Gauti Kristmannsson | University of Iceland (original) (raw)
Books by Gauti Kristmannsson
Orality, Ossian and Translation, 2020
An examination of how the folklore and popular poetry of the Highlands of Scotland were translate... more An examination of how the folklore and popular poetry of the Highlands of Scotland were translated into "high" culture by James Macpherson.
Heimur skáldsögunnar, 2001
Article on the novel The Defense in Icelandic translation by Illugi Jökulsson
Að jaðri heims, 2015
Afterword of my translation of Manfred Peter Hein's poems in Weltrandhin, published 2011 original... more Afterword of my translation of Manfred Peter Hein's poems in Weltrandhin, published 2011 originally by Wallstein Verlag
EGO European History Online, 2015
The Poems of Ossian are a unique phenomenon in European literary history. They have been referred... more The Poems of Ossian are a unique phenomenon in European literary history. They have been referred to as a "pseudotranslation" and effectively discarded from the canon, to which they undoubtedly belonged to for a hundred years, yet their monumental influence on literature, visual art and music is undeniable. The poems were certainly not a translation of one single text but an editoral construct which on its own shook the literary system of the late 18th century to its foundations and helped usher in Romantic notions of poetry, in addition to turning the focus definitely to the native productions of the people in each country or area. The number of translations and imitations of several degrees underlines the huge creative impulse of the poems, which can be seen as a major paradigm shift in the outlook of what is called high culture literature. "The Poems of Ossian" and the New National Epic When James Macpherson (1736-1796) published his small volume, Fragments of Ancient Poetry collected in the Highlands of Scotland, and translated from the Galic or Erse Language 1 [ ] in the summer of 1760 he may have had a young man's hopes of becoming known as a man of letters, at least in Scotland. Nothing could have been more wrong, since he became famous, infamous, lionised and detested in the course of a few years, and not only in his own country, Great Britain, but all over Europe and beyond. Moreover, his financially rewarding rise from poor schoolteacher in the Highlands of Scotland to intellectual, servant of the empire and MP is more reminiscent of a modern celebrity than the career of a "man of letters" in the 18th century. 2
A series of literary reviews originally written for the radio programme Víðsjá on channel 1 of th... more A series of literary reviews originally written for the radio programme Víðsjá on channel 1 of the State Icelandic Broadcasting service. A selection was published in Iceland in 2011 and now in German translation. Over 50 reviews of Icelandic books from 2002-2011.
A collection of literature reviews originally given on channel one of the Icelandic National Broa... more A collection of literature reviews originally given on channel one of the Icelandic National Broadcasting Service. The reviews were all rewritten and edited by Guðni Elísson. The book contains over 50 reviews of Icelandic books published in this century. A version in German will be published by Queich Verlag in 2012.
Mimesis. Framsetning veruleikans í vestrænum bókmenntum
Formáli okkar Torfa H. Tulinius að þýðingu minni (og annarra) á Mimesis eftir Erich Auerbach.
Laókóon eða um mörkin milli málverksins og skáldskaparins
Formáli að þýðingu á þessu verki eftir Gotthold Ephraim Lessing sem olli straumhvörfum í fagurfræ... more Formáli að þýðingu á þessu verki eftir Gotthold Ephraim Lessing sem olli straumhvörfum í fagurfræði 18. aldar.
Translation of the book of poems Zwischen Winter und Winter by Manfred Peter Hein (Rowohlt 1987) ... more Translation of the book of poems Zwischen Winter und Winter by Manfred Peter Hein (Rowohlt 1987) into three languages, English, Danish and Icelandic. Co-translators into English and Danish Tom Cheesman and Henning Vangsgaard. Illustrations by Christoph Meckel.
This volume looks in more detail at philosophical debates on on identity and language. Herder, Ad... more This volume looks in more detail at philosophical debates on on identity and language. Herder, Adam Ferguson, Rousseau, Hume and Adam Smith are among those mostly discussed.
This volume considers the translational methods and actions taken during the construction phase o... more This volume considers the translational methods and actions taken during the construction phase of national literatures in Europe, the material gathered, rewritten, translated, reconstructed to create a canon of a national literature with a respectable pedigree and comparable to the best in the world.
