OCCT TT 2022 - Week 1 Updates
Joseph Hankinson
Good Afternoon!
The week ahead features one exciting OCCT event:
Next Monday, in our Discussion Group, Mohini Gupta will discuss her Hindi translations of Vikram Seth’s English poetry, specifically from the collection ‘Beastly Tales from Here and There’ (1991; Penguin Books India). Vikram Seth is one of India’s most well-known Indian English writers, with titles such as The Suitable Boy to his credit.
After tracing the diverse meanings of ‘translation’ or ‘anuvaad’ in the South Asian context, she will reflect on her own translation practice and decisions. Do these decisions differ with the changing linguistic direction of her translation - and to what extent are these decisions also determined by the cultural identity of the author and translator? How do the politics of italicisation and linguistic gatekeeping come into play in this text? Can translation be utilised as an effective tool to decolonise the postcolonial underpinnings of an original text? The discussion will be accompanied by readings and interactions with the group. All, as always, are welcome!
Tomorrow, make sure you keep an eye on Twitter for the announcement of the Longlist for the 2022 Oxford-Weidenfeld Prize!
Calls for Papers and Events
[1] Event: University of Warwick - School of Modern Languages and Cultures Annual Distinguished Lecture
Jens Andermann, New York University, "Alliances of survival: Ala Plástica, thislandyourland, and the arts of entanglement''
Wednesday May 4, 5.30 pm - 7.00 pm (Teams event)
Alliances of survival: Ala Plástica, thislandyourland, and the arts of entanglement
Can art help us survive the end of the world? Absurd as the question sounds, it has nonetheless loomed large in recent scholarship asking for the work the aesthetic can do as we confront the end of planetary life as a historical prospect. In this talk, I want to shift this conversation by championing the “unspecific arts” as an at once aesthetic and (cosmo-)political answer to this existential challenge. Rather than to focus on recent visual, filmic, literary or even mixed-media works that address the unfolding ecological catastrophe as their subject matter, by “unspecific arts” I refer to practice-based modes of action that, while taking advantage of the arts’ imaginative, world-making capacity, also involve diverse existents, human and more-than-human alike. In the work of Brazilian artist duo thislandyourland and Argentine artist/activist collective Ala Plástica’s, plants, liquids and earth participate as gathering agents that prompt emerging collectives to imagine what I call “alliances of survival”: modes of togetherness that thrive only in the measure that they are capable of including humans and nonhumans alike. How, I ask following T. J. Demos’s lead, “might the world-generating activity of aesthetics become a multinatural, multispecies affair, and not simply the reserve of human exceptionalism?”
To join the event on Teams, click here (we would be grateful if you could join 5 or 10 minutes before the talk begins so that we can allow you in from the virtual lobby)
[2] Event: A Conversation with Eva Baltasar
You are warmly invited to a reading and presentation by the leading Catalan novelist and poet, Eva Baltasar, organised in conjunction with the Institut Ramon Llull at 4 pm in the Taylor Institution (University of Oxford) on Friday 29 April.
The event will be bilingual, in Catalan and English, and there will be refreshments.
Eva Baltasar has published eleven volumes of poetry to widespread acclaim. Her debut novel, Permafrost, received the 2018 Premi Llibreter from Catalan booksellers and was shortlisted for France’s 2020 Prix Médicis for Best Foreign Book. Her new novel, Boulder, appears in August from And Other Stories.
[3] Event: BCLT Research Seminar – Laura McGloughlin
The Translator as Liberator: Finding the Echoes in Translation
Wednesday 27 April 2022, 4–5.30pm (BST), Online
This seminar focuses on the idea of echoes in translation – linguistic echoes, like other languages/dialects that the translator moves through while translating, and literary echoes in the texts that echo through a translator’s mind and feel like kin to the text being translated. How does the translator respond to these echoes she uncovers, and how does that impact on the process?
