If Babel had a form : translating equivalence in the twentieth-century transpacific / Tze-Yin Teo.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Teo, Tze-Yin, author.

Series:

Fordham scholarship online.

Fordham scholarship online

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Equivalence (Linguistics).

Translating and interpreting--Asia--History--20th century.

Translating and interpreting.

Translating and interpreting--United States--History--20th century.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (237 pages)

Edition:

First edition.

Place of Publication:

New York : Fordham University Press, 2022.

Summary:

'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'. This volume 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.

Contents:

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Contents

Note on Translation, Transliteration, and Transcription

Introduction: Equivalence beyond Value

1. Transpacific Abstraction

2. Sound Translation: Eileen Chang

3. Concrete Translation: Theresa Hak Kyung Cha

4. Translingual Erasure: Yang Lian

Conclusion: If Babel Had a Form

Acknowledgments

Notes

Works Cited

Index.

Notes:

This edition also issued in print: 2022.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (viewed on October 13, 2022).

Other Format:

Print version: Teo, Tze-Yin If Babel Had a Form

ISBN:

9781531500665

1531500668

9781531500214

1531500218

OCLC:

1300917702