Repackaging books for a new audience: innovative approaches to research on cross-cultural literary flows

Panel Convenors: Gabriela Saldanha, University of Birmingham (UK)
, Célia Maria Magalhães, Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, Brasil

Theme of the panel: The circulation of literature is affected by marketing practices, understood as "the decisions publishers make in terms of the presentation of books to the marketplace, in terms formats, cover designs and blurb, and imprint" (Squires 2009: 2) but also "the multiplicity of ways in which books are presented and represented in the marketplace: via their reception in the media; their gaining of literary awards; and their placement on bestseller lists” (ibid. 3). Translations have on impact on the landscape of reception as well as on the perceptions of the landscape of production. These perceptions are affected by the literature marketing process and have a role in shaping images of a nation's cultural landscape and the projection of such images in foreign cultural landscapes, as well as in the making of world literature. The circulation of translated literature in a globalised world passes through many filters; books are 'packaged', distributed and displayed with a particular audience in mind. Once in print, they often go through a filter of literary critics and media exposure, which contribute to the mediascape (Appadurai 1996) created around a nation's cultural tradition. These mediascapes are changing dramatically due to the impact of new technologies, which allow for the circulation of images and representations which are not under the control of the literary elite. Social approaches to translation studies need to develop innovative frameworks and methodologies that are specifically adapted to explore how the contexts of production, circulation and reception of translated literature are changing. The panel will discuss images of national/cultural identity in translation as represented in translation metatexts such as paratexts (such as, prefaces, translator's notes, glossaries, blurbs and covers) and peritexts (such as, reviews and interviews). The use of the World Wide Web by publishers, readers and other agents involved in the marketing process has open new channels for the circulation of opinions that were previously filtered by media and professional reviewers. Papers will discuss stereotypical and other kinds of (un)marked representation through and around translated literature with a focus on marginalised literary cultures as a result of the trade imbalance in translated literature. Contributions will be innovative either in terms of the theoretical framework proposed to study this area, the methodologies (a focus on multimodal analysis will be encouraged, as well as mixed methods combining corpus/text analysis and socio/cultural methodologies), or the specific contexts and translation directions addressed.

For informal enquiries: [gDOTsaldanhaATbhamDOTacDOTuk]

Gabriela Saldanha is a Lecturer in Translation Studies at the University of Birmingham (UK). She has published extensively on translation stylistics and is the author of Research Methodologies in Translation (Routledge, 2013) together with Sharon O’Brien. She co-edited the Routledge Encyclopedia of Translation Studies (Routledge, 2009), together with Mona Baker; and a special issue on ‘Global Landscapes of Translation’ (Translation Studies, 2013) together with Angela Kershaw. She is also co-editor of New Voices in Translation Studies, InTRAlinea and Translation and Translanguaging in Multilingual Contexts.

Célia M. Magalhães is a Full Professor in Linguistics and Applied Linguistics at Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, Brasil. Her research interests lie on the style of translations/translators, and to innovative ways of using multimodal social semiotics analysis to translation which includes representations of translated texts on book covers and other metatextual material. She has published papers in Brazilian journals as well as books and chapters in (inter)national books on these topics.

 

 

 

SESSION PLAN

10 minutes – Introduction: Cultural translation in a changing book market

SESSION 1: Re-imaging nations and translation

PAPER 1: 20 minutes + 10 minutes discussion

Title: China as Dystopia: Cultural Imaginings Through Translation

Speaker: Tong King Lee, University of Hong-Kong

(Submission #168)

PAPER 2: 20 minutes + 10 minutes discussion

Title: 'Translation' but not as we know it: new circuits of reading and writing

Speaker: Fiona Doloughan

(Submission #216)

PAPER 3: 20 minutes + 10 minutes discussion

Title: Images of the Western Balkans in English Translation for Children

Speaker: Marija Todorova

(Submission #159)

PAPER 4: Marketing, Reading and Problematizing Turkish Literature in English Translation: From Production and Consumption to Critical Analysis

Speaker: Sehnaz Tahir Gurcaglar, Boğaziçi University, Istanbul

(Submission #294)

10 minutes – Wrap-up

SESSION 2: Cross-cultural flows in a globalized literary market.

