Pub Date : 2023-05-01DOI: 10.1632/s0030812923000470
Paul Michael Johnson
Abstract Literary back-translation, the practice of bringing a text back into the language of its source after it has passed through one or more translations, has long been overlooked. To recuperate its richly entangled global history, this essay looks to the representation of translation in Cervantes's Don Quixote and to the novel's recent back-translation based on 魔俠傳 ( Moxia Zhuan ; Story of the Enchanted Knight ), a 1920s translation into classical Chinese by Lin Shu that itself was an indirect translation based on two eighteenth-century English editions of Cervantes's text. While foregrounding the generative labor of translators, both fictional and historical, the transnational and diachronic scope of this back-translational loop prompts us to rethink the domesticating/foreignizing binary. Taking a cue from Cervantes's metaphor of translation as the knotty back side of a tapestry, this study seeks to overturn front-facing notions of translation by approaching its history from the back.
{"title":"Errant Translation; or, Lin Shu's <i>Don Quixote</i> and the Paybacks of Back-Translating","authors":"Paul Michael Johnson","doi":"10.1632/s0030812923000470","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1632/s0030812923000470","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Literary back-translation, the practice of bringing a text back into the language of its source after it has passed through one or more translations, has long been overlooked. To recuperate its richly entangled global history, this essay looks to the representation of translation in Cervantes's Don Quixote and to the novel's recent back-translation based on 魔俠傳 ( Moxia Zhuan ; Story of the Enchanted Knight ), a 1920s translation into classical Chinese by Lin Shu that itself was an indirect translation based on two eighteenth-century English editions of Cervantes's text. While foregrounding the generative labor of translators, both fictional and historical, the transnational and diachronic scope of this back-translational loop prompts us to rethink the domesticating/foreignizing binary. Taking a cue from Cervantes's metaphor of translation as the knotty back side of a tapestry, this study seeks to overturn front-facing notions of translation by approaching its history from the back.","PeriodicalId":47559,"journal":{"name":"PMLA-PUBLICATIONS OF THE MODERN LANGUAGE ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135516183","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-05-01DOI: 10.1632/s0030812923000597
Haun Saussy
{"title":"Translating from Translations, As One Does","authors":"Haun Saussy","doi":"10.1632/s0030812923000597","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1632/s0030812923000597","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":47559,"journal":{"name":"PMLA-PUBLICATIONS OF THE MODERN LANGUAGE ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135516351","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-05-01DOI: 10.1632/s0030812923000433
Karen Emmerich
Abstract This piece acknowledges the MLA's many initiatives in support of translation while also advocating for even greater visibility for translation as a mode of combatting language injustice in disciplines across the university. Translation offers opportunities for inclusiveness, information sharing, and collaborative knowledge production across linguistic, social, economic, and geographic divides. It also offers a form of hands-on apprenticeship in intellectual and scholarly rigor for undergraduate and graduate students alike. And by translating the texts of colleagues writing in other languages, scholars working in languages of the Global North can help further goals of language justice and access by facilitating exposure to and for other traditions of knowledge production. This piece proposes that, instead of treating translation as a threat to an individual's academic viability, we embrace translation as a means of increasing the vitality and equity of our intellectual communities.
{"title":"Translating for Language Justice, across the Disciplines","authors":"Karen Emmerich","doi":"10.1632/s0030812923000433","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1632/s0030812923000433","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract This piece acknowledges the MLA's many initiatives in support of translation while also advocating for even greater visibility for translation as a mode of combatting language injustice in disciplines across the university. Translation offers opportunities for inclusiveness, information sharing, and collaborative knowledge production across linguistic, social, economic, and geographic divides. It also offers a form of hands-on apprenticeship in intellectual and scholarly rigor for undergraduate and graduate students alike. And by translating the texts of colleagues writing in other languages, scholars working in languages of the Global North can help further goals of language justice and access by facilitating exposure to and for other traditions of knowledge production. This piece proposes that, instead of treating translation as a threat to an individual's academic viability, we embrace translation as a means of increasing the vitality and equity of our intellectual communities.","PeriodicalId":47559,"journal":{"name":"PMLA-PUBLICATIONS OF THE MODERN LANGUAGE ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135516355","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-05-01DOI: 10.1632/s0030812923000378
Spencer Lee-Lenfield
Abstract The ability to translate English poetry into ancient Greek and Latin sat at the pinnacle of a Victorian classical education, but we rarely read the resulting Greek and Latin poetry as serious literature. Yet this corpus documents an important, culturally prestigious poetic practice that entrenched a narrative of cultural descent from Greece and Rome, affiliating modern British poetry with classical antecedents. Moreover, it taught generations of schoolboys (and some noteworthy schoolgirls) interpretive methods for understanding English poetry, thereby providing an arena in which the canon of English poets coalesced before the institutionalization of English literature in universities. I re-create the interpretive moves and cultural affiliations enacted through verse composition in the Victorian period, and I analyze particular verse compositions that shed new light on the classicizing context informing contemporary poetic creation.
