Conference Programme

Poster Session

Vindicación Feminista and Off Our Backs: Transatlantic feminist dialogue during ‘la Transición española’ 1975-1979
Alison McNaughton, The University of Glasgow

This poster presentation will examine selected extracts from two feminist publications, Vindicación Feminista and Off Our Backs as an example of transnational feminist dialogue 1975-79. In line with the wider Translating Feminism research project, this research will serve as a case study, examining the use of translation in fostering transnational solidarity across feminist movements. The longest running feminist journal in the United States, Off Our Backs published continuously from 1970-2008, providing transnational feminist perspectives on women’s rights and movements. More broadly addressing current events worldwide, a central aim was “to educate the public about the status of women around the world”. As part of this wider, transnational perspective, Off Our Backs drew heavily on Vindicación Feminista as a voice for Spanish feminist activism and socio-political affairs. Excerpts from Vindicación Feminista were presented as either ‘translations’ or ‘summaries’ on a range of themes with a particular emphasis on the two organisations shared concerns of abortion, access to contraception and divorce laws.

Vindicación Feminista, in print from 1976-1979, was the first Spanish feminist journal to emerge in the period of ‘la Transición from dictatorship to democracy. Co-founded by left-wing feminist activists Lidia Falcon and Carmen Alcalde, their aim was to provide a platform to unify feminist voices in Spain. Vindicación Feminista also engaged in national and global politics, offering feminist perspectives on current affairs and fostering transnational connections with activists and publications abroad, including links to Off Our Backs in the USA. Despite its positive reception, particularly in Barcelona where the organisation was based, Vindicación Feminista was also widely criticised by numerous feminist organisations, trade unions and political parties in Spain, primarily due to the price of subscription. Lack of national publicity and financial backing ultimately led to its closure in 1979, though occasional special editions continued to be published. Although on a national scale, Vindicación Feminista proved to be controversial, the publication clearly had an international reach and established a transatlantic dialogue with foreign publications, including Off Our Backs.

 

 

The Outsider’s Freedom
Maria Marchidanu, The University of Glasgow

This paper is constructed upon a synthesis of my MLitt in Comparative Literature dissertation. Indeed, through this research, I am focusing upon the similarities and contrasts between the presence and development of Existentialism within Western European and Romanian novels and short stories. The presentation is divided into four case studies (each exploring one individual text), while the philosophical movement represents the common perspective from which the literary works are deconstructed and analyzed.

Through this research, I will be engaging with existentialists thinkers and texts extensively, yet  concepts such as freedom of self, alienation, duality and angst form the instruments of comparison between the texts. These conditions of identity are explored in the individual works and, through this analysis, the paper reflects cultural and literary comparisons between Germany, Scotland, and Romania, while also emphasizing the exploration of the condition of the outsider across Western and Eastern Europe.

On the one hand, the paper addresses the condition of the marginalized individual as a result of the pursuit of art and of a non-conformist life in Thomas Mann’s short story ‘’The Joker’’ (1897). On the other hand, the research puts forward issues regarding the condition of the immigrant in Muriel Spark’s novel, A Far Cry from Kensington (1988), and Herta Muller’s work, The Passport (1989). In addition, the status of the outcast native is explored within Mihail Sebastian’s text For Two Thousand Years (1934).

Thus, this paper engages with the themes of ‘’Authority, Memory and Transgression’’ through a comparison between literary deconstructions of the self across Western Europe and Romania through the lens of Existentialism.

 

Panel 3 – Transgression in Literature

Translation as Revision: Vladimir Nabokov’s Russian Works in Translation
Lyndsay Miller, The University of Glasgow

 Vladimir Nabokov, throughout a career spanning six decades, five countries, three languages, two continents and two calendars, was an ‘incorrigible reviser’, constantly altering his own works.^[1] He noted that ‘even the dream I describe to my wife across the breakfast table is only a first draft’.^[2] This paper examines revision as a device employed by Nabokov in the translations of his Russian works into English, undertaken following the critical and commercial success of Lolita. Nabokov uses translation to revise his works in two distinct ways. Firstly, he develops and foregrounds key thematic material from Lolita in order to retrospectively impress an overall design onto his oeuvre. Thus, Nabokov uses his scandalous text to create the authorial persona of VN. Secondly, he adds instructive forewords to his translated texts, with the intention of guiding the reader. This ‘authorial trespassing’ has the dual effect of informing the reading process and reinforcing his newly-fashioned authorial persona onto his texts.^[3]

