Alexandra Lopes | Universidade Católica Portuguesa (original) (raw)

Papers by Alexandra Lopes

Mediations of Disruption in Post-Conflict Cinema is a transdisciplinary volume that addresses the... more Mediations of Disruption in Post-Conflict Cinema is a transdisciplinary volume that addresses the cinematic mediation of a wide range of conflicts. From World War II and its aftermath to the exploration of colonial and post-colonial experiences and more recent forms of terrorism, it debates the possibilities, constraints and efficacy of the discursive practices this mediation entails. Despite its variety and amplitude in scope and width, the innovative and singular aspect of the book lies in the fact that the essays give voice to a variety of regions, issues, and filmmaking processes that tend either to remain on the outskirts of the publishing world and/or to be granted only partial visibility in volumes of regional cinema.

Mediations of Disruption in Post-Conflict Cinema, 2016

This essay constitutes a general introduction to the volume Mediations of Disruption in Post-Conf... more This essay constitutes a general introduction to the volume Mediations of Disruption in Post-Conflict Film. More than just describing each contribution, the essay discusses the problems, the different approaches and discursive practices involved in the debates on (post-)conflict situations, and their representation in cinema, pondering its possibilities and limits. By providing insights on modes of representation, the chapter addresses and discusses a politics of conflict representation and an ensuing cinematic poetics of conflict, articulating different critical positionings in a dialogue that highlights a prismatic and complementary understanding of the topic.

Este trabalho é financiado por Fundos Nacionais da FCT-Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia no âm... more Este trabalho é financiado por Fundos Nacionais da FCT-Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia no âmbito do projeto PEst-OE/ELT/UI0126/2013.

Translation Matters

RESUMO: Este texto procura refletir sobre uma ideia de tradução que se assume como uma geografia ... more RESUMO: Este texto procura refletir sobre uma ideia de tradução que se assume como uma geografia de acolhimento, um lugar inclusivo em que recebemos o outro, que é necessariamente diferente do "nós" que traduz. Aplicando a reflexão à Europa, o artigo defende, especulativamente, a tradução como gesto relacional, em que, reconhecendo os nossos outros como iguais, nos (re)conhecemos neles.

Mediations of Disruption in Post-Conflict Cinema, 2016

This essay reflects on how contemporary cinema represents the diverseness resulting from differen... more This essay reflects on how contemporary cinema represents the diverseness resulting from different mobilities, with the city becoming the fractured geography of narratives of displacement and melancholia. Being inhabited by polyphony, the city embodies dissonance and potential conflict, thus becoming a site of translation. Translation becomes a key strategy for deciphering and coming to terms with traditions, contradictions and fears resulting from ‘the flux and chaos of the postcolonial world’. Cinema compounds this multiplicity, which unfolds into a polyphony of refractions staging loss in the aftermath of social upheaval. Films such as London River (2009) and Breaking and Entering (2006) are exemplars of the aesthetic attempt to come to grips with the pluralities and partialities that inhabit the global city.

The huge success of Walter Scott in Portugal in the first half of the 19 th century was partially... more The huge success of Walter Scott in Portugal in the first half of the 19 th century was partially achieved by sacrificing the ironic take on authorship his Waverley Novels entailed. This article examines translations of his works within the context of 19 th century Portugal with a focus on the translation(s) of Waverley. The briefest perusal of the Portuguese texts reveals plentiful instances of new textual authority, which naturally compose a sometimes very different author(ship)-an authorship often mediated by French translations. Thus a complex web of authority emerges effectively, if deviously, (re)creating the polyphony of authorial voices and the displacement of the empirical author first staged by the source texts themselves.

The huge success of Walter Scott in Portugal in the first half of the 19 th century was partially... more The huge success of Walter Scott in Portugal in the first half of the 19 th century was partially achieved by sacrificing the ironic take on authorship his Waverley Novels entailed. This article examines translations of his works within the context of 19 th century Portugal with a focus on the translation(s) of Waverley. The briefest perusal of the Portuguese texts reveals plentiful instances of new textual authority, which naturally compose a sometimes very different author(ship)-- an authorship often mediated by French translations. Thus a complex web of authority emerges effectively, if deviously, (re)creating the polyphony of authorial voices and the displacement of the empirical author first staged by the source texts themselves.

Revista de Letras, 2018

In 1810, Johann Wolfgang Goethe suggested in Zur Farbenlehre that colour is a phenomenon diffi cu... more In 1810, Johann Wolfgang Goethe suggested in Zur Farbenlehre that colour is a phenomenon diffi cult to categorise, resulting as it does from physiology, physics and perception. The fact that colour seems to be experiential to a large extent posits an interesting (and challenging) problem to literary works focussing on it. In this article, I argue that this issue is translational in nature and takes shape at two levels: fi rst, at the level of its representation in literary works — how does one translate a visual experience into words? —, and secondly at the level of its re-representation in translated literary works — how does one translate what is essentially an already-translated visual experience? Whenever colour is semantically and morphologically constitutive of meaning in literature, untranslatability haunts the text. However, publishers and translators rarely shrink from the task of translating on this account. This stake against probability is well worth looking into, as it ...

