ABSTRACT
For those who have been thinking in terms of post-translation or transdisciplinary translation studies, older definitions of translation do not hold, and the first and most important distinction to be broken down is the separation among originals, translations, and rewritings. Books such as Homer’s Odyssey, Virgil’s Iliad, Dante’s Divine Comedy, Shakespeare’s Hamlet or A Midsummer Night’s Dream, or Goethe’s Faust are texts often imbued with a great deal of aura, as if the authors of these texts were divinely inspired with access to original ideas and expressions. Yes, maybe these authors are geniuses, but postmodern literary critics and post-translation scholars suggest that they are geniuses of a different sort-of construction, form, composition, importing new ways of expression, and, especially, translation. Homer (if indeed he were the author) transcribed and rewrote from a history of oral tales passed down over centuries. Goethe rewrote Faust from a series of plays and oral performances deeply embedded in Germany literary history. In A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Shakespeare rewrote many texts-Chaucer, Ovid, Plutarch, Apuleius, Golding, various almanacs, as well as a miscellany that are written and oral depictions of Celtic and Germanic folklore. For example, the primary theme of A Midsummer Night’s Dream is transformation, including translation and metamorphosis, and as Shakespeare rewrote, he transformed (see Chapter 1 in this volume). No, the source texts for many of the classics, as Jorge Luis Borges has cleverly argued, are already rewritings. As Bassnett and Lefevere have shown over the past 30 years, it is impossible to analyze textual matters without looking at the poetics and ideology of the cultures into which they are being rewritten. A few translation studies scholars, such as Lawrence Venuti (2007) and John Milton (2009), have begun the dialogue with academics who study rewritings, but most investigations of rewritings are conducted by scholars in the fields of film studies, children’s literature, reception theory, and the new field of adaptation studies.
