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  • Literary Translations and the Making of Originals by Karen Emmerich
  • Shengyu Fan (bio)
Literary Translations and the Making of Originals. By Karen Emmerich. New York and London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2017. viii + 224 pp. Paperback $24.29.

Karen Emmerich's new book Literary Translations and the Making of Originals is a brilliant contribution to the arena of textual criticism, translation theory, and practice. Drawing on her own extensive experience in translating from Greek and Spanish, she presents an innovative and creative approach to "translation as translingual editing," where translators both negotiate existing versions of a certain work and create a new version of their own in the translated work's textual history. Emmerich "questions the often unexamined assumption that the object of translation is a single, stable lexical entity whose existence predates the process of translation" (13). At the same time, she aims to "challenge the notion that textuality brings stability" (83), and hopes to "encourage suspicion not of translation but of the very idea that stable originals exist" (187). It is easy to recognize that a given work of literature can have multiple translations, but it is also easy to forget that the so-called original is itself composed of multiple sources. Emmerich challenges the myth of the fixity of the source text. In her own words, "the 'afterlife' begins not with the translation but with those 'originals' themselves" (20), or as she puts it, "the textual makeup of 'originals' are an inevitable part of the process of translation" (25).

Emmerich, unlike other literary critics and translation scholars, pays close attention to developments in the field of textual criticism. [End Page 861] Other translation critics seldom, if ever, pay attention to this area, which can often appear dull and boring to outsiders. No wonder textual scholars have been complaining that for too long literary critics and theorists have overlooked the fact that texts are actually "unreliable" (or "fluid" as John Bryant describes), or to put in D. C. Greetham's words, they very often lack a "suspicion of text." Emmerich proposes that "translators, editors, and publishers of texts in translation should develop a sufficient awareness of the fundamental issues in textual scholarship." (123) She points out that textual scholars have "likewise rarely recognized translation as a process that shakes the foundations of the editorial project" (11). And it is time to engage these two groups of scholars with the same set of questions for shedding light on each other's blind spots.

Emmerich's book comprises five comprehensive chapters, ranging from the consideration of ancient texts such as Epic of Gilgamesh to the analyses of modern Greek folksongs, covering works from the Greek poet Cavafy to the American poets Emily Dickinson and Spicer. The introduction sets out the outline of her book and the structure allows for the elucidation of different aspects of her key argument that "editing and translating are mutually implicated interpretive practices that further the iterative growth of a work in the world" (8).

Chapter 1 focusses on how the textual instability of Gilgamesh and the task of translation influenced each other. As an ancient text, Gilgamesh is a typical example of those "standard texts," which are often taken for granted even by specialists. The texts of Gilgamesh are basically archaeological fragments gradually excavated, and its textual transmission history involves several languages and expands over more than a thousand years. Emmerich explores how the modern construction of this ancient epic is conducted and what role bilingual dictionaries play in bridging ancient and modern languages and cultures.

The second chapter develops her main argument further by highlighting the editorial construction through translation of modern Greek folk songs. Claude Fauriel's bilingual Folk Songs of Modern Greece is actually a compilation through conversation and correspondence with Greeks living in Europe, which later was translated into English. Emmerich argues that these translations helped shape the foundational texts for a national Greek literature later on.

Chapter 3 uses "translation" in a more rhetorical sense, for it is mainly about the posthumous editorial history of Dickinson's poetry. How best to represent Dickinson's idiosyncratic textual and scriptural forms has been an ongoing scholarly debate, and the visual and material...

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