TranscUlturAl (Journal)
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Translation and Response between Maurice Blanchot and Lydia Davis
No full textWhen an author translates a text by another writer, this translation is one form of a response to that text. Other responses may appear in their own writings that are more inflected with their authorial persona. Lydia Davis translated six books by Maurice Blanchot, including fiction and theoretical writings. Blanchot’s concept of the récit privileges non-conventional forms of narrative and it can be considered to have influenced Davis, a view shared in critical writing about Davis. However, responses to his fiction can also be found in Davis’s work. This article reads Lydia Davis’s story “Story” as a response to Maurice Blanchot’s récit, La Folie du jour, translated by Davis as “The Madness of the Day”. Both texts develop a narrative that questions the possibility of arriving at a single story: Blanchot’s narrator cannot tell the story of how he came to have glass ground into his eyes, while Davis’s narrator must try to understand a contradictory story told to her by her lover. However, Davis responds to Blanchot by reversing the perspective in the story: where Blanchot’s narrator must and cannot create a story that explains his situation in a judicial/medical context, Davis’s narrator is struggling to understand her lover’s story which does not explain the situation that they find themselves in. Davis’s narrator is therefore motivated by an emotional need to find an acceptable story that is absent from Blanchot’s narrator. This difference in motivation is central to the difference between Davis’s and Blanchot’s approach, and complicates any reading of his influence on her because she responds to his text in her own
Valéry’s Graveyard: Le Cimetière marin
No full textA Review of Valéry’s Graveyard: Le Cimetière marin Translated, Described, and Peopled, by Michael Comenetz & Hugh P. McGrath
Cinema d\u27auteur and dubbing: the Woody Allen Paradox
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Dubbing is the most common AVT technique in France but few scientific studies have been conducted on the subject, due to several factors: the difficulty in understanding oral speech, the cultural devaluation of a mode of translation initiated by the American studios to target the masses or the impossibility of assigning an author to a collective production. Nonetheless, a Cinéma d’auteur exists, far from Hollywood studios, and thus quite rare in the American film system. Woody Allen, an American director independent from the Majors, is a unique example: he has been able to preserve his artistic autonomy while using international distribution channels. They have brought him a real fame in France, thanks to the subtitled and dubbed versions of his films. Cinéma d’auteur and dubbing can however be regarded as an antinomy as the former is supposed to address an elite and the latter is ontologically tied to mass media. The “Frenchification” of Allen’s films lies at the very heart of that paradox and demands a balance between two poles, one leading towards the author’s speech, and the other towards the facilitation of the spectator’s work. This dissertation seeks to understand how dubbing has negotiated the contradictions at the very heart of this situation, and what room is ascribed to the author in the dubbed versions, between the Model Author and Addressee as defined by the reception theories. Based on examples taken from nine of Allen’s comedies over a 30-year period, this descriptive diachronic and comparative study contrasts the original versions of the films with their translations in French editions and their dubbed versions, using Berman’s theory of “deforming tendencies”
Either this ou aquilo: traduzindo a poesia infantil de Cecília Meireles para o inglês
No full textTelma Franco Diniz Abud ([email protected])
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I\u27m an independent translator working with the language pair English/ Portuguese, and specializing in literary translation. I hold a Master\u27s degree in Translation Studies with an emphasis on Poetry, and am enrolled in the PhD Program in Translation Studies of the University of São Paulo, Brazil.
