Books by Valerie Henitiuk
Spark of Light: Short stories by women writers of Odisha (book download available for free)
Spark of Light is a diverse collection of short stories by women writers from the Indian province... more Spark of Light is a diverse collection of short stories by women writers from the Indian province of Odisha. Originally written in Odia and dating from the late nineteenth century to the present, these stories offer a multiplicity of voices—some sentimental and melodramatic, others rebellious and bold—and capture the predicament of characters who often live on the margins of society. From a spectrum of viewpoints, writing styles, and motifs, the stories included here provide examples of the great richness of Odishan literary culture.
In the often shadowy and grim world depicted in this collection, themes of class, poverty, violence, and family are developed. Together they form a critique of social mores and illuminate the difficult lives of the subaltern in Odisha society. The work of these authors contributes to an ongoing dialogue concerning the challenges, hardships, joys, and successes experienced by women around the world. In these provocative explorations of the short-story form, we discover the voices of these rarely heard women.
A Literature of Restitution: Critical Essays on W.G. Sebald. Co-edited with J. Baxter and B. Hutchinson. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2013.
This book investigates the crucial question of 'restitution' in the work of W. G. Sebald. Written... more This book investigates the crucial question of 'restitution' in the work of W. G. Sebald. Written by leading scholars from a range of disciplines, with a foreword by his English translator Anthea Bell, the essays collected in this volume place Sebald's oeuvre within the broader context of European culture in order to better understand his engagement with the ethics of aesthetics.
Whilst opening up his work to a range of under-explored areas including dissident surrealism, Anglo-Irish relations, contemporary performance practices and the writings of H. G. Adler, the volume notably returns to the original German texts. The recurring themes identified in the essays - from Sebald's carefully calibrated syntax to his self-consciousness about 'genre', from his interest in liminal spaces to his literal and metaphorical preoccupation with blindness and vision - all suggest that the 'attempt at restitution' constitutes the very essence of Sebald's understanding of literature.
A comparative, interdisciplinary approach, incorporating both anthropological theories of the lim... more A comparative, interdisciplinary approach, incorporating both anthropological theories of the limen and feminist literary criticism, brings to light vital aspects of four very different works. This book analyses liminality as a meaningful strategy for social comment and protest in works by Murasaki Shikibu, Marie de France, Elizabeth Inchbald, and Edith Wharton. Negotiating the demands and perils of courtship, their heroines create a form of refuge on the threshold as a way of protesting a female’s bounded body and limited options. Through an innovative juxtaposition of East and West, ancient and modern, and multiple linguistic communities, striking connections in women’s writing are revealed. Embodied Boundaries demonstrates how these authors, despite obvious differences in socio-cultural context, employ strikingly similar images that act to destabilize the prevalent centre/margin paradigm and thereby challenge gendered hierarchical practices based on a damaging imbalance of power.
A comparative study of translations of The Pillow Book.
Embodied Boundaries: Images of Liminality in a Selection of Women-Authored Courtship Narratives (Madrid: Gateway Press, 2007)
Papers by Valerie Henitiuk
“Prefacing Gender: Framing Sei Shônagon for a Western Audience, 1875-2006.” Translating Women. Ed. L. von Flotow. Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 2011. 239-61.
Complete and partial versions of the Classical Japanese text known as the Pillow Book (Makura [no... more Complete and partial versions of the Classical Japanese text known as the Pillow Book (Makura [no] Sôshi) of Sei Shônagon have appeared in many different languages since Japan was “discovered” by the West in the mid-19th century and today, at the dawn of the 21st century, new translations are being published apace. Because mediation of a given text for its target-language readership cannot help but significantly impact communication, an analysis of the translator’s explicit and implicit attitudes as expressed in prefaces and notes usefully reveals how readers have been led to understand and respond to this author over the past 130 years. More particularly, such paratextual materials provide evidence of the central role gender continues to play in the framing of a woman author by her (predominantly male) translators. Discussion of Sei Shônagon’s physical appearance, “loveability”, sexuality, and competitiveness with both men and women at the imperial court constitutes an important part of these prefatory remarks. Another common theme with gendered implications for how the author and her work are read is the degree to which art is involved in writing the deliberately informal genre of zuihitsu. In this article, I explore how awareness of/engagement with gender in translators’ prefaces has been and remains bound up with the reception of this masterpiece by Western audiences.
