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PRISMATIC TRANSLATIONAnnual workshop of the AILC/ICLA Research Committee on Literary TheoryUniversity of Vienna, Room Hs 4125–26 July 2016Organised by: Sowon S Park, Oxford UniversityCall for PapersWalid Hamarneh, Sowon S Park, Matthew Reynolds, Stefan WillerTranslation can be seen as producing a text in one language that will count as equivalent to a text in another. It can also be seen as a release of multiple signifying possibilities, an opening of the source text to Language in all its plurality. The first view is underpinned by the regime of European standard languages which can be lined up in bilingual dictionaries, by the technology of the printed book, and by the need for regulated communication in political and legal contexts. The second view attaches to contexts where several spoken languages share the same written characters (as in the Chinese scriptworld), to circumstances where language is not standardised (e.g., minority & dialectal communities & oral cultures), to the fluidity of electronic text, and to literature, especially poetry and theatrical performance. The first view sees translation as a channel; the second as a prism. The prismatic view of translation has yet to be fully theorised. For instance, a historical and intercultural glimpse at translation practices reveals a highly varied relationship between ‘original’ and ‘copy’ that demands further examination. Papers of the 2016 committee meeting could study the pragmatic requirements of translations (e.g., the function of dominant languages, the precarious prestige of specialised vernaculars, shifts in audiences, the situated behavior of authors), their concrete realisation in the individual transformation of documents (i.e., in multilingual groups of texts consisting of originals and translations), and their impact on the history of language and literature. This approach would develop the line taken in the key recent intervention in the study of translations, the Vocabulaire européen des philosophies : dictionnaire des intraduisibles by Cassin et al., itself translated as Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon. Despite its catchy subtitle or title, the volume in fact tends to deconstruct the binary translatable / untranslatable, revealing instead what Benjamin called ‘Ubersetzung bis zu einem gewissen Grade’ (‘the translatable to some degree’). Such degrees of translation require standard ideas such as ‘equivalence’, ‘fidelity’, and the binary of ‘foreignising’ and ‘domesticating’ to be rethought. Attention to non-European languages and translation traditions is likely to be crucial to this endeavour.PROGRAMMEMonday, 25 July 9:00 Introduction (Sowon Park)A 9.03–10.30 (Chair: Walid Hamarneh)Matthew Reynolds, ‘Variorum Translations’Robert J. C. Young, ‘Translation through the Lens of Language’Sowon Park, ‘Ideographic Translation’B 11:00–12.00 (Chair: Stefan Willer)Yvonne Howell, ‘Translating Happiness’Walid Hamarneh, ‘Translation and the (Un-)making of Meaning Value’LunchC 14:00– 15:30 Invited Guest Speaker, Francesca Orsini, SOAS (Chair: Robert J. C. Young)‘Language-stretching, Parallel Aesthetics and Poetic Equivalence: Poetic Idioms in a Multilingual Literary Culture’D 16:00–17:30 (Chair: Eva Horn)Kyohei Norimatsu, ‘From Space to Event: The Development of Yuri Lotman’s Concept of Translation’Vladimir Biti, ‘What Remains Untranslated in translatio imperii? Translation as a Political Operation’Jernej Habjan, ‘Cultural Translation, or, the Political Logic of Prismatic Translation’19:00 Conference Dinner at “Schubert,” Schreyvogelgasse 4–6Tuesday, 26 JulyE 9:00– 10:30 (Chair: Vladimir Biti)Monika Schmitz-Emans, ‘Literary Dictionaries as Meta-poetical Projects’Robert Stockhammer, ‘The (Un-)translatability of Welt’Rahilya Geybullayeva, ‘Translation or Itinerary? Tracing the Path of Azerbaijani Literary Terms’F 11:00–12:45 (Chair: Robert Stockhammer)Péter Hajdu, ‘The Hungarian Spectrum of Petronius’ Satyricon’Stefan Willer, ‘“Originalm??ig”: Goethe/Retranslation/Diderot’General discussion led by Matthew ReynoldsLunchG 13:45 – 15:50 Business MeetingABSTRACTSWhat Remains Untranslated in translatio imperii? Translation as Political OperationVladimir Biti, University of ViennaAs if by definition, translation lays claim to continuity, refusing to accept any substantial break between its states of departure and arrival. The latter declares fidelity to the former, suppressing the betrayal which is being committed. The same repudiation characterises the operation of translatio imperii carried out along an irreversible historical axis, even if it transfigures political rather than linguistic states into one another. Inasmuch as the asymmetry between the internal structures of these states underlies the same denial in both translatio and translation, the analogy between the political kernels of these two seemingly fully heterogeneous transitions appears to be illuminating. Although their states of departure and arrival are both discontinuous and dislocated with regard to one another, the successor erases this an-archic and ec-static relation with the model. It refuses to acknowledge the latter because this peculiar conjoining disjuncture