Abstract
The aim of this study is to discuss the translations into English of a selection of poems from the classic Brazilian children’s book Ou isto ou aquilo, by Cecília Meireles, namely the poems “O cavalinho branco”, “A égua e a água”, “Enchente”, “Passarinho no sapé”, “Ou isto ou aquilo” and “A lua é do Raul”. To this end, the study begins with a biographical profile of Cecília Meireles, a discussion of her ideas on education and literature for children, and a contextualization of the book in question in relation to her other poetic works. Next, it discusses the principles and criteria of poetic translation practiced by Brazilian poet-translators Paulo Henriques Britto, Mário Laranjeira, Haroldo de Campos, Alípio Correia de Franca Neto and José Lira, among others. In the light of these principles and criteria, the selected source language poems are then analyzed, with an examination of their semantic, prosodic, rhythmic, and phonic features, with the aim of re-creating, in the target language, the poetic characteristics previously identified as being the most significant in the source language poems. The results are then commented on and discussed, with the aim of demonstrating, throughout the discussion, that some liberties in the re-creation of certain poems, particularly in the case of “Passarinho no sapé” and “A lua é do Raul”, were taken more due to sound structure, or phonetic aspects, than a sense of impossibility of semantic, cultural, or formal correspondence. Finally, this study includes, in Appendix, the translation into English by British poet-translator Sarah Rebecca Kersley of the poems “A chácara do Chico Bolacha”, “O menino azul”, “A pombinha da mata”, “O mosquito escreve”, “Para ir à Lua”, “O último andar”, “A bailarina”, “Ou isto ou aquilo” and “Pescaria”.
ISSN 1920-0323
 
Translating Silence: Memory and Forgetting in Andrea Maturana\u27s No decir
No full textI earned my BS in Spanish and Mathematics from Doane College in 2008. In the course of my undergraduate studies, I spent a semester at La Universidad Católica de Valparaíso, leading to a deepened interest in Chilean literature and the post-dictatorship Chilean landscape. I continued my studies at UMass Amherst, earning an MA in Hispanic Literatures and Cultures in 2012. My graduate work included a heavy emphasis on translation studies, which I owe primarily to Dr. Maria Tymoczko\u27s instruction. I\u27m currently working on a translation of Vicente Huidobro\u27s little-known theatrical work, En la luna.
Abstract
This thesis project is composed of two major parts: my English translation of No decir—a collection of short stories by Chilean author Andrea Maturana—titled Don’t Tell, and an academic introduction to that translation. The first chapter of the introduction gives biographical and cultural information about Andrea Maturana and her work, and it provides a summary of most of the criticism that has been written about her fiction. In the second chapter of the introduction I describe my translation goals and analyze challenges encountered while translating No decir. I first discuss the general problems of any translation project and then focus on several difficulties involved in Spanish to English translation. Finally I analyze a variety of specific challenges from my translation project, providing examples to both emphasize the partial nature of any translation and describe how I attempted to achieve my translation goals. 
Failures of Domesticity in Contemporary Russian-American Literature: Vapnyar, Krasikov, Ulinich, and Reyn
No full textHybrid literature has flourished in the Russian diaspora in the last decade and much of it is semi-autobiographical, concerned with the reconfiguration of identity in emigration. It dwells productively on the translation of the self and (more broadly) on the relationship between center and margin in the post-Soviet, transnational world. Gender roles are subject to contestation, as writers interrogate and reconsider expectations inherited from traditional Russian culture. This article situates Russian hybrid literature vis-à-vis Western feminism, taking into account Russian women’s particular experience of feminism. Four female writers of contemporary Russian-American literature – Lara Vapnyar, Sana Krasikov, Anya Ulinich, and Irina Reyn – inscribe failures of domesticity into their prose. Their female characters who cannot or do not cook or clean problematize woman’s role as nurturer. Home (geographic or imaginary) carries a semantic load of limitation and restriction, so failure as a homemaker may be paradoxically liberating. For female characters working in the West to support their families in Russia, domesticity is sometimes even more darkly cast as servitude. Rejection of traditional Russian definitions of women’s gender roles may signal successful renogotiation of identity in the diaspora. Although these writers may express nostalgia for the Russian culture of their early childhood, their critique of the tyranny of home is a powerful narrative gesture. Failures of domesticity represent successful steps in the redefinition of the self and they support these writers’ claim to transnational status
