Translating the Monster: Volter Kilpi in Orbit Beyond (Un)Translatability
Douglas Robinson, "Translating the Monster: Volter Kilpi in Orbit Beyond (Un)Translatability "
English | ISBN: 9004519920 | 2022 | 308 pages | PDF | 4 MB
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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