German Literature In The 19th Century

999 Words4 Pages

1. Introduction
1.2 Background of the Study
1.2.1 The German 19th Century
Many authors have long been discussing the radical changes the German 19th century underwent in all aspects. Mojtahedi, the author of German philosophy: from Luther to Nietzsche, maintained that in the 19th century, philosophy flourished and deeply perused in Germany, hence, the European thought was illuminated by the German philosophy (S. M. Mousavi, personal communication, March 15, 2015).
The studies carried out in this scope have been mostly devoted to very specialized topics, hence, the period needs a broader and distinguished attention. Seyhan (2010) puts it in different words and says:
Although a tremendous amount of scholarship on the critical legacy of early …show more content…

Since translation is inevitably involved in representing source country or culture, various elements should be considered in the process.
As said above, German literary and philosophical traditions are the root of the tree of translation theory (Venuti, 2004). Therefore, we get to another important matter, namely, literary translation.
Literary translation is a phenomenon which enables people of different nations with different cultural backgrounds, to read and appreciate other languages’ literary works. Thus a good translation will enrich the literary works of the target language (Haque, 2012). In contrast, the bad translation will certainly degrade both the original and the target language’s literary works (Ning, 2008).
It is true that, throughout the history of translation, literary works have been considered as the most difficult task, since literary works are composed of arbitrary aesthetic signs and even cultural aspects of the original language (Shiyab, 1999). In other words, Ning (2008) believes that “literature is, first of all, an art of language” (p. 79). In his viewpoint, he also states, “literary translation should be considered as the highest phase of translation practice” (p. …show more content…

The plant must spring again from its seed, or it may bear no flower and this is the burthen of the curse of Babel (as cited in Bassnett & Lefevere, 1998, p. 58).
Many studies have been conducted on poetry translation so far but very few ones have been non-empirical, Bassnett (2014) believes. Furthermore, she adds that mostly, the searches on the translation and poetry are devoted to investigating the different problems of poetry translation. Many of the studies in this scope are comparisons between two or more translations or personal judgments on solving these problems (Bassnett, 2014).
Translating poetry is of high significance due to its challenges. The studies in this regard, as put by Bassnett (2014), are many but the ones with high methodological values are very few. Hence, she calls scholars for more studies

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