Abstract
This introduction outlines the key arguments of this book, namely, the idea of textual ‘afterlife’ as a continual process of translation, and that all texts have a ‘messianic’ quality—that is, the fact that texts continually promise to overcome the conditions of textuality itself. The introduction also summarises some of the other ways in which ‘afterlife’ has been understood in literary and cultural studies, and the way in which potential and translation are understood in this book, before an outline of the book’s shape.
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Notes
- 1.
Suzanne Jill Levine’s translation is more idiomatic: ‘no problem is more essential to literature and its small mysteries than translation’ (Borges 1992: 1134; emphasis added). Borges’ (1976: 89) Spanish, ‘Ningún problema tan consustancial con las letras y con su modesto misterio como el que propone una traducción’, also has the theological implications of ‘consubstantial’.
- 2.
Benjamin and Derrida are included in such ‘introductory’ Translation Studies texts as, for example, Schulte and Biguenet (1992), Gentzler (2001), and Venuti (2012).
- 3.
Jakobson’s final type of translation is ‘intersemiotic translation or transmutation’, the ‘interpretation of verbal signs by means of signs of nonverbal sign systems’.
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Chapman, E. (2019). Introduction. In: The Afterlife of Texts in Translation. Palgrave Pivot, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32452-0_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-32452-0_1
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