The Trampslator: Performing the Translation of the Sound of Silence (original) (raw)

Translation as a Liminal Poetic Practice.

Poetry Wales, 2018

In the afterword of "Currently & Emotion: Translations" (Test Centre, 2017), Zoë Skoulding states that ‘[a]s poets seek to orient themselves in rapidly changing configurations of time, space and technology, translation and poetry become ever more interdependent’ (Skoulding: 340-341). Contemporary experimental poets have recently shown a lot of interest in translation, to the extent that creative translation has become a poetic practice, or at least an important part of its forms and discourse. In this piece I will show how this interest continues practices originated by twentieth-century avant-gardists. I will address two creative translations of the last century and two contemporary pieces in order to trace a liminality common to these works. In all of them the position of the poet moves between and within the texts, constantly reconfiguring their role, while the texts also move between and within languages, questioning concepts of ‘originality’ and authorship throughout.

Translation: a process that penetrates the silences

A Jar of Wild Flowers: Essays in Celebration of John Berger, London: ZED Publications 2016., 2016

Translator choices, issues of fidelity, the infinite possibilities of différance and, ultimately, culture itself as a living process of translation. A remodeling of the key points (excluding examples) of my essay "Translating John Berger: A plunge into the deep" from the collective book "A Jar of Wild Flowers: Essays in celebration of John Berger". London: ZED Publications, 2016.

TRAS 5240.03 Desire in Translation: Explorations in Contemporary Poetics and Practices

Overview: This course offers a survey of theories and practices of literary translation that seek to account for the unpredictable effects of the cultural unconscious in the translator's work. Drawing on a range of theories (psychoanalytic, feminist and postcolonial) of language, culture and translation, the course will provide a critical laboratory for students to ask questions about the role of desire in translation, and its multifaceted implications with regards to translators' agency and their role as cultural producers.

the poetics of movement & translation

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.

Transmedial Noise: Babel and the Translation of Radio

Yearbook of Comparative Literature, 2017

In his 1923 essay "The Task of the Translator," Walter Benjamin takes a strong stance against the idea of communicability in poetry: "But what then is there in a poem-and even bad translators concede this to be essential-besides a message? Isn't it generally acknowledged to be the incomprehensible, the secret, the 'poetic'?" The theory of translation that flows from this statement is one in which concepts such as transparency and originality are cast aside in favor of the notion of the secret that, he claims, lies at the heart of poetic language. Here, the idea of Babel as a site of confusion, as a fall from grace, is called into question. How do we approach Babel today, and what new forms, what new media allow us to reconsider Benjamin's assertions? This article considers the way in which conceptual art has approached the question of untranslatability through the motif of noise. Evaluating the role sound plays in thinking through the problem of untranslatability, I suggest that it is through "transmedial exposure"the exposure of one medium to another-that we can begin to think about the ethics and politics of untranslatability, of Babel. The article takes as a case study Brazilian conceptual artist Cildo Meireles's 2001 large-scale sculptural installation Babel, a tower of radios each tuned to a different station that, taken together, produce an overwhelming experience of cacophony.

From voice to performance, the artistic agency of literary translators

Unsettling Translation, 2022

The relationship between a text and its translation is arguably one of the most basic questions addressed by translation theory. It is this relationship that defines translation and governs the value norms that emerge around a definition. Hermans’s proposal of authentication instead of equivalence as the defining feature of translation is the most important development in translation theory since Toury’s proposal of the notion of assumed translation and the subsequent disciplinary shift in focus from prescription to description. Hermans’s understanding of translation as metarepresentation highlights the inevitable presence of the translator’s voice, thus facilitating a disciplinary shift away from fidelity as the key parameter for evaluating translation and promoting a self-reflective and ethically aware stance towards translation as social action. In this article I argue that, in the context of literary translation, the notion of performance captures more aspects of the translator’s art than that of voice. In particular, it enables the location of literary translation within a wider theory of art in a way that does better justice to its artistic nature. My claim is that in quoting another literary text, translators give rise to a new work of art which, authenticated or otherwise, takes on a life of its own, beyond the control of authors and translators. The illusionary – but pragmatic and legal – effects of authentication disguise the nature of translation as a work of art with a social life of its own.

Translating Drama: Speaking the Unspeakable in Other Words

A play is meant for stage performance. Translating a dramatic work is in many ways different from translating the other genres of literature, for the language spoken in a play is colloquial and not necessarily formal. It is not simply an act of transferring linguistic or verbal rhetoric per se; it is an act of cultural shift and remaking, involving cross-cultural interaction of homogeneity, and adaptation of cultural heterogeneity. It is both a linguistic and cultural exchange of conversations and dialogues. Drama translation involves actability of the characters, performativity of the roles, clarity of thoughts, and brevity of speeches. Time, place and action, as well as the stage and the audience, are to receive special consideration as far as drama translation is concerned. The paper investigates the extent to which translation theory gives rise to the strategy of 'intentional betrayal' to attain the 'translatability' of the 'untranslatability.' The paper again attempts to validate the analogical dichotomy between theory and practice in translation studies, focusing on the dynamics of translation based on a translational process of loss and gain.

Self-Translation, (Anti-)Translation: Roque Raquel Salas Rivera’s Poem 45

CEA Critic, Volume 86, Number 3, 2024

In response to the 2017 Puerto Rican hurricanes María and Irma, Roque Raquel Salas Rivera's 2019 while they sleep (under the bed is another country) alternates between various Spanish-English translingual strategies. This paper discusses one of these translingual strategies, a technique named here as (anti-)translation. As exemplified by the collection's poem 45, (anti-)translation is the ironic performance of a failed and violent style of translation-critically staging how Puerto Ricans were translated into silence in the hurricanes' wake. In the poems that (anti-) translate, fragments of Spanish-language voices return in the footnotes to haunt the failures of English-language, translated texts. As English is subverted by Spanish and the main text is undermined by paratext, Salas Rivera's (anti-)translation dramatizes how translation has reinforced colonial power through the stories that such translation has left actively untold.

Politics and Poetics in Translation

The Translator is a refereed international journal that seeks to bring professional and academic interests closer together by addressing issues that have relevance in both professional and academic settings. It publishes articles on a variety of issues related to translation and interpreting as acts of intercultural communication, without restriction in scope to any particular school of thought or academic group. By keeping an open mind on how translation can or should be studied and the kind of disciplines that can inform it, The Translator hopes to provide a meeting point for existing as well as future approaches and to stimulate interaction between various groups who share a common concern for translation as a profession and translation studies as a discipline. Translation is understood to cover all types of translation, whether written or oral, including activities such as literary and commercial translation, various forms of oral interpreting, dubbing, voice-overs, subtitling, translation for the stage, and such under-researched areas as sign language interpreting and community interpreting.