Literary Translations and the Making of Originals, by Karen Emmerich (original) (raw)

Self-translation in Translingual Writing

Autotraduction aux frontières de la langue et de la culture, 2013

The paper dwells on the polyvalence of self-translation in the work of translingual authors (ranging from a rhetorical device mimicking multilingual conversations or imaginary languages to ways of circumventing censorship or editorial pressures) and draws most of the examples from works of Nabokov, Beckett, and Nancy Huston. Since their creations take shape not only in the space between two languages (langue, in Saussure’s terms), but in intertextual and intratextual crevices, between multiple langages and genres even within one language, I designate a consistent practice of writing in two or more languages and self-translating as translingual writing and examine self-translation as one of its modes. Brian Fitch and Michael Oustinoff's major studies of bilingual writing and self- translation rightly stress the difficulty of finding an appropriate, all-encompassing theoretical model for the enterprise of self-translation. Since each translation is driven by different needs and impulses, I find it more productive to study the role of self-translation within the ensemble of the authors' work, to historicize and to contextualize each instance of self-translation and to examine the changing functions and audiences of self-translated texts. Whenever possible, I compare and contrast the authors’ views on translation of other writers with their self-translating strategies.

Literary Translation and the Making of Originals

This book starts from one main premise: a literary translation makes an original. This is bolstered with a series of related ideas that are fleshed out in five interesting and detailed case studies, further cementing the argument that literary translation does not first and foremost transfer meaning or produce equivalence but stabilizes an unstable original. Karen Emmerich's argument runs counter to the conventional notions about source texts and target texts that have largely framed Anglo-American/European work in academic Translation Studies over the past half-century, and that underlie most non-academic ideas about translation as well – at least in the Anglo-American Eurozone. She states point blank that the binary view of source and target texts and the expectation of " equivalence " and " faithfulness " this brings with it, always condemn translation, to failure and to accusations of " loss " if not treachery.

THE WORK OF LITERARY TRANSLATION

Offering an original reconceptualization of literary translation, Clive Scott argues against traditional approaches to the theory and practice of translation. Instead, he suggests that translation should attend more to the phenomenology of reading, triggering creative textual thinking in the responsive reader rather than testing the hermeneutic skills of the professional translator. In this new guise, translation enlists the reader as an active participant in the constant re-fashioning of the text's structural, associative, intertextual and inter-sensory possibilities, so that our larger understanding of ecology, anthropology, comparative literature and aesthetics is fundamentally transformed and our sense of the expressive resources of language is radically extended. Literary translation thus assumes an existential value which takes us beyond the text itself to how it situates us in the world, and what part it plays in the geography of human relationships.

Translators Writing, Writing Translators

2016

is professor emerita of Spanish and translation studies at Kent State University. The inspiration for this book, she is a prizewinning translator of the works of Octavio Armand, Severo Sarduy, Rosa Chacel, and María Zambrano and a leading scholar in translation studies who has published widely on topics ranging from the poetry of Ramón del Valle-Inclán to issues of gender, ethics, and the pedagogy of translation. She was instrumental in giving voice to translators in the United States through a number of interviews and many collaborative works. She has had and continues to have a profound influence on many students, scholars, writers, and translators, several of them contributors to this volume in her honor. Her work displays a rare combination of extreme precision, erudition, daring, and generosity. She is currently the book review editor for Translation and Interpreting Studies and a member of the advisory board of The Translator, TTR, and the book series Literatures, Cultures, Translation (Bloomsbury). She is also translating work by Octavio Armand and Rosa Chacel and editing a volume in honor of another formidable translator, the late Helen Lane.

TRANSFORMING LITERATURE: THE HERMENEUTICS OF TRANSLATION

This article focuses on the manner in which the translator signals her presence in the translation of Kiran Desai's Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard. In the light offered by semiotics and componential analysis, I will attempt to illustrate the differences regarding shades of meaning, the appropriateness of lexemes in the given context and the occasional inaccuracies that emerge in the TT. The study will also prove that receptor response is usually challenged by the effect the content, form and style of the ST had on the translator and that it loses its importance if the translation has not been previously evaluated.

The Translation Memoir: An Introduction

2024

This introduction presents the frame and contents of this volume devoted to the translation memoir. The translation memoir is formed at the intersection of life writing and translation studies, in which translators interweave reflections on their practice, craft, texts they translate and positionalities they occupy. As such it is a kind of creative-critical research carried out by translators. It offers a unique entry into texts, languages, cultures and the work of translation. The contributions included in the volume explore the way in which the subject position of writing can be displaced and problematised by inserting the translator's voice and subjectivity into a text, as the translator is precisely the player within a textual ecology who is supposed to not occupy a central position, but reside on the margins, invisible or couched in shadows, speaking only through the voice of another. The writings discussed in this volume, and in some cases the writings themselves, are thus a form of translational experimentation insofar as they break some of the rules, or push the limits of translation as precisely that which is not traditionally considered an original, authored writing. As such it is also a location from which to carry out critiques of other dominant paradigms such as national or gender-based oppressions.

The Translation Memoir as Autotheory (Chapter 1)

Translation as Creative-Critical Practice, 2023

translation practices resist the classification of cultures and languages which 'the modern regime of translation' reproduces (Sakai 2017). In this study, I therefore also propose to analyse the hierarchical relationship between translation practice and theory as a stabilising force of social and geographical norms. My Element posits that the apparent division of labour between practice and theory in translation studies is not socially neutral but reproduces wider asymmetries of power along the lines of gender, racial and social inequalities by perpetuating silence and ways of (not) listening to the theoretical thinking implied in conventional and unconventional translation choices. In other words, I argue that to open translation to creative-critical enquiry is to move away from a communicative model of translation in order to reframe and rethink the regime of translation which naturalises such differences. Section 1 discusses how the division between practice and theory in translation studies comes under scrutiny in what I call 'autotheoretical' translation memoirs. Predominantly written by women, autotheoretical translation memoirs explore translation as an embodied experience of the relationship between practice and theory in translation. They can be interpreted as a wider critique of strong theory's inclination to overlook the 'tender things' of translation (Siddiqi 2022), and its tendency to underestimate the entangled and co-emergent relation between language and matter in processes of theorisation (Barad 2007). Section 2 explores what I call performative translations, or translations which make visible and question the performativity present in translation as a repetition of norms, differences and values, as well as texts. After exploring the theoretical contours of performative translation practice by analysing experimental translations by Charles Berstein, Caroline Bergvall, and Erin Moure, this analysis focuses on Anne Carson's translation of Sappho's texts. I analyse how the practice of translation itself is mobilised in her performance of interpretation and theorisation. The third and final Section focuses on visual and literary examples of what I call 'transtopian' translations, or translations which explore and disrupt geopolitical frameworks of identity modelled on the nation. Instead of 'thickening' the source-text or culture in translation, I argue that transtopian approaches to translation 'thicken' the practice of translation itself as a location of critique and contestation of hegemonic ontologies of belonging (Appiah 1993).