Rowman & Littlefield Publishers / Rowman & Littlefield International
Pages: 222
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Trim: 6¼ x 9⅜
978-1-78660-508-5 • Hardback • November 2017 • $174.00 • (£135.00)
978-1-78661-089-8 • Paperback • April 2019 • $56.00 • (£43.00)
978-1-78660-509-2 • eBook • November 2017 • $53.00 • (£41.00)
Jacques Lezra is Professor of Hispanic Studies at the University of California-Riverside. His publications include On the Nature of Marx's Things: Translation as Necrophilology (2018), Lucretius and Modernity (co-edited with Liza Blake, 2016) and Wild Materialism: The Ethic of Terror and the Modern Republic (2010).
Introduction: This Untranslatability Which is Not One / 1. Two Dogmas of Translation / 2. On Contingency in Translation / 3. Nationum origo / 4. Sovereignty or Translation / 5. What is Possible in Machine Translation / 6. The Animal in Translation / Conclusion / Bibliography / Index
What do thinkers as disparate as Hobbes, Cervantes, Marx, Wittgenstein, Irigaray, Derrida, Cassin and Laclau have to say to each other about translation? If your answer was going to be “not much,” pause, and read this book. Translation and sovereignty, the oneness and not-oneness of untranslatability, universalism’s dependence on non-universal standards of commensuration, comparison and market equivalence, “widgets,” animal translation, the problem of unshared natural language, the articulation of plural modes of “being” in languages - all these topics and more are considered in response to a disturbing thought: “Globalization has taken our tongues from us.” To the growing list of signal works in “non-translation” studies we must add Jacques Lezra’s astute and witty Untranslatating Machines.
— Emily Apter, Professor of French and Comparative Literature, New York University, author of Against World Literature: On the Politics of Untranslatability
Jacques Lezra’s exciting, lucid intervention into untranslatability explores the theories and – most of all – the ethics of translation under globalisation. Deep, dense close readings are rooted in the early modern – Cervantes holds centre stage – and range energetically through Asterix, Borges, Wittgenstein, Wagner, Shakespeare, Grandin and Derrida in a dense but also immediate and wonderfully conversational book. Reading Untranslating Machines is a provoking experience and a spur to thought, like sitting in on the ideal seminar on translation and untranslatability from someone in absolute control of their subject.
— Clare McManus, Professor of Early Modern Literature and Theatre, University of Roehampton