Book at Lunchtime: Prismatic Translation

The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities (TORCH) hosted a Book at Lunchtime webinar on Prismatic Translation, edited by Professor Matthew Reynolds. The panel consisted of Professor Marilyn Booth, Dr Stefano-Maria Evangelista, Professor Nicola Gardini, and Professor Matthew Reynolds. Book at Lunchtime is a series of bite-sized book discussions held fortnightly during term-time, with commentators from a range of disciplines. The events are free to attend and open to all.

A recording of the event is available here.

About Prismatic Translation:

Translation can be seen as producing a text in one language that will count as equivalent to a text in another. It can also be seen as a release of multiple signifying possibilities, an opening of the source text to Language in all its plurality. 

Matthew Reynold’s volume explores prismatic modes of translation in ancient Egypt, contemporary Taiwan, twentieth-century Hungary, early modern India, and elsewhere. It gives attention to experimental literary writing, to the politics of language, to the practices of scholarship, and to the multiplying possibilities created by digital media. It charts the recent growth of prismatic modes in Anglophone literary translation and translational literature; and it offers a new theorisation of the phenomenon and its agonistic relation to the ‘channel’ view. Prismatic Translation is an essential intervention in a rapidly changing field.