Nabokov’s revisions to his translated works intrude upon both the original and translated texts. This causes them to become incomplete after the point of their completion and to join with one another, which leads to the creation of an interconnected oeuvre. The resultant dynamic model of oeuvre construction destabilises the individual component texts, which lose their autonomy as a consequence of the multiple tracks of revisions affecting them contemporaneously. The subsequent textual form is a fully cohesive oeuvre, which could be termed a ‘supertext’, constituted of every part of Nabokov’s corpus at all times: akin to a Möbius strip referring endlessly to itself.

^[1] Julian Connolly, Nabokov’s Early Fiction: Patterns of Self and Other (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), p.17.

^[2] Vladimir Nabokov, Strong Opinions (New York: Vintage, 1990), p. 3.

^[3] Michael Wood, The Magician’s Doubts: Nabokov and the Risks of Fiction (London: Chatto and Windus, 1994), p. 186.

 

 

The Duel of Honour and its Radical Inverse
Jamie Daniel & Nathan Hamel, The University of Glasgow

Our project will investigate figurations of the duel of honour in nineteenth century Russian literature, parodies of the duel in Diderot and Proust, and ultimately what a juxtaposition with de Sade’s radical inversion thereof can offer.

We shall begin with Pushkin using the duel in Eugene Onegin (1837) to expose the position of masculine potency within a phallogocentric economy, as well as presenting the duel as a constructed performance. Dostoevsky, in The Brothers Karamazov (1880), shares this with Pushkin, along with locating castration anxiety as conducive to the duel, but specifically presents the Zosima’s duel with reference to a patriarchal Super-Ego. Chekhov subsumes these arguments in ‘The Duel’ (1891), and goes further than his predecessors, presenting the duel as ontologically self-referential (and therefore compromised), but also triangulating the construct with reference to a maternal-subconscious-Ego. In doing so, he shows the masculine libidinal economy to be dependent upon the maternal, without which the Death-Drive is abnegated; masculine potency questioned (the maternal annihilated in the subject), the duellist is always already castrated. To a similarly radical degree, Proust, in Sodom and Gomorrah (1921-2), both queers and ridicules the duel, presenting it as a substance-less construct, only ever with reference to a patriarchal Super-Ego – that is, a specifically feudal patriarchal Super-Ego.

It is here that the Marquis de Sade becomes relevant. Sade’s libertines are all of the nobility, which is explicitly stated to be a pre-condition of their libertinage, and yet also contrary to the espoused tenets of libertinage. By valourising specifically non-reproductive sexual practices (an apotheosis is reached in the final orgy of Juliette (1797-1801), where the libertines not only focus their sexual energies exclusively upon non-reproductive acts, but also simultaneously slaughter their progeny, undoing their prior acts of pro-creation), de Sade annuls the notion of masculine potency – the primary impetus for staging a duel. He presents us with the duel’s “phantasmic counterpart”[1] in La philosophie dans le boudoir (1795). By conceiving of the duel as such, we see, in Eugenie’s dildo, that the duellist’s rapier or pistol belies precisely the same phallic lack, and that the execution of the progenitor, along with the annihilation of her sexual potential, is the same figuration as structuring the duel with reference to the annihilated Maternal. The key difference is that, in the duel, this violence is repressed, whereas, in the libertine ideology, this is the totalising Symbolic statement. Viewed as such, the duel functions within a feudal Symbolic as the Lacanian Object petit A – simultaneously “radically alien” to, and “conceptualised as a condition of [the ideology’s] possibility”[2]. In the case of the libertine, precisely the opposite is true. We argue, however, that this reading of the duel is only possible in the Sadean radical inverse; transgression exposes the machinations of the patriarchal authority.

[1] Slavoj Zizek, ‘Lacan with Eyes Wide Shut’ in How to Read Lacan (London: Granta Publications, 2006), (pp.40-60) p.56.

[2] Michael Syrotinski, Deconstruction and the Postcolonial (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2007), p.58.

