Readings combined into a single cluster to English Japanese poems of Joycean density untranslatable as single poems came to be called composite translations. While this book essays the translation of poetry and glances at other books of multiple translation, it is mostly an exhibition of the art not only intended for serious students or scholars of translation but all word-lovers. While the author hates how to books, writing the last chapter, he came to realize that not only translators, but monolingual readers who find it hard to compose poems or do not know how to get other people to do so, might find it instructive. He dreams of millions of people working out their own poems - or variations on others' work - rather than crossword puzzles. A crossword solved ends up in the trash; with a poem, you can have your cake and not only eat it, too, but serve it up for others to eat.--amazon.com.

Studying Language through Literature invites readers to reconsider the opportunity represented by literary texts for language-related purposes. Despite the close relationship between literature and language in educational contexts, literature is frequently associated with teaching practices which have been judged to be unsuccessful. Subsequently, texts of the non-literary type are preferred, on the basis that they are ‘authentic’ and closer to ‘real’ language. The everlasting relationship between language and literature is here reassessed starting from two assumptions: literature is the expression of an emphasized perception of reality – be it private, collective, or pertaining to a certain temporal/spatial context; and literary language is language in its utmost form. Following an outline of the philosophy that governs the book, each chapter presents specific insights on the use of the various different literary genres: namely, fiction, poetry and drama. The opportunities offered by translation in the foreign language classroom constitute a recurrent theme throughout the book, although Chapter 5 is entirely devoted to translation criticism. The closing pages put forward a few reflections on assessment. While offering some food for thought in order to reassess the role of literature in the language class, this book puts together ideas, considerations and suggestions from which the reader is free to pick, mix and adjust, exploiting them to her/his greatest benefit.

Imagine a cat who mastered more tricks than a highly trained dog, covered up cans of food he did not want to eat before they were opened and could delicately touch a tiny finger-spun top repeatedly without stopping it. Han-chan was such a cat. His memory, preserved in notes and sketches, inspired an authority on stereotypes of national character and translator of Edo era Japanese poetry to essay out of his fields of expertise and into felinity. Sample chapters: The animal that kneads the world. / Conversing with cats: easier in Japanese? / Smiling with closed eyes, or far from Ecotopia. /Are cats the most or least false animal. / Beauty: Is it relative or . . . is it the cat? / A little red mouse, or are we keeping the right pet? / The third-generation tanuki - a new theory of domestication. Observations are coupled with thought about things such as 1) whether the altered behavior usually explained as saving face or covering up weakness is not more like improvisation that, retrospectively, makes melodic sense of what would be wrong notes by offsetting or dream-style logic that, ever present, keeps the flow from breaking. 2) Cats, or some cats, may avoid trauma from bad experiences by convincing themselves it was only a nightmare and continuing to hope until they can cope. 3) Cats demonstrate their social nature by showing off their catches, sleeping together in the cold and behaving themselves, but most are, unfortunately, like so-called feral children: because they are separated from their family while too young to have socialized, they re-enforce the stereotype of the independent asocial cat. One can only understand felinity by living with generations of cats under one roof. The author did this. People who liked Barbara Holland's "Secrets of the Cat," the cat chapter in Vicki Hearne's "Adam's Task" and Leonard Michaels' "A Cat" will probably purr while reading this.

Even readers with no particular interest in Japan - if such odd souls exist - may expect unexpected pleasure from this book if English metaphysical poetry, grooks, hyperlogical nonsense verse, outrageous epigrams, the (im)possibilities and process of translation between exotic tongues, the reason of puns and rhyme, outlandish metaphor, extreme hyperbole and whatnot tickle their fancy. Read together with The Woman Without a Hole, also by Robin D. Gill, the hitherto overlooked ulterior side of art poetry in Japan may now be thoroughly explored by monolinguals, though bilinguals and students of Japanese will be happy to know all the original Japanese is included.--amazon.com.

Gill introduces hundreds of haiku about flies, fly-swatters and flypaper, scores of which are by Issa (1763-1827), whose famous haiku about a fly begging not to be swatted has long been controversial because of its alleged maudlinity and anthropomorphism.

Drawing on ancient and modern sources, "a lucid discussion of Taoism and the Chinese language [that's] profound, reflective, and enlightening." —Boston Globe According to Deepak Chopra, "Watts was a spiritual polymatch, the first and possibly greatest." Watts treats the Chinese philosophy of Tao in much the same way as he did Zen Buddhism in his classic The Way of Zen. Critics agree that this last work stands as a perfect monument to the life and literature of Alan Watts. "Perhaps the foremost interpreter of Eastern disciplines for the contemporary West, . . . Watts begins with scholarship and intellect and proceeds with art and eloquence to the frontiers of the spirit."—Los Angeles Times

Lost in an art—the art of translation. Thus, in an elegant anagram (translation = lost in an art), Pulitzer Prize-winning author and pioneering cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter hints at what led him to pen a deep personal homage to the witty sixteenth-century French poet Clément Marot.”Le ton beau de Marot” literally means ”The sweet tone of Marot”, but to a French ear it suggests ”Le tombeau de Marot”—that is, ”The tomb of Marot”. That double entendre foreshadows the linguistic exuberance of this book, which was sparked a decade ago when Hofstadter, under the spell of an exquisite French miniature by Marot, got hooked on the challenge of recreating both its sweet message and its tight rhymes in English—jumping through two tough hoops at once.In the next few years, he not only did many of his own translations of Marot's poem, but also enlisted friends, students, colleagues, family, noted poets, and translators—even three state-of-the-art translation programs!—to try their hand at this subtle challenge.The rich harvest is represented here by 88 wildly diverse variations on Marot's little theme. Yet this barely scratches the surface of Le Ton beau de Marot, for small groups of these poems alternate with chapters that run all over the map of language and thought.Not merely a set of translations of one poem, Le Ton beau de Marot is an autobiographical essay, a love letter to the French language, a series of musings on life, loss, and death, a sweet bouquet of stirring poetry—but most of all, it celebrates the limitless creativity fired by a passion for the music of words.Dozens of literary themes and creations are woven into the picture, including Pushkin's Eugene Onegin, Dante's Inferno, Salinger's Catcher in the Rye, Villon's Ballades, Nabokov's essays, Georges Perec's La Disparition, Vikram Seth's Golden Gate, Horace's odes, and more.Rife with stunning form-content interplay, crammed with creative linguistic experiments yet always crystal-clear, this book is meant not only for lovers of literature, but also for people who wish to be brought into contact with current ideas about how creativity works, and who wish to see how today's computational models of language and thought stack up next to the human mind.Le Ton beau de Marot is a sparkling, personal, and poetic exploration aimed at both the literary and the scientific world, and is sure to provoke great excitement and heated controversy among poets and translators, critics and writers, and those involved in the study of creativity and its elusive wellsprings.