Journal articles: 'American poetry, translations into foreign languages' – Grafiati (2024)

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The article deals with features and problems of translating texts of Englishlanguage songs and ways of translating them into Ukrainian by the blogger UkrTrashDub. With the advent of American culture and its influence on Ukrainian youth, research is becoming increasingly relevant in our time. In the course of a comparative analysis of the original, it was revealed that linguistic realities and reproduction of the form of the original text are the main difficulties in the perception and translation of songs. Despite a deep understanding of the ideological and thematic orientation of the original text, the translator must be able to find adequate verbal means and the specifics of the author’s language. In addition, when translating is a poetic text, it is very important to preserve its rhythmic organization and rhyme system, which, however, is not always possible. Speaking about the ways of translating lyrics, the authors dwell on the rhymed method of translation, focusing on achieving the maximum possible adequacy of the translation. Particular attention is paid to the social factor that motivates the existence of this type of translation. As part of the study, the main features, problems and means of translating English-language songs into Ukrainian were identified. The main features include: unstable poetic meter; the huge influence of the culture of native speakers of the original text; a large number of the realities of the culture of the native speakers of the original language depicted in the lyrics. The problems of translating lyrics are: preservation of the original form; adaptation and/or transmission of foreign language realities and the difference in languages, which forms the approach to writing poetry. It can be concluded that the main features of the translation of English songs are related to the preservation of the original form.

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The paper analyzes the return of Bohdan Ihor Antonych’s name to the literature after several decades of suppression and prohibition by the Soviet totalitarian regime. The author also focuses on the interpretation of the poet’s work in Ukrainian and foreign literary studies. The researcher points out the following historical and cultural factors: partial liberalization of the communist regime in the Soviet Union; high appreciation of Antonych’s work by leading poets and literary critics in Ukraine and the Ukrainian diaspora; translations of works into foreign languages, in particular, Slavic ones; the influence of the poet’s work on the generations of the 1960s—1980s. Special attention is paid to the cooperation of American scholars and translators Watson Kirkconnell and Constantine H. Andrysyshen in translating the Ukrainian poet’s texts into English. The researcher traces the changes in views on Antonych’s poetry: the claims that he was a talented poet who did not have time to fully realize his talent due to his early death were eventually substituted by recognition of his poetry’s kinship with the works of Western European modernist poets such as R. M. Rilke, T. S. Eliot, F. G. Lorca, Cz. Miłosz. The paper also highlights the discussion on the stylistic dominant of Antonych’s poetry and focuses on the elements of different literary movements, namely futurism, imagism, and surrealism. It is emphasized that the poet was not only interested in the issues of style but also shaped the different styles of the time with his special features. He characterized impressionism as the relation of color to light, pointed out the idea of movement in futurism, focused on the geometric outlines of real objects in cubism, appreciated pure harmony of geometric patterns in suprematism. Moreover, Antonych’s poetry was related to creating myths, based on the tradition of the national folklore worldview.

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Edgar Lee Masters’ 1915 Spoon River Anthology has been one of the most popular books of foreign poetry in Italy since it was first translated and published there by Fernanda Pivano and Cesare Pavese in 1943. Yet, in the US, Masters is virtually unknown to the public; American scholars find him a problematic figure and his Spoon River only viable in piecemeal form. This article considers the translation and reception history of Spoon River in Italy as well as Masters’ publication and reception history in the US until his death in 1950, to bring to light the reasons for the poet’s differing legacies. It goes on to examine recent scholarly translations of Spoon River, as they at once engage with and neutralize critical American scholarship in order to secure Masters’ status in Italy. Finally, the article suggests a way forward for Italian scholarly work on Masters, which does not attempt to engage American criticism, but, rather, roots itself in the fraught Italian relationship with “agrarian” literature after the ventennio fascista and Mussolini’s rural rhetoric.