Refraction involves the turning or bending of something as it passes from one medium into another... more Refraction involves the turning or bending of something as it passes from one medium into another, the term normally being used of light or sound waves, which become oblique as they encounter the boundary between media of different densities. The wave’s velocity is affected by this change in medium; the wavelength changes (increasing or decreasing depending on circumstances) although the frequency may remain the same. Refraction tends to create optical illusions, for which our brains have learned to compensate—we “know” that a pencil standing in a glass of water is not really broken or that objects below the surface of a lake are not quite as large as they may appear. More spectacular natural phenomena such as rainbows or the splitting of white light into many colours as it passes through a glass prism and disperses (i.e. its various components each taking a different angle) are also the result of refraction, the colour spectrum constituting the visible manifestation of the existing range of wavelengths. It was Newton who taught us that all those colours are not created by the prism, as was previously believed, but rather that they are naturally contained within the light itself.
I cannot help but find this concept to be a surprisingly useful one for working through how texts angle off in a different direction from the path of origin upon being translated, how they adapt to new forms and take on new significances, and how we are able to read, in English, something quite different in form and style from what the West understands as belonging to the novelistic genre and yet speak in all seriousness of having read a Japanese novel. This article, therefore, will tease out what it might mean to understand literary translation, retranslation, and their related creative by-products as being indebted to an inherently refractive process. If we look at translational activity in terms of a prism that functions to reveal a range of colours or interpretations, can this help us avoid some of the more common traps of the perennial and perennially over-simplifying dichotomy of domestication versus foreignization or literal versus free? Can we usefully view a given source text’s offshoots in other languages and cultures as various manifestations of the spectrum already potentially present in an original work of literature?
![Research paper thumbnail of “A Crisis of Translation: Early European Encounters with Japan,” A Companion to Translation Studies. Ed. S. Bermann and C. Porter. Oxford: John Wiley & Sons, 2014. 401-12. [pre-pub. ms.]](https://attachments.academia-assets.com/42710197/thumbnails/1.jpg)
The 19th century as a whole represents a pivotal moment in global cultural exchange and translati... more The 19th century as a whole represents a pivotal moment in global cultural exchange and translation history. Perhaps nothing, however, elucidates the spirit of the age better than the European encounter with Japan, where the incipient sense of boundless possibility is coupled with a profound disorientation. When this long-isolated nation was abruptly and forcibly opened for trade in 1854, the West finally got a glimpse of its hitherto unsuspected literary wealth. Importantly, what was being “discovered” in Japan was not a dead language, its artefacts long buried beneath the sand and lacking native interpreters—this was a living entity, if only just being revealed. Granted, an intrepid few had already tentatively undertaken studies of the Japanese language, despite the extreme dearth of resources, and a contemporary novel had even been translated into German as early as 1847, but suddenly scholar-diplomats, philologists, and interested amateurs enjoyed the possibility of direct, albeit problematic, access.
Before Suematsu’s 1882 translation of the Tale of Genji, the information available in the West ab... more Before Suematsu’s 1882 translation of the Tale of Genji, the information available in the West about Murasaki Shikibu’s masterpiece was sketchy and erroneous. Reaction to his version was mixed: reviewers are curious about the previously unsuspected literary world presented to them, but struggle to comprehend and find points of reference. Suematsu’s own relationship with his text was a markedly ambivalent one, as he adopts an apologetic posture regarding the “effeminacy” and lack of “true morality” of the age in which it was written, and justifies his extensive abridgements as being of only “superfluous” material. My paper focuses on the circumstances that made possible this early representation of Japanese literature to the West, while paradoxically keeping the Genji from being widely read and admired until Waley’s famous translation appeared some 40 years later.
From Pre-Modern Japan to the Twenty-First Century World: Comparative Translation in the Classroom [link to article]
This essay discusses how serial translations and adaptations can be used pedagogically to enhance... more This essay discusses how serial translations and adaptations can be used pedagogically to enhance a student's understanding of the complexities of textual production, re-production and reception. It draws on the author's research in world literature, specifically with regard to pre-modern Japanese texts. The discussion proposes effective ways to challenge our students' understanding of authorship, stimulate classroom discussion, and foreground the centrality of translational concepts to every act of reading literary works, Romantic or otherwise.
The opening sentences of an 1896 anthology of Japanese literature read as follows:
Translating Woman: Reading the Female through the Male
Meta: Journal des traducteurs, 2000
La critique féministe dit souvent que le sexe de l'auteur et de l'audience peut avoir u... more La critique féministe dit souvent que le sexe de l'auteur et de l'audience peut avoir un impact très profond sur notre compréhension des paradigmes et métaphores littéraires, comme c'est le cas pour le sens et la signification en général. Selon ces critiques, l'expérience de la ...
Comparative Literature Studies, 2008
The Genji dates from the early eleventh century, but is widely read today via translations into m... more The Genji dates from the early eleventh century, but is widely read today via translations into modern Japanese and a vast range of other languages. Although an examination of the Japanese modernizations of the Genji is beyond the scope of this article, it should be pointed out ...
