The Translator's Turn

Library Journal

Certain to become a key text, this essay legitimizes a translator's ``feel'' for the ``right'' word choice by a felt comfort with a choice determined by personal and collective usage. Robinson's critical persona, that of a breezy yet erudite psychotherapist, both attacks and appreciates Augustine, Luther, and Goethe. He will make other theorists reconsider George Steiner, rush to the defense of Eugene Nida, and go prospecting themselves in the works of Bakhtin, Bloom, and Burke. Robinson persuasively uncovers the applicability of most language-oriented literary theory and criticism to translation when the word translation is substituted at key junctures. Since an attack on various traditional translation theories is comprehensible chiefly to those who already know them, this is a book for specialists.-- Marilyn Gaddis Rose, SUNY at Binghampton