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Введение. Рассматриваются высказывания в адрес оригинальной англоязычной поэзии И. Бродского, сделанные англоязычными критиками, поэтами и переводчиками. Все высказывания разделены на группы согласно географической, лингвистической и профессиональной принадлежности их авторов. Большинство характеристик в адрес английских стихов Бродского носят ситуативный, несистемный характер, представляя собой разрозненные высказывания. Объединяет их то, что многие даже самые ярые сторонники английской поэзии Бродского вынуждены отмечать некоторые шероховатости использования им языка, стилистические несуразицы и излишнюю «русскость» английских стихов поэта. Цель статьи – систематизация и критическая оценка подобных высказываний, носящих ситуативный и несистемный характер. Материал и методы. В качестве материала исследования выступили высказывания зарубежных исследователей и поэтов, касающиеся оригинального англоязычного поэтического творчества Бродского, встречающиеся в многочисленных интервью и книгах, посвященных жизни и творчеству поэта. Предметом исследования становится рецепция англоязычных стихотворений Бродского носителями языка. Были использованы методы фронтального анализа и контент-анализа, сравнительный метод. Результаты и обсуждение. Английские стихотворения Бродского до сих пор являются малоизученными, исследователи обходят стороной этот важный пласт творчества поэта, который, однако, может помочь достроить картину эстетического мышления автора до ее логической завершенности. В то время как исследователи традиционно концентрируются на русской поэзии, англоязычной прозе и (авто)переводах Бродского, в фокус данной статьи попадает англоязычная оригинальная поэзия автора – феномен, нуждающийся в более глубоком осмыслении. В работе классифицируются причины обращения Бродского к английскому языку, которые можно разделить на три группы: эстетические, утилитарные, лингвистические. Отношение Бродского к своим английским стихотворениям было непростым. Создание оригинальных поэтических текстов на английском для него было сродни так называемой игре в стихосложение с использованием иного лингвистического инструментария. Он видел в английском стихосложении возможность рифмовать краткосложные лексемы английского языка в различных комбинациях, использовать невозможные в русском языке ритмико-синтаксические структуры, экспериментировать с просодией. Одна из самых больших претензий к английским поэтическим текстам Бродского – некорректное использование им английских идиоматических единиц. По мнению даже большинства доброжелательных критиков, английская идиоматика стихов Бродского бывала проблематична. Многие отмечают взаимопроникаемость и взаимообусловленность русского и английского языков в поэтическом творчестве Бродского. Некоторые находят подобное явление неприемлемым, другие считают это уникальным стилем поэтики двуязычного автора. Заключение. Сделан вывод о том, что Бродский являлся носителем двух национально-языковых культур и литератур: русской и английской. При всем разночтении мнений критиков и поэтов, подавляющее большинство из них касаются исключительно лингвистического уровня оригинальных англоязычных стихотворений Бродского, ни один из критиков или высказывающихся по этому вопросу поэтов не обращается к эстетическому уровню анализа английских стихов автора. Будущее исследование предполагает ответить на вопрос: остается ли мироощущение Бродского русским и в его английской поэзии или оно меняется вслед за языком? Introduction. The article focuses on different statements concerning Joseph Brodsky’s original English poetry made by English and American critics, poets and translators. Aim and objectives. The paper aims to classify, systematize and critically value those statements, which can be described as occasional and unsystematic. Material and methods. The research is based on statements concerning Brodsky’s original English poetical works made by foreign English-speaking philologists, critics and poets. All the statements are found in variety of different interviews and books dedicated to Brodsky’s life and work. The methods used in the research are as follows: frontal analysis and content analysis, comparative method. Results and discussion. Brodsky’s English verses are yet to be studied as for researchers neglect such an important component of Brodsky’s works, which however is to help construct the whole picture of one’s esthetic thinking to its logical whole. As long as philologists traditionally concentrate on Brodsky’s Russian verses, English essays and (self) translations, this paper addresses Brodsky’s original English poetry as a phenomenon craving for deeper scientific understanding. The article brings the light on the reasons determined Brodsky’s turn toward English which can be divided into three groups: esthetic, utilitarian and linguistic ones. Brodsky’s attitude towards his own English verses was complicated. Creating original English poetical texts was like so-called play in versification and prosody with the using of new linguistic tools. He admitted in English prosody ability of rhyming short English lexical elements in broad variety of possible combinations, using impossible in Russian rhythmical and syntactic structures, experimenting with prosody. The paper provides review of statements addressing Brodsky’s original English poetry. All the statements are divided into groups according to geographical, linguistic and professional areas of the authors they were made by. The majority of studying statements are occasional and unsystematic, united however with some same features. Even supporters of Brodsky’s English poetry were forced to mention a bunch of imperfections in Brodsky’s English, stylistic mistakes and too Russian being of his English verses. One of the main grievance about Brodsky’s English verses is his incorrect using of English idiomatic elements. Many underline interferential and interconditional nature of English and Russian languages in Brodsky’s verses. Some consider this feature to be unacceptable, others as a unique style of bilingual author. Conclusion. Finally the article concludes that Joseph Brodsky was a two-cultured and two-language representative: Russian and English. Despite all the deviation in opinion of critics, poets and translators, the majority of them focus solemnly on linguistic level of Brodsky’s English verses. It’s worth noticing the lack of esthetic interpretation of Brodsky’s English poetry. The upcoming research can provide an answer to a question: does Brodsky’s world view remain the same in his English poetry or did it change subsequent to the language?

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Stanisław Barącz. The Creative Personality of a Blind PoetThe poetry of Stanisław Barącz (1864-1936), a blind artist associated with Lwów, belongs to the literary output of the Young Poland period. It involves poems and translations from foreign languages (German and French), as well as texts set to Karol Szymanowski’s music. The poet had an Armenian background, he was involved in the communal life of Polish Armenians in Lwów and he also translated Armenian poetry. Maria Łukasiewicz, a student of Stanisław Pigoń, in her 1952 work (which is published here for the first time) performed an in-depth and unique in scholarly literature analysis of the works of this forgotten poet. She performs a holistic overview of the author’s own works and his translations from other languages, and she discusses the following: themes and thematic motifs, composition, literary technique (style, the study of stanzaic forms, musical elements, work with a text), focusing on the crucial problem of the creative imagination of the blind poet (the visual and colour-related aspects). She also compares Barącz’s poetry with the creative works of the Young Poland period.