The focus is very much on the differences and similarities of translation and original work. Authors and translators such as James Macpherson and his Ossian, Thomas Percy and his Reliques; in addition Goethe, Herder and Hegel have a role along with many others.
It is a pdf version of the final manuscript with the same page numbers as the printed book, along with the all the information on the title pages. Revisions are none apart from a handful of minor corrections. There is a difference in the numbering of the footnotes, due to the fact that the footnote no. 4 was on two footnotes in the printed version. This was corrected.
Papers by Gauti Kristmannsson
Peter Lang eBooks, 2005
These two volumes examine the way in which translation was instrumental in constructing a literar... more These two volumes examine the way in which translation was instrumental in constructing a literary identity in Britain and Germany in the eighteenth century. The first volume covers in three parts how different methods of translation can be applied to enrich the existent literature in the native language and to an extent create it as an aesthetic possibility, in particular through the translation of form. The first part is theoretical without being a theory, the second part covers the national literary rivalry in Britain in the latter part of the eighteenth century and the third part a German synthesis of material and methods applied earlier on in Britain. The second volume is dedicated to aesthetic, philosophical and national concerns of several major thinkers of the eighteenth century such as Adam Smith, Adam Ferguson, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Johann Gottfried Herder.
Meta: Translators' Journal, Sep 13, 2004
L'étude présente un aperçu de la politique linguistique en Islande qui, en sa qualité de petit pa... more L'étude présente un aperçu de la politique linguistique en Islande qui, en sa qualité de petit pays, est particulièrement sensible à la confrontation avec les médias modernes. Elle débute par un bref historique de la politique linguistique islandaise, qui puise ses racines au XIX e siècle, afin d'introduire ses bases idéologiques et de démontrer à quel point ces dernières ont pu perdurer dans le débat national sur la langue et les médias. Elle traite ensuite de la manière dont le consensus sur le purisme linguistique a souffert des développements politiques et technologiques, bref de la mondialisation des médias. Ces développements transparaissent dans les pratiques de traduction des médias ainsi que dans l'approche évolutive de la traduction.
Benjamins translation library, Feb 15, 2019
Translation and Literature, Nov 1, 2013
The Poems of Ossian were instrumental in putting the North in Europe into a new and elevated cult... more The Poems of Ossian were instrumental in putting the North in Europe into a new and elevated cultural perspective. The first part of this essay examines how the general aesthetic development in the North of Europe was in many ways determined by the paradigm shift ushered in by the poems, despite latter-day denials. Two case studies are briefly presented: the first is the modern denial of Ossianic influence on Danish arts, literature, music and visual art; the second the actual reception in Iceland, the country which, for some, represented the Northern ‘counter example’ to Ossian, with the manuscripts of Eddas and Sagas.
Translation and Literature, Nov 1, 2018
discovering just where the perceptions and stimuli offered by the phenomenon of self-translation,... more discovering just where the perceptions and stimuli offered by the phenomenon of self-translation, in all its ramifications, might lead. Failure to meet this challenge head-on risks reinstating existing power relations, masking them by means of dissimulation. Those like myself who are active in the pursuit, by choice or by constraint, are all too often left to follow our own inadequate lights, inventing our own guidelines case by case, in particular when English looms large in the field where we operate. The best theory not only illuminates practice but inspires it too. In terms of opening up new areas of self-translation, rewriting, and bilingual writing I knew nothing about, reading this collection was a rewarding experience. In terms of gleaning illumination and support for one's own procedures as a translator and self-translator, rather less so.
Peter Lang eBooks, 2005
These two volumes examine the way in which translation was instrumental in constructing a literar... more These two volumes examine the way in which translation was instrumental in constructing a literary identity in Britain and Germany in the eighteenth century. The first volume covers in three parts how different methods of translation can be applied to enrich the existent literature in the native language and to an extent create it as an aesthetic possibility, in particular through the translation of form. The first part is theoretical without being a theory, the second part covers the national literary rivalry in Britain in the latter part of the eighteenth century and the third part a German synthesis of material and methods applied earlier on in Britain. The second volume is dedicated to aesthetic, philosophical and national concerns of several major thinkers of the eighteenth century such as Adam Smith, Adam Ferguson, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Johann Gottfried Herder.
