Book review
Jiří Levý. The Art of Translation
Translated by Patrick Corness. , Edited with a critical foreword by Zuzana Jettmarová. (Benjamins Translation Library 97 (EST Subseries 8). Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 2011. xxviii + 322 pp. ISBN 978-90-272-2445-3 €95.00, $143.00

Reviewed by Jaroslav Špirk
Table of contents

Jiří Levý’s The Art of Translation is finally available in English. That, in itself, is good news for any translation scholar who reads neither in Czech nor in German. Although it appears in English almost 50 years after its first Czech edition was published, the book has lost surprisingly little of its relevance. Like Vinay and Darbelnet’s Stylistique comparée du français et de l’anglais (1958), it has proved to be a timeless classic. Unlike the Stylistique comparée or Catford’s A Linguistic Theory of Translation (1965), however, Levý’s emphasis is—pioneeringly for his time—not on linguistics.

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References

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