would prevent both its complete melting into and its clear separation from the model. In such manner, neither of the paths to the successor’s sovereignty would be available. The successor can only legitimate its claim to inheritance if the sovereignty of both relates is guaranteed.Interpreting translatio(n) as the successor’s self-asserting reaction to the ‘spectral’ address of the model, I, on the contrary, intend to question both the model’s and the successor’s sovereignty. The model, inasmuch as the successor’s unequal constituencies experience it, turns out to be a conflict-ridden constellation rather than sovereign. However, if the successor’s constituencies cannot respond to the model’s uncertain address without competing with other internal constituencies, their sovereignty is equally questionable. It is precisely translatio(n) as a camouflaged self-establishment which the successor’s constituency needs to become sovereign. What dismantles translatio(n) as a sovereignty-warranting undertaking at the expense of others, is that it only promotes the constituency that authors it to the status of agency, while relegating other constituencies to the status of its enablers. This constitutive bifurcation points to an apocryphal untranslated residue amid the publicly translated state, uncovering the possibility of different translatio(n)s. Leaving this residue untranslated means sentencing it to a state of anonymity. Liberating its suppressed zone of potentiality means retranslating the official outcome of translatio(n). This is why I argue for understanding translatio(n) as a stubbornly recommencing politics instead of taking it for granted as the state that covers its policing.Translation or Itinerary? Tracing the Path of Azerbaijani Literary TermsRahilya Geybullayeva. Baku Slavic UniversityWords, like peoples, travel their own evolutionary path, which can be retraced in one way or another. Like families and tribes, the words crossbreed in fresh soil with other interpretations, acquiring new shades of meaning. These shades then spill out into new words which, at first glance, have nothing in common with the previous meaning of their progenitor; for example, the lexical series – semeni-sema-semela-zemlya – where each word appears to be original.Interpreting individual words in translation without any knowledge of their culturological context leads to contradictions. For example, how should we understand the ban on wine in the Holy Scriptures (sherab) and the praise of wine (sherab) in classical Islamic poetry of the same era? How did wine come to be divided into both drink and symbol in one and the same culture and historical period? Why do the Azerbaijani and Turkish languages have two words to mean the same drink wine (the semiotics of the word Russian vino [вино – wine] go back to the semiotics of the word of the same root vina [вина – sin]): sherab and chakhir, which are different from one another in terms of their lexical roots? Searches for an answer to these questions lead to the distant past (relatively) of the primary semiotics of sacred drinks, which through interpretation and translation enter different cultures in new semiotic dimensions.In this work we suggest retracing the path of several literary terms of Azerbaijani and Turkish literature studies such as ?d?biyyat, tarikat, kitab, nam?, x?ms? and also figures and images such as a?uq, ozan, D?d?, m?cnun, saqi and ??rab which are not mentioned (as well as other appropriate terms from other eastern cultures) in the Western textbooks and in Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms by Chris Baldick. They are traditionally considered to have been borrowed from classical Islamic poetry in the Middle Ages by peoples newly converted to Islam. To restore their contemporary interpretation the medieval period is accepted as their point of origin. Although the question of the beginning of (primary) meaning, of the starting point or origin, is relative, like the beginning of national literature and culture of a nation or people. Parallels with, and divergences from, earlier cultures, cultures that are geographically close and not so close, can be found in these literary terms. They existed in the pre-Islamic period in other neighbouring cultures. Study of this path allows cultural matrix to be determined which reveal common names for different phenomena, different names for common phenomena or elements of so-called prismatic translation.Cultural Translation, or, the Political Logic of Prismatic TranslationJernej Habjan, Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and ArtsIn political terms, the transition from translation as channelling of equivalences to translation as refraction of differences can be viewed as part of the shift from consensual translation to cultural translation. Arguing for consensual translation, Jürgen Habermas speaks of a process of returning excluded individuals into the community by translating their pathological private languages into public communication. On the other side, Homi Bhabha’s and Judith Butler’s cultural translation is a process of universalising the very sphere of public communication by making it recognise its excluded other. Both Butler and