{"title":"Literary Translation as Cultural Affiliation: The Case of Victorian Poetry and Classical Verse Composition","authors":"Spencer Lee-Lenfield","doi":"10.1632/s0030812923000378","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1632/s0030812923000378","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract The ability to translate English poetry into ancient Greek and Latin sat at the pinnacle of a Victorian classical education, but we rarely read the resulting Greek and Latin poetry as serious literature. Yet this corpus documents an important, culturally prestigious poetic practice that entrenched a narrative of cultural descent from Greece and Rome, affiliating modern British poetry with classical antecedents. Moreover, it taught generations of schoolboys (and some noteworthy schoolgirls) interpretive methods for understanding English poetry, thereby providing an arena in which the canon of English poets coalesced before the institutionalization of English literature in universities. I re-create the interpretive moves and cultural affiliations enacted through verse composition in the Victorian period, and I analyze particular verse compositions that shed new light on the classicizing context informing contemporary poetic creation.","PeriodicalId":47559,"journal":{"name":"PMLA-PUBLICATIONS OF THE MODERN LANGUAGE ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135516178","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-05-01DOI: 10.1632/s0030812923000391
Katherine Gillen, Kathryn Vomero Santos
An abstract is not available for this content. As you have access to this content, full HTML content is provided on this page. A PDF of this content is also available in through the ‘Save PDF’ action button.
{"title":"Shakespeare and the Politics of Tradaptation","authors":"Katherine Gillen, Kathryn Vomero Santos","doi":"10.1632/s0030812923000391","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1632/s0030812923000391","url":null,"abstract":"An abstract is not available for this content. As you have access to this content, full HTML content is provided on this page. A PDF of this content is also available in through the ‘Save PDF’ action button.","PeriodicalId":47559,"journal":{"name":"PMLA-PUBLICATIONS OF THE MODERN LANGUAGE ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135516324","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-05-01DOI: 10.1632/s0030812923000469
Lucas Klein
Abstract What is the international literary history behind Xi Chuan's Chinese prose poems, and what is the literary history behind translating them into English as prose poems? Did Hegel's belief that poetry can be “translated into other languages without essential detriment to its value” contribute to the birth of prose poetry, through a synthesis with poetic form? If so, what does this notion say about Hegel's idea that China lies “outside the World's History”? In the light of the historical association between China and prose poetry in the literary history of French (Judith Gautier, Victor Segalen, Henri Michaux) and English (Allen Upward, Nathaniel Tarn, Ron Silliman, Bob Perelman, Joan Retallack, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Tammy Lai-Ming Ho, Sarah Howe, Ken Chen, Cathy Park Hong, Eleanor Goodman, Jennifer Kronovet, and Nick Admussen), I discuss prose poetry as an outcome of what Joyelle McSweeney and Johannes Göransson call a translational “deformation zone,” to argue that translating Chinese prose poetry demonstrates China to be inside, not outside, the history of the world.
{"title":"Inside the History of the World: Syntheses of Literary Form between Prose Poetry and China","authors":"Lucas Klein","doi":"10.1632/s0030812923000469","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1632/s0030812923000469","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract What is the international literary history behind Xi Chuan's Chinese prose poems, and what is the literary history behind translating them into English as prose poems? Did Hegel's belief that poetry can be “translated into other languages without essential detriment to its value” contribute to the birth of prose poetry, through a synthesis with poetic form? If so, what does this notion say about Hegel's idea that China lies “outside the World's History”? In the light of the historical association between China and prose poetry in the literary history of French (Judith Gautier, Victor Segalen, Henri Michaux) and English (Allen Upward, Nathaniel Tarn, Ron Silliman, Bob Perelman, Joan Retallack, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Tammy Lai-Ming Ho, Sarah Howe, Ken Chen, Cathy Park Hong, Eleanor Goodman, Jennifer Kronovet, and Nick Admussen), I discuss prose poetry as an outcome of what Joyelle McSweeney and Johannes Göransson call a translational “deformation zone,” to argue that translating Chinese prose poetry demonstrates China to be inside, not outside, the history of the world.","PeriodicalId":47559,"journal":{"name":"PMLA-PUBLICATIONS OF THE MODERN LANGUAGE ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135516330","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-05-01DOI: 10.1632/s0030812923000585
Leah Middlebrook
{"title":"Amphionic Translation","authors":"Leah Middlebrook","doi":"10.1632/s0030812923000585","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1632/s0030812923000585","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":47559,"journal":{"name":"PMLA-PUBLICATIONS OF THE MODERN LANGUAGE ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135516333","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-05-01DOI: 10.1632/s0030812923000408
Keith Leslie Johnson
