Wednesday, October 1, 2014

“Translated, it is: …” — An Ethics of Transreading


Freshly Published Article 
(online on Sept. 21, 2014; printed in Oct. 2014)

Abstract

        Inspired by Friedrich Nietzsche's idea of philology and William Gass's concept of transreading, I employ “transreader” to suggest the integration of four roles in one: reader, translator, writer, and scholar. “Transreader” recognizes that close reading, literary translation, creative writing, and cultural hermeneutics are interdependent activities with intertwined goals: to transfer, transvalue, transform, and transcend the canon. From this perspective, Lu Xun, China's Nietzsche, is a twentieth-century transreader of the canon, and his prose poem “Revenge (The Second)” delivers a self-referential ethics of transreading. My transreading of this poem shows why slow reading is today more necessary than ever, in what sense translation is a universal dilemma, how humanity grows when its expression grows more subtle, and that transreading opens a space for genuine communication.

Note:
An electronic version of the article, as published in the print edition of Educational Theory, is available on the journal's website within Wiley Online Library at
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/edth.12076/full


You can access through your library systems.  If you have no such subscription, you may request a copy via email at helen-zhang@utulsa.edu.  



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