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This scientific research is devoted to the attempt of linguistic analysis of Heinrich Heine's poetry "Enfant perdü" and its translations into Ukrainian and Russian made by the Ukrainian poetess Lesya Ukrainka. During the research the author comes to the conclusion that translations of works of fiction play one of the key roles in the process of interaction of cultures of different peoples. Poetry, as a component of fiction, is an important component in the process of spiritual rapprochement of different ethnic groups, their mutual enrichment and development. Undisputed in this process is the figure of the translator, as a bridge between the two cultural shores. The translator's work contributes to a deeper understanding of the foreign language reader and understanding of the mentality of the people whose literature he is acquainted with. And the original through translation gets a new existence in a new parallel projection. The translation of poetic works is considered important in this direction for the author of the investigation. Poetic translation is one of the most difficult areas of translation, as the translator must fully understand the poetic work, the author's idea and concept of the work, which should be fully communicated to the reader in the language of translation, so as not to change the impact of this work on the reader. the language of the original. To the tasks of the translator of poetic works, in contrast to prose, is added the requirement of compliance with the form, rhyme, size, which is not always possible. German, Ukrainian and Russian languages are somewhat similar in terms of poetic dimensions. That is why the Ukrainian poetess Lesya Ukrainka almost always manages to follow the poetic dimensions when translating from German. Poetry "Enfant perdü" is one of the key in the poetic heritage of Heinrich Heine, so it is of great interest to study attempts to translate it into different languages and different translators. And the creative genius of Lesya Ukrainka occupies an important place in this list.

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Reflecting on my experience of translating contemporary Hungarian theater into English, this paper examines the fluidity of dramatic texts in their original and in translation, and charts collaborations between playwrights, translators and theater-makers. Mindful of the responsibility when working from a “minor” to a “major” language, the paper signals the discrepancy between the indigenous and foreign ‘recognition circuit’ and observes that translations from lesser-known languages are predominantly marked by a supply-driven agenda. Through case studies from the work of Transylvanian-Hungarian playwright András Visky, the paper argues that considerations regarding such key tenets of live theater as “speakability” and “performability” have to be addressed in parallel with correspondences in meaning, rhythm and spirit. The paper also points out that register and the status of certain lexical choices differ in various languages. Nuancing the trajectory of Visky’s plays in English translation, this paper makes a case for translations created with and for their originals, in full knowledge of the source and receiving cultures, and with a view to their potential in performance. The paper posits the need for multiple options encoded in the translation journey, including hypothetical concepts for future mise-en-scène, and situates the translator as a key participant in the performance making process.

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This study is an attempt to clarify translation between mother tongue and foreign languages; it means the translations between two different languages. The contents consist of (introduction, idiomatic translation, proverbial translation, literary translation, and the terms that untranslatable). In literary translation we choose the poetry for two reason, firstly its main topic of literary translation, secondly its difficult topic translation. This study tries to show the difficulties and obstacles of each of these subjects, because each of them has a set of cultural and social characteristics, and they have a direct and complete relationship with human emotions and feelings. We mean choosing this title is human genitals will be a competence and any languages other than this language will be a performance for it, and also competence and performance will form an important part of all the languages of the world, because the competence is the basis of the creation of language, and performance is the expression of the language, and this caused choosing the subject and mixing with translation.

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In 1995 I whined to Dave Henige about the difficulties involved in producing a 753-page volume of 383 pages of translated poetry (each including a work number, language of the original, source of the text, an historical introduction, and related text section) containing three orthographies, four languages, 947 footnotes, 241 pages of barely-arranged Arabic-script (but not all Arabic language) facsimiles, six maps, three glossaries, two works cited lists (published and unpublished), two appendices, and an index – all without a copy editor, and for a press demanding camera-ready copy from two novices an ocean apart who had access only to primitive email (remember CompuServe?) that would scramble poetic verse and jumble margins. When I finally took a breath, he smiled. Dave loves a challenge, and loves even more, passing one on. “Write about it,” he said. Suddenly I found myself signed up for the “Technical Problems in Preparing Text and Translations for Camera-Ready Copy” Historical Texts Panel at ASA's 1996 meetings. But that was not enough for Dave. He also expected an article, which I duly produced: “This Will (Not) Be Handled By the Press: Problems and Their Solution in Preparing Camera-Ready Copy for The Collected Works of Nana Asma'u, Daughter of Usman Dan Fodiyo 1793-1864” for History in Africa 25 (1998). In fact, it was Dave who rained on our anticipated title, “The Complete Works…,” dryly inquiring, “How can you be sure?” So it was “Collected Works…” instead.

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Abstract This article reconsiders the social, economic, and literary significance of Chinese Pidgin English (CPE) in Chinese society by exploring lexicographical and literary practices of pidgin in nineteenth-century China. Resituating the history of CPE in Chinese language history, this article problematizes the concept of pidgin and pursues three arguments. First, the author maintains that CPE arose from the marginalized status of the Euro-American traders who were restricted from learning the Chinese language in Canton. Second, by exploring foreign-language glossaries, this article foregrounds the key role of sinographs and Chinese topolects in mediating and remolding foreign languages. Last, by examining the appropriation of foreign sounds in Cantonese folk songs and Pan Youdu's poetry, this article demonstrates the complex flow of these sounds among different languages and the power of pidgin in transgressing linguistic boundaries.

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Abstract. The article deals with the peculiarities of the introduction of the method of learning English songs in the process of teaching “English for Specific Purposes” for students of “Music” specialty at higher education institutions. The author considers the essence and features of this innovative method, analyzes its main principles and priorities. In particular, the stages of work with a song composition and examples of exercises on the acquisition of language material are considered. The article substantiates the methodical expediency of using the method of learning English songs in the process of teaching English in artistic specialties. Recently, the higher educational institutions intensify the process of learning foreign languages through the introduction of the variety of teaching technologies. The method of learning English songs by students of “Music” specialty in English classes is efficient and productive, because of enriching the vocabulary, improving the pronunciation and grammar. It increases the efficiency of students’ professional training. Poetic and song material encourages creativity, performing verse translations, composing poetry and songs in native and English languages, promotes the memorization of new words due to the rhymed forms as a great way of phonetic training.

