Understanding & Translating the heart & the soul

James Underhill (1)

1 ERIAC - Équipe de Recherche Interdisciplinaire sur les Aires Culturelles

Abstract This paper will focus on two rival synonyms, the heart and the soul in various languages, but focusing on English, Czech, French and German, in order to understand what they mean and the values they engender. Is the soul a value in itself or the property of other ideals? How does the heart contain or relate to other virtues? Is the heart good in and of itself? This would appear to be the case, if we consider ‘heartless’, and the gift of the heart to men by God. But even at the beginning of Genesis, the heart of men is said to be “evil”. The heart and the soul, are complex in themselves, they follow tortuous paths, and translating them will take us on intriguing but surprising, even upsetting adventures. Bio James W. Underhill was born in Glasgow in 1967. He is Full Professor and lectures on Literature, Poetics, and Translation at Rouen University in Northern France. He has worked as a full-time translator of French and Czech, and published poems in translation from French and German. Underhill's work on worldview and language focuses on both linguistic constraints at a deeper level, and the essential creative impulse by which individuals stimulate the shared language of the community. He is the author of Humboldt, Worldview, and Language (Edinburgh University Press, 2009), Creating Worldviews: Ideology, Metaphor and Language (Edinburgh University Press, 2011), Ethnolinguistics and Cultural Concepts: Truth, Love, Hate and War (Cambridge University Press, 2012), and Voice and Versification in Translating Poems (Ottawa University Press, 2017).

Mots clés: translating; Bible; herzlos; heartlessness; coeur; ethnolinguistics; heart; srdce; Herz

Domaines: Linguistique; Anthropologie sociale et ethnologie; Littératures

James Underhill. Understanding & Translating the heart & the soul. 2018. ⟨hal-02333673⟩