OCCT - Week 8 Updates
We hope you’ve all had an exciting term, and have enjoyed what has proved to be a fascinating and thought-provoking range of events.
This Monday, for our final Discussion Group Session of the term, we hosted a discussion linked to Jamie McKendrick’s exhibition The Years and After, which was displayed at St Anne’s College in October. In dialogue with Anna Saroldi and Matthew Reynolds, Jamie explained the semi-autonomous relationship between image and poetry in his recently published pamphlet The Years (2020) and, more broadly, the relationship between translation and poetry in his work. Jamie also discussed his motives for publishing The Foreign Connection (2020), his recent collection of essays on poetry, art, and translation, within the context of Brexit and recent debates about national and European identities.
Wednesday saw the launch of the Oxford-Weidenfeld Translation Prize 2022. The Oxford-Weidenfeld Prize is for book-length literary translations into English from any living European language. It aims to honour the craft of translation and to recognise its cultural importance. For more information, including specific entry requirements, please visit the Prize’s page on our website.
A warm thank you to everyone who has attended our events this term, and to all of our wonderful speakers. We look forward to seeing you in 2022!
Calls for Papers and Events
[1] Event: Migrant Masculinities in Women’s writing: (In)Hospitality, Community, Vulnerability
Seminar
Monday 6 December, 2021
10am - 11:30am GMT
https://modernlanguages.sas.ac.uk/events/event/25120
Speakers:
Ashwiny O. Kistnareddy (Cambridge)
Lisa Downing (Birmingham)
Natalie Edwards (Adelaide)
Christopher Hogarth (South Australia)
Chair: Amaleena Damlé (Durham)
Ashwiny O. Kistnareddy is joined by Lisa Downing, Natalie Edwards, Chris Hogarth and Amaleena Damlé (Chair), to talk about her new monograph, Migrant Masculinities in Women's Writing: (In)Hospitality, Community, Vulnerability. The book examines the representation of masculinities in contemporary texts written by women who have immigrated into France or Canada from a range of geographical spaces. Exploring works by Léonora Miano (Cameroon), Fatou Diome (Senegal), Assia Djebar, Malika Mokeddem (Algeria), Ananda Devi (Mauritius), Ying Chen (China), and Kim Thúy (Vietnam), this study charts the extent to which migration generates new ways of understanding and writing masculinities. Kistnareddy draws on diverse theoretical perspectives, including postcolonial theory, affect theory and critical race theory, while bringing visibility to the many women across various historical and geographical terrains who write about (im)migration and the impact on men, even as these women, too, acquire a different position in the new society.
[2] CfP: World Literature and the Circulation of Art
Compendium invites submissions for the inaugural issue of the journal on the theme of World Literature and the Circulation of Art from 1800 to the present. This special issue welcomes essays that explore world literature as an inter-art phenomenon which connects the literary sphere with other manifestations of art and culture, thus challenging the boundaries of interpretation and text.
Art objects and other artifacts participate as mediators in literary creation and companion pieces to texts and books, such as the Convent of Mafra in José Saramago’s novel Baltasar and Blimunda, or the photographs in George Rodenbach’s Bruges-la-Morte, André Breton’s Nadja, and the works of W.G. Sebald. But they can also assert their presence in different ways: as central references (John Singer Sargent’s portrait of Samuel Pozzi in Julian Barnes’ The Man in the Red Coat); sources of inspiration (A.S. Byatt’s The Matisse Stories); objects of intermedial adaptations (Brueghel’s Procession to Calvary in Michael F. Gibson’s exploratory essay The Mill and the Cross); or entirely fictional constructs (the bronze idol in Prosper Mérimée’s La Vénus d’Ille, the narrator’s paintings in Clarice Lispector’s Água Viva, or the “disconnected objects” of Leila Aboulela’s short story The Museum).
Prospective authors are invited to look into the different ways in which works of art of all forms and media travel throughout the globe, and in this process contribute to the definition and formation of world literature, allowing it to look beyond the hegemonic centres and safeguarding diversity. They are encouraged to discuss the material or ghostly presence of artefacts and art works in literature, as well as the role of world literature in the international circulation of artistic cultures.