The City as Dialectic: Andrei Bely’s Creative Consciousness, Its Nietzschean Influence, and the Urban Center in Petersburg
No full textIn Petersburg (1916), Andrei Bely uses the space of the city to examine and attempt to reconfigure the persistent question of identity within the Russian consciousness. Bely’s awareness of St. Petersburg’s historical and national significance as a political nucleus compels him to work within the symbolic, drawing from various disciplines including mythology, philosophy, and mathematics. As Robert A. Maguire and John E. Malmstad suggest in the novel’s introduction, the city’s geographic positioning contributes to its greater cultural uncertainty; it pits the Neo-Kantian reason, structure, and order of the “West” against the alleged irrational, impalpable, and intuitive nature of the “East” (Bely viii). Bely’s urbanized creative consciousness can be contextualized by way of its origins in Western philosophy, particularly its Nietzschean influence and the idea of eternal return. Although his use and understanding of this concept fluctuated over the years, Bely interpreted Nietzsche’s notion of “return” as being creative, using it to describe the circularity of every artistic, philosophical, and literary endeavor (Maguire and Malmstad 103). By approaching Bely’s symbolism via its Nietzschean foundations, a better understanding can be gained regarding his use of the city’s geometric space in establishing a connection with the modern. Bely’s creative reading of Nietzsche facilitates his turn to the symbolic, and more critically, the novel’s enduring significance in his “diagnosis of modern culture” (Maguire and Malmstad 102). The amalgamation of Western philosophy, the modern novel, and the modern city ignited his examination and creation of Petersburg, as within this context, the symbolic rests in the act of creation. For Bely, the city and the text are interchangeable; both behave creatively as developmental centers for the modern. Likewise, his calculated and mathematical re-creation of St. Petersburg within the text allows it to operate as a public space for the articulation of Russia’s political and cultural anxiety
The Lifeline of Chromos: Translation and Felipe Alfau
No full textWhen Felipe Alfau’s novel Chromos was published in 1990, approximately fifty years after its creation, it was nominated for the National Book Award in the US and critics repeatedly commented on the novel’s unique language. For most critics, Alfau’s language was special because of the New York-based, Spanish-born author’s decision to write in English. Alfau’s profession as a bank translator has often been dismissed as having any relation with his literature save its disconnection from his creative writing. In this article, I argue that translation techniques are responsible for the extraordinary language of Chromos, and further, that the novel’s existence relies on the narrator’s role as a translator. Translation in Chromos is an integral and essential part of literary creation-- especially for an author working in a multilingual and multinational setting--to the extent that the novel, in its original version, impersonates a translation
L’empathie rationnelle : vers un nouveau paradigme traductionnel
No full textThis article sets out to show that translation, far from being a mere impersonation, is an activity involving a complex form of rational empathy. In order to do their work to the best of their abilities, translators must adopt an empathetic attitude not only toward the author of the source text, but also toward the text and the future reader whose knowledge skills he needs to consider in the same way the original author did.
Our text situates the translation process in a functionalist perspective and subordinates it to the preliminary establishment of a translation postulate (“postulat traductif”) in accordance with which the translator lays down a translation strategy based on the type of text, the origin of the text, for whom the text is intended as well the function of the text. At this stage, the translator seeks to achieve maximum objectivity based on rational empathy.
As a rule, empathy in translation is associated with literary translation, in keeping with a lyrical view of the latter and with an inordinate focusing on the author. We will try to show that the empathy factor is a constant, whether the text be literary or pragmatic, and that rational empathy is an indispensable tool for all translators since few of them are in a position to both choose their texts and hope to feel a spontaneous emotional empathy with their author or text.
Lastly, we will see that a broad general culture, including both a knowledge of the source language and culture, combined with an acute awareness of one’s own culture, is an essential basis for rational empathy, and conditions the intercultural and communication skills of the translator. Seen from this angle, the translator must master the various linguistic codes, namely language levels and diatopic variations, which he must use in order to best fulfil his role as a translator according to the most efficient translation postulate