'Transtopia' (chapter 3)

Cambridge University Press, 2023

In Translation as Creative-Critical Practice, Delphine Grass questions the separation between practice and theory in translation studies through her analysis of creative-critical translation experiments. Focusing on contemporary literary and artistic engagements with translation such as the autotheoretical translation memoir, performative translations and 'transtopian' literary and visual art works, this Element argues for a renewed engagement with translation theory from the point of view of translation as artistic and practice-based research capable of reframing translation theory. Exploring examples of translation as both a norm-breaking and world-making activity in the works of Kate Briggs, Ayesha Manazir Siddiqi, Noémie Grunenwald, Anne Carson, Charles Bernstein, Chantal Wright or Slavs and Tatars to name a few, this Element prompts us to reconsider the current place of translation practice in translation studies. https://www.cambridge.org/core/elements/translation-as-creativecritical-practice/CAB7EFF5BFA456C0D33BA241566B797D

Glavanakova, Alexandra. Transcultural Imaginings. Translating the Other, Translating the Self in Narratives about Migration and Terrorism. Sofia: KX – Critique and Humanism Publishing House, 2016. ISBN: 978 954 587 201 3, 2016

In Part Two I analyse texts which reflect on the process of cultural adaptation and identity-formation of Bulgarian “transnational migrants” to the U.S. and Canada. These are “transmigrants” that “forge and sustain simultaneous multi-stranded social relations that link together their societies of origin and settlement” (Schiller et. al. 48). Whether dealing with exilic, travel, or (im)/migrant experience, these texts thematically refer to a negotiation between American or Canadian, and Eastern-European (Bulgarian) identities as presented by Bulgarian-American or Bulgarian-Canadian authors. My aim is to explore the writers’ reflection on issues of cultural and personal identity, related specifically to marginalization, cultural insularity, and social disparity; the complex experience of acculturation through compromise, negotiation, and assimilation; its success or failure. The questions examined in this part are: How are the inner battles between the Old World steeped in tradition, and the New World offering material opportunity revealed in the material examined? How is transcultural identity demarcated in communities, which are ethnically, ideologically and culturally distinct? How does migration, which is sometimes a traumatic experience, affect the creation of hybrid identity in the migrant? First among these migrant writings are the exilic narratives – autobiographies and memoirs – written about the traumatic experiences of Bulgarian exiles who left their home country prior to 1989 with no prospect of ever returning, which are discussed in this chapter. In a second group fall the stories of travels to North America – mostly non-fictional travelogues – which have appeared in great numbers from the 1990s onwards and would merit a separate study. While these two groups are largely non-fictional, occasionally bordering on the factional, there is another group of “migrant writings” published in the last decade rendered predominantly as fictional tales. This latter type of narratives, discussed in Chapters 4 and 5, are authored by writers of Bulgarian descent who have migrated to North America and have chosen to write fictional texts articulating their experiences of migration from the East to the West. The texts included in this chapter present the act of displacement, the emotional hardships and the mental processes accompanying the contact with a new culture. These practices require a complex negotiation between the Self, experienced as fixed, and the Othering of Self in the context of the new culture, involving not least of all the constant movement between linguistic and cultural planes. Language itself becomes an identity issue, since learning the new language involves crossing linguistic and cultural frontiers, as well as reinventing oneself. The characters of Radka Yakimov’s exilic narratives and biofictions, Dream and Shadows and Café “Blue Danube,” for example, reflect aspects of the process of adaptation, self-transformation and cultural translation that accompany exile. She becomes a translator of the constant inner dialogue between different cultures - Bulgaria and Canada. This act of translation engenders an inner transformation, so it generates a creative power, which allows for the cohabitation of multifaceted identities.

Romanian Literature as World Literature (edited by M. Martin, C. Moraru & A. Terian), Bloomsbury, 2018

The geopolitical imaginary undergirding the theory, practice, and reception of translation in Romania and its neighbors has registered a major shift in the post-Cold War era. Until 1990, translating into Romanian as well as into other Central and East European languages had been, broadly speaking, part and parcel of nation building. Guided by concerns and discourses of nationhood and national identity as they had been since the mid-nineteenth century, modern translational cultures arising in this area of the continent essentially enacted a dualistic, self-other and here-there dynamic whose actors and places were seen as neatly and sometimes rigidly separated spatially, culturally, and otherwise. As I contend in my essay, this antinomianism has subsided since the Cold War. More to the point, after the early 1990s flare-up of nationalist conflicts, the national project fell by the wayside as the authoritarian regimes sponsoring it collapsed and, consequently, translation initiatives and policies were shaped, in and around Romania, less and less by the nation-state and increasingly by book markets, major publishers, and their transnational extensions and partners. Accordingly, the translation industry’s focus has shifted over the last three decades or so away from particular and discrete national identities and their reinforcement to the planetary spectacle of ever more interconnected places, communities, and literatures. In Romania, the previously monolithic, nation-state-oriented, often nationalist translation program has yielded to a range of uncoordinated “microprograms” in which, as I also suggest, the translational, alongside other domains, discourses, and practices of national culture, characteristically does the bidding of the transnational, a situation largely paralleled by the treatment renditions of Romanian authors into foreign languages receive in the world arena.

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

Oltreoceano, 2011

Translation Studies

More and more, scholars have been turning their attention to the fascinating phenomenon of literature written in languages not native to their authors. Although far from new (Kellman 2000; Hokenson and Munson 2007), this kind of translingual writing is arguably more visible than ever before. Beginning in the late eighteenth century, when the German Romantics promoted a language philosophy that defined the mother tongue as the only authentic means of expression, a monolingual paradigm has dominated literary scholarship, as Yasemin Yildiz (2012) shows in Beyond the Mother Tongue: The Postmonolingual Condition. This has led literary historians to sort literatures into the same categories as nation states, and to view the presence of non-native or multiple languages in poetry, prose and drama as an exception, rather than the rule. 1 In reality, a great many people in the world regularly speak and write more than one language, and "living transnationally" is becoming more common (Levitt, DeWind, and Vertovec 2003, 571). As Yildiz notes, globalization "produces a new framework … in which languages circulate, change, and accrue meaning" (2012, 109). In the conclusion to their seminal study on the history of literary self-translation in the West, Jan Walsh Hokenson and Marcella Munson suggest that "we seem to be recreating today the ambient multilingual conditions of earlier periods, when writers routinely elected to write in adopted dialects and languages" (2007, 211). Similarly, Aneta Pavlenko argues:

2015

Some texts have an inherent quality that makes them susceptible to translational activities, according to Benjamin. Translation involves complex meta-textual politics that perhaps becomes palpable in text conceived in diasporic continuum such as Jhumpa Lahiri's The Namesake; wherein the source and the target language often overlap. In this paper, I would attempt to make an in-depth reading of both the original and the translated text with the objective of unravelling the politics of translation at play therein. I would endeavour to qualify Lahiri's novel as a 'translatable' text as I delve deeper into the novel, in the light of Benjamin's argument. Through my reading, I would try and link the palpable act of translation and the extra-textuality that it proposes aspiring for corporeality. I would also look at the cyclical nature of the act of translation and the idea it entails that is pertinent to this particular text.

Transfer Revista Electronica Sobre Traduccion E Interculturalidad, 2013