Work of Literary Translation

Offering an original reconceptualization of literary translation, Clive Scott argues against traditional approaches to the theory and practice of translation. Instead he suggests that translation should attend more to the phenomenology of reading, triggering creative textual thinking in the responsive reader rather than testing the hermeneutic skills of the professional translator. In this new guise, translation enlists the reader as an active participant in the constant re-fashioning of the text's structural, associative, intertextual and intersensory possibilities, so that our larger understanding of ecology, anthropology, comparative literature and aesthetics is fundamentally transformed and our sense of the expressive resources of language radically extended. Literary translation thus assumes an existential value which takes us beyond the text itself to how it situates us in the world, and what part it plays in the geography of human relationships.

'For Clive Scott, the new proximities and the new estrangements wrought by global flows of people, goods, finance, communications - have given literary translators a more urgent part to play than ever before.' Marina Warner, London Review of Books, '… formidable and eloquently argued philosophy of translation, which richly rewards the readerly attention of all those interested in the art, practice, and work of translation.' Thomas O. Beebee, Translation and Literature, '… this work is a stimulating and thought-provoking exploration of the open-ended potential of literary translation. Fascinating reading for practitioners, scholars and - perhaps with a dictionary to hand - the lay reader.' Forum for Modern Language Studies

Clive Scott is Professor Emeritus of European Literature at the University of East Anglia and a Fellow of the British Academy. His previous publications include, Translating Baudelaire (2000), Channel Crossings: French and English Poetry in Dialogue 1550–2000 (2002), Translating Rimbaud's 'Illuminations', (2006), Street Photography: From Atget to Cartier-Bresson (2007), Literary Translation and the Rediscovery of Reading (Cambridge, 2012) Translating the Perception of Text: Literary Translation and Phenomenology (2012), and Translating Apollinaire (2014).