Bhabha have convincingly criticised Habermas’s therapeutic essentialism, which shares much of its flaws with the channelising translation as compared to prismatic translation. Like channelising translation, Habermas’s universal pragmatics subsumes otherness under equivalence, and only Butler’s and Bhabha’s proposals of cultural translation grant otherness the status of difference. However, according to the Viennese collective eipcp, and notably Boris Buden, Butler’s and Bhabha’s models of translation are prone as much as Habermas’s to the post-political ideology of balancing the impossibilities instead of facing the impossibility of balancing. In my paper, I will focus on Butler’s proposal of cultural translation as an endless process of translating identities excluded from the legal notion of universality back into this notion, which is thereby itself retroactively universalised. I will argue that Butler’s proposal rests on a misreading of (Derrida’s misreading of) Austin’s speech act theory, and try to show how such a reification of performativity could be avoided in the shift from channelising translation to prismatic translation.The Hungarian Spectrum of Petronius’ SatyriconPéter Hajdu, Hungarian Academy of SciencesI would like to test the metaphor of translation as prism in the Hungarian translations of Petronius. It is always a challenge to translate Latin texts into non-Indo-European languages, which have completely different structure, and very probably different ideas about artistic merits of a text. The situation is especially delicate with Petronius for two reasons. On the one hand, the text does not everywhere fit in with the traditional standards of Latin, which is taught in schools and for which a canon of translation strategies have been developed. On the other, Petronius' work started being regarded as a novel in the 20th?century, which solicited translators use free, creative strategies to apply the text to the expectations of novel readers. There are three Hungarian translation sf the work. István Székely (1910) and József Révay (1920) translated only the single long continuous fragment, Trimalchio's dinner, then István Károly Horváth (1963) all the available fragments. All the three translators can be regarded as professionals, since they translated a lot. Székely was a secondary school teacher, who translated several books from German and some from Latin. He produced the most innovative prose translation from Latin in his age. Interestingly enough he regarded the literary piece a xenophobic fable. Révay in that period of his life was a freelance translator and writer. He was not allowed to teach between 1920–45, so he translated from Latin, Greek, Italian and French, and wrote several informative books on ancient cultural history, but also a lot historical fiction. He rather standardised the Hungarian Petronius. Horváth was a university teacher and a talented scholar, who loved to do research in texts that he regarded as examples of ancient popular realism. His Petronius is a realist writer. These three translations offer three rather different images of the?Satyricon.Translation and the (Un-)making of Meaning ValueWalid Hamarneh, University of RichmondDuring the past two decades scholars have been engaged in studying the role of translation in the different and diverse processes that helped universalise the western ‘modern’ and its spread in different societies and cultures especially during the historical moments of colonialism and globalisation. These two historical moments, highly controversial and difficult to disengage temporally, have been moments of interaction and strife, contact and confrontation, encountering and countering, sharing and separation, or at least attempts at all that. The, by now accepted, central role that translation played in these complex processes has been difficult to theorise due to the different historical conditions and cases that were studied. Most theoretical pronouncements depended on particular cases or cases from contiguous areas.The global circulation of signs and the ways their meaning values are made and unmade problematise further the issues of equivalence and reciprocity of meaning that have been central to theories of translation. This is especially the case when we are confronted with cases where reciprocity becomes a problem in trans-lingual and trans-cultural exchanges where predominantly unequal forms of global exchange characterise the material and intellectual conditions of that exchange. Such en-counters become more interesting when they are performed with the pretext of ‘authenticity’ envisioned under these conditions of unequal exchange.To examine some theoretical aspects of such processes, I have chosen two cases, one from Egypt (Mujstafa Lutfi al-Manfaluti 1876–1924) and one from China (Lin Shu 1852–1924). The two were contemporaries who had no or little command of any foreign language and were proponents of the resuscitation of classical modes of literary discourse. Yet both worked mostly in ‘translation’. They translated works from the western cannon, especially novels, and from languages they did not know. However, their ‘translations’ were very popular to the extent that they became