 

 

Pier Paolo Pasolini and the Beauty of Transgression
Mauro Di Lullo, The University of Glasgow

This paper intends to discuss transgression and memory in literature through Pier Paolo Pasolini’s transgressive novel  ’’Ragazzi Di Vita’’.

‘’Ragazzi Di Vita’’, literally boys of life, idiomatically hustlers) is a novel by the Italian author, poet and intellectual Pier Paolo Pasolini The novel tells the story of Riccetto, a street yob who the readers are first introduced to during his Confirmation and First Communion. Not too long afterwards, Riccetto is stealing from a blind beggar and a convent. Over the next few years, the reader follows along with Riccetto as he goes from robbery to scam to prostituting himself and back again while wandering around. During this time, many of his companions are killed or die off and there is an atmosphere of constant transgression present in the story. Riccetto is finally arrested and put in jail after trying to steal some iron in order to buy his fiancée an engagement ring. He is released later and goes back to his same life of transgression. Pasolini makes it clear to the readers that Riccetto and his peers are wanderers and thieves by nature, they have no clear life plans; Riccetto becomes the embodiment of a beautiful transgressive hero. Pasolini finds Riccetto and his companions to be free from modernity and consumerism and rooted in a way of life that has since been lost. He also admired what he considered their pre-political antagonism and transgressive behaviour still clearly separated from the partisan politics that plagued modern Italy and all the Western cultures.

Ragazzi di vita can be compared to some of Pasolini’s more transgressive films like Mamma Roma, La Ricotta (Curd Cheese) and Salo in developing his own form of art through a dialectics of transgression, separate from that of other post-war directors. Pasolini carried neo-realism further creating a kind of hyper-realism in which transgression becomes the dominant element. While neo-realism highlights the common individual in his/her daily life, Pasolini seeks to highlight the transgressive lives and the forgotten memory of the sub-common man and woman.

Ragazzi di Vita will be discussed as a landmark for the development of a literature of transgression. The novel was criticized among the public upon its release and was heavily censored. The Italian government condemned it for its ‘offensive’ transgression. The Italian Communist party did not approve the book as well accusing Pasolini of lack of historical memory. It was not the first time Pasolini had faced persecution; yet the controversy and criticism of his transgressive novel created attention and new potentialities for literature and the arts.

Pasolini had succeeded to start shedding light on the beauty and attractiveness of transgression and on the forgotten heroes  he wanted the public to remember.

Panel 2 – Translation and Multimodality

Translating Transgressive Language in Banlieue Film: The Case of La Squale (Genestal, 2000)
Hannah Silvester, University of Glasgow

This paper will present the findings of a case study of the English subtitles for La Squale (Genestal, 2000).  Through the application of a new methodology combining both macro- and micro-contextual analysis of the subtitled film, this paper will offer a linguistic analysis of the subtitles in-context; both in the macro-context of the release of the film, but also in the micro-context of the polysemiotic network within which a subtitle appears at a given point in the film.

The banlieues are housing estates on the outskirts of large towns and cities in France, which are often home to the underprivileged, and immigrants to France or their descendants.  The language spoken in the banlieue differs from standard French in terms of grammar, lexicon and pronunciation and therefore presents a challenge for subtitlers working to translate films set in these areas.  In addition to the constraints of time and space in subtitling, and the need for maximum readability, one of the greatest challenges for subtitlers working to translate this variety of French into English is the presence of ‘an untranslatable verlan’ (Jäckel, 2001, p.226) which has no direct linguistic or cultural equivalent in British English.

Originally developed as a code language, verlan is now a marker of identity for the banlieue communities, and expresses their sense of exclusion from mainstream society (Hamaidia, 2007).  The case of La Squale (Genestal, 2000) is particularly interesting, as in addition to the presence of non-standard French, the theme of sexual violence in the banlieue is central to the film and reflected in the characters’ dialogue.  This paper will examine how far this transgressive language is conveyed in translation for a British English audience.

