Beyond translation

In this collection of essays A. L. Becker develops a bold, new approach to translation that addresses the subtleties of cultural identity. Becker describes how texts in Burmese, Javanese, and Malay differ profoundly from English texts in all the ways they have meaning: in the games they play, the worlds they constitute, the memories they evoke, the media they shape, the structures they build, and the silences they maintain. In each of these dimensions there are excesses and inadequacies of meaning that make a difference across languages. Becker's "modern philology" insists, beyond translation, on the sorting out of these ambiguities and contexts of meaning. . In linguistics, the essays emphasize important kinds of nonuniversality in all aspects of language and look toward a new theory of language grounded in American pragmatism. In anthropology, the essays demonstrate that much of culture can be described in terms of text-building strategies. And for the comparatist, whether in literature, history, rhetoric, music, or psychology, the essays provide a new array of tools of comparison across distant languages and cultures.