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Abstract This is an investigate study on the frequency of punctuation use in Brazilian Portuguese and American English translations. Six textual pairs were selected, each representing a particular genre of translation. Punctuation was divided into two contrasting categories. Under terminal punctuation were placed marks which came at the end of sentences and caused the next word to be capitalized. Under internal punctuation were included marks which appeared within the sentence limits. 1692 marks in 622 sentences were carefully tabulated and constituted the corpus of this project. Results indicated that Portuguese texts were considerably more populated by various punctuation marks than their English counterparts. Frequent rhetorical pauses, tolerance towards longer and more complex sentences, and occasional use of double punctuation invited a higher ratio of marks per sentece in the Portuguese texts. In the last part of the paper, a number of conventions governing punctuation usage in the two languages are discussed, providing a direct application to the training of translators and students of foreign language composition and rhetoric.

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This study investigates the diachronic evolution of poetic figurative language and some of its aesthetic effects. It suggests that poetic expressions can lose their poetic force over time as they conventionalise through repetition. A hypothesis based on the concept of poetic effects developed in Relevance Theory (Pilkington, 2000; Sperber and Wilson, 1995 [1989]) and on the theory of semantic change (Traugott and Dasher, 2002) is proposed to explain this phenomenon. This hypothesis was successfully tested through three case studies, in which French idiomatic expressions that have originated in poetry were shown to have progressively lost their aesthetic power and to have become cliché phrases as they were gaining a clearer, more determinate and conventional meaning. The methodology makes use of various sources to determine the poetic power of an expression and its change through time: literary critiques, newspaper corpora, Google Ngram graphs, translations into foreign languages and date of appearance in the dictionaries.

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This study aims to assess the adequacy of the form of German sonnets when reproduced in English translations. The focus is on interrogative sentences, which, together with the sonnet in the form of a macro-sentence, the shortened verse and enjambment, are the characteristics of the innovative features of Sonnets to Orpheus by R. M. Rilke. The lyrical cycle Sonnets to Orpheus is among the most translated into world languages of Rilke’s poetry works, as well as Duino Elegies. Both professional and amateur poets and translators have been competing to put the Austrian writer’s best poems into English. Here we examine more than twenty English translations of the Sonnets into English, made from 1936 to 2008. The importance of the comparative linguistic-stylistic study of the original and its translations is determined by the continuing interest in Rilke’s works in English-speaking countries and the necessity to understand the principles of reconstructing the features of Rilke’s poetics using the English language. The system of methods used in this work includes: historical and philological analysis, comparative linguistic and stylistic description, as well as comparative analysis of the original and translation in the form that was developed in the works of V. Bryusov (1905), N. Gumilev (1919), M. Lozinsky (1935), E. Etkind (1963), S. Goncharenko (1987). We have found that the innovative nature of German sonnets is not always reflected in English translations. In some translations, American and British translators significantly modified the form of the original: interrogative sentences dominating in XVII and XVIII sonnets of the second part of the lyric cycle were not reproduced in English translations made by G. Good, D. Young, C. Haseloff, N. Mardas Billias and others.

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This article seeks to examine how the Kashmiri-American poet Agha Shahid Ali explores and rethinks ideas of “home” and travel in his poetry. Ali’s poetry is a layered affective terrain in which his complex, entangled emotions surrounding home, exile, nostalgia, displacement, and travel play out. I argue that Ali’s verse, through multiple journeys ranging over locations, languages, cultures, and literary terrain, interrogates and collapses the boundaries between the “home” and the world. I read his poetry as voicing the “disturbed” and displaced home of Kashmir, while simultaneously distilling a “re-homing” desire. Such an impulse reconfigures and reimagines the home through the inhabiting and repeated “homing” of multiple, “foreign” locations. Poetic travel across geographic and literary terrain, in Ali’s oeuvre, thus speaks to the fraught and complex nature of the “home” in postcolonial and diasporic contexts, while remapping the home through the “re-homing” of the “foreign”. Arguing that “travel” is a means of negotiating and rethinking the “home” in Ali’s poetry, the article examines the intermeshed and dialogic relationship between home and travel that imbues his verse. Focusing particularly on poetic experimentation as a mode of travel, it aims to show how such literary travel makes new homes, while remembering and articulating Ali’s lost homes.

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ABSTRACTTranslation techniques favoured by Tolkien in rendering Beowulf and other medieval poetry into modern English. J. R. R. Tolkien was a prolific translator, although most of his translation work was not actually published during his lifetime, as occurred with the greater part of his fiction. He never did any serious translation from modern foreign languages into English, but rather devoted himself to the task of turning Old English and Middle English poetry into something that could be readily understood by speakers of the modern idiom. His largest and best-known published translation is of the anonymous 14th Century poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, which was published posthumously with two other translations from Middle English in the volume Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Pearl and Sir Orfeo (Allen & Unwin 1975). The translation of Middle English texts constitutes the bulk of his output in this field, both in the above volume and in the fragments that appear in his lectures and essays. However, his heart really lay in the older, pre-Norman form of the language, and particularly in the greatest piece of literature to come down to us from the Old English period, the epic poem Beowulf.

