[Malamud, Bernard] Belitt, Ben.

Adam’s Dream. A Preface to Translation.

New York, Grove Press, Inc., 1978. 24cm x 16cm. 186 pages. Original Hardcover with original illustrated dustjacket. In protective Mylar. Very good + condition with only minor signs of wear. Presentation copy. With manuscript letter by Ben Belitt, reflecting on mistakes in the book and comparing it to Borges’ “Pierre Menard”. Page six inscribed by Ben Belitt to Ben and Ann Malamud.

Between an original text and its translation, there is a gap – a “middle kingdom” of unkowns and equivalences – which the translator traverses alone. Ben Belitt, a poet and scholar widely acclaimed for his translation of poetry from the Spanish of Alberti, Machado, Garcia Lorca, Borges, Jorge Guillen, and Pablo Neruda, has mapped out some of the terrain which divides and unifies the languages of the world and compels the translator’s search for his function. In the sense that it is the attempt of a distinguished translator to ‘come to cases’ with the theory and practice of his craft in the on-going drift of choice and decisions, this is a log-book, as well as a casebook on translation. Its posture, as Mr. Belitt frankly concedes, is quizzical and empirical, rather than polemical. It combines essays, prefaces, dialog and reviews, with position papers ‘reflecting the controversy into which all translators are drawn in their pursuit of an equivocal undertaking’. In two long sections on Pablo Neruda, Belitt offers a sequence of ‘revaluations’ of the Chilean master, in which the language and the substance of a ‘Homeric sensibility’ are measured against the literature of the world as a ‘single community of tradition’. They help to fix the true subject of this volume as the relationship between translation and imagination, or ‘Adam’s dream’ of reality.

Ben Belitt teaches at Bennington College and has received numerous awards for his poetry and translation, including a Guggenheim Fellowships, National Institute of Arts and Letters Award, and the Princeton Press Award. He is the author of four volumes of poetry, and other translations.

• Keywords: Linguistics – Rare · literary translation. · Philosophy Rare · Spanish-language literature
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0394502884
• Inventory Number: 40624AB

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