KEITH LESLIE JOHNSON is director of film and media studies at William and Mary, where he is senior lecturer of English and affiliated faculty of Japanese studies. He is the author of Jan Švankmajer: Animist Cinema (U of Illinois P, 2017); essays on Aldous Huxley, Franz Kafka, and other modernist figures; and translations of Haruki Murakami and Akira Yoshimura. I want to make a modest case for exophony as a term deserving of wider application and scrutiny. The phenomenon of exophony is familiar enough, even if the term itself is not. Put simply, it refers to composition in a nonnative language—which, at first blush, might seem a rather exotic state of literary matter. However, since appearing in Susan Arndt, Dirk Naguschewski, and Robert Stockhammer’s 2007 edited collection, Exophonie: Anderssprachigkeit (in) der Literatur (Exophony: Otherlanguaged-ness in/of Literature), exophony has become an increasingly widespread and galvanizing concept in literary studies, of obvious interest to those working on translation but also more generally to those working on migrant or exile literatures, postcolonial literatures, and transnational literatures. Beyond these direct applications of the term, however, I argue that exophony represents not just an exception or special case of translation but the paradigm of literary production as such. To flesh out that thesis, I want to briefly address (and push back on) three related assumptions one often sees at the scene of translation: the idea that translations are secondary or subordinate to the composed literary object (i.e., the original), the idea that exophonic writers represent a vanishingly small minority, and the idea that self-translation is a special case, even among exophonic writers. Assumptions regarding translation as such, then exophony, and finally self-translation: obviously, these are not the only ones we might think about—and I do not treat them in any systematic, sequential way in what follows—but they nonetheless help us begin zeroing in on why translation matters, integrally, for literary studies as a whole. As a preemptive exercise, maybe we can think about how many exophonic writers we can name off the top of our heads. Here goes: Jhumpa Lahiri; Gary Shteyngart and Kazuo Ishiguro, both of whom moved to English-speaking countries as children (though Ishiguro claims to remember little to no Japanese); Aleksandar
{"title":"(M)Other Tongue; or, Exophony","authors":"Keith Leslie Johnson","doi":"10.1632/s0030812923000408","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1632/s0030812923000408","url":null,"abstract":"KEITH LESLIE JOHNSON is director of film and media studies at William and Mary, where he is senior lecturer of English and affiliated faculty of Japanese studies. He is the author of Jan Švankmajer: Animist Cinema (U of Illinois P, 2017); essays on Aldous Huxley, Franz Kafka, and other modernist figures; and translations of Haruki Murakami and Akira Yoshimura. I want to make a modest case for exophony as a term deserving of wider application and scrutiny. The phenomenon of exophony is familiar enough, even if the term itself is not. Put simply, it refers to composition in a nonnative language—which, at first blush, might seem a rather exotic state of literary matter. However, since appearing in Susan Arndt, Dirk Naguschewski, and Robert Stockhammer’s 2007 edited collection, Exophonie: Anderssprachigkeit (in) der Literatur (Exophony: Otherlanguaged-ness in/of Literature), exophony has become an increasingly widespread and galvanizing concept in literary studies, of obvious interest to those working on translation but also more generally to those working on migrant or exile literatures, postcolonial literatures, and transnational literatures. Beyond these direct applications of the term, however, I argue that exophony represents not just an exception or special case of translation but the paradigm of literary production as such. To flesh out that thesis, I want to briefly address (and push back on) three related assumptions one often sees at the scene of translation: the idea that translations are secondary or subordinate to the composed literary object (i.e., the original), the idea that exophonic writers represent a vanishingly small minority, and the idea that self-translation is a special case, even among exophonic writers. Assumptions regarding translation as such, then exophony, and finally self-translation: obviously, these are not the only ones we might think about—and I do not treat them in any systematic, sequential way in what follows—but they nonetheless help us begin zeroing in on why translation matters, integrally, for literary studies as a whole. As a preemptive exercise, maybe we can think about how many exophonic writers we can name off the top of our heads. Here goes: Jhumpa Lahiri; Gary Shteyngart and Kazuo Ishiguro, both of whom moved to English-speaking countries as children (though Ishiguro claims to remember little to no Japanese); Aleksandar","PeriodicalId":47559,"journal":{"name":"PMLA-PUBLICATIONS OF THE MODERN LANGUAGE ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135516340","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-05-01DOI: 10.1632/s0030812923000512
Rebecca L. Walkowitz
{"title":"One","authors":"Rebecca L. Walkowitz","doi":"10.1632/s0030812923000512","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1632/s0030812923000512","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":47559,"journal":{"name":"PMLA-PUBLICATIONS OF THE MODERN LANGUAGE ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135516344","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2023-05-01DOI: 10.1632/s0030812923000676
Paul F. Bandia
{"title":"Translation, Postcoloniality, Literary Multilingualism","authors":"Paul F. Bandia","doi":"10.1632/s0030812923000676","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1632/s0030812923000676","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":47559,"journal":{"name":"PMLA-PUBLICATIONS OF THE MODERN LANGUAGE ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135516347","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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