References

• Doran, M. (2007) Alternative French, Alternative Identities: Situating Language in La Banlieue. Contemporary French and Francophone Studies, 11(4), 497-508.
• Genestal, F (2000) La Squale
• Hamaidia, L. (2007) Subtitling Slang and Dialect: Proceedings of the 2007 MuTra – LSP Translation Scenarios Conference (EU-High-Level Scientific Conference Series) [online] held at The Centre for Translation Studies, Vienna, The University of Vienna. Available from: http://www.euroconferences.info/proceedings/2007_Proceedings/2007_Hamaidia_Lena.pdf [accessed 20/02/2015]

 

Baudelaire as Translator / Baudelaire Translated: Illustrations of Les Fleurs Du Mal as Dialogues With The Dead
Fiona Dakin, St Andrews

Charles Baudelaire’s 1857 poetry collection Les Fleurs du mal (conventionally translated as The Flowers of Evil) has been illustrated by over one hundred artists since 1888. In my PhD thesis, I frame these illustrations as inter-medial translations. Certain of these illustrations contain seemingly unexplained ghostly apparitions. In this paper, I initially present these ghosts as having multiple identities, one of which is a deliberate and uneasy manifestation of Baudelaire himself as artistic predecessor. Similarly, the image of the (living) figure of the poet also frequently ‘haunts’ these images which illustrate his work. By physically figuring the artistic predecessor in their target work – alive or as a ghost – these illustrators actively acknowledge and fight the battle for authorship of and authority over their visual translations. This confrontational dialogue usually ends badly for the living (according to Harold Bloom), and as such many of the illustrators concede the battle, thus paying reverence to Baudelaire in their portrayals. Elsewhere, however, the unlikely occurs, whereby the artist wins the battle for authority over the poetic predecessor. At times, this is achieved by inviting Baudelaire’s own influential ghosts into the image, such as Poe, or Delacroix. The phrase “Baudelaire’s ghost” thus takes on a dual meaning, just as Derrida’s Spectres de Marx: both the ghostly apparition of the dead poet, and the artistic ancestors which haunt(ed) him, and his texts. By acknowledging these sources of inspiration, the artist not only negates Baudelaire’s supposed monolithic power over Les Fleurs du mal, but also perhaps goes further, to erase or even override his presence, positioning him as a mere interlocutor between those he translates and those who translate him.

 

Intercultural Competence Development for Translator     Training in China: A Web-Based Localization Model
Jie Wang, Queen’s University, Belfast

All too often World Literature is held to be insensitive to issues of translation, both to the interpretative processes that characterize its processes and to the potential for intercultural misrecognition that may be thought of as inhabiting cultural encounter across geopolitical divides.

This paper uses these concerns as its point of departure and, in the short time available, will examine how translators’ intercultural skills may be developed through training models. In particular, the purpose of this paper is to suggest the adaptation of a web-based localization model to develop Chinese translators’ intercultural competence. To put it at its most simple: translators work constantly at the junction or even fault lines of different cultures, and by using multi-contextualized scenarios, trainee translators might hone their skills through horizontal and dynamic processes of encounter rather than vertical and largely passive analysis of texts, thereby both encountering and participating in multi-otherness.

This research is, of course, important. We live in a multilingual and globalized village in which growing internationalisation requires, both at national and international levels, skills of what we might term a ‘de-commodified cosmopolitanism’. Rather than superficial and unidirectional, this re-assessed cosmopolitanism is a two-way street, a vernacular as well as intercultural set of skills that is much more shaped, interactional and reciprocal.

These are skills, of course, that are difficult to quantify or measure. How training models take that into account is therefore open to debate, and it is part of the intention of this paper to encourage such debate at this seminar. In that sense, fundamentally, its purpose is to to contribute to our awareness both of the gap in translator training in China, and how China might learn from other practices in other countries and systems. The paper is fired by a key concern that the growing awareness among Chinese translators that intercultural encounter is both a key issue and strength of translation should be maintained and developed. In the final analysis this will enable Chinese students to interrogate the value systems behind their own national cultural practices as well as understanding the way in which translation might expand the relatedness between Chinese writing and literatures beyond. In order to exemplify this, the paper will make passing reference to the current RSC Shakespeare in China project.

Panel 1 – Translation and History/Memory/Politics

“After that he started his own story”: Amos Tutuola and the Dissensual Impulse
Ross Mallon, University of Glasgow

This paper draws on the work of French philosopher Jacques Rancière to explore the characteristics of pre-independence West African magical realist fiction.  Using Amos Tutuola’s early novels as case studies, I focus on Rancière’s notion of dissensus and aim to demonstrate how Tutuola’s work can be considered a form of aesthetic (as well as ontological and political) dissensus.