Untranslatability Goes Global, 2018
The paper discusses the modern conflict of the faculties of comparative literature and translatio... more The paper discusses the modern conflict of the faculties of comparative literature and translation studies before the background of the ideas of world literature and untranslatability.
Revista de Llengua i Dret / Journal of Language and Law, 2022
This article reports some of the main achievements of the European Union-funded PRINCIPLE project... more This article reports some of the main achievements of the European Union-funded PRINCIPLE project in collecting high-quality language resources (LRs) in the legal domain for four under-resourced European languages: Croatian, Irish, Norwegian, and Icelandic. After illustrating the significance of this work for developing translation technologies in the context of the European Union and the European Economic Area, the article outlines the main steps of data collection, curation, and sharing of the LRs gathered with the support of public and private data contributors. This is followed by a description of the development pipeline and key features of the state-of-the-art, bespoke neural machine translation (MT) engines for the legal domain that were built using this data. The MT systems were evaluated with a combination of automatic and human methods to validate the quality of the LRs collected in the project, and the high-quality LRs were subsequently shared with the wider community via the ELRC-SHARE repository. The main challenges encountered in this work are discussed, emphasising the importance and the key benefits of sharing high-quality digital LRs.
Orality, Ossian and Translation, 2020
An examination of how the folklore and popular poetry of the Highlands of Scotland were translate... more An examination of how the folklore and popular poetry of the Highlands of Scotland were translated into "high" culture by James Macpherson.
Heimur skáldsögunnar, 2001
Article on the novel The Defense in Icelandic translation by Illugi Jökulsson
Að jaðri heims, 2015
Afterword of my translation of Manfred Peter Hein's poems in Weltrandhin, published 2011 original... more Afterword of my translation of Manfred Peter Hein's poems in Weltrandhin, published 2011 originally by Wallstein Verlag
EGO European History Online, 2015
The Poems of Ossian are a unique phenomenon in European literary history. They have been referred... more The Poems of Ossian are a unique phenomenon in European literary history. They have been referred to as a "pseudotranslation" and effectively discarded from the canon, to which they undoubtedly belonged to for a hundred years, yet their monumental influence on literature, visual art and music is undeniable. The poems were certainly not a translation of one single text but an editoral construct which on its own shook the literary system of the late 18th century to its foundations and helped usher in Romantic notions of poetry, in addition to turning the focus definitely to the native productions of the people in each country or area. The number of translations and imitations of several degrees underlines the huge creative impulse of the poems, which can be seen as a major paradigm shift in the outlook of what is called high culture literature. "The Poems of Ossian" and the New National Epic When James Macpherson (1736-1796) published his small volume, Fragments of Ancient Poetry collected in the Highlands of Scotland, and translated from the Galic or Erse Language 1 [ ] in the summer of 1760 he may have had a young man's hopes of becoming known as a man of letters, at least in Scotland. Nothing could have been more wrong, since he became famous, infamous, lionised and detested in the course of a few years, and not only in his own country, Great Britain, but all over Europe and beyond. Moreover, his financially rewarding rise from poor schoolteacher in the Highlands of Scotland to intellectual, servant of the empire and MP is more reminiscent of a modern celebrity than the career of a "man of letters" in the 18th century. 2
A series of literary reviews originally written for the radio programme Víðsjá on channel 1 of th... more A series of literary reviews originally written for the radio programme Víðsjá on channel 1 of the State Icelandic Broadcasting service. A selection was published in Iceland in 2011 and now in German translation. Over 50 reviews of Icelandic books from 2002-2011.
A collection of literature reviews originally given on channel one of the Icelandic National Broa... more A collection of literature reviews originally given on channel one of the Icelandic National Broadcasting Service. The reviews were all rewritten and edited by Guðni Elísson. The book contains over 50 reviews of Icelandic books published in this century. A version in German will be published by Queich Verlag in 2012.
Mimesis. Framsetning veruleikans í vestrænum bókmenntum
Formáli okkar Torfa H. Tulinius að þýðingu minni (og annarra) á Mimesis eftir Erich Auerbach.
Laókóon eða um mörkin milli málverksins og skáldskaparins
Formáli að þýðingu á þessu verki eftir Gotthold Ephraim Lessing sem olli straumhvörfum í fagurfræ... more Formáli að þýðingu á þessu verki eftir Gotthold Ephraim Lessing sem olli straumhvörfum í fagurfræði 18. aldar.