Cadernos de Tradução

http://dx.doi.org/10.5007/2175-7968.2017v37n1p18Este artigo debruça-se sobre um romance com uma c... more http://dx.doi.org/10.5007/2175-7968.2017v37n1p18Este artigo debruça-se sobre um romance com uma complexa história de publicação: Strawberry Fields Forever de Richard Zimler.Sendo uma narrativa sobre migrantes, o seu trajeto de publicação constitui por si só uma história de migração. Em 2011, Zimler decidiu publicar um livro – Strawberry Fields Forever. Em 2012, o livro estava paginado e pronto para a gráfica. Porém, a Arcadia Books abriu falência, e o livro ficaria por publicar. Em 2011, José Lima traduziu o romance para português europeu com o título Ilha Teresa. Numa nota de tradutor, Lima discute a tradução como forma de “traição consentida”. Assim, a tradução cria um excesso de significado que depende da língua e da experiência de chegada. Embora não constitua propriamente novidade, este excesso resulta, neste caso, do fenómeno da “sobretraduzibilidade”. Esta história de publicação complica-se quando a tradução é exportada para o Brasil, após ter sido “traduzida” para português ...

Europe’s Crises and Cultural Resources of Resilience Conceptual Explorations and Literary Negotiations, 2020

This article argues a two-fold point: (a) modern-day experience is inhabited by mobility that bre... more This article argues a two-fold point: (a) modern-day experience is inhabited by mobility that breeds a sense of rootlessness and un-belonging, consequently, reflections on identity and selfhood are enmeshed in a fabric of translatedness; (b) memoirs and life writings can be read as acts of translation, of bearing lived experience across a narrated page. To be able to tell a story about the self, one translates the experiential into words – words that attempt to make sense out of the randomness of existence. The inherent translatedness of the genre is additionally evinced when the
narrated life unfolds under the aegis of migration.
All these issues are discussed a propos a biography of sorts: Hanif Kureishi’s My Ear at His Heart. Reading My Father (2004). The book presents hitherto unpublished autobiographical material by Kureishi’s father, and as it describes, and to an extent, fictionalises a story of dislocation, the storyteller’s literal writing movement mirrors and problematises the migrant’s translatedness of being. The complexity of Kureishi’s text is compounded by the fact that it is both an attempt at (auto)biography and a form of memoir, as the lives of father and son are inextricably entangled.
Looking into the potential translatability of the memoir as a genre allows for the possibilities and constraints of representing the self to come to the forefront. Following Hall, “the notion of displacement as a place of ‘identity’ is a concept you learn to live with, long before you are able to speak it. Living with, living through difference” (1997: 134). This means that one must dismember in order to remember.

Translators are the shadow heroes of literature, the often forgotten instruments that make it po... more Translators are the shadow heroes of literature, the often forgotten instruments that make it possible for different cultures to talk to one another… (Paul Auster)

In 1992, Lawrence Venuti proposed, in the wake of Friedrich Schleiermacher and Walter Benjamin, a view of translation that "emerges as an active reconstitution of the foreign text mediated by the irreducible linguistic, discursive, and ideological differences of the target-language culture" (1992: 10). This "translation hermeneutic" lays bare the notion of agency, which, while akin to all translatory activity, is conventionally silenced in order not to disturb the illusion of the translator's transparency. Traditionally translators are denied bodies — and voices, and (copy)rights — and histories, so that one of the major cultural deceptions remains unshattered: that of the absolute equivalence between translated texts and their "originals". And an originality that probably derives from the human yearning to be unique.

In this article, I look into a handful of 20th-century texts and their purported translations, in order to showcase that, contrary to popular perception, every act of translation is, must needs be, an authored inscription in the text. I would like to argue that, while this renders the texts different, it does not amount to either betrayal or counterfeit. It is rather the expression of its utter humanity.

