Testing the Relevance of Translations
Testing the Relevance of Translations

Summary/Abstract: A literary canon need not be a scary word violating true histories which would probably be the current politically correct way of treating a canon. Seeing it still as “the relation of an individual reader and writer to what has been preserved out of what has been written” – not as “a list of books for required study“ (Bloom 1994: 17) –, the canon can be included in the realm of aesthetic values and tastes, a realm different from that of politicized curriculums. Even though the formulation is inevitably predestined to exclude literatures written in an unattainable linguistic code, in what follows the canon has been primarily seen as defined by Harold Bloom who, true, excludes from his Codex Librorum many a writer preserved in the memories of the readers in Estonia. It cannot be helped. What troubles us more are the equally exclusive Estonian literary canons for in case with them the problem is not just linguistic: the list of translations into Estonian is long, and there is a steady critical tradition stressing the significance of translations for Estonian culture. Without wanting to confuse a national literary history with the history of either world literature or that of a culture, it still strikes as questionable to exclude translations willfully from the latter (e.g. Talve 2004) – that is translations as objects worthy of separate chapters or special study.

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