This volume is a collection of studies on the issue of authorship in translation. Leading translation scholars and professional translators discuss the theoretical implications and applicability of the author-translator paradigm. The relationship between translators and authors is addressed in its various manifestations, from the author-translator collaboration, to self-translation, to authorial practices of translating. While offering multiple perspectives, in terms of both theoretical approaches and cultural backgrounds, the volume offers an important and original contribution to the current debate.

Over the last two decades, interest in translation around the world has increased beyond any predictions. International bestseller lists now contain large numbers of translated works, and writers from Latin America, Africa, India and China have joined the lists of eminent, bestselling European writers and those from the global English-speaking world. Despite this, translators tend to be invisible, as are the processes they follow and the strategies they employ when translating. The Translator as Writer bridges the divide between those who study translation and those who produce translations, through essays written by well-known translators talking about their own work as distinctive creative literary practice. The book emphasises this creativity, arguing that translators are effectively writers, or rewriters who produce works that can be read and enjoyed by an entirely new audience. The aim of the book is to give a proper prominence to the role of translators and in so doing to move attention back to the act of translating, away from more abstract speculation about what translation might involve.

When renowned translator Hanne Schubert falls down a flight of stairs, she suffers a brain injury and ends up with an unusual but real condition: the ability to only speak the language she learned later in life: Japanese. Isolated from the English-speaking world, Hanne flees to Japan, where a Japanese novelist whose work she has recently translated accuses her of mangling his work. Distraught, she meets a new inspiration for her work: a Japanese Noh actor named Moto. Through their contentious interactions, Moto slowly finds his way back onto the stage while Hanne begins to understand how she mistranslated not only the novel but also her daughter, who has not spoken to Hanne in six years. Armed with new knowledge and languages both spoken and unspoken, she sets out to make amends.

"Why Translation Matters argues for the cultural importance of translation and for a more encompassing and nuanced appreciation of the translator's role. As the acclaimed translator Edith Grossman writes in her introduction, "My intention is to stimulate a new consideration of an area of literature that is too often ignored, misunderstood, or misrepresented." For Grossman, translation has a transcendent importance: "Translation not only plays its important traditional role as the means that allows us access to literature originally written in one of the countless languages we cannot read, but it also represents a concrete literary presence with the crucial capacity to ease and make more meaningful our relationships to those with whom we may not have had a connection before. Translation always helps us to know, to see from a different angle, to attribute new value to what once may have been unfamiliar. As nations and as individuals, we have a critical need for that kind of understanding and insight. The alternative is unthinkable"."--Jacket.

Whether the issue is the rise of religiously inspired terrorism, the importance of faith based NGOs in global relief and development, or campaigning for evangelical voters in the U.S., religion proliferates in our newspapers and magazines, on our radios and televisions, on our computer screens and, increasingly, our mobile devices. Americans who assumed society was becoming more and more secular have been surprised by religions' rising visibility and central role in current events. Yet this is hardly new: the history of American journalism has deep religious roots, and religion has long been part of the news mix. Providing a wide-ranging examination of how religion interacts with the news by applying the insights of history, sociology, and cultural studies to an analysis of media, faith, and the points at which they meet, The Oxford Handbook of Religion and the American News Media is the go-to volume for both secular and religious journalists and journalism educators, scholars in media studies, journalism studies, religious studies, and American studies. Divided into five sections, this handbook explores the historical relationship between religion and journalism in the USA, how religion is covered in different media, how different religions are reported on, the main narratives of religion coverage, and the religious press.

In this prize-winning Iranian novel, a spoiled and foul-mouthed young woman looks to get high while her family and city fall to pieces. What do you do when the world is falling apart and you’re in withdrawal? Disillusioned, wealthy, and addicted to opium, Shadi wakes up one day to apocalyptic earthquakes and a dangerously low stash. Outside, Tehran is crumbling: yuppies flee in bumper-to-bumper traffic as skaters and pretty boys rise up to claim the city as theirs. Cross-dressed to evade hijab laws, Shadi flits between her dysfunctional family and depressed friends—all in search of her next fix. Mahsa Mohebali's groundbreaking novel about Iranian counterculture is a satirical portrait of the disaster that is contemporary life. Weaving together gritty vernacular and cinematic prose, In Case of Emergency takes a darkly humorous, scathing look at the authoritarian state, global capitalism, and the gender binary.

The work of a novelist and translator collide in this visionary and hilarious debut from acclaimed French writer Brice Matthieussent. Revenge of the Translator follows Trad, who is translating a mysterious author’s book, Translator’s Revenge, from English to French. The book opens as a series of footnotes from Trad, as he justifies changes he makes. As the novel progresses, Trad begins to take over the writing, methodically breaking down the work of the original writer and changing the course of the text. The lines between reality and fiction start to blur as Trad’s world overlaps with the characters in Translator’s Revenge, who seem to grow more and more independent of Trad’s increasingly deranged struggle to control the plot. Revenge of the Translator is a brilliant, rule-defying exploration of literature, the act of writing and translating, and the often complicated relationship between authors and their translators.

Máirtín Ó Cadhain’s irresistible and infamous novel The Dirty Dust is consistently ranked as the most important prose work in modern Irish, yet no translation for English-language readers has ever before been published. Alan Titley’s vigorous new translation, full of the brio and guts of Ó Cadhain’s original, at last brings the pleasures of this great satiric novel to the far wider audience it deserves. In The Dirty Dust all characters lie dead in their graves. This, however, does not impair their banter or their appetite for news of aboveground happenings from the recently arrived. Told entirely in dialogue, Ó Cadhain’s daring novel listens in on the gossip, rumors, backbiting, complaining, and obsessing of the local community. In the afterlife, it seems, the same old life goes on beneath the sod. Only nothing can be done about it—apart from talk. In this merciless yet comical portrayal of a closely bound community, Ó Cadhain remains keenly attuned to the absurdity of human behavior, the lilt of Irish gab, and the nasty, deceptive magic of human connection.

By focusing on Luise Gottsched's extraordinary volume and range of translations, Hilary Brown sheds an entirely new light on Gottsched and her oeuvre. Critics have paid increasing attention to the oeuvre of Luise Gottsched (1713-62), Germany's first prominent woman of letters, but have neglected her lifelong work of translation, which encompassed over fifty volumes and an extraordinary range, from drama and poetry to philosophy, history, archaeology, even theoretical physics. This first comprehensive overview of Gottsched's translations places them in the context of eighteenth-century intellectual, literary, and cultural history, showing that they were part of an ambitious, progressive program undertaken with her famous husband to shape German culture during the Enlightenment. In doing so it casts Gottsched and her work in an entirely new light. Including chapters on all the main subject areas and genres from which Gottsched translated, it also explores the relationship between her translations and her original works, demonstrating that translation was central to her oeuvre. A bibliography of Gottsched's translations and source texts concludes the volume. Not only a major new addition to a growing body of research on the Gottscheds, the book will also be valuable reading for scholars interested more broadly in women's writing, the history of translation, and the literature and culture of the German (and European) Enlightenment. Hilary Brown is Lecturer at the University of Birmingham, UK.