bring about social change. She takes a close look at specific issues which include: the history of feminist theories of language and translation studies; linguistic issues, including a critical examination of the work of Luce Irigaray; a look at women translators through history, from the Renaissance to the twentieth century; feminist translations of the Bible; an analysis of the ways in which French feminist texts such as De Beauvoir's The Second Sex have been translated into English.

Federico García Lorca (1898–1936) had enormous impact on the generation of American poets who came of age during the cold war, from Robert Duncan and Allen Ginsberg to Robert Creeley and Jerome Rothenberg. In large numbers, these poets have not only translated his works, but written imitations, parodies, and pastiches—along with essays and critical reviews. Jonathan Mayhew’s Apocryphal Lorca is an exploration of the afterlife of this legendary Spanish writer in the poetic culture of the United States. The book examines how Lorca in English translation has become a specifically American poet, adapted to American cultural and ideological desiderata—one that bears little resemblance to the original corpus, or even to Lorca’s Spanish legacy. As Mayhew assesses Lorca’s considerable influence on the American literary scene of the latter half of the twentieth century, he uncovers fundamental truths about contemporary poetry, the uses and abuses of translation, and Lorca himself.