a part of the canon in their respective cultures.Translating HappinessYvonne Howell, University of RichmondIt has long been noted that words for ‘happiness’ (Freude, Glücklichkeit, schastie, radost, bonheur, raha, etc.) do not translate seamlessly across even closely related languages. The etymological roots of words that designate happiness – presumably a highly subjective state that is, nevertheless, a universal human capacity – point to intriguingly different cultural and philosophical notions of what ‘happiness’ entails. This paper will examine recent attempts to theorise cross-cultural notions of ‘happiness’ and look more closely at the words used to designate (and translate) the concept in several different literary traditions.From Space to Event: The Development of Yuri Lotman’s Concept of TranslationKyohei Norimatsu, University of?TokyoYuri Lotman (1922–93), the leading scholar of Soviet semiotics, in his later years focused his attention on translation and dialogue between various semiotic systems. This enabled him to escape the limitation of static description inherent in a given sign system and to describe and clarify the dynamic process of production of new meanings. In this sense, his notion of translation was highly prismatic. At the same time, Lotman developed the concept of the ‘semiosphere’, which embraces various semiotic systems and functions as the basis for translation between them. This virtual space which precedes any semiotic systems and supplies the precondition for prismatic translation, is reminiscent of the imperial space that was the Soviet Union, uniting various nations and cultures. In the last few years of his life, however, Lotman moved away from this ‘imperial’ view of translation, reconceptualising it as ‘explosion’; he now described the production of new meanings through translation as an unpredictable event in time. Referring to other contemporary Russian cultural theories on translation and dialogue, this paper examines the shift in Lotman’s view and thus explores problematics of prismatic translation.Language-stretching, Parallel Aesthetics and Poetic Equivalence:Poetic Idioms in a Multilingual Literary CultureFrancesca Orsini, University of LondonOne would expect that in a multilingual literary culture there would be a great many translations – isn’t that one way newness enters a literature? But my experience with early modern literary culture in north India is that formal translations were, in fact, remarkably few. From what we can glean from the texts we have and the relatively few multilingual traces in the mostly monolingual archives, the multiple poetic tastes and idioms that existed and were cultivated did not travel through translation. How did they travel, then? Using examples from courtly and devotional Persian, Hindi and Urdu texts, I will argue that either the differences between the poetic idioms were stressed and these were consciously cultivated in parallel from each other, or else it was poetic ideas, images and expressions – rather than whole texts – which travelled from one language to the other. The result was either the setting up of poetic equivalences (X image in Persian is equivalent to Y image in Hindi), the conscious mixing of poetic images and key terms in a macheronic idiom, or language-stretching – the introduction of new words or ideas or stretching old ones to new meanings. Another outcome was that poets and audiences in the various languages became familiar with the different poetic idioms and repertoires even in the absence of formal translations and of widespread literacy, given the oral-performative contexts of much of this poetry. The Indian example, then, helps us think about the ‘carrying over’ of poetic ideas and significant terms beyond formal translation.And while modern language ideologies taught people to believe that ‘Persian and Urdu belong to Muslims’ and ‘Hindi is the language of the Hindus’, not just pragmatic language use but also poetic tastes were and remained eclectic longer after those ideological pronouncements.Ideographic TranslationSowon S Park, Oxford UniversityWriting systems are typically accepted as transparent tools for transcribing spoken languages. This view is encouraged by phonetic alphabetic writing, whether that be Greek, Hebrew or Roman, which encodes the sound of speech. Yet the relations between writing and speech are complex. Speech is at times simply an intermediary between thought and writing; at times it is the immediate manifestation of thought from which writing derives; at others, speech and writing are quite separate. The relations between writing and speech are also as various as the different script systems. Translating literature written in one script system to another might be precisely where the variation would be most evident. Yet translation theories have been notably uninterested in how script shapes meaning, focusing almost entirely on the differences between spoken languages. This phonocentric approach to translation critically neglects the gap between speech and writing, as if speaking and writing are more or less approximate. By being unaware of the range of script systems and naturalising the specific convention that is phonetic