Walter Benjamin and Cultural Translation by Birgit Haberpeuntner

Walter Benjamin and Cultural Translation by Birgit Haberpeuntner

Dissecting the radical impact of Walter Benjamin on contemporary cultural, postcolonial and translation theory, this open access book investigates the translation and reception of Benjamin’s most famous text about translation, “The Task of the Translator,” in English language debates around ‘cultural translation’.

For years now, there has been a pronounced interest in translation throughout the Humanities, which has come with an increasing detachment of translation from linguistic-textual parameters. It has generated a broad spectrum of discussions subsumed under the heading of ‘cultural translation’, a concept that is constantly re-invented and manifests in often heavily diverging expressions. However, there seems to be a distinct constant: In their own (re-)formulations of this concept, a remarkable number of scholars—Bhabha, Chow, Niranjana, to name but a few—explicitly refer to Walter Benjamin’s “The Task of the Translator.”

In its first part, this book considers Benjamin and the way in which he thought about, theorized and practiced translation throughout his writings. In a second part, Walter Benjamin meets 'cultural translation': tracing various paths of translation and reception, this part also tackles the issues and debates that result from the omnipresence of Walter Benjamin in contemporary theories and discussions of 'cultural translation'. The result is a clearer picture of the translation and reception processes that have generated the immense impact of Benjamin on contemporary cultural theory, as well as new perspectives for a way of reading that re-shapes the canonized texts themselves and holds the potential of disturbing, shifting and enriching their more ‘traditional’ readings.

The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by the Author.

Why have the theorist Walter Benjamin and the term cultural translation become irrevocably connected? This is the mystery that the author attempts to elucidateThe resulting quest is accompanied by the very engaging voice of the narrator, who tells the story with the intensity of a novel — making for a rich and rewarding voyage into conceptual history. * Sherry Simon, Concordia University, Canada *

Birgit Haberpeuntner is a Translator and Researcher at the University of Vienna, Austria.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9781350387188
ISBN 10	1350387185
Title	Walter Benjamin and Cultural Translation
Author	Birgit Haberpeuntner
Series	Bloomsbury Advances In Translation
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Hardback
Publisher	Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
Year published	2024-05-16
Number of pages	216
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.