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Abstract The context of the communist regime in the late 1980s Romania was definitely a most peculiar one. During this period of time, translations from other languages were scarce and only the ones which were in accordance with the communist ideology were allowed. It was a time when people had neither many rights nor did they have many choices to make. In the latter part of the 1980s more and more foreign films were smuggled into the country and most of them were obviously American. Such films revealed a new and different world for those who watched them. Consequently, these films needed to be translated and the most well-known voice to have done it was Irina Margareta Nistor's. Her task was both interesting and demanding but also dangerous at the same time given the political context. This essay investigates the manner in which underground film “dubbing” The translation technique used, in reality a combination between the techniques of voice-over and simultaneous interpretation, was mistakenly named ‘dubbing.’ was done and describes the particularities of the clandestine film “dubbing” by discussing how it was performed and by analysing the translations qualitatively.

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“Poema II/ Poem II”, a bilingual expression that goes beyond a mere literary translation, is part of the series Poetízame las ganas/ Turn My Yearnings into Poetry. Although it started as an original poem in Spanish, my first language, an English translation ended up coming together from the first lines. Very much influenced by the playful translations of Eliot Weibenger into English, I enjoy playing with source and target languages to puzzle the reader, by erasing the traces of the translation process, while, at the same time, keeping a foreign debris within the kind of language I use in both texts. With these two pieces that arise as a reciprocated translation, the poet challenges a bilingual form of creative expression in which there is a clear refusal to utterly domesticate the texts. Love and language are, undoubtedly, both the object and the subject of the whole poem. They are represented through an unceasing analogy that depicts the symbolic connections behind these two intrinsic, most desired—and perhaps hardest to understand—human domains.

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SummaryDue to globalization, migration, tourism and other reasons multiculturalism and multilingualism have become the rule rather than the exception. In this context films, on the one hand, serve as a reflection of multilingual and multicultural reality, on the other hand, multilingualism inevitably occurs by translating films for different audiences since (interlingual) translation involves at least two languages. Films, in which characters belong to different cultures and languages, pose a considerable challenge to translators. Such a case is the American animated film “Ratatouille” (2007), which action takes place in France and most of its characters are French. However, by adapting the film for the main target audience – the children – the character identity is revealed not using complete foreign language dialogues but creatively combining various modes: verbal acoustic (dialogues and lyrics), verbal visual (written texts), nonverbal visual (images) and nonverbal acoustic (nondiegetic music). The same modes are applied to render culture-specific items, especially food and drink names. Since verbal mode varies depending on the target audience, American English source language as well as Lithuanian, Russian and French dubbed versions of the film “Ratatouille” will be compared in order to determine semiotic modes, which convey Frenchness. Additionally, by comparing selected dubbed versions of the film, amusing translations, resulting exactly from the encounter of cultures and languages, will be presented as well. For the research methodological approaches of audiovisual translation, multimodality and comparative method will be applied.

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The association's ninety-seventh convention will he held 5–7 November 1999 at Portland State University in Portland, Oregon, under the sponsorship of the dean of Letters and Sciences and the Departments of English and Languages and Literatures. Inger Olsen is serving as local chair. The program will represent the association members' diverse interests in all matters of language and literature in classical, Western, and non-Western languages. The thirty-one general sessions will include papers on classical, Romance, Germanic, Scandinavian, English, American, and Asian literatures, as well as on linguistics, rhetoric, gay and lesbian literature, film, matrilineal culture, autobiography, poetry and poetics, and critical theory. Among the thirty special sessions are sessions on picaresque literature, Shakespeare and popular literature, Native American literature, Russian literature, Slavic literature, Toni Morrison in the 1990s, Caribbean literature, and cybertextbooks in foreign language education. Several special sessions have been organized by Portland State University and PAMLA affiliate organizations Women in French, MELUS, and the Milton Society of America. Registration at the conference will be $35 and $25. All paper sessions are scheduled for classrooms at Portland State University and will begin Friday at 1:00 p.m. and end Sunday at 1:00 p.m.

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Introduction. The fact that Navoi in his works promotes creative ideas that affect all mankind, the fact that the poet's ideas are more important and relevant than ever in today's era of globalization, has led to major research around the world. Know this, all humankind: The greatest curse is enmity; The greatest blessing, amity. We all know the verses by heart. That is, in order for the poet to have peace and tranquility among the people, they must renounce the path of enmity, enmity is not a deed, instead they must be friends with one another. True friendship is a real business. These verses, written before the 6th century, are a vivid proof that Alisher Navoi's poetry and philosophy have stood the test of time and apply equally to the peoples of the world. Research methods. Alisher Navoi's creative heritage has been in the hearts of many readers in different languages for centuries. As a result of many years of research and work of literary critics, poets and writers, the great poet's work is widely promoted around the world, a number of achievements have been achieved. However, we cannot ignore the mistakes and shortcomings in this regard. Results and discussions. The main problem here is that most of the specialists who know Navoi's language and creativity do not know European languages, those who know foreign languages do not know the old Uzbek language or do not feel our classical literature. Therefore, in the study of Navoi's work by foreign scholars, the importance of the poet's work for foreign literature, a serious approach to the issue of foreign translators and researchers of A. Navoi's work, we would like to draw attention to some comments on the subject. Conclusion. A. Navoi's work has a special significance in Uzbek literature, as well as in world literature. The poet’s work has been studied by various scholars for centuries. However, scientific views on A. Navoi were not always correct. In this regard, in this research work, the different opinions of world scholars about the poet, their positive and negative views on the work of the poet are cited and analyzed. The role of Russian, Ukrainian, French, English, German and American scholars in the study of Navoi's works around the world, the factors that stimulated their interest in Oriental literature, in particular, Alisher Navoi's works, works by foreign authors and works inspired by A. Navoi's work along with samples, some information about the manuscripts and lithographs of the great thinker kept in the fund of foreign libraries is the main content of the article.

