Translation and the Languages of Modernism (PDF)

STEVEN G. YAO is Assistant Professor of English at Ohio State University, where he teaches Anglo-American Modernist literature, translation history and Asian American Studies.

"In Translation and the Languages of Modernism, Steven Yao forcibly and irrevocably blends two important trends that have come to the fore these last twenty years: translation studies and the historiography of New Modernisms. This momentous convergence sketches a new translator s task for the twenty-first century. Not only is modernism refigured as a major age of translations but we can perceive better how current views of translation have been transformed by the practices of key modernist writers like Pound, Yeats, H.D., Joyce, and Zukofsky, all analyzed here in detail. - Jean-Michel Rabaté, University of Pennsylvania

Translation and the Languages of Modernism is a powerful and much needed investigation into the crucial role translation played in the development of modernism. Steven Yao s theoretically informed and aesthetically sensitive attention to translations by Pound, H.D., Yeats, Joyce, and others, demonstrate in no uncertain terms that translation had become for the modern writers a primary source of inspiration, innovation, and achievement. This is a timely study, an inevitable study, both brilliant and accessible. It will be equally compelling to scholars and students of the period as well as to poets and translators whose work has been informed by the translations Yao examines." - Alan Shapiro, author of Song and Dance

"In this fascinating new study, Steven Yao makes a compelling case for the centrality of translation to the concerns and practices of modernism. Yao s expert and detailed account of these linguistic transactions allows modernist allusiveness to be understood as something much more than willful opacity, and at a time of encroaching monolingualism, that is welcome indeed." - Peter Nicholls, author of Modernisms: A Literary Guide