Some of the topics we hope to explore in this issue include:
the role of intermediality in comparative and world literature; the impact of art and material culture in the global circulation of literature; aestheticism, exoticism, and modern definitions of art; artistic cosmopolitanism and/or regionalism from the nineteenth century to today; art, sex and the genders of world literature;
world literature and practices of collecting, connoisseurship, and international travel; showing and telling in film, photography, short fiction, ekphrastic poetry;
world literature as visual culture: illustration, adaptation, manga; commercial, imperial and (post)colonial routes in the circulation of art and literature.
We especially encourage submissions on topics that reach beyond Western cultures, as well as submissions from doctoral students and early-career researchers. Submitted articles may be written in English, Portuguese, Spanish, or French, and should range between 6,000 and 8,000 words, including notes, references, an abstract of 150 to 250 words, as well as 4 to 6 keywords. Authors must follow the formatting guidelines listed in the Submissions section under “Author Guidelines” on the journal’s website. Online submission: to register and submit your article for peer review, please follow the hyperlink “Make a Submission” on the Compendium homepage before Monday 30 May, 2022.
Editors of this issue: Amândio Reis (University of Lisbon) Stefano Evangelista (Oxford University)
[3] CfP: Unending Translation: Creative-Critical Experiments in Translation and Life Writing
Editors: Delphine Grass and Lily Robert-Folley
Deadline for abstract proposals: Friday 15 April, 2022
Publisher: UCL Press, Literature and Translation Series (tbc after final submission of proposal)
The aim of this collective monograph is to explore different approaches to translation criticism through the medium of life writing. Traditionally assigned to the paratextual, the translator’s point of view rarely occupies the narrative centre of creative writing and essays. In recent years, however, contemporary translators have taken on a more prominent role in translation criticism, exploring their practice through the medium of memoirs and experimental essays allowing for fragmentation, doubt, and openness to be expressed in subjective modes of writing. The translational turn to life writing and the essay can be interpreted as a challenge to the separation between practice and theory which traditionally exists in translation studies. On the one hand, the meeting between translation and life writing can be seen as an attempt to rethink autobiographical forms, reinventing the terms within which we create, shape and think the category of the subject through literature. On the other, creative-critical experiments in essay writing and translation have allowed for a more embodied and situated critical engagement with translation, an opportunity to explore translation as a practice-led thinking of texts and writing in their own right. The meeting between translation and life writing thus shifts our literary focus from thinking about the essence of individual works to thinking about translation as a space of subjective and material entanglement, a practice capable of re-imagining relations not only between cultures but between the traditionally opposed practices of reading and writing, thinking and doing.
In this collective monograph, we ask and call for translators, writers, teachers and critics to approach translation practice from such an embodied, situated position. What happens when translation meets life writing? But also, what happens when translation shapes the essay as a form, and when the essay in its turn continues translation? What happens, in other words, when translation practice becomes the subject rather than the object of literary introspection? How can life writing accounts of translation make us rethink our understanding of the relationship between translation and politics, translation and life?
We welcome experimental essays and life writing experiments, for example:
- Stories of a translator’s personal experience that narrate the interpretive experience as a writerly one.
- Experimental approaches to translation that rewrite a text through the translator’s engagement with it, or perhaps weave together different types of text, playing with form.
- Reflections on the subject position and voice of the translator, both as a lived experience but also as a politically situated one that is enjoined to tackle on the one hand the appropriative gesture of translation and on the other, the marginalised, secondary position that translation takes in traditional binaries of original/translation.
- Writings that play on the form of the translator’s commentary, responding to the traditional forms of translator prefaces, footnotes etc.
- Essays that multiply translational variants through a collection of hybrid approaches.
- Translations where the figure of the author is translated into the figure of the translator
- Stories of translation that give unique openings onto texts, for example through the interweaving of translation and commentary in the translation of genetic material (manuscripts, authorial marginalia, intertexts etc.)
- Writings that explore translation as fiction, in the sense given by Kate Briggs as an invitation to suspend one’s disbelief, to enter the foreign as though it is familiar, but also that tell a story of the time and place of the translating figure.
- Writings that visibilise the translator's voice, their process and technique, challenging the injunction to produce a unitary, sole text as a finished product to be sellable.
- Translator writings that reflect upon political and identity dynamics such as feminist translation or decolonial practices. Reflections on the specificity of translating minority, regional, non-standardized or non-national languages are also welcome here.
- Heterolingual experiences that mix languages, texts, translations and originals and deterritorialise the attachment of languages to nation states.