In my account of Tutuola, I outline three features of his writing, specifically his use of tautologies, modifications and deletions, which place it at odds with standard text and speech.   This, I suggest, seeks to undermine dominant discourse and illustrate its limitations as well as the possibilities offered by other forms.

This paper explores Tutuola’s first two novels (The Palm-Wine Drinkard, 1952 and My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, 1954) and is centred around Rancière’s writing on dissensus, in particular The Politics of Aesthetics (2004), Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics (2010) and The Politics of Literature (2011).    Additionally, it will be complemented by insights from Frantz Fanon (1961) and Jürgen Habermas (1984).

Reference List:

Fanon, F. (2004 [1961]). The Wretched of the Earth. New York City: Grove Press.

Habermas, J. (1984). The Theory of Communicative Action: Vol.1, Reason and the Rationalization of Society. London: Heinemann.

Rancière, J. (2004). The Politics of Aesthetics : the Distribution of the Sensible. London: Continuum.

Rancière, J. (2010). Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics. London: Continuum.

Rancière, J. (2011). The Politics of Literature. Cambridge: Polity Press.

 

 

Theatre and Censorship: From the ‘Posibilismo’ of Franco’s Spain to the Contemporary Stage in Jordan and Syria
Isra Al-Quada, Queen’s University, Belfast

How do writers name the unnamed and/or unnameable in the public space? This is a central problem for translators today in the Arab world.

Controlling what reaches the public space has long been an integral part of ensuring authority, moral and political. The mechanisms of censorship across widely divergent cultures and to suit a range of purposes are strikingly uniform, so that it may not therefore be altogether surprising that writing practices designed to negotiate the attentions of the censor also share a number of characteristics.

This paper, which focuses on the particular context of theatre, examines what became known as ‘posibilismo’ during the Franco’s period in Spain (by analogy with the ‘imposibilismo’ of writers who preferred silence to what they considered collaboration). Posibilismo, which may be thought of as the opposition of the practices of creativity to imposed silence and was most associated with the work of Antonio Buero Vallejo (1916-2000), has also been adopted by contemporary Arab playwrights writing on issues deemed controversial by current regimes in the Arab world. The paper therefore offers a necessarily brief comparative reflection on the effectiveness of posibilismo across time and space by reference to these two contexts – that is, the Spanish theatre of Francoist Spain (1939-1975), and contemporary Arab theatre(s), represented here by case studies of Jordanian playwright Ahmad Al-Zoubi’s play Now, I Understand You, and Syrian playwright Abdul-Jabar Alabed’s play Corruption Academy. The paper analyses the techniques that these two playwrights use in to write drama under censorship and compare them to those implemented by Buero. The paper will conclude by elaborating on the implications of implementing posibilismo as an approach to creating theatre in the context of Jordan and Syria. Hopefully, through this comparison the Arabic theatre will be enabled to develop its own language; to translate itself from the experience of others.

 

 

Is there still a hope for orality? Paolo Nori as a possibility of a written collective memory
Monica Martinelli, St Andrews

Orality has always played a crucial role in any society before the birth of literacy, after which most of the cultures became writing-based. Although literacy, according to Walter Ong, is “absolutely necessary for the development of science, history and philosophy”, there is no doubt that a consistent part of traditions and meaning has been lost during the translation process. In fact, while spoken words have a visual connotation (they immediately convey the idea of the material counterpart they are associated with), written words do not exert the same power. Moreover, spoken words are the core of what Halbwachs called collective memory, namely the lived experiences shared by a group of people, be it as large as a nation or as small as a family. How do we engage with the persistent presence of electronic modes of communication (what Ong called secondary orality), which endlessly reproduce the same tailored and refined message without variations? Is there a way to include our collective memory and oral tradition in the modern writing-based world, whose aim is that of producing a marketable standard message, able to reach out to an audience as wide as possible? My paper will focus on Paolo Nori, an Italian author who started presenting his novels to the public in an oral form and then decided to write them down. Paolo Nori is part of a new Italian tradition of “young writers” who write as they speak and will be taken as an example of how the oral tradition belonging to the collective memory of a society can still be salvaged in its written / printed form.