Beyond Translation: Essays Toward a Modern Philology PDF
Preview Beyond Translation: Essays Toward a Modern Philology
Essays toward - Meodérn P hilology A? Biexrm = Ve eee MICHIGAN How does Ralph Emerson sound in Kawi? In this collection of essays A.L. Becker develops a bold, new approach to translation that addresses the subtleties of cultural identity. Becker describes how texts in Burmese, J avanese, and Malay differ profoundly from English texts in all the ways they have meaning: in the games they play, the worlds they constitute, the memories they evoke, the media they shape, the structures they build, and the silences they maintain. In each of these dimensions there are excesses and inade- quacies of meaning that make a difference across languages. Becker's “modern philology” insists, beyond translation, on the sorting out of these ambiguities and contexts of meaning. Drawn from over three decades of study- ing, teaching, and writing, the essays collected here for the first time are particu- lar accounts of Becker’s experiences in attempting to translate into or out af Burmese, Javanese, and Malay a vari- ety of texts ranging from single words, phrases, and sentences to whole stories. The essays describe such things as the building of a Javanese shadow play, the past life of a Burmese proverb, how a Sanskrit story about the language of ani- mals has been used in Tndones how textual coherence works in languages with- out tense and number, and some of the profound semantic silences a translator faces in taking an anecdote by Gregory Bateson from English into Malay. (continued on back flap) Beyond Translation Digitized by the Internet Archive In 2022 with funding from Kahle/Austin Foundation https://archive.org/details/beyondtranslatio0000beck Beyond Translation Essays toward a Modern Philology A. L. Becker Ann Arbor THE UNIVERSITY OF MICHIGAN PRESS Copyright © by the University of Michigan 1995 All rights reserved Published in the United States of America by The University of Michigan Press Manufactured in the United States of America @Printed on acid-free paper 1998 1997 1996 1995 4 3 2 1 A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Becker, Alton L. Beyond translation : essays towards a modern philology / A.L. Becker. p. cm. Collection of sixteen previously published essays, 1974-1993. Includes bibliographical references and index. Partial Contents: pt. 1. Text building in Javanese — pt. 2. Some Burmese figures — pt. 3. Learning Malay — pt. 4. Translating Emerson into Old Javanese — pt. 5. Music and language, language and music — pt. 6. A place for particularity — pt. 7. Afterword. ISBN 0-472-10573-6 (alk. paper) 1. Translating and interpreting. 2. Discourse analysis. 3. Philology. 4. Semantics. 5. Asia, Southeastern—Languages —Translating. I. Title. P306.2.B4 1995 418'.0o2—dc20 94-47089 CIP For Richard Emerson Young pro beneficiis amicitiae diuturnae wb Be 4 eee 1 Dt gone rg™ T. T GD aed OV EAS Apshinat VU at toe ro leer | ; adaum , ay @96 1006 er as e6¢ ee - — — a a— (Hew SEV AR Aa oa § aire ten y
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