Offers postrationalist perspectives on translation, based not on the rational control of words and meanings but on the translator's own subjective experience and interpretation.
Douglas Robinson (b. 1954) was born in Lafayette, Indiana, and grew up in the LA and Seattle areas. After an exchange year in Finland in 1971-1972, he did two years of undergraduate work at Linfield College and the Evergreen State College, and then returned to Finland, taking three degrees and teaching full-time as "the American lecturer" in the English department at the University of Jyvaskyla before returning in 1981 to the US to do a doctorate in English at the University of Washington (Seattle). Upon completion of his Ph.D. in 1983, he accepted an assistant professorship in American Language and Literature at the University of Tampere, Finland, and was appointed to that post permanently in 1987; he then spent two years as an assistant professor of English-Finnish Translation Theory and Practice at the same university, before accepting a professorship in English at the University of Mississippi in 1989.
His dissertation, "American Apocalypses: The Image of the End of the World in American Literature," was published by the Johns Hopkins University Press in 1985. His next book, written while teaching in the Translation Studies department at Tampere, was The Translator's Turn, which JHUP brought out in 1991. His next two books, Ring Lardner and the Other (OUP, 1992) and No Less a Man (Popular Press, 1994), were again in American Studies; but The Translator's Turn found its audience, and Robinson soon found himself invited around the world to give guest lectures and workshops on translation. Out of this pedagogical engagement with students and their teachers world-wide was born his textbook, Becoming a Translator: An Accelerated Course (Routledge, 1997, rev. ed. Becoming a Translator: An Introduction to the Theory and Practice of Translation, 2003). In the 1990s he also published Translation and Taboo (Northern Illinois UP, 1996), Translation and Empire: Postcolonial Theories Explained (St. Jerome, 1997), his 270,000-word anthology Western Translation Theory from Herodotus to Nietzsche (St. Jerome, 1997), and What is Translation? Centrifugal Theories, Critical Interventions (Kent State UP, 1997). In 2001 appeared his last book exclusively devoted to translation: Who Translates? Translator Subjectivities Beyond Reason (SUNY Press).
By the end of the 1990s he began to work in the field of linguistics, specifically in a branch of language theory or the philosophy of language that had never quite been dignified (or demeaned) with the rubric "linguistics," and published first Performative Linguistics: Speaking and Translating as Doing Things with Words (Routledge, 2003), then Introducing Performative Pragmatics (Routledge, 2006). His idea in these two books is that Austin's distinction between constative and performative may not work with UTTERANCES, but offers a useful classification of LINGUISTIC METHODOLOGIES, constative linguists being interested in "language" as abstract structure, performative linguists in language as fully embodied people doing things interactively with words.
After Introducing Performative Pragmatics was written, and before it was published, he embarked on new theoretical project: the development and dissemination of somatic theory. He had first theorized the somatics of language in a conference paper in 1985 (and indeed first theorized performative linguistics in a job talk in 1986), and first published on it in The Translator's Turn; but though somatic theory had figured passingly in his books of the 1990s, and two chapters were devoted to it in Performative Linguistics, he had never undertaken a book-length exfoliation of the theory. In 2004 he wrote The Somatics of Language (forthcoming from Rodopi); in 2005-2006, while on a Fulbright in Russia, he wrote Estrangement and the Somatics of Literature: Tolstoy, Shklovsky, Brecht (Johns Hopkins UP, 2008); in 2006-2007 he wrote Displacement and the Somatics of Postcolonial Culture (under consideration at Rodopi); in 2007-2008, while directing the first-year writing program at the University of Mississippi, he wrote "First-Year Writing and the Somatic Exchange" (under consideration at Hampton Press); and in 2008-2009 he wrote "Aristotle and the Somatics of Rhetorical Life" (under consideration at the University of South Carolina Press).
