What is it about?
Ancient Chinese and late-19th-century Western philosophers never sat down and discussed translation--so this book constructs an imaginary version of that dialogue. Laozi and Mengzi have their say; Ritva Hartama-Heinonen's "abductive" approach to translation is tracked back to a mystical reading of Laozi; Peirce and posthumous Saussure turn out to have veered remarkably close to the ancient Chinese thinkers, and their work is filled out by Pierre Bourdieu and Daniel Simeoni.
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Why is it important?
I have been arguing in recent work (including The Deep Ecology of Rhetoric in Mencius and Aristotle and Exorcising Translation) that "peripheral" or "dissident" Western thinkers (Renaissance and Enlightenment esoterics, German Romantics, pragmatists, phenomenologists) were reading the ancient Chinese philosophers and finding inspiration for their counterhegemonic work there--and that their anti-mainstream thinking in turn influenced Occidentalist thought. This is my first major statement of that counterhegemonic convergence.
Perspectives
This book grew out of an endnote I wrote to Semiotranslating Peirce on the semiotic theory of translation advanced by Dinda Gorlée's graduate student Ritva Hartama-Heinonen, to the effect that her belief that the translator shouldn't translate, but should sit back and let the source text do the translating, was effectively a Daoist mysticism (and also a misreading of the Laozi). The ripples radiating out from that original realization generated the book.
Professor Douglas J. Robinson
Chinese University of Hong Kong, Shenzhen
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: The Dao of Translation, June 2015, Taylor & Francis,
DOI: 10.4324/9781315727400.
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