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(More customer reviews)Levine's book is a very personal exploration of the problems of translating not just one language into another (which is virtually impossible), but of translating from one or more culture(s) into another. Her specific experiences document in some detail the difficulties and possibilities that translating Latin American fiction into (American) English presents. Each of the four sections, "Puns: The Untranslatable", "Spoken into Written", "The Source of the Source", and "Words are Never the Same" takes the reader into her particular journeys through the jungles of translation difficulties - offering not only some of the options that presented themselves and were rejected, but also the reasoning that led to both the development of those options and the reasoning behind their being deemed inappropriate. What is especially productive and useful about this text to anyone interested in Latin American writing, translation studies, north-south relations in the Americas, etc. is that Levine's is an offering that goes into great detail about translation issues that are very specific to the Americas.
Levine has produced a book that confronts the complex relationship between the North and South Americas in all its multivalent intricacies of economics, politics, power and privilege, through her dissection of the particular translation practice of bringing some of the greatest literary works into the North American English forum. The strength of this book lies in the boundaries set by the author: by choosing to focus primarily on difficulties of translating puns, proper names, jokes, titles and other kinds of word-play, Levine has not only limited her scope geographically, but also literarily. By thus limiting her field of analysis, she offers a much more constructive and detailed picture of the importance of this particular area of translation.
The importance of her project, however, is betrayed by her own prefaces (two of them) and introduction to it. In her opening comments, Levine (like every translation theorist before or since) chases after her own reading of the relentless "traduttore, traditore" amid pages of apparent self-congratulation. There is nothing transgressive or subversive about her own general theorization about translation and the first twenty pages of her book are by far the weakest. Rather than making some attempt at clarifying the issues that will nuance much of the translation that she details through the subsequent chapters, she makes a vain effort to fabricate her own general theory of translation while weaving in several glowing reviews of her own work as a translator, from both critics and authors. As this is not what the book is about, it makes little sense for it to be the focus of her introduction. However, despite the relatively off-putting first twenty pages, the book is a good read and offers excellent insights into the very particular issues of the emerging field of hemispheric American studies.
Click Here to see more reviews about: The Subversive Scribe: Translating Latin American Fiction (Dalkey Archive Scholarly Series)
A classic study of the art of translation from one of our greatest translators.
To most of us, 'subversion" means political subversion, but The Subversive Scribe is about collaboration not with an enemy, but with texts and between writers. Though Suzanne Jill Levine is the translator of some of the most inventive Latin American authors of the twentieth century-including Julio Cortázar, G. Cabrera Infante, Manuel Puig, and Severo Sarduy-each of whom were revolutionaries not only on the page, but in confronting the sexual and cultural taboos of their respective countries, she considers the act of translation itself to be a form of subversion. Rather than regret translation's shortcomings, Levine stresses how translation is itself a creative act, unearthing a version lying dormant beneath an original text, and animating it, like some mad scientist, in order to create a text illuminated and motivated by the original. In The Subversive Scribe, one of our most versatile and creative translators gives us an intimate and entertaining overview of the tricky relationships lying behind the art of literary translation.
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