writing, we limit our perspective to this one kind of written language – ‘speech for the eyes’ – instead of seeing the full spectrum. This paper examines writing from a more visually inclined prism and brings into focus ‘ideographic’ translation, which bypasses sound and operates directly from visual image to meaning.Variorum TranslationsMatthew Reynolds, Oxford UniversityThere are various partial and competing theoretical paradigms for thinking about multiple translations. They can be seen in terms of ‘reception’, ie as manifestations of historical and cultural difference; as indexes of period or personal styles; as eruptions of the signifying potential of the source text. This paper will begin by reaching back to classic 1970s and 80s work on texts and interpretation by Fish and de Man to ground a more comprehensive theorisation in terms of an agonistic and yet generative relationship between the many and the one.Variorum editions display a range of variants as evidence for the selection of a ‘best text’ while at the same time eroding confidence in that text by revealing the many different choices that have been made in the past. Each branch of the paradox is reliant on the other: the ‘best text’ conjures into being a crowd of less good readings that it is being preferred to; while the idea of the ‘variant’ assumes the existence of a unitary text that it varies from. In many respects, the same tensions are generated by multiple translations.The paper will go on to ask how much this state of affairs owes to a particular set of institutional assumptions, the regime of standard languages and the technology of the book. Here, it will draw on Matthiessen’s 2013 argument about the relevance to translation of ‘agnation’, ie the shadowing of texts by innumerable possible alternative expressions. It will consider whether new ways of presenting prismatic translations, both in print and in electronic media, might move on from the example of the variorum so as to nourish new reading practices and point towards fresh ideas about textuality and meaning.Other points of reference are likely to include multiple translations of Dante, Inferno 33 into English and of Charlotte Bront?, Jane Eyre into French and Italian; Peter Robinson Poetry and Translation: The Art of the Impossible; new media artworks by John Cayley; the 2015 Prismatic Translation conference at OCCT (Oxford).Literary Dictionaries as Meta-poetical ProjectsMonika Schmitz-Emans, Ruhr University BochumAccording to the linguist Mario Wandruszka (‘Interlinguistik’), we are multilingual within the realms of our own language, using different languages corresponding to diverse practical contexts of living. Languages are no monosystems, and thus there is only a relative difference between the speaking of the different idioms any language is consisting of and real multilingualism. Moreover, we never master our native language perfectly; it remains, at least partially, a foreign language for us. – Examples of experimental poetic writing have been interpreted as intralingual translation projects ponting to the relativity of this difference and revealing strange and unexplored dimensions within the seemingly familiar everyday language. Especially with regard to the French poet Michel Leiris, but also to Edmond Jabès and Georges Perec, the writer and literary criticist Felix Philipp Ingold has stressed the significance of what he (also) calls intra-lingual translation as a basic poetical strategy. To his opinion, a closer and more systematical investigation on this topic would lead to important discoveries concerning the theory of translation as well as of literature. Intralingual translation, to Ingold’s opinion, is dominating large, though peripherical areas of poetical art, including phenomena as anagrammatical texts, palindroms, phonetical readings, and other kinds of experiments based the language- and letter-‘materials’.In literature, the dictionary can be regarded as an important reflection model that points to a fundamental self-referential interest of literary writing in the nature and the potentials of language. It can firstly be modelled in its function as a device to foster communication and understanding, even with regard to the world of nonverbal things. But it can secondly also be viewed as a device of questionable value, as far as the ‘other’ in whatever respect is concerned. Literary dictionaries of invented languages are paradoxical object reflecting the borders of translation. Similarly, dictionaries containing unfamiliar words or proposing deviant explications stimulate reflection both about language itself and about the tension between the comprehensible and the incomprehensible.From a comparative perspective, different poetical ‘Dictionaries’ shall be presented – selected lyrical texts by the Austrian writer Ernst Jandl as well as by the Japanese (and also German writing) poet Yoko Tawada (‘Ein Chinesisches W?rterbuch’; ‘A Chinese Dictionary’). Michel Leiris’ text ‘Glossaire j’y serre mes gloses’ is already by its title and structure quoting the concept translation. (Ingold has not only commented this linguistic-poetical experiment on the borderline between obvious and hidden ‘meanings’, but he has as