Translation as Creative-Critical Practice

New York and London: Routledge, 2022

This book looks to expand the definition of translation in line with Susan Bassnett and David Johnston’s notion of the “outward turn,” applying this perspective to contemporary art to broaden the scope of how we understand translation in today’s global multisemiotic world. The volume builds on Bassnett and Johnston’s “outward turn” as well as Edwin Gentzler’s work on “post-translation” which have focused on traversing the disciplinary boundaries of translation. The book takes as its point of departure the idea that texts are comprised of not only words but other semiotic systems and therefore expanding our notions of both language and translation can better equip us to translate stories told via non-traditional means in novel ways. While the “outward turn” has been analyzed in literature, Vidal directs this spotlight to contemporary art, a field which has already engaged in disciplinary connections with Translation Studies. The volume highlights how the unpacking of such connections between disciplines encourages engagement with contemporary social issues, around identity, power, migration, and globalization, and in turn, new ways of thinking and bringing about wider cultural change. This innovative book will be of interest to scholars in translation studies and contemporary art. Table of Contents Preface, by Susan Bassnett 1. Translating in a Visual Age. Transdisciplinary Routes. 2. The Artistranslator’s Gaze 3. Translating with Art 4. Concluding Remarks

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 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).

How can we affirm the act of translation as a vital force of proliferation rather than a mode of flattening and silencing the rough edges of our world? With the sensorial turn gripping the field of curatorial and artistic research, in a time where politics of hurt, care, feeling, and dissent are on the table, translation cries out for an intentional re-definition in a trans-disciplinary structure of our negotiations with the world. In the process, ‘language’ must undergo continual questioning and face challenges from such transdisciplinary practice. The contemporary is marked by an urgency for mediation of experience and meaning as understood cohesively. This paper derives as its starting points, the subversive strength of the unintelligible ‘text’ and the precarity of the subject while confronting an object. In the domain of art-science intersections, philosophers like Sundar Sarukkai have argued for translation as a method surreptitiously in use by science and mathematics, though unacknowledged by the disciplines. Arguing for translation as a careful transaction of experience as well as process, being attentive to the fine entanglements between ontology and epistemology, Kaikini reflects on the task of living with unintelligible, opaque and subjective points of view, and situates translation as a foundational method in acts of trans-disciplinary creation.

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 present paper discusses the modernist authors' process in blurring the lines between literature and translation as part of their various aesthetic experiments. In contention with their contemporary English linguistic and cultural agendas, the modernist writers have internalized translational strategies to challenge the national identity and culture. Since many of them straddled two cultures, the resort to translation was inevitable introducing not only literature to the intercultural communication but translation as well to working mechanisms of culture. Taking as a point of departure the nature and function of translation as a paradigm for modernist thought, I tend to survey Jacob Korg's idea of 'the verbal revolution', Venuti's views and the emergence of various translation types among which is the intertextual translation or transmitting and introducing a foreign word into a text. Such a meeting of two different languages in literature has indeed been the focus of many scholars in translation studies echoing Bakhtin's 'polyphony'. Second, considered as a key to cross-cultural communication, the paper offers insights about translation as an aesthetic experiment of the modernists in their attempts to forge the discourse of modern experience based on the interaction of many languages.

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.

Translation Matters. Spring, 5, 1, 2023

of translation have become much more flexible because what is translated and the means by which it is translated have now significantly broadened in scope. This is the context of the five books reviewed in this article. These books deal with translation as the starting point for new artistic manifestations. Lily Robert-Foley's Experimental Translation: The Work of Translation in the Age of Algorithmic Production takes the AI angle; Douglas Robinson's The Experimental Translator focuses on the translator, rather than the text; Tong King Lee's Translation as Experimentalism: Exploring Play in Poetics introduces us to concrete Chinese poetry and its translation; Delphine Grass' Translation as Creative-Critical Practice insists on the link between theory and practice and Alexandra's Lukes' edited volume Translating the Avant-Garde, Avant-Garde Translation wants to answer several questions: What is avant-garde translation? Why should we pay attention to it? And why now? The five volumes offer a creative approach to traditional ideas on translation. Grass argues for an experimental, bodily translation, in which translating is seen as a poetic and political task, which highlights openness, variation, a vast patchwork of impulses of a diverse range of cultural, physical and emotional reaches. In her book she integrates theory and practice with autobiography, the body, and other subjective modes. Lee foregrounds an open-ended, experiential translation that focuses on memes rather than signs and adds value to the original through verbal and nonverbal resources. His ludic translation offers a brilliant methodology to approach apparently untranslatable writing like concrete poems, and deconstructs traditional assumptions about translation. It can be seen as a site for raising questions of representation and for understanding translation not as the mere reproduction of an original but as a Deleuzean map where the translator's voice must also be heard. In her edited volume, Lukes invites the various contributors to challenge the role and limits of translation, to destabilize such concepts as authorship, primary and secondary, and also the very notion of translation. From different perspectives, the chapters show the reader the possibilities of the experimental and the avant-garde through translation seen as a dynamic process. The volume shows translation as a mobile, creative process and reveals "the extent to which the translator's 'readerly consciousness' […] comes into play during their (the translator's and the reader's) encounter with a text". Robert-Foley argues that experimental translation responds to the way translation happens in the algorithmic marketplace of languages, in order to oppose, respond, critique interrogate and try to understand that it is operating as a device for interrogating and challenging marketplace norms and practices of translation. In the age of algorithmic production, this seems mostly to happen between spoken human languages with writing systems. Robinson, for his part, celebrates experimental translation through the hypercyborg translator, the collage translator, the smuggler translator, and the heteronymous translator. A translation is totally different from any binary, predetermined, and unmoveable truth. His experimental translator participates in literary creativity and he

Translation Studies, 2011

Comparative Literature Studies, 2014

In recent years, we have come to understand translation as exceeding the exact reproduction of a text from one language into another and as intimately intertwined with new forms of textual and cultural production. Arguing against models of translation as pure fidelity to an original text, Walter Benjamin asserts in "The Task of the Translator" that translation is at best a contingent and provisional way of coming to terms with the foreignness of languages, given that even the most painstaking fidelity in the translation of individual words can never reproduce fully the meaning they have in the original text. 1 Far from merely transmitting subject matter or content, a translation addresses the mode of signification of the source text by touching, perhaps caressing, to add a slightly queer touch, "the original lightly and only at the infinitely small point of the sense, thereupon pursuing its own course according to the laws of fidelity in the freedom of linguistic flux." 2 Here Benjamin is asking us to allow the source text to touch and affect in new ways our own language, or the language into which we are translating, and to inhabit difference by and through language. This textual caress incites translation as an act of recreation, which produces in the target language an echo, not a mere copy, of the original, hinting at the utter impossibility of equivalent correspondence between the source and translated text. As Benjamin writes, the translator's task lies in "aiming at that single spot where the echo is able to give, in its own language, the reverberation of the [original] work in the alien one." 3 These echoes and their reverberations, and the multiple potentialities of translations and/as counter-translations as they intersect with the social, historical, and cultural conditions that produce them, remain at the heart of contemporary translation studies, of what Gayatri Spivak has referred to as the translator's task of tracing brought to you by CORE View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk