{"product_id":"beyond-translation-essays-toward-a-modern-philology-9780472105731","title":"Beyond Translation: Essays toward a Modern Philology","description":"\u003cp\u003e\"This is not only a new philology but a new American linguistic philology. . . . Beckers harvest over a lifetime will be widely welcomed and respected.\" -Paul Friedrich  University of Chicago \". . . a book of extraordinary quality and importance.\" -James Boyd White  University of Michigan How does Ralph Waldo Emerson sound in Kawi? In this collection of essays A. L. Becker develops a new approach to translation he calls modern philology  an approach that insists  beyond translation  on the sorting out of ambiguities and contexts of meaning. Becker describes how texts in Burmese  Javanese  and Malay differ profoundly from English in all the ways they have meaning: in the games they play  the worlds they constitute  the memories they evoke  and the silences they maintain. In each of these dimensions there are excesses and inadequacies of meaning that make a difference across languages. Drawn from over three decades of studying  teaching  translating and writing about Southeast Asian languages and literatures  the essays collected here for the first time are particular accounts of Beckers experiences in attempting to translate into or out of Burmese  Javanese  and Malay a variety of texts. They describe such things as the building of a Javanese shadowplay  how a Sanskrit story about the language of animals has been used in Indonesia  and some of the profound semantic silences a translator faces in taking an anecdote by Gregory Bateson from English into Malay. In linguistics  the essays emphasize important kinds of nonuniversality in all aspects of language and look toward a new theory of language grounded in American pragmatism. In anthropology  the essays demonstrate that much of culture can be described in terms of text-building strategies. And for the comparativist  whether in literature  history  rhetoric  music  or psychology  the essays provide a new array of tools of comparison across distant languages and cultures. A. L. Becker is Professor Emeritus of Linguistics and Anthropology  University of Michigan.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"My Store","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":45655834853429,"sku":"ByrdShop_0472105736","price":249.1,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0627\/8139\/0901\/files\/9780472105731.jpg?v=1781941705","url":"https:\/\/atxbooks.com\/products\/beyond-translation-essays-toward-a-modern-philology-9780472105731","provider":"ATX Books","version":"1.0","type":"link"}