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Dark Pastoral: The Ecopolitics of Translation in John Kinsella’s Season in Hell

Emily Apter, Silver Professor of French and Comparative Literature. Chair, Department of Comparative Literature. New York University.
Series Editor, Translation/Transnation, Princeton University Press, USA.

Australia is burning. Images of its charred nature, spoliated indigenous territories, vistas strewn with dead birds and animals, reenact the nightmare landscapes of burning worlds: Dante’s Inferno, Blake’s apocalypse, Rimbaud’s hell. “Bodyrot of the Age, parked on trashed cell-phones, tentacles of circuitry slowly (de)composed by the sun…”  this line is taken from a hyper-translation of Arthur Rimbaud’s A Season in Hell by the Australian ecoactivist poet John Kinsella.  Kinsella, I will argue is a foundational practitioner of ecopolitical translation – an ecopoesis, or écosophie (the latter Félix Guattari ‘s term for an ecological materialism grounded in humanity’s “sense of responsibility not only to its own survival, but to the future of all life on the planet: animal and plant species; music, art, and cinema, feelings of love, compassion and fusion with the cosmos”).

In his collection The New Arcadia Kinsella draws on Sir Phillip Sydney’s The ‘Old’ Arcadia (1580) – a pastoral romance with lots of sex and cross-dressing – for an idiom of dark pastoral, featuring a “the rural stage” on which evidence of devastation by pesticide is casually brushed off by the real estate agent, and the spectacle of a “crop-duster jerkoff” figures the violent abuse of the land. More recently, in his retranslation of Delmore Schwartz’s translation (1939) of Rimbaud’s Une Saison en enfer Kinsella takes this further; gleaning the resources for his “howl.”  He travels to the outer reaches of hell - the “endgaming of life on earth by rapacious governments, companies, and individuals” – to re-energize collective consciousness; prompting us to activate ecologies of translation even as we question what an ecology of translation might be.

Translation and Transformation

Esperança Bielsa, Associate Professor and ICREA Academia Fellow
at the Department of Sociology of the Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain.

Ideas of stability and change are central in both translation studies and sociology. In translation studies, stability, embodied in the notion of equivalence, has been challenged by approaches that highlight the transformations that allow translations to function in new cultural contexts. The idea of transformation, as well as that of social reproduction, is also key in the sociological tradition, which itself arises from the great transformations that shaped the emergence of modern society. Both disciplines are confronted today with the need to provide wide-ranging perspectives on the profound social transformations of the present, which from the point of view of climate change and the era of the Anthropocene assume a completely new dimension. The very concept of transformation has been deemed no longer adequate to capture the magnitude of this transfiguration, which defies our understanding in unprecedented ways. Attempting to respond to this challenge, this presentation will investigate different notions and processes of transformation, bringing sociological insights on social transformation to bear on current conceptualizations of translation ecology, whilst also demonstrating the relevance of an approach to translation as transformation for sociology, as well as for the social sciences more widely.

 Should translation cost the earth?
Language, culture and communication in the age of the anthropocene

Michael Cronin, Professor of French. Director of Trinity Centre for Literary and Cultural Translation, the University of Dublin, Ireland.

Throughout its history translation as a body of theory and form of practice has shaped and is being shaped by prominent transnational movements such as global religions of conversion, trading activities consequent on urban settlements and movements of ideas like the Renaissance, Communism and Liberalism. Climate change as a global phenomenon both informs and is informed by varieties of translation theory and practice. The global nature of the climate change and the emergence of humans as geological as opposed to biological agents in the era of human-induced climate change (the Anthropocene) has raised many questions about what it is to be human in radically changed environmental circumstances. It is the contention of this lecture that central to any new understanding of what it is to be human in the age of the Anthropocene is the question of translation. What we mean by this is that as humans are being forced to reconsider the catastrophic consequences of human exceptionalism they must look at their relationship to other species and to other constituent elements of their environment - organic and inorganic. The question of relation across difference, of how humans relate to the ontologically distinct, is a question that can be tackled by translation studies due to its long history of dealing with the underdetermination of meaning. Central to the lecture will be the thesis that whereas previous translation theories have focused on the paradigm of Nation or the Globe it is now time to take seriously the paradigm of Earth in the development of a terrestrial translation studies.

Mécanismes cognitifs de la traduction harmonieuse
du texte

Liudmila Kushnina, Professor of Foreign Languages, Linguistics and Translation.
Perm National Research Polytechnic University, Perm, Russia.

Dans notre étude nous essayerons de dresser un bilan deDans notre étude nous essayerons de dresser un bilan dela refléxion théorique concernant les mécanismes cognitifsde la traduction harmonieuse du texte conformément aumodèle de traduction nommé «espace traductif». Notremodèle a pris appuie sur la synergétique qui est devenuel’idéologie des plusieurs sciences. L’espace traductif est une construction mentale, abstraiteformée dans l’esprit du traducteur qui tâche de créer le texte-cible admis par la culturecibleet qui enrichit cette culture. Nous avons supposé que le milieu cognitif influencele processus de la traduction. Nous avons introduit le terme «harmonie» pour montrerqu’une bonne traduction est le résultat des refléchissements du traducteur sur l’idéede la proportion juste entre les textes. C’est l’effet synergétique qui amène le traducteur àl’harmonie, et le lecteur à la compréhension du texte proche à sa vision par l’auteur. Le rôleprimordial dans notre explication des mécanismes cognitifs de la traduction joue la synergiedes sens. Nous insistons que l’ajout des sens qui est le critère de la traduction harmonieuseest le facteur décisif dans ce mécanisme. On peut conclure que la cognition du traducteur estun phénomène compliqué dont l’actualisation au cours de la communication interculturellecontribue à l’activité intellectuelle, émotionnelle, créatrice du traducteur et à la réalisationefficace de ses intentions professionnelles et humanitaires.