UMBERTO ECO
Umberto Eco (5 January 1932 – 19 February 2016) was an Italian novelist, literary critic, philosopher, semiotician, and university professor. He is best known internationally for his 1980 novel Il nome della rosa (The Name of the Rose), a historical mystery combining semiotics in fiction with biblical analysis, medieval studies, and literary theory.
WHO IS HE?
He was a writer, linguist, philosopher. Eco also wrote academic texts, children's books, and essays.
He was the founder of the Department of media studies at the University of the Republic of San Marino, president of the Graduate School for the Study of the Humanities at the University of Bologna, member of the Accademia dei Lincei, and an honorary fellow of Kellogg College, Oxford.
ACADEMIC CAREER
In 1959 Eco published his second book, Sviluppo dell'estetica medievale (The Development of Medieval Aesthetics), on medieval philosophy.
Eco began seriously developing his ideas on the "open" text and on semiotics, writing many essays on these subjects, and in 1962 he published Opera aperta (translated into English as "The Open Work").
Eco founded and developed one of the most important approaches in contemporary semiotics, usually referred to as interpretative semiotics
THEORY
Eco argues that translation is not about comparing two languages, but about the interpretation of a text in two different languages, thus involving a shift between cultures. He was centered in literature translation (books, poems, etc).
WHAT IS TRANSLATION FOR UMBERTO ECO?
"Translation is not about comparing two languages, but about the interpretation of a text in two different languages."
