Woodsworth, Judith (2017): Telling the Story of Translation. Writers Who Translate. London/New York: Bloomsbury, 248 p.

In the disciplinary field of translation studies, it has already been demonstrated how productive it is to tell the story of translation with a focus on translators and their activity throughout history (Delisle and Woodsworth 2012). Judith Woodsworth now associates a foreign language with the concomitance of creative writing and translation, broadening her research. Thus, her new book brings together three writers − Bernard Shaw (1856-1950), Gertrude Stein (1874-1946), and Paul Auster (1947-) − to make a point about writers who translate, and the insights translation studies and translation history could gain by acknowledging and analysing their profiles. Justifying the motivation behind this research, Woodsworth shows, when she describes the life story of each author through the eyes of the people who knew them − Shaw and his translators, Stein and her avant-garde circle, Auster and the authors he translates and reads −, that the three highlighted writers have in common the fact that they: The three of them also share some common characteristics as far as the construction of their literary careers, as Woodsworth cleverly shows in three subsequent chapters. In general terms, there is the assumption that Shaw, Stein, and Auster, among many others, “integrated translation practice and thinking on translation into their body of writing, raising complex questions of linguistic identity and cultural affiliation” (p. 3). The depth and breadth of such a revolutionary, translational influence on creative writing, literary bodies of work, and authorial trajectories, is evidenced accordingly through a narrative that not only combines biography and history as genres, but that also goes beyond the traditional boundaries of translation studies. In fact, it is a given that this book will not be confined to the circle of translation scholars; it will reach out to colleagues in comparative literature and literary history, and even to enthusiasts of any of the mentioned writers, who would most certainly be interested and pleased by the literary style Woodsworth adopts to answer the question that guides her path: “What is translation for?” (p. 5). By telling their stories, as any good story-teller does (subchapters are especially useful for these matters), Woodsworth strikes a remarkable balance between theoretical aspects of translation (the introduction is perhaps the most theoretical part of the book), a dense, comparative, literary analysis sustaining her argument, as well as clarity in tracing the impact of translation on each of the chosen writers. Woodsworth’s first move is a clarifying one: she revisits the definition of translation propounded by modernists, taking Ezra Pound as a departing point of the movement, as suggested by Steven Yao’s in his book Translation and the Languages of Modernism (2002). Although the writers she studies don’t necessarily align on the spectrum of modernism and postmodernism, Woodsworth points is that, as modernists, they gave primary importance to translation and to the translator, not only to the text or to the profession, but to the whole activity as “a way of being” (p. 2). Yao’s own argument is grounded on Benjamin’s “The Task of the Translator,” which he references from the outset of his book, particularly in the introduction (Yao 2002: 1-22). Woodsworth goes on to illustrate her point, citing many other writers who used translation as a stratagem to trigger writing, from Geoffrey Chaucer to Charles Baudelaire, to Stefan Zweig, to Boris Pasternak. Self-translation is also mentioned, with Samuel Beckett and Nancy Huston given as examples. Woodsworth summarizes her approach like so: In the chapter on Shaw, we witness a sui generis situation: Bernard Shaw translating the work of Siegfried Trebitsch, his own translator into German. Woodsworth includes in the long bibliography of the book …