ABSTRACT
This chapter covers three different translational hermeneutics: (1) the feeling-based hermeneutics of verbal translation, as theorized by Johann Gottfried Herder and Friedrich Schleiermacher on Gefühl/feeling, Wilhelm Dilthey and Walter Benjamin on der Zusammenhang des Lebens/the nexus of life, narratoriality as an emergent property of translating, and empathic narration as a heteroglot de-/re-stabilization of language; (2) material hermeneutics and biosemiotics, as theorized by Don Ihde, Olga Kudina, Karin Littau and Anne Coldiron, Henrik Gottlieb and Yves Gambier; and (3) multimodal hermeneutics, as theorized by Gunther Kress and Kobus Marais, also linked to biosemiotics by Alin Olteanu and Marais.
Arguably the first ‘hermeneutical’ study was Aristotle’s On Interpretation, the second text in his Organon – in Greek Περὶ Ἑρμηνείας/Peri Hermeneías, but often referred to by its Latin title, De interpretatione. Modern hermeneutics arises out of, and in part responds to, the long patristic and scholastic tradition of Biblical exegesis; its ‘founder’ is variously identified as Johann Gottfried Herder, Friedrich Schleiermacher, or Wilhelm Dilthey, and of those, the two earliest, Herder and Schleiermacher, were also intensely interested in the hermeneutics of translation.
