translation studies. retrospective and prospective views

consciousness, at a time when almost everything was disintegrated and
then renewed on account of the revolution of progress and of
emancipation. The power of knowledge and the self-assertion of the
intellectuals as “legislators of the avant-garde” (Docherty, 1996: 4) led to a
democratically-willed rationality. The adventure, power, and growth that
this brings about are only threatened by the disintegration of the old, by
rising contradiction and anguish. “To be modern is to live a life of paradox
and contradiction” says Marshall Berman (1982: 13), and he continues by
mentioning the sources of modern life: great discoveries in the physical
sciences, the industrialisation of production, demographic upheavals,
urban growth, development of communication systems, the affirmation of
national states, mass social movements, and the development of capitalist
world market. All these build a frame of constant transformation in areas
spanning from science to philosophy, from urbanisation to state
bureaucracy. Malcolm Bradbury had clearly foretold this aspect of the
contemporary society no sooner than 1965 in Stepping Westward:
‘We all live under the pressure of facts,’ said Walker. ‘I mean, look
how the world is going. Look at this vast urbanized and
technologized mass-society that we are going to have to live with if
we don’t evade the issue – as I do. What a foul empty life that
promises to be to people who have some idea of what the good life
was like’. (1968: 251)
Man, sometimes in despair, is caught up in the inevitable progress of
history: ‘roots’ are plucked out and ‘branches’ of thought are projected into
a future which is expected to hold in store radical differences. In his study
on postmodernity, David Lyon clearly warns that any investigation of this
issue cannot be done without relating extensively to modernity. Thus, he
too connects modernity to the social order that followed the Enlightenment
and created a world that
is marked by unprecedented dynamism, dismissal or marginalizing of
tradition and global consequences. Time seemed to speed up, and
space to open up. Modernity’s forward-looking thrust relates strongly
to belief in progress and the power of human reason to produce
reason. (Lyon, 1999: 25)
Malcolm Bradbury also separates the two epochal moments placing
the period between 1889 and 1939 under the ‘embrace’ of modernism that
found its buds in the “great upheavals in the political, scientific,
sociological, and familial orders of the last two decades of the nineteenthcentury”
(1995: 764) that set new directions and configurations in painting,
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