6. The poetics of experience

The author explores what he calls the poetics of experience (the translation of experience into various forms of expression, linguistic and otherwise) against the backdrop of a pragmatist understanding of human practices. Such an understanding of these practices highlights their historical and thus open-ended character, also the ubiquitous possibility of dramatic alterations in the self-understanding of the participants in these practices. Anything approximating an adequate account of translation in its various senses demands that critical attention be paid to linguistic and literary practices, precisely as historically evolved and evolving affairs. Interlingual and, indeed, other forms of translation generate the need for complex renegotiations involving various aspects of these interwoven practices. Translating a text from one language into another (to take but one example) is far from a simple process of decoding and re-encoding; it is rather a complex practice in which historically established relationships are, in some measure, renegotiated and thereby transformed.