Periods and Resistances

Abstract

S usan Bassnett provides the plank from which this collection of essays jumps off.In her handbook Translation Studies Bassnett writes of "one great pitfall: periodization, or compartmentalization of literary history."She then comments as follows:It is virtually impossible to divide periods according to dates for, as [ Jurij] Lotman points out, human culture is a dynamic system.Attempts to locate stages of cultural development within strict temporal boundaries contradict that dynamism.A splendid example of the kind of difficulties that arise from the 'periodization approach' emerge [sic] when we consider the problem of defining the temporal limits of the Renaissance. 1 Periods are entities we love to hate.Yet we cannot do without them.For whatever the vitalist continuities of Bassnett's principles, her practice cannot escape a truism formulated by Michel Foucault, who writes, "Knowledge is not made for understanding; it is made for cutting." 2 And cut she does.The table of contents for "History of Translation Theory," the section of Bassnett's book from which my quotation comes, begins with "Problems of 'Period Study'" and continues with "The Romans," "Bible Translation," "Education and the Vernacular," "Early Theorists," "The Renaissance," "The Seventeenth Century," "The Eighteenth Cen-

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