The article focuses on a novel with a convoluted publishing history: Richard Zimler’s Strawberry ... more The article focuses on a novel with a convoluted publishing history: Richard Zimler’s Strawberry Fields Forever. As a narrative about migrants, its publishing trajectory constitutes in itself a migration story. In 2011, Zimler planned to have a book coming out – Strawberry Fields Forever. In 2012, the book was paginated and ready to go to press. However, Arcadia Books went bankrupt, and the book remained unpublished. In 2011, José Lima translated the novel into European Portuguese. In a translator’s note, Lima discusses his translation as a form of ‘consented betrayal’. Using the resources of Portuguese, the translated text creates a surplus of meaning(s) dependent on the target language and experience. Although hardly new, the surplus results, in this case, from a phenomenon of “overtranslatability”. This publishing history has been further compounded by the fact that the translated text was exported to Brazil, after being “translated” into Brazilian Portuguese. I would like to address the different forms of migration that this translation brings to the fore: (1) migration as story; (2) migration as form; (3) translation as transit; (4) text migration as a challenge to traditional concepts – as the “original” has never been published, the translations are the only extant texts.

New Frontiers in Translation Studies, 2015

Landscapes of Memory/Paisagens da Memória, 2004

Working in Portugal on the concept of translation in the 19th century, the Translation Studies re... more Working in Portugal on the concept of translation in the 19th century, the Translation Studies researcher will come across a most intriguing but somehow unsurprising phenomenon: s/he seems to be able to uncover an ever growing number of translations which, although unequivocally signed by women, remain anonymous.
Is translation then to be taken as gender-specific in literary tradition and discourses? Judging by the apparent matter-of-factness with which these translations are presented to a wide audience, it would most certainly seem so. While researching 19th-century translational habits, we have so far encountered “a Portuguese lady” [“uma Senhora Portuguesa”], “a lady” [“uma Senhora”], “a Portuguese girl” [“uma menina portuguesa”], “a twelve-year-old girl”, etc. Interesting as it is, the question as to whether these translations were indeed produced by women is – perhaps indefinitely – to remain an unsolved mystery. Yet it cannot be denied that such dubious authorship does in fact mirror the social, political and cultural constraints of the period, landscaping the place(s) which women were allowed to occupy and/or were in fact sent off to.
Like women, translations have traditionally been equated with frailty, treason, and subalternity. Furthermore – as feminist translation theory has revealed in the last 10 to 15 years –, translation has often been metaphorically linked to women. Both seem to be derivative [“she shall be called Woman, because she was taken out of Man” (Genesis, 2, 23)], a necessary evil, who may (and most often do) lead the man/original astray. Translations, like women, seem to be pariahs, whether by choice or imposition, within the meanders of power and memory.
Theoretically, this paper will draw on the work done by feminist scholars within Translation Studies, in an attempt to understand the engendered views on translation, as revealed by newspapers and magazines of the age. We shall furthermore try to position them within their wider cultural framework and to analyse and seek to explain the enigma of such semi-anonymous translations.

Anglo-saxónica. Revista do Centro de Estudos Anglísticos da University of Lisboa, 2012

Paratexts have always played an important role in the history of literary translation. Much atten... more Paratexts have always played an important role in the history of literary translation. Much attention has been devoted to what translators — particularly renowned translators, i.e., those who had previously distinguished themselves in other intellectual fields — had to say about translating, its nature and place in the architecture of the arts. Following this tradition, readers of translation history tend to focus exclusively on prefaces and preface-like material. While undeniably crucial to the understanding of the symbolic and real value of translation at any given period of time, prefaces are but one of the instances of the emergence of the translator in the translated text, and often not even the most challenging, as prefaces and preface-like material are usually constrained by the accepted discursive practices applicable to the format. Furthermore, prefaces usually speak of conscious intentions, and intentions may unconsciously go awry in the actual text or may even be a masquerade, mimickring positions which are not followed through in the text, for their sole aim is to save the translator from social disgrace and/or make a given translatory practice acceptable by paradoxically denying it.

If Theo Hermans is right in assuming that "[i]n any given translation there is a latent gesturing towards additional possibilities and alternative renderings" (Wolf and Fukari, 2007: 61), I would argue that paratexts are the latitude where such gesturing is most obviously harboured. However, prefaces, postfaces, dedicatory epistles and, above all, footnotes and endnotes, glossaries, titles, intertitles, inscriptions — and, more recently, the overflow of public epitext — constitute the liminal space (the text outside/inside the text which discusses the text) that simply cannot be disregarded — it is right in the heart of the text — as it constitutes the locus of a second narrative and points to a new agency of authority within the written text: the translator. Footnotes are, I would like to argue, the clearest manifestation of the Janus-like presence of the translator in the text: while acknowledging the past/origin of the text, the footnote and other paratextual material also assert the translator's present reading/rendering while pointing to other (future?) possibilities of reading the text.

In order to make my position clearer, I discuss three uses of paratexts in the translation of contemporary narrative texts of diverse origin: (1) Rui Viana Pereira's 2004 rendering of James Rollins's Map of Bones, (2) Carla Lopes's 2008 translation of Jay McInnerney's The Good Life, and Paulo Faria's two translations (2004 and 2010) of Corman MacCarthy's Blood Meridian.