Translation of the book of poems Zwischen Winter und Winter by Manfred Peter Hein (Rowohlt 1987) ... more Translation of the book of poems Zwischen Winter und Winter by Manfred Peter Hein (Rowohlt 1987) into three languages, English, Danish and Icelandic. Co-translators into English and Danish Tom Cheesman and Henning Vangsgaard. Illustrations by Christoph Meckel.
This volume looks in more detail at philosophical debates on on identity and language. Herder, Ad... more This volume looks in more detail at philosophical debates on on identity and language. Herder, Adam Ferguson, Rousseau, Hume and Adam Smith are among those mostly discussed.
This volume considers the translational methods and actions taken during the construction phase o... more This volume considers the translational methods and actions taken during the construction phase of national literatures in Europe, the material gathered, rewritten, translated, reconstructed to create a canon of a national literature with a respectable pedigree and comparable to the best in the world.
The focus is very much on the differences and similarities of translation and original work. Authors and translators such as James Macpherson and his Ossian, Thomas Percy and his Reliques; in addition Goethe, Herder and Hegel have a role along with many others.
It is a pdf version of the final manuscript with the same page numbers as the printed book, along with the all the information on the title pages. Revisions are none apart from a handful of minor corrections. There is a difference in the numbering of the footnotes, due to the fact that the footnote no. 4 was on two footnotes in the printed version. This was corrected.
Peter Lang eBooks, 2005
These two volumes examine the way in which translation was instrumental in constructing a literar... more These two volumes examine the way in which translation was instrumental in constructing a literary identity in Britain and Germany in the eighteenth century. The first volume covers in three parts how different methods of translation can be applied to enrich the existent literature in the native language and to an extent create it as an aesthetic possibility, in particular through the translation of form. The first part is theoretical without being a theory, the second part covers the national literary rivalry in Britain in the latter part of the eighteenth century and the third part a German synthesis of material and methods applied earlier on in Britain. The second volume is dedicated to aesthetic, philosophical and national concerns of several major thinkers of the eighteenth century such as Adam Smith, Adam Ferguson, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Johann Gottfried Herder.
Meta: Translators' Journal, Sep 13, 2004
L'étude présente un aperçu de la politique linguistique en Islande qui, en sa qualité de petit pa... more L'étude présente un aperçu de la politique linguistique en Islande qui, en sa qualité de petit pays, est particulièrement sensible à la confrontation avec les médias modernes. Elle débute par un bref historique de la politique linguistique islandaise, qui puise ses racines au XIX e siècle, afin d'introduire ses bases idéologiques et de démontrer à quel point ces dernières ont pu perdurer dans le débat national sur la langue et les médias. Elle traite ensuite de la manière dont le consensus sur le purisme linguistique a souffert des développements politiques et technologiques, bref de la mondialisation des médias. Ces développements transparaissent dans les pratiques de traduction des médias ainsi que dans l'approche évolutive de la traduction.
Benjamins translation library, Feb 15, 2019
Translation and Literature, Nov 1, 2013
The Poems of Ossian were instrumental in putting the North in Europe into a new and elevated cult... more The Poems of Ossian were instrumental in putting the North in Europe into a new and elevated cultural perspective. The first part of this essay examines how the general aesthetic development in the North of Europe was in many ways determined by the paradigm shift ushered in by the poems, despite latter-day denials. Two case studies are briefly presented: the first is the modern denial of Ossianic influence on Danish arts, literature, music and visual art; the second the actual reception in Iceland, the country which, for some, represented the Northern ‘counter example’ to Ossian, with the manuscripts of Eddas and Sagas.
Translation and Literature, Nov 1, 2018
discovering just where the perceptions and stimuli offered by the phenomenon of self-translation,... more discovering just where the perceptions and stimuli offered by the phenomenon of self-translation, in all its ramifications, might lead. Failure to meet this challenge head-on risks reinstating existing power relations, masking them by means of dissimulation. Those like myself who are active in the pursuit, by choice or by constraint, are all too often left to follow our own inadequate lights, inventing our own guidelines case by case, in particular when English looms large in the field where we operate. The best theory not only illuminates practice but inspires it too. In terms of opening up new areas of self-translation, rewriting, and bilingual writing I knew nothing about, reading this collection was a rewarding experience. In terms of gleaning illumination and support for one's own procedures as a translator and self-translator, rather less so.