Abstract:

This paper looks at self-censorship and censorship in Bushido: The Soul of Japan (1900) by Nitobe, Inazo (1862-1933) as well as in four different translations of the book. In Bushido, probably the best known of Nitobe’s books, the renowned Japanese writer and diplomat tried to act as an inter-cultural mediator between East and West and export the concepts and values of Bushido (the path of the samurai). Nitobe was descended from one of the great samurai families, but he converted to Christianity, married an American Quaker from Philadelphia and studied widely in the US and in Europe. Bushido was a valiant attempt to “translate” the ethical code of the samurais for the West, but perhaps in so doing Nitobe idealized the samurai caste by domesticating their values and teaching in order to bring them closer to Christian values and teaching. The main purpose of his book was to make Japanese culture acceptable to and valued by the West and in particular Philadelphia at the beginning of the 20th century, but he also had to assure the approval of the imperial authorities. The original text was written in English, which was not Nitobe’s mother tongue, and it can be studied as a self-translation that involves self-censorship. Writing in a foreign language obliges one to “filter” one’s own emotions and modes of expression. To a certain extent, it also limits one’s capacity for self-expression. Alternatively, it allows the writer to express more empathy for the “other culture.” Furthermore, one is much more conscious of what one wants to say, or what one wishes to avoid saying, in order to make the work more acceptable for intended readers. The four translations are the Spanish translation by Gonzalo Jiménez de la Espada (1909), the French translation by Charles Jacob (1927), the Japanese translation by Yanaihara Tadao (1938) and the Spanish translation by General José Millán-Astray (1941). A descriptive, diachronic study of the translation of selected cultural references shows the four translations to be good examples of the way translations vary over time. They also illustrate the relationship between context, pretext and text (Widowson, 2004) and the visibility or invisibility of the translator (Venuti, 1995). We have also found it useful to draw on skopos theory, as well as some aspects of the Manipulation School, in particular ideology, censorship and the emphasis on translation between distant languages and cultures. The analysis of the four translations shows that censorship of cultural references is evident during periods of conflict (such as the Japanese translation of 1938 and the Spanish translation of 1941). We hope to show that the context/pretext of the translator led to such manipulative or censorial translation decisions that Nitobe’s skopos was lost in at least one of the translations.

Abstract:

