Extreme Translations

Franco Nasi is a former Professor of Anglo-American Literature at the University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, Italy.

"Unlike the recent rash of books about experimental translation, driven more by narcissistic display than commitment to readers, Franco Nasi’s study never abandons respect for the unique identity of the source text--even when it is structured by the most maddeningly difficult constraints. His experience is both illuminating and admirable"-Lawrence Venuti, Professor Emeritus of English, Temple University, USA"Nasi has spent a lifetime joyfully wrestling with the kind of texts — nonsense, limericks, anagrams, acrostics — that most translators dread. Extreme Translations brings us the fruit of his experience, brilliantly illuminating the tension between creativity and faithfulness along the boundaries of the untranslatable."-Tim Parks, author of Translating Style (Routledge 2007)

• PrefaceIntroduction1. Extreme Translations and Backcountry Skiing1.1 Gravity and Snow1.2 Seashells Sellers1.3 The Duckrabbit2. Lipograms, Pangrams, Anagrams2.1 The Missing Book2.2 Falling Tiles2.3 Eleven Plus Two3. Acrostic and Contracrostics 3.1 “To live according to your Word”3.2 Bach’s Contracrostic3.3 Amorous Visions4. Nursery Rhymes and Nonsense4.1 The Barking Barkeep4.2 Wordfish and Brush Babies4.3 Barefoot Bears and Egyptian Crocodiles5. Translating Outside the Box5.1 Two Riddles5.2 Escaping the Cage of Algorithms5.3 Yellow Submarines6. Translating the Error6.1 He am Gascon Titubante6.2 The Energy of Error6.3 Tentative Translations7. Creativity, Captives and Constraints7.1 Unexpected Anagrams7.2 Constraints7.3 Cables and ChainsValediction: A Homeopathic Treatment for the Stress of Extreme TranslationsBibliographyList of FiguresIndex