Bücher der Reihe Cultures in Translation

This book offers an interdisciplinary rethinking of the role of translation in the perception and reception of cultural texts. It discusses human everyday discursive practices at the time of fluctuation of meanings and the decline of the authentic. The authors focus critically on the phenomenon of imitative replacement by all sorts of simulacra.

This book critically analyzes various means by which the authentic is searched for, staged, admired, dismissed, replicated or simply taken for granted. What is at work in such discursive practices is a poetics of imitation. This is seen as a paradoxical kind of poetics which renounces the authenticity of the created text.

Essays in this book discuss textual and discursive formulations of dominance and resistance. The authors analyze how they are narrated and re-narrated, framed and reframed in different social, political and language communities and realities, through different media and means, and translated into different contexts and languages.

The book offers a view of literary text translation as a reconstruction of the non-standard linguistic worldview embedded in that text, and emerging from the standard, conventional worldview in a given language and culture. Using a metaphor of two icebergs, this thesis is by analyses of English translations of two poems by Wislawa Szymborska.