well translated the ‘Glossaire’ into a German version. It is obvious that there can’t be any word-to-word-translation.) The strangeness of language in theses examples points to the unknown potentials and possibilities of everyday language; poetical language may be regarded as foreign language because it shows us the hidden reverse of familiar words and expressions. It is the fictitious character of these translations which provides for their function as a reflection model – they are meaningful not though, but because they are ‘false’.The (Un-)translatability of WeltRobert Stockhammer, Ludwig Maximilians University MunichParadoxically enough, there doesn’t exist a worldwide concept of world. Its translatability cannot even be guaranteed with respect to the three official languages of the ICLA conference in Vienna, 2016. Neither does the Vocabulaire européen des philosophies: Dictionnaire des intraduisibles contain an entry on monde, nor the Dictionary of Untranslatables: A Philosophical Lexicon an entry on world – both of them confine themselves on near-equivalent signifiers from other languages, olam (Hebrew), mir (Russian), and Welt (German). Leaving, with regard to my competences, Hebrew and Russian aside, even the equivalence of the English and German words, despite of their obvious etymological relation, cannot be taken for granted. It seems that the German signifier implies a philosophical dignity which is not always realised in the world wide web: ‘die Bezeichnung einer in sich sinnvoll gegliederten Ganzheit, einer intern strukturierten Vielfalt’ (to quote the Historisches W?rterbuch der Philosophie which heavily relies on the impressive entry on Welt in Grimm’s Deutsches W?rterbuch). German is a language especially presumed to make sense (see also Weltweisheit or Weltanschauung, composites without satisfactory equivalents in other languages – but there are similar, albeit less acknowledged problems if Weltliteratur is hastily translated as world literature). At the same time, however, the entries on Welt in Grimm’s W?rterbuch and in the Dictionnaire des intraduisibles make it plausible that the German word has, in its turn, developed its semantic abundance via the incorporation of related signifiers from other languages (Kant’s use of the German word, for example, is explicitly influenced by connotations of monde). In other words: At least some problems of (un-)translatability are produced, not so much by linguistic or cultural uniqueness (by the Greek or the German way of talking and thinking), but rather by prismatic refractions of earlier translations. Perhaps, Welt has been always already translated. My contribution will try to test this hypothesis, specifically via readings of the above mentioned dictionary entries as texts in their own right.‘Originalm??ig’: Goethe/Retranslation/DiderotStefan Willer, Center for Literary and Cultural Research BerlinDenis Diderot’s philosophical dialogue Le neveu de Rameau, written probably in the 1760s, remained unpublished until the beginning of the 19th century. In 1804, a handwritten copy was forwarded to Johann Wolfgang Goethe, who almost immediately started to translate the text. After this German version had been released in 1805, the French copy seems to have disappeared. However, some fifteen years later, in 1821, Le neveu de Rameau was published in the French edition of Diderot’s collected works – for which the editors, in lack of any copy of the original text, had tacitly re-translated Goethe’s German version. (It was only in 1890 that a copy from Diderot’s own hand was discovered.) In my talk I will reconstruct the story of this complex circulation of copies whithout originals. For this purpose, I will elaborate on Goethe’s own account of the matter, which he published in 1824. This essay comprises several (translated) documents of the case in question, e.g., a letter in which the French editor praises the fidelity of Goethe’s translation by means of which Diderot’s work could be restored ‘originalm??ig’ (= in the mode, shape, or measure of the original). This case story can be regarded as an inquiry into the predicament, but also the potential, of prismatic translation.Translation through the Lens of LanguageRobert J. C. Young, New York UniversityWhile much attention has been directed towards the role of translation in its relation to the range of differences between source and target languages, comparatively little thought is given to its relation to the ways in which language itself is conceptualised in such transactions. In this paper I shall argue that it makes little sense to conceptualise translation without first asking ‘what is a language?’ Since this is quite possibly an unanswerable question, this in turn causes difficulties for any concept of translation. What becomes clear is that translation, in its modern understanding, is founded on a particular concept of language, which is rarely articulated and when it is, can be seen to be profoundly problematic from a conceptual and practical point of view. As a result, it might be said that far from mediating the differences between languages, it is translation that produces them ................
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