Translation – Theory and Practice: A Historical Reader. Edited by Daniel Weissbort and Astradur Eysteinsson. Pp. 672. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006. Hb. £65. An Anthology of Chinese Discourse on Translation. Edited by Martha P. Y. Cheung. Vol. 1: From the Earliest Times to the Buddhist Project. Pp. 300. Manchester: St Jerome Publishing, 2006. Hb. £45.
Both these anthologies fence in new territory for thoughts about translation to roam. Volume 1 of Martha Cheung's Anthology of Chinese Discourse on Translation – compiled with the help of a large advisory board of Chinese scholars – ranges from Laozi in the sixth century BC to the mid Song dynasty in the twelfth century. Almost all this material is brought into English for the first time. Daniel Weissbort and Astradur Eysteinsson's Historical Reader, again edited with the help of other experts, reaches out to include snippets of ethnography and life-writing alongside the familiar core of St Jerome, Dryden, Pound, Benjamin, et al. Though focused on translation into English, it gives space to German romantic arguments and to French views from the Renaissance and eighteenth century. And, though most concerned with the translation of literature, especially poetry, it also samples the counterpoint tradition of Bible translation, into German as well as English. Best of all, it is truly – as its title announces – an anthology of both Theory and Practice. Many translations (and some of their source texts) are included, in recognition of the obvious but neglected fact that translations themselves often resist or elude the statements criticism and theory make about them; that they are themselves instances of thinking through translation, not just raw material to be thought about. It is a magnificently compendious volume.