What I propose is a heterodox reading of paratexts by looking at them not as instances of failure (of 'indebtedness' in Eco's words) but as the apparent locus of authorship in a translated text. The 'skyscraper of footnotes' stands, in my view, as a monument to the new (and often ultimate) authorship/authority of a text in a given culture — that of the translator. Regardless of what s/he may think or even purport."

Übersetzen - Translating - Traduire: Towards a 'Social Turn'?, 2006

In many respects, Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811-1896) may be said to embody the dreams, fears and c... more In many respects, Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811-1896) may be said to embody the dreams, fears and controversies of her age. Although a polemical figure in literary history nowadays, the “little lady who started the big war”, as Lincoln is said to have called her, dared to question the geometry of accepted power relations in what was then a traditionally male terrain: the world of writing and publishing. By risking visibility, Stowe could lend her [humane? moralising? too white?] voice [or God’s?] to the anti-slavery movement, simultaneously asserting herself as a best-selling author.
Published in 1852, the novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin met with unprecedented success, both in the United States and Europe. It sparked many reactions and translations, and became a best-selling phenomenon in the modern sense of the word. In Portugal, five translations of the work were published in 1853 alone, in both serial and book form. While two of the translations remain elusive, having been part of private collections that have since been dispersed, an examinaton of the remaing three may shed some light on major issues of contemporary translation studies, such as:
(1) The cultural processes of engendering authorship/authority and acceptability, both in literary history and in the political and ideological domains — for example, one of the translations presents the author as male, one Henrique Beecher Stowe;
(2) The ways in which a translated text is put to use in a given culture and at a given time, creating of a community of readers “joined by a common fascination” [Venuti, 2001]. In the case of an anti-slavery best seller, this may well have been an ambivalent need to (i) rewrite the sentimental novel within new political and social contexts, including civil war(s), Chartism, and liberalism; (ii) create the means to express anti-slavery sentiments in Portugal: in 1869, a law was passed putting a formal, if not real, end to slavery in the Portuguese empire;
(3) the import of human translators, people with flesh-and-blood bodies [Pym, 1998], in the history of the field. Examining three contemporary but different translations of the same work may provide new insights into the agency of individual translators and their position in the literary [and ideological] memory of the domestic system.
The paper will endeavour to answer a cluster of interrelated questions: who were the translators; who was responsible for comissioning the 1853 translations in a society that was, to a great extent, still illiterate; what was the [political, social, literary] agenda behind each translated text; how were the texts received, and what effects did they have in the target culture? The answers, however tentative, will provide a different – and hopefully deeper – understanding of one of the most turbulent and exciting periods in Portuguese history and literature.
Reading Harriet Beecher Stowe and the rewritings of her work may supply translation studies scholars with new colours that enable them to landscape more accurately the socio-cultural conditions and effects of translation [Chesterman, 2000] in 19th-century Portugal, thus effectively questioning what we [believe we] know about the literary canon and contributing to an ever more complex and, by the same token, more inclusive geography of memory.

Mediations of Disruption in Post-Conflict Cinema, 2016

Translation Matters

Mediations of Disruption in Post-Conflict Cinema, 2016

The huge success of Walter Scott in Portugal in the first half of the 19 th century was partially... more The huge success of Walter Scott in Portugal in the first half of the 19 th century was partially achieved by sacrificing the ironic take on authorship his Waverley Novels entailed. This article examines translations of his works within the context of 19 th century Portugal with a focus on the translation(s) of Waverley. The briefest perusal of the Portuguese texts reveals plentiful instances of new textual authority, which naturally compose a sometimes very different author(ship)-- an authorship often mediated by French translations. Thus a complex web of authority emerges effectively, if deviously, (re)creating the polyphony of authorial voices and the displacement of the empirical author first staged by the source texts themselves.

Revista de Letras, 2018

Cadernos de Tradução

Europe’s Crises and Cultural Resources of Resilience Conceptual Explorations and Literary Negotiations, 2020

New Frontiers in Translation Studies, 2015

Landscapes of Memory/Paisagens da Memória, 2004

Anglo-saxónica. Revista do Centro de Estudos Anglísticos da University of Lisboa, 2012

