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Both views are defensible; indeed both are arguably commonsensical. What Douglas Robinson argues in Translating the Monster, however, is that both are gross oversimplifications of a complex situation that he calls on Jacques Derrida to characterize as “the monster.”
The Finnish novelist Robinson takes as his case study for that monstrous rethinking is Volter Kilpi (1874-1939), regarded by scholars of Finnish literature as Finland’s second world-class writer—the first being Aleksis Kivi (1834-1872). Kilpi’s modernist experiments of the 1930s, especially his so-called Archipelago series, beginning with his masterpiece, In the Alastalo Parlor (1933), were forgotten and neglected for a half century, due to the extreme difficulty of his narrative style: he reinvents the Finnish language, to the extent that many Finns say it is like reading a foreign language (and one contemporary critic called it the “Mesopotamian language … of a half-wit”). That novel has been translated exactly twice, into Swedish and German. Translating the Monster also gives the English-speaking reader an extended taste of the novel in English—en route to a series of reframings of the novel as allegories of translation and world literature.
Both views are defensible; indeed both are arguably commonsensical. What Douglas Robinson argues in Translating the Monster, however, is that both are gross oversimplifications of a complex situation that he calls on Jacques Derrida to characterize as “the monster.”
The Finnish novelist Robinson takes as his case study for that monstrous rethinking is Volter Kilpi (1874-1939), regarded by scholars of Finnish literature as Finland’s second world-class writer—the first being Aleksis Kivi (1834-1872). Kilpi’s modernist experiments of the 1930s, especially his so-called Archipelago series, beginning with his masterpiece, In the Alastalo Parlor (1933), were forgotten and neglected for a half century, due to the extreme difficulty of his narrative style: he reinvents the Finnish language, to the extent that many Finns say it is like reading a foreign language (and one contemporary critic called it the “Mesopotamian language … of a half-wit”). That novel has been translated exactly twice, into Swedish and German. Translating the Monster also gives the English-speaking reader an extended taste of the novel in English—en route to a series of reframings of the novel as allegories of translation and world literature.
Contributors: Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Masoud Ariankhoo, Mohammed Rustom, Kazuyo Murata, Ali Karjoo-Ravary, Shankar Nair, Maria Massi Dakake, Gregory Vandamme, Alireza Pharaa, Justin Cancelliere, Matthew Melvin-Koushki, Marlene DuBois, Naser Dumairieh, Omar Edaibat, Oludamini Ogunnaike, Khalil Andani, Davlat Dadikhuda, Rosabel Ansari, Muhammad U. Faruque, Sayeh Meisami, Cyrus Ali Zargar, Alireza Asghari, Amer Latif, Mukhtar H. Ali, Laury Silvers, Mohammed Mehdi Ali, Tahera Qutbuddin, Yousef Casewit, and Atif Khalil.
Contributors: Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Masoud Ariankhoo, Mohammed Rustom, Kazuyo Murata, Ali Karjoo-Ravary, Shankar Nair, Maria Massi Dakake, Gregory Vandamme, Alireza Pharaa, Justin Cancelliere, Matthew Melvin-Koushki, Marlene DuBois, Naser Dumairieh, Omar Edaibat, Oludamini Ogunnaike, Khalil Andani, Davlat Dadikhuda, Rosabel Ansari, Muhammad U. Faruque, Sayeh Meisami, Cyrus Ali Zargar, Alireza Asghari, Amer Latif, Mukhtar H. Ali, Laury Silvers, Mohammed Mehdi Ali, Tahera Qutbuddin, Yousef Casewit, and Atif Khalil.