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I highly recommend this book to a psychoanalytic audience on two counts. Firstly, for those who have not already sampled some of the recent writing on problems of reading Freud in translation, this book is an excellent guide. The reader will be impressed that subjective bias must contribute to every reading and every translation of Freud. He will learn how our 'Freud' has been shaped by multiple forces of taste, perspective, and even political organisational pressures which have influenced how we translate and read Freud. English-speaking readers will perhaps need most to consider how the Standard Edition has affected our grasp of Freud's psychology, although Ornston's volume makes clear that the Standard Edition has influenced translation of Freud into every other language.
This book makes the reader want to grasp Freud more immediately, vividly and humanly, by diminishing the barriers of formal structure and reification. All the contributors evoke a Freud who seeks to engage his reader passionately with multiple techniques of fiction and of psychoanalysis. The reader of Freud also becomes an analysand whose resistance is to be interpreted and pushed aside by the force and persuasion of Freud's rhetoric. Ornston's volume thus deals not only with translation but with contemporary problems of reading and of being a reader, of Freud, as of every author. This is my second reason for recommending Ornston's book. Here, problems of translation and reading intersect as the contributors explore the force-field between the author, his work, and the reader.
Two themes in particular emerge from recent writing on translation. Firstly, most students of translation now emphasise the translator's act of interpretation during the act of translating. That is, close study of the choices made by the translator in rendering a text into the target language show that the translator has his own agenda, often not even fully known to himself, for influencing the reader. The more f