Statement of the problem. There are a lot of works in the national musicology focusing on the study of vocal chamber music for voice and piano by Ukrainian composers of the 20th century. Researchers cover quite a wide range of issues regarding vocal pieces and touch upon the problems of cyclocreation, dramaturgy, features of musical and linguistic means, etc. However, they rarely pay attention to translation, though there are many vocal opuses, in which composers use foreign poetry. In this case, the specifi c choice of the translated sample helps to determine the principles of the composer’s approach to the embodiment of the poetic text, especially in comparison with other works based on the same sources. Hence separate songs from D. Klebanov’s vocal cycle on the poems of H. Heine did not become an exception, thereby confi rming the relevance of the proposed topic. The purpose of the article is to determine specifi c features of the embodiment of H. Heine’s poetry translations in the vocal cycle of D. Klebanov on the basis of two romances – “In a grove, on a wild path”, “My love, lay your hand on my heart”, as compared to the works of other composers of the twentieth century . To achieve the research objectives the following methods were used: historical, structural-functional, genre-style and comparative. Results. Under consideration are peculiarities of the embodiment of H. Heine’s poetry translations in the vocal cycle of D. Klebanov, one of the founders of Kharkiv composition school. For this work the author took eight verses from the fi rst two cycles of the “Book of Songs” by the German poet. They were based on the motives of love poems with vivid images of nature; sometimes the poems are full of sadness, a sense of loneliness. When D. Klebanov was choosing certain samples from different poetic cycles, he tried to stick to the plot of the “Book of Songs”, since he ordered the poems in the same way they were written in the collection. Another indicator of the composer’s relation to Heiner’s texts is the choice of poetic works which are given in the cycle in Ukrainian and Russian languages. The composer’s individual vision of Heine’s lyric poetry is clearly seen when compared to the vocal works of other composers of the twentieth century, M. Medtner and E. Denisov, written on the same poetic texts. In cross-romances, similar musical-linguistic means are used, including the metrical principle of vocalization of the poetic text, hom*ophonic-harmonic structure, harmony of classical-romantic type. However, each of the composers renders the fi gurative and semantic implications of the poems in their own way. M. Medtner builds his romance “My love, lay your hand on my heart” according to the crescendo principle. Beginning with a quieter dynamics, the composer gradually increases the volume of the sound, which at the end leads to a general climax that moves from the point of the golden section. D. Klebanov chose a different way – to reinforce the dramatism of the poem. This was possible thanks to various musical and linguistic means: a strict, intense melody in the bass doubled in the sixth with a chromatic motion and semiquavers at the end of each bar in the last line of the fi rst stanza, designation Meno mosso, chromaticized vocal melody. The composers’ choice of poetic translations depends on the place and role of the romance in the general structure of the cycle. The eight-part composition of D. Klebanov is based on the wave principle of the plot development. The original four romances pave the way to the fi rst climax – unrequited love in the fi rst romance (“Every morning I awake and ask”), painful memories in the second one (“In a grove, on a wild path”), a tragic image in the third one (“My love, lay your hand on my heart “), and an attempt to overcome the pain in the fourth romance (“First I was afraid of darkness”). Further on, the development is based on contrast: the image of death in the fi fth romance (“Your lovely face, so fair and dear”), a subtle feeling of love in the sixth one (“Oh, let me plunge my heart”), worries because of the marriage of a loved one to another guy in the seventh romance (“I hear the fl ute and the fi ddle”) and disappointment in her spiritual values in the last one (“The violets blue”). Such a location of the third romance justifi es the choice of translation, where the colours are thickening and the content becomes even darker. Such kind of a fi gurative and semantic plot resembles the tradition of a romantic vocal cycle, in which the emotional state of the lyrical character, his emotional collisions сome to the fore. In this perspective, “ 3 Poems of H. Heine” by D. Medtner demonstrate another relationship between the romances of the cycle. All of them have feelings of sorrow, despair circle, a no-go. At the same time, distancing from the immediate events is felt, as if it is a look at someone else’s life, which is evidenced by the storytelling from the third person in the second and third romances. Therefore, the fi rst romance, based on the poem “My love, lay your hand on my heart”, is a kind of “preface” to the cycle, which involves some personal detachment. This leads to the selection of softened content in the translated version of the poem. The second romance, “In a grove, on a wild path”, has a similar function in the vocal cycle of D. Klebanov as it became the preparation for the climax of the third one. The semantic line of his poem is based on two storylines: the external one is the “theme of the journey” that is refl ected in the image of nature, and the internal one is the “theme of sadness”, which focuses on the feelings of the lyrical hero. The composer here, like Анна in the third romance, deepens the line of inner experiences. This became possible thanks to the Tranquillo tempo, fl at minor tonality, massive discordant accompaniment chords, variable measure, melody of the recitative-oratorial type. H. Heine’s poem, presented in the work of D. Klebanov, became the basis of the fi fth romance of E. Denisov’s vocal opus. Like the Ukrainian master, E. Denisov builds his cycle in the spirit of the romantic tradition, but in revealing the fi gurative structure of the poem he goes a different way. He makes a clear distinction between two fi gurativesemantic lines. This is refl ected in the form of a romance that has the features of binarity and variability, the embodiment of the metro-rhythmic structure of the verse based on two opposing principles - metric and cantilena, as well as other means of musical expression. Thus, choosing the same poem by H. Heine, D. Klebanov and E. Denisov represent their own vision of its content. Conclusions The comparative analysis of the embodiment of Heine’s texts by D. Klebanov and other composers of the twentieth century helps to highlight the individual approach of the Ukrainian artist. Despite the fact that the composer chooses similar means of musical expression, he fi nds his own way of refl ecting the semantics of the poetic source. In the above mentioned romances – “In a grove, on a wild path” and “My love, lay your hand on my heart” – the author focuses on the inner confl icts of the lyrical hero, his experiences. Attention paid to the sensory side of the poems also determined the selected translations, since the rejection of translators from the original results in a certain deformation of its meaning and fi gurative structure, which infl uences the musical embodiment of the poetic source.

Abstract:

The article attempts to find common ground between the artistic systems divided by a century – the lyrics of the Russian poet and philosopher F. I. Tyutchev and prose of the outstanding Russian-American writer V. V. Nabokov. The first part of the article deals with the ideas of domestic and foreign researchers of the peculiarity of the Nabokov’s aesthetic system. Nabokov did not write a special article and did not publish a single lecture on Tyutchev’s lyrics, although he repeatedly turned to the work of the poet, in particular, while teaching in America, left excellent translations of his poems into English. The authors of the article show the common perception of life of nature and man for both authors. The inner closeness of Nabokov and Tyutchev is manifested not so much in direct statements as indirectly. This is an acknowledgement of the narrator in the General Ledger, Nabokov’s Other shores (“Pushkin and Tolstoy, Tyutchev, Gogol stood at the four corners of my world”); and accented by the intertextuality in the prose of the author with specific Tyutchen’s reminiscences, sometimes shocking-pun (short story “Cloud, lake, tower”); and focusing on the motifs of memory, gift, abyss (in Schellingian understanding); and Nabokov’s use of the key opposition “dream – chaos”, which runs through the entire lyrics of Tyutchev. The second part of the article is devoted to the analysis of Tyutchev’s poetry in the light of researches conducted by Russian philosophers and literary critics. The article notes the little-known fact that Nabokov and Tyutchev were related in kinship. You can find out at what point the kinship of the two great masters of the word crossed by reading the article.

