Classical And Sacred Texts In Translation: Celebrated Translations

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There is no definitive textbook for translation studies at the undergraduate level, just as there is no definitive course. Readings from The Translation Studies Reader sparked a range of reactions: curiosity, pique (regarding Vladimir Nabokov3), or perplexity (regarding Benjamin, at least at first glance). The Translation Studies Reader moves chronologically through translation theory rather than melding the chronological with the conceptual in organizational strategy. The result is a linear and logical academic progression that introduces students to Cartier Roadster Replica Watches translation studies by means of crucial selections from the history of writing about translation. A helpful introductory essay by the editor supplements each cluster of selections. Our course readings often required a theoretical and philosophical grounding that most students did not have; this necessitated a fair amount of accelerated "catching up" on new conceptual vocabulary in class.

In contrast, Jeremy Munday's Introducing Translation Studies is a more traditional ...
... textbook, offering boxes with key concepts and chapter-ending review questions. Considering Munday's own conclusion that a key reason for translation studies' original marginalization is that the "study of a work in translation was generally frowned upon once the student had acquired the necessary skills to read the original", we can see the advantage of Venuti's approach for garnering academic respect. Nevertheless, at the undergraduate level, we believe that it would be helpful to begin the course with an overview of terms and concepts geared toward the lay student. Once exposed, students in the class gamely wrestled with the theory, embracing the opportunity to do further research for class presentations and final projects, and garnering the theoretical tools to do so.

Several selected readings and Cartier Replica Watches presentations explored the translation of sacred texts. We carefully considered a number of the key places in the New Testament where the Hebrew Bible is allegorized, and participated in comparative presentations on the Song of Songs and Job. Passions run wild when readers compare the merits of Edward Fitzgerald's and Robert Fagles's translations of Homer, but the topic of biblical translation seemed potentially delicate in the so-called Bible belt. How would discussions go in a classroom in which a variety of views were represented, during a period when cultural and religious issues in this country were as fraught with tension as ever? My apprehension was misplaced; in fact, several students' strong knowledge of various translations of the New Testament and related translations of the Hebrew Bible turned out to be an unexpected and welcome advantage. Many of our course readings, including the first and the last, deal, to some extent, with the translation of Jewish texts for a Christian readership. Our related discussions aroused curiosity and informed commentary, but not controversy.

In fact, our discussions of sacred texts were among the most productive of our course, as they vividly demonstrated the stakes of translation. For evidence of the influence of translation on English and American literature, we need look no further than the translations of the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament. The wording and poetic meter of the King James Bible, as well as William Tyndale's unfinished English translations from which the King James version draws significantly continue to inflect our daily speech and influence countless writers, just as they previously influenced writers from William Shakespeare to William Wordsworth and e. e. Cummings. "Getting Tyndale out of my head seems to me impossible," Harold Bloom wrote recently of the sixteenth-century scholar who burned on the stake for heresy. "We go about daily many of us unknowingly repeating sentences, phrases, and words invented as much by Tyndale as by Shakespeare".