Übersetzen - Translating - Traduire: Towards a 'Social Turn'?, 2006

Die Erfahrung lehrt uns, daß die einzelnen Farben besondre Gemütsstimmungen geben ('experience te... more Die Erfahrung lehrt uns, daß die einzelnen Farben besondre Gemütsstimmungen geben ('experience teaches us that the individual colours offer particular dispositions') — Johann Wolfgang Goethe's famous assertion in 1810 already points to a prevailing understanding of colour as a phenomenon difficult to categorise neatly, resulting as it does from physiology, physics and perception and consequently thriving in connotation and potentiality, as much as actuality and denotation.
The fact that colour seems to be experiential to a large extent posits an interesting (and challenging) problem to literary works focussing on colour. I will argue that this problem is translational in nature and takes shape at two levels: first, at the level of its representation in literary works — how does one translate a visual experience into words? —, and secondly at the level of its re-representation in translated literary works — how does one translate what is essentially an already-translated visual experience? Whenever colour is semantically and morphologically constitutive of meaning in literature, untranslatability haunts the text. However, publishers and translators rarely shrink from the task of translating on this account. This stake against probability is well worth looking into, as it may uncover a wealth of creativity and a resistance to the understanding of art as solipsism.
In this paper, Paul Auster's 'Ghosts', part of his New York Trilogy, will be read as a text suggesting a culture-bound hermaneutics of colour, and as such fundamentally untranslatable. I will discuss the possible paradox of this fundamental untranslatability against the text's actual 'translatedness' by examining the two extant Portuguese translations by Maria Luzia Martins (Difusão Cultural, 1990) and Alberto Gomes (Asa, 1999).

In this paper, I reflect on the often paradoxical role played by translation in the imaginings of... more In this paper, I reflect on the often paradoxical role played by translation in the imaginings of 'world literature'. I focus on the (re/dis)figuration of the concept resulting from a most interesting publishing undertaking which I read as a large, ongoing macrotext. I am referring to the most influential — albeit controversial — collection by the publishing house Romano Torres: Selected Works by Selected Authors. Composed entirely of translated novels, the series constitutes arguably both a (meta)discourse on the novel and a canon-forming undertaking.

Published in the 1940s through to the 1960s, the translations are of great interest, as they raise important issues regarding literature, authority and translation in Salazar's Portugal. The keyword is, of course, 'selected'. English-speaking novelists of the 'great tradition' — Austen, Dickens, Scott, Elliot, the Brontë sisters — are taken to be insurmountable models. The selection comprises a view of literature as well as of the world: in the (re)composed face of the other, mainstream Portuguese culture retranslates itself into a set of discursive practices meant to last. The agenda behind the series is further enhanced by the fact that every translation offers novel images of the work and the author translated, thereby actively producing new understandings of authorship, authority and literary language. This is effected through different translatory strategies that insist on the readability of texts, thus imposing an otherness on the authoritative narratives. Viewed critically, authority and authorship are in the collection concepts in transit, as they keeping getting relocated. While the sanctity of the novels and their authors is reiterated, authorship and authorial idiolect are metamorphosed into acceptability.

In this context, I wish to discuss one translation in particular which seems to epitomize the whole project – that of The Mystery of Edwin Drood by Charles Dickens. The novel appears in the collection as having been ‘translated and continued’ by Mário Domingues. Domingues is one of the regular translators in Selected Works by Selected Authors and a rather interesting personality in the Portuguese culture of the time.

Working mostly in the field of Translation Studies, I am particularly interested in observing and... more Working mostly in the field of Translation Studies, I am particularly interested in observing and reflecting on the movement between languages, landscapes and cultures. (Etymologically, translation of course means "to carry across".) My paper will reflect on how contemporary British cinema represents the diverseness and tension(s) resulting from mobilities of different natures (unemployment, war, terrorism), with the global, ever-expanding city becoming the fractured geography of individual narratives of displacement and melancholia (Gilroy 2004). As John McLeod puts it, "the urban and human geography of London has been irreversibly altered as a consequence of patterns of migration" (2004: 4) — being inhabited by a new polyphony, the city comes to embody diversity, dissonance and potential conflict, thus becoming a site of translation.

I argue that cinema — that most inclusive of art forms — compounds this multiplicity, which, in turn, unfolds into a p0lyphony of refractions (see Lefevere, 1985) when staging loss (of security, lives and/or identity) in the aftermath of social tensions and conflicts. As a travelling concept, translation again becomes a key strategy for decyphering and coming to terms with the traditions and contradictions, the challenges and fears resulting from perceptions of what Paul Gilroy critically translates as "the flux and chaos of the postcolonial world, where the danger of terrorism by nihilistic nonstate actors and rogue or failing governments looms at large" (2004:66). While remaining committed to the narrative form, films such as London River (2009) and Breaking and Entering (2006) are exemplary of the aesthetic attempt to come to grips with the pluralities and partialities that inhabit the global city.

