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If Babel Had a Form - Translating Equivalence in the Twentieth-Century Transpacific (Paperback)
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If Babel Had a Form - Translating Equivalence in the Twentieth-Century Transpacific (Paperback)
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"The likeness of form between Chinese and English sentences,"
writes the American Sinologist Ernest Fenollosa around 1906,
"renders translation from one to the other exceptionally easy." If
Babel Had a Form asks not if his claim may be true, but what its
phantasmic surprise may yet do. In twentieth-century intersections
of China and Asia with the United States, translations did more
than communicate meaning across politicized and racializing
differences of language and nation. Transpacific translation
breached the regulative protocols that created those very
differences of human value and cultural meaning. The result,
Tze-Yin Teo argues, saw translators cleaving to the sounds and
shapes of poetry to imagine a translingual "likeness of form" but
not of meaning or kind. At stake in this form without meaning is a
startling new task of equivalence. As a concept, equivalence has
been rejected for its colonizing epistemology of value, naming a
broken promise of translation and false premise of comparison. Yet
the writers studied in this book veered from those ways of knowing
to theorize a poetic equivalence: negating the colonial foundations
of the concept, they ignited aporias of meaning into flashpoints
for a radical literary translation. The book's transpacific
readings glean those forms of equivalence from the writing of
Fenollosa, the vernacular experiments of Boxer Scholar Hu Shi, the
trilingual musings of Shanghai-born Los Angeles novelist Eileen
Chang, the minor work of the Bay Area Korean American transmedial
artist Theresa Cha, and a post-Tiananmen elegy by the exiled
dissident Yang Lian. The conclusion returns to the deconstructive
genealogy of recent debates on translation and untranslatability,
displacing the axiom of radical alterity for a no less radical
equivalence that remains-pace Fenollosa-far from easy or
exceptional. Ultimately, If Babel Had a Form illuminates the
demanding force of even the slightest sameness entangled in the
translator's work of remaking our differences.
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