"Translation Routes"
Friday March 25th at 3:30pm
Nicholson Hall 325
Akshya Saxena, "In Other Words: Reading Dainik Jagran's Sangini"
Dan Dooghan, "Polytopic Texts and Incremental Apprehension: Republican China's Contribution to Translation Theory"
Michelle Baroody, "The Untimeliness of World Literature"
Greta Bliss, "Looking Back, Looking Forward: The Vital Antagonisms of Maghrebi Untranslation"
Please find below detailed descriptions of the four papers, which will be followed by a question and answer period. Light refreshments will be available. We will head over to the Kitty Cat Klub following the event in order to continue our discussion. We hope to see many of you there.
Greta Bliss, "Looking Back, Looking Forward: The Vital Antagonisms of Maghrebi Untranslation"
This paper introduces the history of French translations of the Maghreb
via the literary figure of Maghrebi woman through an analysis of how
Maïssa Bey's 2005 novel Surtout ne te retourne pas "untranslates"
Orientalist representations of the Maghreb. Bliss argues that the
notion of bilingual "antagonisms" (Abdelfattah Kilito) touching Bey's
work are integral to the project of untranslation as a whole. By
refusing to settle on a single sort of portrayal of the female
narrator(s) and by deferring her (their) history(ies), Bey theorizes
untranslation as a tactic of reading that must look forward and back in
antagonistic and contradictory ways that are distinct from the concept
of "hybridity." This paper challenges mainstream discourses in French
and Francophone Studies that have conditioned the emergence of Maghrebi
women's fiction and ratified it as an academic subfield in problematic
ways.
Akshya Saxena, "In Other Words: Reading Dainik Jagran's Sangini"
My paper attempts to read the Hindi-English bilingualism found in Jagran Sangini, the four-page color women's weekly supplement that accompanies the largest-circulating Hindi daily in India today, Dainik Jagran. I take my cue from The Translation Zone (2006) by Emily Apter, where she offers a provocative discussion of the significance of the theory and practice of translation to the discipline of Comparative Literature. As I grapple with the dynamics of the Vernacular Press Revolution of the nineties in India (of which I see Sangini to be a sign), I find both value and discomfort in her use of the category of the Creole, her stand-in for non-standard, non-vehicular, ungrammatical and plurilingually inventive language. My paper, in its study of Sangini, seeks to trouble her understanding that a new comparative literature founded in the Creole necessarily disrupts the "deep structural law that languages are named after nations", and so traffics in only "phantom inter-nations".
Dan Dooghan, "Polytopic Texts and Incremental Apprehension: Republican China's Contributions to Translation Theory"
Given China's lack of translators working in most languages, many European texts during the first half of the twentieth century entered Chinese through indirect translation from Japanese. The translated text thus appears as a product of multiple topoi: origin, intermediaries, and destination. As each topos produces translations that respond to the local literary polysystem, the skopoi of the intermediary translators accrete to the translated texts, thus complicating the usual binary translation relationship usually encountered in Euro-American translation studies. Furthermore, cognizant of the weaknesses of indirect translation, Chinese intellectuals of the Republican period (1911-1949) developed methods of translation criticism both to compensate for the intermediary accretions and guide translators when approaching polytopic texts.
Michelle Baroody, "The Untimeliness of World Literature"
How do we begin to think of world literature outside of the terms West and non-West? Is there a space for the "Third world" to enter into an exchange with other "world literatures" without always carrying the label "other"? The logic of contemporary, popular theories of world literature are founded upon the disavowal of Orientalism as both a discursive and political logic of the west and the critique of that logic initiated by such thinkers as Edward Said. This disavowal tends to homogenize the field of world literatures, covering up potential social contradictions and power relations, as well as the social complexities of literary exchange in the global market. As I will demonstrate, the disavowal of Orientalism also produces a temporal logic whereby literature is considered modern (a term which in many literary critical discourses assumes a distinct value) only insofar as it passes through and is canonized by the West. Rather than simply scrap the project of world literature, I contend that it may be more adequate to the situation of the global literary market to consider the possibility of untimely world literatures: that is, to consider the project of world literature as a critical task involving the exchange between often incommensurable spaces and temporalities, which nonetheless are articulated together in specific literary instances. In order to develop this idea, I investigate one such exchange that between the Syrian poet Adonis and the American poet Walt Whitman as Adonis reworks, reinvents, and goes beyond Whitman's
