Exorcising Translation

Douglas Robinson is Chair Professor of English at Hong Kong Baptist University, Hong Kong, and is one of the world’s leading experts on translation. He is the author of path-breaking publications in translation studies, including The Translator’s Turn (1991), Translation and Taboo (1996), Translation and the Problem of Sway (2011), and The Dao of Translation (2015). He is also author of important works on postcoloniality, from Translation and Empire (1997) to Displacement and the Somatics of Postcolonial Culture (2013).

While the introduction and legitimation of CTS (Critical Translation Studies) to plain old TS (Translation Studies) frames Exorcising Translation, its significance for readers outside of Translation Studies is considerably deeper. In short, out of Sakai’s notion of the “civilizational spell," Robinson builds a critical apparatus that can explain Orientalism and its less discursively-defined other Occidentalism, critiquing renowned scholars and philosophers for being spellbound to “ethnocentric misunderstandings of other cultures and other civilizations”. … [Robinson] builds a framework for a more ambitious Translation Studies.

• Preface0.1 Panicked Eurocentrism0.2 The Structure of the Book0.3 AcknowledgmentsChapter 1: Sakai Naoki on Translation 1.1 Sakai’s Model1.2 Implications for Civilizational SpellsChapter 2: The Casting of Civilizational Spells: Nietzsche as Precursor, Bloom as Ephebe2.1 Nietzsche 1: Slave Morality as a Civilizational Spell2.2 Nietzsche 2: The Mnemotechnics of Pain2.3 Bloom 1: The Western Canon as a Tug-of-War Between Civilizational Spells2.4 Bloom 2: The Canon as Memory as Pain2.5 Nietzsche 3: Guilt and Debt2.6 Nietzsche 4: The Desomatization of Somatic Codes2.7 Bloom 3: The Western Canon, Universalized2.8 Cofiguration?Chapter 3: East and West: Towards an Intercivilizational Turn3.1 An East-to-West Countertradition as a Cofigurative Regime of Translation3.2 The Occidentalist Attack on “Immature, Self-Centered Western Minds”3.2.1 Kirkland on Distortions of Daoism3.2.2 Problems in Kirkland’s Attack3.3 Three Historical Stages of Laozi Translation3.3.1 Christianity3.3.2 Esotericism3.3.3 Romanticism3.4 First Conclusion: Civilizational Spells, Again3.5 Second Conclusion: Eurocentrism, Decentered3.6 Third Conclusion: An Intercivilizational Turn?ReferencesEndnotesIndex