What is it about?
This is a rethinking and reframing of a 1995 article, "Translation as Phantom Limb," which framed the old idea that translation has to bring the text to life in the target culture through the metaphor of the phantom limb. The 2006 reframing suggests that it isn't actually a metaphor--that it may be literally true--by exploring David Bohm's notion of "the proprioception of the body politic," namely the possibility that we can feel other people the way we feel our own bodies.
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Why is it important?
This article is part of an ongoing attempt, through somatic theory and latterly through icotic theory, to understand the functioning of human communication all the way down to the neural level, without reducing human behavior to biochemistry.
Perspectives
I wrote this originally while on a Fulbright in Voronezh, Russia, as the Marilyn Gaddis Rose Keynote Lecture for the Literary Division, American Translators Association, New Orleans, November 1-4, 2006; and later delivered it as the Rosenblatt Distinguished Lecture in Translation Studies. Florida Atlantic University, Boca Raton, April 19, 2007, and as an Invited distinguished lecture and colloquium at Wesleyan University, Center for the Humanities, Middletown, CT, March 3-4, 2008.
Professor Douglas J. Robinson
Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Proprioception of the body politic: "Translation as phantom limb" revisited, Translation and Interpreting Studies, January 2006, John Benjamins,
DOI: 10.1075/tis.1.2.02rob.
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