Translation and the Languages of Modernism: Gender, Politics, Language

This study examines the practice and functions of literary translation in Anglo-American Modernism. Rather than approaching translation as a trans-historical procedure for reproducing semantic meaning between different languages, Yao discusses how Modernist writers both conceived and employed translation as a complex strategy for accomplishing such feats as exploring the relationship between gender and poetry, creating an authentic national culture and determining the nature of a just government, all of which in turn led to developments in both poetic and novelistic form. Thus, translation emerges in this study as a literary practice crucial to the very development of Anglo-American Modernism.

Table of Contents:
Introduction: 'Every Allegedly Great Age': Modernism and the Practice of Literary Translation SECTION I: TRANSLATION AND GENDER 'Today's Men Are Not the Men of the Old Days': Ezra Pound's Cathay and the Invention of Modernist Literary Translation 'My Genius Is No More Than a Girl': Exploring the Erotic in Pound's Homage to Sextus Propertius 'From Greece into Egypt': Translation, and the Engendering of H.D.'s Poetry SECTION II: TRANSLATION AND POLITICS Yeats, Oedipus and the Translation of a National Dramatic Form 'Better Gift Can No Man Make To a Nation': Pound, Confucius and the Translation of Politics SECTION III: TRANSLATION AND LANGUAGE 'Transluding from the Otherman": Translation and the Language of Finnegans Wake 'Dent Those Reprobates, Romulus and Remus': Lowell, Zukofsky and the Legacies of Modernist Translation Conclusion Appendix: Transcriptions from the Fenollosa Notebooks

About the Author :
STEVEN G. YAO is Assistant Professor of English at Ohio State University, where he teaches Anglo-American Modernist literature, translation history and Asian American Studies.

Review :
"In Translation and the Languages of Modernism, Steven Yao forcibly and irrevocably blends two important trends that have come to the fore these last twenty years: translation studies and the historiography of New Modernisms. This momentous convergence sketches a new translator s task for the twenty-first century. Not only is modernism refigured as a major age of translations but we can perceive better how current views of translation have been transformed by the practices of key modernist writers like Pound, Yeats, H.D., Joyce, and Zukofsky, all analyzed here in detail. - Jean-Michel Rabate, University of Pennsylvania Translation and the Languages of Modernism is a powerful and much needed investigation into the crucial role translation played in the development of modernism. Steven Yao s theoretically informed and aesthetically sensitive attention to translations by Pound, H.D., Yeats, Joyce, and others, demonstrate in no uncertain terms that translation had become for the modern writers a primary source of inspiration, innovation, and achievement. This is a timely study, an inevitable study, both brilliant and accessible. It will be equally compelling to scholars and students of the period as well as to poets and translators whose work has been informed by the translations Yao examines." - Alan Shapiro, author of Song and Dance "In this fascinating new study, Steven Yao makes a compelling case for the centrality of translation to the concerns and practices of modernism. Yao s expert and detailed account of these linguistic transactions allows modernist allusiveness to be understood as something much more than willful opacity, and at a time of encroaching monolingualism, that is welcome indeed." - Peter Nicholls, author of Modernisms: A Literary Guide