The Translator's Turn (review)

Reviews203 on Sartre; they both show that Percy moved beyond these mentors. Similarly, Linda Hobson, drawing quite good connections with Dostoevsky, and John Desmond, showing how Percy goes beyond Faulkner in relation to the question of not committing suicide, provide useful essays. Desmond, for example, demonstrates that parallels, especially in TL· Second Coming, "abound" while "Percy's move beyond Lancelot is decisive" (p. 136). Maybe the most insightful piece in this section, frequently concerned with existentialism, is John Edward Hardy's "Man, Beast . . . ," a beautiful evocation of what Percy suggests with his myriad studied references to non-human creatures from whom we can learn. Finally, Robert Brinkmeyer's essay on Lancelotis rich with insights about intersubjectivity in the fiction and in the relationship between the fiction and the reader. The concluding section contains six essays: Ashley Brown considers Percy as "moralist"; François Pitavy studies the final novel as "Brave New World"; William Rodney Allen argues against the polemics of Father Smith in The Thanatos Syndrome; Patricia Lewis Poteat, in a particularly insightful piece, analyzes tenderness , the will to power, and the death of spirit as depicted in the final novel; Elzbieta H. Oleksy draws valuable parallels between Lancelot and Moby-Dick; and in an appropriate final piece Sue Mitchell Crowley probes the relationship between Percy and Flannery O'Connor and discovers starding assimilations of O'Connor in Percy's work. In the concluding essays by Poteat and Crowley we are reminded of how Percy could be simultaneously "sad and funny" (p. 223). This tightly executed and well-edited volume will be required for any serious reader of Percy. It demonstrates that Percy made successful art out of the consideration of many of the most disturbing questions of his age. Above all, through the mystery oflanguage, Percy would remind us that we are, and must remain, grounded in the world of reality, and that we should not put too much stock in abstract systems. Georgia State UniversityVictor A. Kramer The Transfer's Turn, by Douglas Robinson; xviii & 318 pp. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991, $42.00 cloth, $14.95 paper. According to Douglas Robinson, traditional translation theory has three chief components: dualism, instrumentalism, and perfectionism (p. 91). That is, it makes a sharp distinction between spirit and matter, assumes that translation is merely a vehicle for conveying the meaning of the original, and concludes 204Philosophy and Literature that because that meaning can never be perfectly reproduced in another language , translation is always doomed to fail: traduttore traditore. Robinson sets out to show that this way of thinking about translation is neither natural nor inevitable: it has a history, which he traces from Plato and Augustine through Luther and Goethe to present-day theories such as those of Eugene Nida and Charles Taber. Once we have abandoned the idealistic assumptions underlying traditional theories of translation, Robinson argues, we can recognize the diversity of translatorial practice. He views this diversity through lenses provided by Wittgenstein , Buber, Bakhtin, Austin, Kenneth Burke, Harold Bloom, and other modern thinkers, and discusses its potential in terms of the various tropes or turns that characterize differing modes of translation. We should not assume, Robinson suggests, that the translator's status is that of a humble but always inadequate servant; on the contrary, he can play a leading role in the reformation of culture. For the idealism of mainstream translation theory, Robinson proposes to substitute a "physicalistic" theory in which "meaning and its interpretation are motivated and guided by feeling, or, more broadly, by body or somatic response" (p. 10). He argues that the latter is largely "ideosomatic" (programmed by social conditioning), but always pardy "idiosomatic" (peculiar to an individual body and its history). Ideosomatic conditioning accounts for the agreement and regularity in usage that make language (and translation) possible; idiosomatic resistance to such conditioning prevents agreement and regularity from ever becoming complete and provides a basis for agency and change. "On the one hand, we can never escape our ideosomatic past, because we carry it with us in our bodies. On the other hand, we can escape our ideosomatic past, by discovering idiosomatic enclaves that we have been programmed to ignore and expanding them into new somatic...