TranscUlturAl (Journal)
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Inside Out or Outside In? Translating Margins, Marginalizing Translations. The Case of Francophone Pacific Writing
No full textThe concepts of centre and margins are of course, or ought to be, interchangeable: where we are is, in that sense, always the centre. However, no one would deny that in terms of culture, some \u27centres\u27 are more dominant than others. As a translator of Pacific texts, both from French into English and from English into French (as a co-translator), I have become acutely aware of what is at stake in the \u27centre\u27 of the Pacific, in particular on the islands of New Caledonia and French Polynesia. Focusing on texts from French Polynesia, I look at some of the ways in which indigenous Pacific authors writing in French \u27deterritorialise\u27 both genre and language conventions to create new forms of expression. Chantal Spitz, for example, employs a highly poetic style, even including traditional poetic forms in her prose. How can the translator respond to these strategies in such a way as to promote a reading \u27from the inside out\u27
Just How Marginal Was Machado de Assis? The Early Translations and the Borges Connection
No full textBrazilian literature is traditionally understood to have developed in relative isolation from the literatures of Hispanophone Latin America, inhabiting a peripheral cultural space within the already peripheral sphere of Latin American literature. Perhaps the most striking example of this traditional conception is the commonly held assumption of the complete literary-historical separation of two of Latin America’s most renowned fiction writers: the Brazilian Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis and the Argentine Jorge Luis Borges. Machado de Assis, in particular, is often regarded as inhabiting a double cultural periphery, as both a Latin American and a Brazilian, who, furthermore, wrote in a “minor” language, never traveled outside of his own country, and rarely ever left his native Rio de Janeiro. Another enduring belief, tangential to the tale of Brazil’s cultural isolation, is that Machado de Assis’s work went untranslated, by and large, until about half a century after his death. Yet the early translation history of Machado’s work offers a fascinating insight into the literary ties that connect his work to the dominant literary cultures of the Americas and Europe and provides an intriguing literary-historical link between Machado de Assis and Jorge Luis Borges. Curiously, the connection between Machado and Borges, whose countries share a border, follows a route of translational cultural exchange through France and Spain, and involves a prolific translator who was both the first Spanish translator of Machado’s short fiction and the mentor of a young Borges: Rafael Cansinos Assens. Thus, the early history of Machado’s fiction in translation demonstrates that Machado is a much less peripheral figure than previously imagined, and that, through Machado, Brazilian literature is more intimately intertwined with the literatures of Hispanophone Latin America and the cultural capitals of Europe than critics and scholars have recognized
"East Germany Lives!”: An Encounter with Rural Graffiti
No full textThis essay undertakes a provisional reading of spray-painted writing on a dilapidated rural bus shelter that I encountered while investigating cultural practices that evoke and invoke the East German past in contemporary Germany. The graffiti, which read “DDR lebt!” (“East Germany lives!”), appeared in large red letters and was accompanied by the shape of a heart. I propose interpretive possibilities for the themes to which the graffiti allude, acknowledging that I construct a translation that others may not share. The bus shelter with its adornment serves as entry point into interrogating how East Germany is remembered and historicized today. Drawing on Slavoj Žižek (2002) and Svetlana Boym (2001), I point to the limitations of applying the construct of nostalgia to practices that appear to appraise positively Germany’s socialist past. Alaida Assman’s (1996) use of the trace, Kevin Hetherington’s (2010) theorizing on the ruin, and Walter Benjamin’s dialectical image emerge as alternative possibilities for interrogating how individuals intervene in unconventional, unpredictable, and contradictory ways as they connect what has been to the present
Clothes Lines
No full textThis collaboration, featuring poetry by Christine Wiesenthal and photography by Elena Siemens, connects domestic spaces to the social, public and commercial sphere of the street: to relationships, traffic, gossip, and sundry forms of “dirty laundry.” In his essay on “Naples,” Walter Benjamin states: “Porosity is the inexhaustible law of the life of this city, reappearing everywhere” (170). “Buildings and actions,” he explains, “interpenetrate in the courtyards, arcades, and stairways. In everything they preserve the scope to become a theatre of new, unforeseen constellations” (169). He adds: “The stamp of the definitive is avoided” (169). This unique characteristic of Naples, its porosity, also surfaces in the “unforeseen constellations” of Wiesenthal’s The Laundry Cycle, and
Siemens’ images of Tel Aviv
Joe Annie Street
No full textA short critical fiction, derived from my experience of the demolition of my studio & home on Joe Annie Street, Houston, TX, placed in the context of a political/philosophical reflection on the "destructive character" (Benjamin) and the performative illusions or self delusions of street protest and street art in times of war
Paris Wall Flowers, Moscow Wall Wars
No full text“Paris Wall Flowers, Moscow Wall Wars” is intended as an introduction to the themed issue on Translating Street Art, inspired in part by Guy Debord and his associates from the Situationist International (SI). The issue’s international cast of contributors trace various contemporary expressions of the “dérive” and the “detournament” as found in many diverse spheres from graffiti to defaced monuments to “subvertising.” Following in the footsteps of the SI’s collage-like publications, Translating Street Art incorporates poetry, photography, scholarly essays, and personal accounts. “Paris Wall Flowers, Moscow Wall Wars” discusses two graffiti sites in Paris and Moscow, and considers the importance of their locations, as well as the distinction between street art and graffiti, and the fate of the unofficial genres in today’s mainstream culture
Transforming Alyosha into Superman: Invented Traditions and Street Art Subversion in Post-Communist Bulgaria
No full textOn June 17th 2011 graffiti artists transformed the West side of the Monument of the Soviet Army (MSA) in Sofia, Bulgaria. MSA comprises part of a spatial environment where the invented traditions of the Bulgarian state interact and compete. The art of provocation challenges those invented traditions and opens up the potential for alternative readings and discursive practices of the past and present, contrary to the official political and NGO discourse. As such it subverts ideological symbols in a fashion similar to the carnivalesque. The graffiti art provides the potential to reevaluate, bridge and connect a violent past with an equally violent present, as well as pose questions about the future. It signifies the presence of history and politics in everyday life