Translation Studies, 2008
In the west, frequent references to thousand-year-old masterpieces such as the Tale of Genji and ... more In the west, frequent references to thousand-year-old masterpieces such as the Tale of Genji and the Pillow Book suggest that although born in a particular national context, such works now possess a new life as international cultural artefacts. All too often, however, the globalization of Japanese literature reveals a quite astonishing persistence of Orientalist and otherwise reductive readings. This article examines Sei Shônagon’s Pillow Book as an eastern text that, from a western perspective, acquires meaning only when articulated by the west, albeit in forms that would prove unrecognizable to its author or her contemporaries. Focusing on how they underpin or resist Orientalising themes and attitudes, I consider the multiple and rapidly multiplying translations that it has inspired. The term ‘translation’ is used in its broadest possible meaning to encapsulate a vast range of linguistic and cultural transfers along a continuum from literal to free, involving various forms of manipulation in the process of transforming this work into world literature.
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Books by Valerie Henitiuk
In the often shadowy and grim world depicted in this collection, themes of class, poverty, violence, and family are developed. Together they form a critique of social mores and illuminate the difficult lives of the subaltern in Odisha society. The work of these authors contributes to an ongoing dialogue concerning the challenges, hardships, joys, and successes experienced by women around the world. In these provocative explorations of the short-story form, we discover the voices of these rarely heard women.
Whilst opening up his work to a range of under-explored areas including dissident surrealism, Anglo-Irish relations, contemporary performance practices and the writings of H. G. Adler, the volume notably returns to the original German texts. The recurring themes identified in the essays - from Sebald's carefully calibrated syntax to his self-consciousness about 'genre', from his interest in liminal spaces to his literal and metaphorical preoccupation with blindness and vision - all suggest that the 'attempt at restitution' constitutes the very essence of Sebald's understanding of literature.
Papers by Valerie Henitiuk
I cannot help but find this concept to be a surprisingly useful one for working through how texts angle off in a different direction from the path of origin upon being translated, how they adapt to new forms and take on new significances, and how we are able to read, in English, something quite different in form and style from what the West understands as belonging to the novelistic genre and yet speak in all seriousness of having read a Japanese novel. This article, therefore, will tease out what it might mean to understand literary translation, retranslation, and their related creative by-products as being indebted to an inherently refractive process. If we look at translational activity in terms of a prism that functions to reveal a range of colours or interpretations, can this help us avoid some of the more common traps of the perennial and perennially over-simplifying dichotomy of domestication versus foreignization or literal versus free? Can we usefully view a given source text’s offshoots in other languages and cultures as various manifestations of the spectrum already potentially present in an original work of literature?
In the often shadowy and grim world depicted in this collection, themes of class, poverty, violence, and family are developed. Together they form a critique of social mores and illuminate the difficult lives of the subaltern in Odisha society. The work of these authors contributes to an ongoing dialogue concerning the challenges, hardships, joys, and successes experienced by women around the world. In these provocative explorations of the short-story form, we discover the voices of these rarely heard women.
Whilst opening up his work to a range of under-explored areas including dissident surrealism, Anglo-Irish relations, contemporary performance practices and the writings of H. G. Adler, the volume notably returns to the original German texts. The recurring themes identified in the essays - from Sebald's carefully calibrated syntax to his self-consciousness about 'genre', from his interest in liminal spaces to his literal and metaphorical preoccupation with blindness and vision - all suggest that the 'attempt at restitution' constitutes the very essence of Sebald's understanding of literature.
I cannot help but find this concept to be a surprisingly useful one for working through how texts angle off in a different direction from the path of origin upon being translated, how they adapt to new forms and take on new significances, and how we are able to read, in English, something quite different in form and style from what the West understands as belonging to the novelistic genre and yet speak in all seriousness of having read a Japanese novel. This article, therefore, will tease out what it might mean to understand literary translation, retranslation, and their related creative by-products as being indebted to an inherently refractive process. If we look at translational activity in terms of a prism that functions to reveal a range of colours or interpretations, can this help us avoid some of the more common traps of the perennial and perennially over-simplifying dichotomy of domestication versus foreignization or literal versus free? Can we usefully view a given source text’s offshoots in other languages and cultures as various manifestations of the spectrum already potentially present in an original work of literature?
Translation Studies aims to extend the methodologies, areas of interest and conceptual frameworks inside the discipline, while testing the traditional boundaries of the notion of “translation” and offering a forum for debate focusing on historical, social, institutional and cultural facets of translation.
In addition to scholars within Translation Studies, we invite those as yet unfamiliar with or wary of Translation Studies to enter the discussion. Such scholars include people working in literary theory, sociology, ethnography, philosophy, semiotics, history and historiography, theology, gender studies, postcolonialism, and related fields. The journal supports the conscious pooling of resources for particular purposes and encourages the elaboration of joint methodological frameworks.