The Strange Loops of Translation

Description

ne of the most exciting theories to emerge from cognitive science research over the past few decades has been Douglas Hofstadter’s notion of “strange loops,” from Gödel, Escher, Bach (1979). Hofstadter is also an active literary translator who has also written about translation, perhaps most notably in his 1997 book Le Ton Beau de Marot, where he also draws on his cognitive science research. And yet he has never considered the possibility that translation might itself be a strange loop. In this book Douglas Robinson puts Hofstadter’s strange-loops theory into dialogue with a series of definitive theories of translation, in the process showing just how cognitively and affectively complex an activity translation actually is. Cover Contents Pandemonial Abbreviations Introduction I.1 “Paradoxical Level-crossing Feedback Loop” I.2 “Pleasantly Pervasive Paradoxes” I.3 The Strange Loops of Translation I.3a First Strange Loop of Translation: Self-reference I.3b Second Strange Loop of Translation: The Incoherently Written Source Text I.3c Third Strange Loop of Translation: The Passage of Time I.4 The Structure of the Book I.5 Acknowledgments 1 The Strange Loops of (Non)Equivalence 1.1 The Campaign Against Word-for-Word Translation 1.2 The Strange Loops of Sense-for-Sense Translation: Jerome 1.3 The Shared Strange Loops of Sense-for-Sense Translation 1.4 Strange Loops of Word-for-Word Translation: Friedrich Schleiermacher 1.5 Conclusion 2 The Strange Loops of the Translator-Function 2.1 The Strange Loops of the Translator-Function 1: Myriam Díaz-Diocaretz 2.2 The Strange Loops of the Translator-Function 2: Rosemary Arrojo 2.3 Towards an Author-Function: Derrida, Barthes, Foucault 2.4 The Strange Loops of the Translator-Function 3: Theo Hermans 3 The Strange Loops of Translation as (Peri)Performative Identities 3.1 Logical Aporias and the Strange Loops of Periperformative Workarounds: Mauricio Mendonça Cardozo 3.2 The Strange Loops of Translating Heidegger’s Untranslatables: Sabina Folnović Jaitner 3.3 The Strange Loops of “Good” and “Bad” (Periperformative) Translatabilities: Natalia S. Avtonomova and Tatevik Gukasyan 3.4 The Strange Loops by which Translation Shapes Collective Subjectivities: Sakai Naoki and Lydia H. Liu 4 The Strange Loops of Translating Bodies 4.1 The Strange Loops of Somatic Response: The DRP 4.2 The Strange Loops of Knowledge-Translation as Mouthable Rhythm: Henri Meschonnic 4.3 The Strange Loops of the Translator’s Constructivist Agency: Kobus Marais Conclusion: The Strange Loops of Translation as Transgressive Circulations: Johannes Göransson C.1 Hoaxes C.2 Interiority and Identity C.3 Transminoritization C.4 Salutary Failures Notes References Index