PAPER 5: 20 minutes + 10 minutes discussion

Title: Modern European poet-translators: a statistical analysis

Speaker: Jacob Blakesley

(Submission #181)

PAPER 6: 20 minutes + 10 minutes discussion

Title: Anthologizing Italy: forms and functions of Scandinavian collections of Italian prose and poetry

Speaker: Cecilia Schwartz, Stockholm University, Sweden

(Submission #309)

PAPER 7: 20 minutes + 10 minutes discussion

Title: Representing Brazilian literary translation and translators in verbal and visual metatexts

Speaker: Célia M. Magalhães, Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, Brasil

(Submission #158)

20 minutes – Wrap-up

PAPER TITLES, ABSTRACTS AND BIONOTES

PAPER 1: China as Dystopia: Cultural Imaginings Through Translation

Speaker: Tong King Lee, University of Hong-Kong

Abstract: This paper explores how China is represented in English translations of contemporary Chinese literature. It commences with the case of Yan Lianke (b.1958), a controversial novelist some of whose novels have been banned in China due to their politically sensitive content. Specifically, I look at the paratexts surrounding the English translation of Yan’s novel SERVE THE PEOPLE! (banned in China upon publication), and examine the image of China as projected through the translated version of the novel. The following questions guide my analysis: Given that British and American publishers have a comparatively low propensity to import translated works (as Lawrence Venuti as shown), what is it, then, that makes a novel such as SERVE THE PEOPLE! particularly attractive to Anglo-American publishers? Is it its “subversive critique of the hypocrisy and madness of the Cultural Revolution”, as the book’s introduction and blurb repeatedly tell readers, coupled with the fact that Yan was subject to state punishment for writing politically incorrect novels? Or is it the “intolerable humiliation”, allegedly endured by the masses in China, and “the desperate situations of their existences” that are depicted in novels by Yan and his contemporaries? What discourses are at work in framing these translated works for reception by an English-speaking readership, such that political subversiveness turns into a tactical motif in marketing translated literature? And how do such discourses dovetail into broader meta-narratives on China and Chineseness in the West? These questions pertain to the construction of images of alterity through translation, and to how market forces in the publishing industry collaborate with political ideologies in forging particular narratives on the culture of Other. Tapping into ideas from postcolonial criticism, the paper argues that China is systematically imagined as the dystopic Other by the Anglophone world through translation, specifically via the selection of specific texts for translation and the strategic deployment of paratexts in these translation products. It makes the case that in translated literature, the tendency to construct a tyrannical China – through the selection of censored/sensational titles and the evocation of landmark historical events in paratexts – falls in line with broad trends of Western perceptions of China. Within the geopolitical context of China’s global ascendance as a world power and its perceived hegemony in the Asia-Pacific region and beyond, the significance of the phenomenon discussed goes well beyond literature and translation. Literary translation is but part of a wider, institutionalized programme of Anglophone textual practices that positions China as a subject of gaze. These textual practices tend to triangulate around a self-fulfilling idea of what China is or will become, as if the latter were an object that can be exhaustively signified using a unified set of conceptual terminology.

Bionote: Tong King Lee is an assistant professor of translation at the University of Hong Kong. He is the author of Translating the Multilingual City: Crosslingual Practices and Language Ideology and Experimental Chinese Literature: Translation, Technology, Poetics (forthcoming).

PAPER 2: 'Translation' but not as we know it: new circuits of reading and writing

Speaker: Fiona Doloughan

Abstract: In a recent article on “Translation studies at a cross-roads”, in the context of a personal view of how far Translation Studies has come since the 1970s, Bassnett (2012) points to the challenges facing Translation Studies today in an age of increasingly intercultural writing and suggests that it needs to think more broadly and engage in dialogue with those from other related disciplines. She goes on to identify a number of scholars in Comparative Literature, Post-colonial Studies and World Literature whose work is engaging with translation and translational writing in interesting and provocative ways. Taking Bassnett’s own provocation as my starting point, I wish to suggest that understanding cross-cultural literary flows is as dependent on new conceptualizations of translation and what translated literature may look like across the globe today as it is on innovative approaches to the reception and production of writing in translation. This is not to suggest that the packaging and marketing of works in translation and their reception across cultures does not continue to be worthy of investigation. It is simply to acknowledge that the translational project has broadened at a time when it is no longer possible to make simple adequations between and among language, culture and nationhood in literary or other cultural representations; and that translation as a mode of writing and reading has become ever more complex in a world where English has become a lingua franca. To Bassnett’s contention that “so much thinking about translation seems to be coming from scholars working outside it” (Bassnett 2012: 21), I would add that contemporary writers themselves are increasingly aware of, and thematising in their work, issues of translation both literal and metaphoric. In order to explore both sides of the translational coin, I shall discuss two examples: Diego Marani’s novel New Finnish Grammar originally written in Italian in 2000 and published by Dedalus Books in English translation by Judith Landry in 2011 and by all accounts more popular in Finland in English translation than in the 2003 Finnish translation; and Xiaolu Guo’s recent novel I am China (Guo 2014), a work that cleverly draws on the process of translation (from Chinese to English) to withhold and reveal information, in line with what the translator knows, and advance the plot. In discussing these two examples, I shall draw on a range of sources both textual and extra-textual, including author interviews, publishers’ blurbs, reviews, both popular and academic in addition to reflections on the changing nature of translation today at a point when writers may be drawing on more than one language and culture in their literary representations and be conscious of the myths of nationhood, “the whole question of identity as a politics rather than an inheritance” (Clifford, 1997: 46) and the widening scope and significance of translation today.