The working premise of this paper is the suspicion that the established author of best-selling bo... more The working premise of this paper is the suspicion that the established author of best-selling books has had historically little occasion to dwell upon — let alone interfere with — translations of his work. This may remain true today due to the pressures of the book market and marketing. For the purposes of the present reflection, I would, however, like to delve into the very beginnings of the book industry as such. In the 19th century, the demands of the new industry may very well have hindered successful authors from exercising any form of control over translated texts. Thus, an interesting phenomenon may have occurred: the more popular the book, the less supervised its translation. This, in turn, has often produced new forms of highly creative but hidden authority.

Should one add to this state of affairs an author who, as one of the most famous personalities of his time, is paradoxically conspicuous for and keen on his 'disappearance' from the public eye, and one is confronted with one very interesting form of literary achievement: a form of authorship which builds its authority on a 'disappearing act'. Authorship thus becomes a Protean movement, always displaced, ever unstable — an ever-evolving translatability. The case in point is Walter Scott, the novelist rather than the poet.

I will argue that the huge success of Walter Scott in the first half of the 19th-century was partially achieved by sacrificing the ironic take on authorship and authority his Waverley Novels entailed. I will examine his translations within the context of 19th-century Portugal and focus particularly on the translation(s) of Waverley. The briefest perusal of the Portuguese texts reveals plentiful instances of new authority, while naturally composing a sometimes very different author(ship). An authorship often mediated by French translations and authority (mainly Defauconpret and Montémont). Thus a complex web of authority emerges — with the editors chiming in as well — effectively, if deviously, (re)creating the polyphony of authorial voices and the displacement of the empirical author first staged by the source texts themselves. In having different agendas, translators attained, it could be argued, identity in difference.

Over the course of history, translation has been doubted, (ab)used, outright rejected, forbidden,... more Over the course of history, translation has been doubted, (ab)used, outright rejected, forbidden, exalted, made compulsory, subject to metaphors (≈ translated), elected as metaphor, silenced. Never, however, has it ceased to impact on our worldview in one form or another.
In this paper I would like to argue that translation may well have been the very first — or at least the most visible — form of remixing since the beginning of time, and that it was precisely this feature that has doomed it to cultural oblivion in the West. We need translations but are in love with (the idea of) originals. Thus creativity fell hostage to originality, and we began to live dans l'oubli de nos métamorphoses (Éluard, 1963).
However assimilated the foreign text may be by the recipient culture, translation remains the locus of difference (Venuti, 1992), of exposure to and contagion from other worldviews, other languages, other people. To a greater or lesser extent, translation always confronts us with the "elsewhereness" of our existence, our dependence upon the other to achieve even the semblance of autonomy.

Throughout centuries, the discourse on translation has reminded us of its participatory nature of translation — sometimes in spite of itself and out of its dream of total equivalence. Metaphors as different as digestion/cannibalism (du Bellay/de Campos), transplantation (Schleiermacher), transubstantiation (Mendes Leal), cross-dressing (Willamowitz-Moellendorf) all point to translation as a geography of confluence, both integrating and transgressing difference — a patchwork of creativity and dissonance, polyphony and nostalgia.
Resorting to the example of Walter Scott's reception in 19th and 20th-century Europe, we seek to showcase translation as a remixing practice avant la lettre, one that both complies with and questions the laws of copyright and authority/authorship.

In 1992, Lawrence Venuti proposed, in the wake of Friedrich Schleiermacher and Walter Benjamin, a... more In 1992, Lawrence Venuti proposed, in the wake of Friedrich Schleiermacher and Walter Benjamin, a view of translation that "emerges as an active reconstitution of the foreign text mediated by the irreducible linguistic, discursive, and ideological differences of the target-language culture" (1992: 10). This "translation hermeneutic" lays bare the notion of agency, which, while akin to all translatory activity, is conventionally silenced in order not to disturb the illusion of the translator's transparency. Traditionally translators are denied bodies — and voices, and (copy)rights — and histories, so that one of the major cultural deceptions remains unshattered: that of the absolute equivalence between translated texts and their "originals". And an originality that probably derives from the human yearning to be unique.

In this paper, I shall look into a handful of 20th-century texts and their purported translations, in order to showcase that, contrary to popular perception, every act of translation is, must needs be, an authored inscription in the text. I would like to argue that, while this renders the texts different, it does not amount to either betrayal or counterfeit. It is rather the expression of its utter humanity.

However factual, biography is always dependent on imagination, and remains a hybrid construct per... more However factual, biography is always dependent on imagination, and remains a hybrid construct permanently lost in the contact zone between historiography and fiction. While the data (the Gradgrindian facts) may belong to the realm of the verifiable, the flux of narrative, its meanders and sequentiality always comes after, as does the sense of completeness, of well-roundedness — in short: of a meaningful life. Thus, all biography tends to be conservative in gesture, aiming, as it usually does, to construct and/or preserve the notion of life as (stable) narrative. Biography, not unlike maps, is an expression of rage at the frailty of human life.

