Translating the Monster Volter Kilpi in Orbit Beyond (Un)Translatability

Free Download Douglas Robinson, "Translating the Monster: Volter Kilpi in Orbit Beyond (Un)Translatability "
English | ISBN: 9004519920 | 2022 | 308 pages | PDF | 4 MB
One of the hottest battles emerging out of the theoretical and methodological collisions between Comparative Literature and Translation Studies-especially on the battleground of World Literature-has to do with translatability and untranslatability. Is any translation of a great work of literature not only a lamentable betrayal but an impossibility? Or is translation an imperfect but invaluable tool for the transmission of works and ideas beyond language barriers?

Both views are defensible; indeed both are arguably commonsensical. What Douglas Robinson argues in Translating the Monster, however, is that both are gross oversimplifications of a complex situation that he calls on Jacques Derrida to characterize as "the monster."
The Finnish novelist Robinson takes as his case study for that monstrous rethinking is Volter Kilpi (1874-1939), regarded by scholars of Finnish literature as Finland’s second world-class writer-the first being Aleksis Kivi (1834-1872). Kilpi’s modernist experiments of the 1930s, especially his so-called Archipelago series, beginning with his masterpiece,
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