Bionote: Fiona Douloughan is a Lecturer in English (Literature and Creative Writing) with an ongoing interest in translation and translational writing, having previously taught Creative Writing within a Translation Studies context. She is currently writing a monograph for Bloomsbury entitled English as a Literature in Translation to be submitted in December 2014 and has been involved in Panel Discussions with writers and translators as part of the activities organized in connection with European Literature Night at the British Library, London. She has a PhD in Comparative Literature from the US and a Masters in Applied Linguistics from the UK.

PAPER 3: Images of the Western Balkans in English Translation for Children

Speaker: Marija Todorova, Hong Kong Baptist University

Since the late 1990s there has been an increasing interest in the representation of Balkan culture in the literary works of authors writing in English. Scholars (Bakic-Hayden 1995, Todorova 1997, Goldsworthy 1998, Norris 1999, Hammond 2010) have shown how literary representations of the Balkans have reflected and reinforced its stereotypical construction as Europe’s “dark and untamed Other”. However, the contribution of translated literature in the construction of these images has rarely been considered. Thus, this study of representations of the Western Balkans in translated literature, published since 1990, addresses a gap in the study Balkanist discourses and helps shed a new and more complete light on the literary representations of the Balkans, and the Western Balkans more precisely. Children’s literature has been selected for this study due to its potential to transform and change deeply rooted stereotypes (Sutherland, 1997). The paper looks at the use of paratexts, and especially the cover (front and back), in the translated books as framing and representation sites that contest or promote stereotypes in the global literary market. English has been selected as a target language due to its global position as а mediating language for the promotion of international literature. However, translations in other languages, where they exist, are also examined for comparative purposes. The study adopts Kress and van Leeuven’s (1996) model of multimodal analysis and focuses on five books, each from a different country (Bosnia and Herzegovina, Croatia, Serbia, Macedonia, and Montenegro) and representing a range of genres and formats (non-fiction, anthology, novel, picturebook, and an ebook). The discussion considers how covers changed over time, in different editions of the translated book. It also examines adaptations accompanying the introduction of the translated book into the target society, such as documentaries, music scores and theatre performances.

Bakić-Hayden, Milica. 1995. Nesting Orientalisms: The Case of Former Yugoslavia. Slavic Review, 54.4:917-31.

Goldsworthy, Vesna. 1998. Inventing Ruritania: The Imperialism of the Imagination. London: Yale University Press

Hammond, Andrew. 2010. British Literature and the Balkans: Themes and Contexts. Amsterdam: Rodopi.

Kress, Gunter and Theo van Leeuwen. 2006. Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design. Second edition. New York: Routledge.

Norris, David A.. 1999. In the Wake of the Balkan Myth. London: Macmillan Press.

Sutherland, Zena. 1997. Children and Books. New York: Longman.

Todorova, Maria N. 1997/2009. Imagining the Balkans. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Bionotes: Marija Todorova holds a dual BA in English Language and Literature and Macedonian Language, and MA in Peace and Development Studies. She has more than 10 years of experience as interpreter for various international organisations. For one of her literary translations she received the 2007 National Best Translation Award. In 2008 she has established and taught at the University American College Skopje, Translation Programme. Currently, she is a Research Fellow in Translation Studies at the Hong Kong Baptist University. Todorova is an Executive Council member of IATIS and Kontakt. Her research interests include intercultural education, children’s and young adults literature and visual representation.