Rethinking biography and the expectations it raises is all the more significant, when discussing texts that willfully remain at the borders of established genres, such as is the case of a tale of the life of J. S. Bach: The Little Chronicle of Magdalena Bach. Published in 1925, the text does not so much attempt to be a biography in the academic sense, rather it is supposed to be an exalted, personal account of Bach's life by his second wife, Anna Magdalena.

The gesture is reinforced by anonymity, as the first edition of the book omits any reference to an author, thereby allowing the function of the author to be taken up by the 1st-person narrator: Anna Magdalena herself. Through this strategy and a clever understanding of the power of language in translation, the book manages to manipulate the reader's expectations of both biography and translation, and effectively creates a pseudotranslation and a fictional biography. It is, in a sense, a forgery. Readers are led to believe the text they are perusing is a translation of Anna Magdalena’s memoirs. Many generations have therefore read the sentimental chronicle as biography and correspondingly shaped their emotional knowledge of Bach on an imaginary account written by Esther Meynell.

While hardly interesting by contemporary literary standards, the text posits challenging questions regarding genre, gender, translatory and (broadly speaking) cultural issues, one of the most interesting being the problem of how literary authority is achieved in the absence of the name of the author. Arguably, authority is gained here by effacing any sign of external authorship.

The absolute suppression of the author's name, the clever play on preconceptions of verisimilitude, authorship, biography and translation have produced a complex web of imaginary contexts and a representation of historical figures that the success of the book rendered even more intricate. It prompted a vast number of versions, all of which differ immensely from the English text, as the former fail, as a general rule, to recognise the latter as the "original" text.

Retracing the cultural assumptions that led to a maze of duplicity and counterfeit narratives may allow us not only to draw up a tentative cartography of reading expectations and trust within the literary system but also to illuminate the many functions of translation as a means of (re)defining a geography of images, lies, (mis)conceptions & dreams in any given culture.

The collection of essays by eleven TS researchers focuses on translation in the first half of the... more The collection of essays by eleven TS researchers focuses on translation in the first half of the 20th century, a period of political and social turmoil in Europe. The collection concentrates mainly, though not exclusively, on the Iberian Peninsula, addressing relevant questions, such as censorship and dictatorial regimes, power, war, the role of women in society. It seeks to shed new light on the concepts, debates and practices of the time, as well as to showcase both translatedness in its many guises (translation, adaptation, pseudotranslation) and its conspicuous absences. The contributors discuss, in different ways and using various methodologies, the omnipresence of translation in «the age of the extremes»

The first edition of the Lisbon Spring School in Translation Studies aims to provide an open spac... more The first edition of the Lisbon Spring School in Translation Studies aims to provide an open space for the exchange of ideas, methods, and best practices.

O poema "Rua André Breton" (Entre a Cortina e a Vidraça, 1972), de Alexandre O'Neill, pode ser li... more O poema "Rua André Breton" (Entre a Cortina e a Vidraça, 1972), de Alexandre O'Neill, pode ser lido como súmula perspicaz da história da literatura de uma parte significativa do século XX português. O'Neill convoca para o poema os dois movimentos literários que marcaram, de forma determinante e transgressora, o panorama nacional, a partir da década de 30 do século XX: o Neorrealismo (a que alude no verso "A imitação do isto, a gangazul, a variz da varina") e o Surrealismo (vincando-se desde logo a dissidência e a mobilidade como marcas identitárias do movimento: "A rua André Breton está sempre a mudar de rua.")

The conference wishes to be a locus of celebration and discussion, both by placing Mary Shelley a... more The conference wishes to be a locus of celebration and discussion, both by placing Mary Shelley and Emily Brontë in the context of their time (coeval artists and ideas), and by displacing them and investigating their impact on literature and other media (music, cinema, videogames, etc.). By rereading the works critically in the context of a 200-hundred-year time lapse, the conference aims to look at the texts as clues ‘to how we live, how we have been living, how we have been led to imagine ourselves, how our language has trapped as well as liberated us, how the very act of naming has been till now a male prerogative, and how we can begin to see and name – and therefore live – afresh’ (Rich, 1979: 35).

