Literary Translation and the Making of Originals

Book excerpt: Literary Translation and the Making of Originals engages such issues as the politics and ethics of translation; how aesthetic categories and market forces contribute to the establishment and promotion of particular “originals”; and the role translation plays in the formation, re-formation, and deformation of national and international literary canons. By challenging the assumption that stable originals even exist, Karen Emmerich also calls into question the tropes of ideal equivalence and unavoidable loss that contribute to the low status of translation, translations, and translators in the current literary and academic marketplaces.