PAPER 4: Marketing, Reading and Problematizing Turkish Literature in English Translation: From Production and Consumption to Critical Analysis

Speaker: Sehnaz Tahir Gurcaglar, Boğaziçi University, Istanbul

Abstract: The paper will concentrate on the course followed by Turkish literature in English translation within the last decade and the way these translations have been tackled by researchers, working both in and out of Turkey. It will adopt a discourse-critical approach to the subject and focus on three different levels of representation and analysis. The critical moment taken as a milestone in the promotion and marketing of Turkish literature in the English-language context is the 2006 Nobel Prize for Literature awarded to Orhan Pamuk, Turkey’s only Nobel laureate. The paper will focus on developments following this milestone and will also explore the ways in which a major prize such as the Nobel Prize for Literature --features in the marketing, consumption and analysis of translated literature. The study will first of all focus on the immediate paratextual aspects of a select group of works of fiction translated from Turkish into English and explore the covers, blurbs and prefaces of the works, i.e. the peritexts of the novels. The second level of analysis will engage in a critical discussion of epitextual material published about the works in question in the form of reviews and interviews with authors or translators. This level will also include an analysis of on-line reviews and comments posted in book forums and on-line bookstores by non-professionals with the expectation of building better proximity to literary reception by ordinary readers. The third level of analysis will deal with the way researchers have approached patterns of marketing and reception of Turkish literature in the Anglophone context in the light of a recent proliferation of books, essays, reports and theses written on the topic (A selection includes Seyhan 2008, Göknar 2013, Tekgül and Akbatur 2013, Eker Roditakis forthcoming, Akbatur forthcoming). This level will probe into how researchers problematize (or fail to problematize) issues of national/cultural identity and cross-cultural literary representation as they tackle translations and their reception.

Bionote: Şehnaz Tahir Gürçağlar is professor of Translation Studies at Boğaziçi University, Istanbul and a visiting scholar at the School of Translation, Glendon College, York University in 2014-2015. She studied Translation Studies at Boğaziçi University and Media Studies at Oslo University. She holds a PhD degree in Translation Studies and teaches courses on translation theory, translation history, translation criticism and interpreting. She is the author of The Politics and Poetics of Translation in Turkey, 1923-1960 (Rodopi, 2008) and various papers published in international journals and edited volumes. Her research interests include translation history, retranslation, periodical studies and reception studies.

PAPER 5: Modern European poet-translators: a statistical analysis

Speaker: Jacob Blakesley, University of Leeds, England

Abstract: With the rise in nation states and the development of a world economy, poets have increasingly turned to translation as a fundamental creative act. It is through translation that modern poets often begin their careers, develop their poetics, and make a living. It is through such activity that poet-translators have helped shape and form the dynamics of modern European literary fields, a fact long overlooked by scholars. My project, Poets of Europe, Translators of the World, investigates modern European poet-translators, based on new and original research undertaken in national library catalogues in England, France, Italy, and Spain. My work reveals that poets often produce more translated volumes than original books: their translations form an invisible as well as visible network stretching across Europe and beyond. My paper reveals translation has been a prime motor for modern European literary systems. Despite widespread translation work by a large number of canonical 20th-century European poets – from Federico García Lorca, and René Char to Rainer Maria Rilke, Eugenio Montale, and Ted Hughes –, no one has specifically addressed poet-translators in a transnational context. Moreover, there is no comparable project that uses a sociological approach to show translation trends across modern literary Europe. My methodology is based on two pillars of modern literary sociology, Franco Moretti and Pierre Bourdieu. I draw on Moretti’s notion of “distant reading,” where individual texts (in this case, translations) are not analysed on the level of close reading, but are examined as part of a larger group. Instead of dealing with only a few books through close reading, we can now analyse the other 99.5% of texts, “the great unread,” in Moretti’s words. I likewise make use of Bourdieu’s theorisation of the literary field, and his related concepts of cultural and symbolic capital. In this paper, I will show how the number of 20th century poets who translate (and what they translate) depends on several key factors: the importance of translation for a particular linguistic tradition, the role of poetry in society, the prestige of various languages and literary cultures nationally and internationally, the political and historical situation at large (peacetime vs. wartime), and the economic opportunities available to poets. In short, my project strives to demonstrate how translation is a vital, creative practice for poets of all nations, and allows crucial literary exchange across cultures far and wide. This research project is being continued through a Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship at the University of Leeds, which I will begin in September. I am co-editing a special journal issue of Translation & Literature with Jeremy Munday (2015), dedicated to the sociology of poetry translation, which will contain an article of mine about this very topic.

Bionote: Jacob Blakesley received his PhD in Italian literature in 2011 from the University of Chicago. He has taught translation studies and Italian literature at the University of Manchester and Durham University. He is taking up a 3-year Leverhulme Early Career Fellowship at the University of Leeds Centre for Translation Studies in September. His monograph Modern Italian Poets: Translators of the Impossible was published this year by the University of Toronto Press.