Throughout history, but particularly from the 1800s onwards, translation has played a pivotal, th... more Throughout history, but particularly from the 1800s onwards, translation has played a pivotal, though often silent, role in the increasingly pressing goal of promoting literacy and the ideal of 'universal education'. In the 19 th and early 20 th centuries serialized translations in newspapers, as well as inexpensive collections of translated works were often used both as a means of educating the masses and of increasing sales. Thus, translation has been instrumental in both the rise in literacy and the growth of capitalism. Resorting to translation was often an ambiguous means, both progressive and conservative in nature, of enhancing literacy, on the one hand, and of producing and disseminating pulp literature among the uneducated masses on the other, thus actively seeking to preserve the status quo in the fast-changing world of industrialization. It could be argued that translation and literacy have always shared a common goal: that of striving to acquaint with unfamiliarity and difference, with a surplus of meaning and information, of molding citizens out of subjects by providing them with the ability to make informed choices in religion, politics, and culture are concerned, and, thereby, to expand their worldview, making it broader and more inclusive. Nowadays, both the concept and the everyday practice of citizenship in a global world require informed and literate subjects, who are able to decode and interpret a range of different discursive practices produced with the help of multiple technologies. Therefore, 'literacy' has come to be redefined, eschewing the traditional definition of 'classic' literacy and encompassing a series of mental and practical tasks. UNESCO, for instance, argues that '[l]iterate societies are more than locales offering access to printed matter, written records, visual materials and advanced technologies; ideally, they enable the free exchange of text-based information and provide an array of opportunities for lifelong learning.' (Education for all. Global Monitoring Report, 2006, http://www.unesco.org/education/GMR2006/full/chapt6_eng.pdf). NGOs are keen to stress the role that literacy plays in the development of communities and countries. However, as the

In spite of all the century-long – theoretical, social, political, economic – noise about and aro... more In spite of all the century-long – theoretical, social, political, economic – noise about and around translation, which has tended to represent it as (just) replication, translators and editors, authors and other literary agents have always known that translation entails, must entail transformation. Languages, cultures, historical, political, social circumstances, and authorial idiolects are too diverse to allow for mere reproduction.
While Venuti’s invisibility concept and discussion illustrate the translators’ status quo in the West rather aptly, highlighting the ways in which this obscures their presence in the public realm, there is still much work to do in order to document how translators have lived through this invisibility, i.e., how their being mostly invisible in Western world throughout time has, on the one hand, socially detracted from their rightful place in culture, and, on the other, how invisibility has made a set of practices possible that have helped shape the ways a given culture sees (and construes) its different Others. As ‘undercover agents’ (Cronin, 2003), translators were, in fact, allotted a not negligible degree of power: that of introducing and (re)presenting the other in a given culture. This has, more often than not, implied a sense of centeredness, a sense of a ‘we’ speaking about (translating) ‘them’. As Adrienne Rich (1985) reminds us, it may be fruitful to ask who ‘we’ are, inasmuch as ‘we’ have to be responsible for ‘our’ others, their presence but, to some extent, also their invention.
As every piece of translation – literary, economic, political – can be both a decentering and a recentering practice, i.e., a window into the lives of others and/or a brick in the wall of self-perception, this special issue of Cadernos de Tradução aims at discussing processes of manipulation, (dis/re)figuration and (mis)understanding the Other/others. In short: the processes by which translation as creative transformation helps produce the imaginative fabric of a culture.
Contributions focusing on translated children’s literature, travel writing, memoirs, migration literature, journalism are particularly welcome. The volume would like to provide tentative answers to questions such as: how have translation practices and patterns produced images of the other(s) for different audiences?, how have others been ‘exoticized’ throughout time and how has this been made part of the imaginings of different cultures?, how is fear of the other(s) construed in and through translation?, in what ways does children’s literature (as well as literature for adults) promote/detract from a cosmopolitan worldview?

TRANSLOCAL. , 2022

Convite à publicação no n.º5 da revista TRANSLOCAL, subordinado ao tema TRADUÇÃO. As propostas (... more Convite à publicação no n.º5 da revista TRANSLOCAL, subordinado ao tema TRADUÇÃO.
As propostas (texto completo e eventuais imagens) deverão ser enviadas até 30 de junho de 2023, para a coordenação da revista (translocal.revista@mail.uma.pt).
Acolher-se-ão com interesse propostas de ensaios escritos e artigos (entre 2500 e 5000 palavras), ensaios visuais (até 5 imagens + texto complementar, entre 500 e 1000 palavras), e recensões críticas (entre 1000/2000 palavras), que, ocupando-se de questões associadas aos fenómenos de tradução (aqui entendidos em sentido lato), abordem (não exclusivamente) tópicos como:

» a (não) tradução como política: nacionalismos, cosmopolitismos e translocalidades;
» a tradução como poética na literatura e/ou em outras artes;
» economia e pragmática da tradução;
» Estudos de Tradução: estado da arte e/ou novas perspectivas;
» História da tradução;
» (po)éticas de tradução: desafios, potencialidades e riscos recriativos e interculturais;
» projetos de tradução (projetos editoriais, coleções, manifestos, etc.): casos de estudo;
» tradutores/as e outros/as agentes de tradução: invisibilidades e desocultação;
» práticas emergentes de tradução no mundo digital.
...