Peter Lang eBooks, 2005
These two volumes examine the way in which translation was instrumental in constructing a literar... more These two volumes examine the way in which translation was instrumental in constructing a literary identity in Britain and Germany in the eighteenth century. The first volume covers in three parts how different methods of translation can be applied to enrich the existent literature in the native language and to an extent create it as an aesthetic possibility, in particular through the translation of form. The first part is theoretical without being a theory, the second part covers the national literary rivalry in Britain in the latter part of the eighteenth century and the third part a German synthesis of material and methods applied earlier on in Britain. The second volume is dedicated to aesthetic, philosophical and national concerns of several major thinkers of the eighteenth century such as Adam Smith, Adam Ferguson, Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Johann Gottfried Herder.
Untranslatability Goes Global, 2018
The paper discusses the modern conflict of the faculties of comparative literature and translatio... more The paper discusses the modern conflict of the faculties of comparative literature and translation studies before the background of the ideas of world literature and untranslatability.
Revista de Llengua i Dret / Journal of Language and Law, 2022
This article reports some of the main achievements of the European Union-funded PRINCIPLE project... more This article reports some of the main achievements of the European Union-funded PRINCIPLE project in collecting high-quality language resources (LRs) in the legal domain for four under-resourced European languages: Croatian, Irish, Norwegian, and Icelandic. After illustrating the significance of this work for developing translation technologies in the context of the European Union and the European Economic Area, the article outlines the main steps of data collection, curation, and sharing of the LRs gathered with the support of public and private data contributors. This is followed by a description of the development pipeline and key features of the state-of-the-art, bespoke neural machine translation (MT) engines for the legal domain that were built using this data. The MT systems were evaluated with a combination of automatic and human methods to validate the quality of the LRs collected in the project, and the high-quality LRs were subsequently shared with the wider community via the ELRC-SHARE repository. The main challenges encountered in this work are discussed, emphasising the importance and the key benefits of sharing high-quality digital LRs.
A World Atlas of Translation, 2019
The report on the Germanic translation tradition spans a long period of time, from the Gothic beg... more The report on the Germanic translation tradition spans a long period of time, from the Gothic beginnings and the Nt translation of bishop Wulfila in the fourth century, through the Carolingian Renaissance and the late medieval traffic of chansons de geste and romances, disseminated and read for centuries. The Reformation and its translational explosion is another important aspect and in the following centuries, it may be argued that the literary development of the Germanic speaking literatures was more or less driven by translation, through translations and imitations of the classics right into the Romantic era, which, paradoxically, led to the invention of the purely original author and ever increasing translational activity, since the mother tongues had taken over in the Germanic literary systems.
Translation and Literature, 2013
The Poems of Ossian were instrumental in putting the North in Europe into a new and elevated cult... more The Poems of Ossian were instrumental in putting the North in Europe into a new and elevated cultural perspective. The first part of this essay examines how the general aesthetic development in the North of Europe was in many ways determined by the paradigm shift ushered in by the poems, despite latter-day denials. Two case studies are briefly presented: the first is the modern denial of Ossianic influence on Danish arts, literature, music and visual art; the second the actual reception in Iceland, the country which, for some, represented the Northern ‘counter example’ to Ossian, with the manuscripts of Eddas and Sagas.
Language Problems and Language Planning, 2007
Edinburgh German Yearbook, 2007
The Nordic turn in many European literatures in the latter part of the eighteenth century may, as... more The Nordic turn in many European literatures in the latter part of the eighteenth century may, as opposed to the stereotypical notion of Northern Europeans, be described as chaotic. If it is accepted that there was a Nordic turn at all, the question arises, of what kind? Was it Scandinavian, Celtic, Pan-German, nationalist, provincial, was it structural, system-based or discursive, was it indeed new? This paper proposes to answer a fragment of these questions.
This paper looks at the nationalisation of the Nordic in German and British literature.
Ritið - tímarit Hugvísindastofnunar, 2008
Tímarit Máls og menningar, 2009
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