PAPER 6: Anthologizing Italy: forms and functions of Scandinavian collections of Italian prose and poetry

Speaker: Cecilia Schwartz, Stockholm University, Sweden

Abstract: So far little attention has been given to literary anthologies as a genre, and especially in the field of translation studies (Seruya et. al 2013). This paper starts out from the idea that translational anthologies based on geographical criteria, are revealing documents of ideas concerning both source and target culture in the intercultural exchange of literary texts. These ideas are reflected in the selection of texts and in paratextual features such as titles, book covers, blurbs, prefaces etc. Just as Bourdieu (1990) points out, a literary text often gets decontextualized when leaving its original national field, which may lead to misinterpretations as well as new and different readings. In the case of translational national anthologies, we are actually dealing with a form of double decontextualization. Firstly the text loses its original cultural context, secondly it loses its original textual context. Literary texts included in translation anthologies, have all been picked out of their original textual surroundings in a rather unsentimental and sometimes careless manner, and then put together in order to create a collection of representative texts from the same geographical background. Having undergone this double decontexualization, the “national” feature of texts included in translational national anthologies might be even more emphasized as a result of paratextual strategies. Focusing on the translation flow from Italy to Sweden, with a glance given to the other Scandinavian countries, during the second half of the 20th century, this paper seeks to find out whether there is consistency to the idea that publishers tend to highlight the “italianity” when selecting and repackaging Italian texts for a Scandinavian audience. For this purpose, a paratextual corpus – consisting of titles, covers, blurbs, notes and prefaces – will be analyzed with prominence given to the selection operations and promotion strategies that are visible in paratextual features of translational national prose and poetry anthologies. Methodologically, the analysis aims to combine well known strategies deriving from sociology of translation with an imagological perspective on the construction of national stereotypes in literature (Pageaux 1994, Beller & Leerssen 2007). More precisely, this paper seeks to respond to the following questions: 1. In what way can paratextual features help us to visualize the selection criteria and, more generally, the main purpose of translational national anthologies? 2. How does the paratext in Scandinavian anthologies of Italian literature relate to stereotypical ideas of “italianity”?

Bionote: Cecilia Schwartz is Associate Professor of Italian at Stockholm University. Her present research deals with the intercultural exchanges between Sweden and Italy, with a special attention given to the circulation on the book market and the impact of literary mediators. Her recent publication on the field is the volume, coedited with Laura Di Nicola, Libri in viaggio. Classici italiani in Svezia (2013). She has also published various articles on the idea of the North in contemporary Italian novels and travel writing. She is responsible for the cultural agreement between the University of Stockholm and Sapienza-University of Rome. She is also a translator and literary critic.

PAPER 7: Representing Brazilian literary translation and translators in verbal and visual metatexts.

Speaker: Célia Maria Magalhães, Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, Brasil

Abstract: The paper offers an analysis of the role of translation and translators in disseminating work from a different cultural context. The aim of the study is to explore which conceptualisations of translations and translators are construed and promoted by the Brazilian literary market and whether they reinforce common sense images of translations and translators or represent and help consolidate new, more positive, perspectives on translations and translators (Magalhães, 1998; St Andre, 2010; Kershaw & Saldanha, 2013). Another relevant aim is to further refine/develop analytical procedures already used in the context of the Corpus of Style of Translations – ESTRA – project, by including textual and multimodal analysis of translation metatexts. ESTRA is a parallel corpus with 72 texts, about 2 million tokens, mainly designed for the study of style of translations/translators and the analysis of

retranslations. It is composed of novels, short stories and children’s literature. The language pairs are English/Portuguese, English/Spanish and Spanish/Portuguese. It includes a corpus of metatexts such as book covers, flaps, prefaces, introductions, translators’ notes, afterwords, and blurbs. The paper will report on preliminary results of a study of both the verbal metatexts of ESTRA and the visual metatexts (covers) of a sample of Brazilian (re)translations of Heart of Darkness, by Joseph Conrad. Two different methodologies are used. The first is analysis of verbal metatexts. The focus of the analysis will be on keywords and their collocates as representing as well as construing discourses on translation and/or translators through metaphors in metatexts (Deignan, 2005; Cameron, 2008; Berber-Sardinha, 2009). The second involves multimodal analysis (Kress & van Leewen, 2006) of the sample of book covers with the aim to decode representational, interactive and compositional

meanings as ways of (re)presenting the translated text to a new audience. Issues to be

discussed as part of the study include the comparison of the visibility of translator/author in the visual and verbal language of the metatexts as well as the inter and intradiscursive relationships established by them.

Bionote: Célia M. Magalhães is a Full Professor in Linguistics and Applied Linguistics at Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, Brasil. Her research interests lie on the style of translations/translators, and to innovative ways of using multimodal social semiotics analysis to translation which includes representations of translated texts on book covers and other metatextual material. She has published papers in Brazilian journals as well as books and chapters in (inter)national books on these topics.

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