Laura McGloughlin has been a freelance translator from Catalan and Spanish since completing a Masters in Literary Translation at the University of East Anglia in 2007. She was awarded the inaugural British Centre for Literary Translation Catalan-English Translation Mentorship in 2011. Among others she has translated work by Bel Olid, Llüisa Cunillé, Maria Barbal, Flavia Company, Toni Hill Gumbao, and Joan Brossa, as well as director Carlos Saura, Museu d’Art Contemporani de Barcelona (MACBA) in Barcelona, and the Association of Writers in Catalan (AELC). Her most recent publication is a translation of Wilder Winds by Bel Olid (Fum d’Estampa Press, 2022). Laura is currently Translator in Residence at BCLT.
Please register in advance for this free event via Eventbrite:
https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/314490669057
[4] Event: Lecture Series: 'Restless China: Mobility in Literature, Art, and Film'
This seminar series brings together scholars who deal with the theme of mobility in China and Sinophone regions over the past four decades. With a broad geographic range and covering literature, theatre, film and art, they consider mobility in terms of physical travel, imagined movement, and the circulation of ideas, information and objects; but also the glaring absence of movement, be it in terms of social immobility or recent regional lockdowns. Together, the series explores how movement, restlessness and stasis have shaped contemporary cultural production.
Seminar convenor: Pamela Hunt, University of Oxford, pamela.hunt@orinst.ox.ac.uk
11 May, 5 pm BST; Online talk; Please email pamela.hunt@orinst.ox.ac.uk to register
Rossella Ferrari, University of Vienna, ‘Sinophone Performances in Journey-Form in Times of (Im)mobility’
18 May, 5pm; Kin-ku Cheng Lecture Theatre, Dickson Poon University of Oxford China Centre
Ros Holmes, University of St Andrews, ‘Not Moving: Performing Sleep in Contemporary China’
25 May, 5 pm; Kin-ku Cheng Lecture Theatre, Dickson Poon University of Oxford China Centre
Hongwei Bao, University of Nottingham, ‘Performing Transnational Chinese Masculinity: Whiskey Chow’s Performance Art’
1 June, 5pm; Kin-ku Cheng Lecture Theatre, Dickson Poon University of Oxford China Centre
Margaret Hillenbrand, University of Oxford, ‘The Logic of Expulsion in Contemporary China’
8 June, 5pm; Kin-ku Cheng Lecture Theatre, Dickson Poon University of Oxford China Centre
Mingwei Song, Wellesley College, ‘New Wonders of a Nonbinary Universe: The Rise of the She-Sci-Fi in China’
10 June, 5pm; Ho Tim Seminar Room, Dickson Poon University of Oxford China Centre
Annabella Mei Massey, University of Oxford, ‘Frontier aesthetics and psychological healing in Guo Xiaolu's Village of Stone’
15 June,5pm; Kin-ku Cheng Lecture Theatre, Dickson Poon University of Oxford China Centre
Yomi Braester, University of Washington, ‘Walking the City 2.0: Urban Space as Digital Noise
[5] CfPs: Rethinking Modernism
The year 2022 will mark the first centenary of the ‘annus mirabilis’ of British modernism, the year 1922, which saw the simultaneous publication of Virginia Woolf’s first experimental novel, Jacob’s Room, of James Joyce’s Ulysses, T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land, R.M. Rilke’s Duino Elegies and Sonnets to Orpheus. Taking its cue from this cause for celebration, the 2022 special issue of Studium, a top-tier journal in Italy founded at the beginning of the 20th century, will thus be devoted to reassessing the impact of modernism in a European and trans-medial perspective, not only in literature, that is, but also in the visual arts, music, the theatre, as well as the language of literary criticism and philosophy and the craft of translation, along the last hundred years. The issue will welcome papers dealing with:
- The redefinition of the modernist canon
- The impact of modernism on language/languages
- Transnational and cross-cultural modernism
- American vs European modernism
- Modernism vs post modernism
- Rethinking tradition after modernism
- Modernism and the visual arts, music and theatre
- Translation
- Modernism in literature and philosophy
- Subjectivity, displacement and fragmentation
- Journals/Reviews
Paper proposals (250 words) and a short cv should be sent to Emilia Di Rocco (emilia.dirocco@uniroma1.it) and Iolanda Plescia (iolanda.plescia@uniroma1.it) by 10 April 2022. Proposals will be evaluated by 30 April 2022, and articles ready for publication must be sent to the editors by 15 September 2022.
