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5 books match the query 'Translating into English'

cover of Basic Technical Japanese

Basic Technical Japanese

Edward E. Daub

University of Wisconsin Press, 2011

Even if you have had no Japanese-language training, you can learn how to translate technical manuals, research publications, and reference works. Basic Technical Japanese takes you step by step from an introduction to the Japanese writing system through a mastery of grammar and scientific vocabulary to reading actual texts in Japanese. You can use the book to study independently or in formal classes.
    This book places special emphasis on the kanji (characters) that occur most often in technical writing. There are special chapters on the language of mathematics and chemistry, and vocabulary building and reading exercises in physics, chemistry, biology, and biochemistry. With extensive character charts and vocabulary lists, Basic Technical Japanese is entirely self-contained; no dictionaries or other reference works are needed.

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cover of Brodsky in English

Brodsky in English

Zakhar Ishov

Northwestern University Press, 2023

A deeply researched account of Joseph Brodsky’s evolution in English as a self-translator and a poet in translation

Joseph Brodsky’s translations of his own Russian-language poems into English “new originals” have been criticized for their “un-Englishness,” an appraisal based on a narrow understanding of translation itself. With this radical reassessment of the Nobel Prize winner’s self-translations, Zakhar Ishov proposes a fresh approach to poetry translation and challenges the assumption that poetic form is untranslatable. 

Brodsky in English draws on previously unexamined archival materials, including drafts and correspondence with translators and publishers, to trace the arc of Brodsky’s experience with the English language. Ishov shows how Brodsky’s belief in the intellectual continuity between his former life in the Soviet Union and his new career in the United States, including as Poet Laureate, anchored his insistence on maintaining the formal architecture of his poems in translation, locating the transmission of poetic meaning in the rhythms of language itself. This book highlights Brodsky’s place within the long history of the compromises translation must make between linguistic material and poetic process.
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cover of Ezra Pound's Confucian Translations

Ezra Pound's Confucian Translations

Mary Paterson Cheadle

University of Michigan Press, 1997

Ezra Pound professed a "belief" in Confucianism from the early 1930s till the end of his life. His interpretation of Confucianism, however, changed over time, and those changes are reflected in the four translations of Confucian texts he produced between 1928 and 1954. Based on painstaking new research, Ezra Pound's Confucian Translations for the first time traces the evolution of Pound's Confucianism during the historical and personal turmoil of this period. Pound's Confucian translations are less correct "philology" than the "re-creation" of works that he hoped would have a potent influence on the twentieth-century West. What Pound first admired in Confucianism was a respect for individuality simultaneous with a concern for social order. From the late 1930s through the Second World War, Pound developed a "totalitarian" Confucianism whose consummation would be a "harmony" of man, earth, and heaven. After the defeat of the Axis powers in 1945 and Pound's arrest on charges of treason against the United States for his activities in Italy during the war, his Confucianism reverted to an emphasis on verbal precision and the importance of individual integrity. In addition to tracing the evolution of Pound's beliefs, Ezra Pound's Confucian Translations elucidates the Confucian elements in The Cantos and suggests a reading of that epic from the point of view of Pound's Confucianism. Ezra Pound's Confucian Translations will be crucial to students of Pound and will also be read by sinologists, scholars of comparative literature, and anyone studying translation.
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cover of Translating the Garden

Translating the Garden

By M. R. Ghanoonparvar

University of Texas Press, 2002

Translating a work of literature from one language to another is an art form, in which the translated work becomes a "conduit" through which the reader of one language may pass into the cultural world of another. For the translator, the process of translation offers an intimate experience of the text that is perhaps unavailable even to the author. And yet, as M. R. Ghanoonparvar observes at the outset of this book, "every translation is inevitably a failure, with occasional moments of success."

In Translating the Garden, Ghanoonparvar allows readers to watch him in the process of translating Shahrokh Meskub's Goftogu dar Bagh(Dialogue in the Garden) from Persian into English. This short philosophical work uses a conversation between a writer and a painter to explore Persian perceptions of art, literature, nature, identity, and spirituality. As he translates the text, Ghanoonparvar discusses the myriad decisions that a literary translator faces, from word choices to the problems of conveying cultural concepts and deciphering authorial intent. He also compares some of his translated passages with those of other translators to highlight the uniqueness of each act of translation. The complete English translation of Dialogue in the Garden rounds out the volume.

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cover of Zen, Poetry, the Art of Lucien Stryk

Zen, Poetry, the Art of Lucien Stryk

Susan Porterfield

Ohio University Press, 1993

Lucien Stryk has been a presence in American letters for almost fifty years. Those who know his poetry well will find this collection particularly gratifying. Like journeying again to places visited long ago, Stryk’s writing is both familiar and wonderfully fresh.

For those just becoming acquainted with Stryk’s work, Zen, Poetry, the Art of Lucien Stryk makes an excellent introduction. It includes his early essay, “The American Scene Versus the International Scene,” written shortly after his service in the Pacific during World War II, and “Digging In,” his first published poem, as well as some of his best-known pieces on Zen and Zen poetry. Among the latter are “Beginnings, Ends,” “Poetry and Zen,” “I Fear Nothing: A Note on the Zen Poetry of Death,” and his introduction to the great haiku poets, Issa and Basho. Selections of his most recent work include “The Red Rug: An Introduction to Poetry,” and an imagined conversation among all four leading haiku poets called “Meeting at Hagi-no-Tera.”

Porterfield’s informative collection includes essays about Stryk’s work as well as his own prose and poetry. As the volume makes clear, writing poetry is for Lucien Stryk a sacred act. It is both escape and communion, inseparable from life’s daily activities.

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