Abstract:

The paper's aim is to analyze transchronical interlingual and intercultural poetic communication. Special attention is paid to the recipient, his significance in diachronic translation is investigated. Linguistic and cultural aspects of poetic communication are analyzed: realities, historicisms, archaisms, phraseological units, allusions. The recipient factor is actively studied in pragmalinguistics, which finds common ground with translation studies and the theory of intercultural communication. The research is based on the integrative method: descriptive, contextual, comparative and discursive analysis are used. The paper reveals the synergetic nature of the recipient, unique on age, gender, worldview, political and cultural characteristics; cognitive dissonance of the author and the recipient in monolingual and in interlanguage communication are revealed. The actual basis is the novel in verse Pushkin “Eugene Onegin”, written almost 200 years ago and numerous translations made at different times (1840-2008). The studied empirical material leads to the following conclusions. The translation multiplicity in transchronical transfer of cultural heritage to foreign languages is natural and unavoidable. The search for adequate means of intercultural translation of poetry is transcendental in nature. The syncretic nature of the poetic sign in diachrony strengthens the discrepancy between the recipient's and the author's conceptual and thematic knowledge content. This is particularly evident in terms of the transf chronic communication when the author and recipient are separated by a significant time interval. The source language recipients and the target language recipients have objective sociocultural differences which are more evident in transtemporal interlingual communication. The above-mentioned factors interact in the complex synergistic system that is impossible to cognize and to describe in a reductive linguistic theory of translation. On the basis of insufficiency of the reductionism of the linguistic translation, can be expected the transition to the methodology of holism translation. Holism as a methodological principle and philosophy of knowledge has found effective application in the Humanities. Its use in translation in cross-cultural, cross-language and TRANS chronic communication appear to be objectively necessary. The need for pragmatic adaptation and the borders of its approximate values is to be verified in further studies, combining pragmalinguistics, cognitive linguistics, translation studies, functional stylistics, discourse analysis and linguocognitive translation.

Abstract:

NOTICIAS / NEWS (“transfer”, 2018) 1) LIBROS – CAPÍTULOS DE LIBRO / BOOKS – BOOK CHAPTERS 1. Bandia, Paul F. (ed.). (2017). Orality and Translation. London: Routledge. <<www.routledge.com/Orality-and-Translation/Bandia/p/book/9781138232884>> 2. Trends in Translation and Interpretin, Institute of Translation & Interpreting<<www.iti.org.uk/news-media-industry-jobs/news/819-iti-publishes-trends-e-book>> 3. Schippel, Larisa & Cornelia Zwischenberger. (eds). (2017). Going East: Discovering New and Alternative Traditions in Translation Studies. Berlin: Frank & Timme.<<www.frank-timme.de/verlag/verlagsprogramm/buch/verlagsprogramm/bd-28-larisa-schippelcornelia-zwischenberger-eds-going-east-discovering-new-and-alternative/backPID/transkulturalitaet-translation-transfer.html>> 4. Godayol, Pilar. (2017). Tres escritoras censuradas: Simone de Beauvoir, Betty Friedan y Mary McCarthy. Granada: Comares.<<www.editorialcomares.com/TV/articulo/3149-Tres_escritoras_censuradas.html>> 5. Vanacker, Beatrijs & Tom Toremans. (eds). (2016). Pseudotranslation and Metafictionality/Pseudo-traduction: enjeux métafictionnels. Special issue of Interférences Littéraires.<<www.interferenceslitteraires.be/nr19>> 6. Jiménez-Crespo, Miguel A. (2017). Crowdsourcing and Online Collaborative Translations: Expanding the Limits of Translation Studies. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. <<https://benjamins.com/#catalog/books/btl.131>> 7. Quality Assurance and Assessment Practices in Translation and Interpreting<<www.igi-global.com/publish/call-for-papers/call-details/2640>> 8. Hurtado Albir, Amparo. (ed.). (2017). Researching Translation Competence by PACTE Group. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.<<www.benjamins.com/#catalog/books/btl.127/main>> 9. Taivalkoski-Shilov, Kristiina, Liisa Tittula and Maarit Koponen. (eds). (2017). Communities in Translation and Interpreting. Toronto: Vita Traductiva, York University<<http://vitatraductiva.blog.yorku.ca/publication/communities-in-translation-and-interpreting>> 10. Giczela-Pastwa, Justyna and Uchenna Oyali (eds). (2017). Norm-Focused and Culture-Related Inquiries in Translation Research. Selected Papers of the CETRA Research Summer School 2014. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang.<<www.peterlang.com/view/product/25509>> 11. Castro, Olga & Emek Ergun (eds). (2017). Feminist Translation Studies: Local and Transnational Perspectives. London: Routledge.<<www.routledge.com/Feminist-Translation-Studies-Local-and-Transnational-Perspectives/Castro-Ergun/p/book/9781138931657>> 12. Call for papers: New Trends in Translation Studies. Series Editor: Prof. Jorge Díaz-Cintas, Centre for Translation Studies (CenTraS), University College London.<<(www.ucl.ac.uk/centras)>>, <<www.peterlang.com/view/serial/NEWTRANS>> 13. Valero-Garcés, Carmen & Rebecca Tipton. (eds). (2017). Ideology, Ethics and Policy Development in Public Service Interpreting and Translation. Bristol: Multilingual Matters.<<www.multilingual-matters.com/display.asp?isb=9781783097517>> 14. Mahyub Rayaa, Bachir & Mourad Zarrouk. 2017. A Handbook for Simultaneous Interpreting Training from English, French and Spanish to Arabic / منهج تطبيقي في تعلّم الترجمة الفورية من الانجليزية والفرنسية والإسبانية إلى العربية. Toledo: Escuela de Traductores.<<https://issuu.com/escueladetraductorestoledo/docs/cuaderno_16_aertefinal_version_web>> 15. Lapeña, Alejandro L. (2017). A pie de escenario. Guía de traducción teatral. Valencia: JPM ediciones.<<http://jpm-ediciones.es/catalogo/details/56/11/humanidades/a-pie-de-escenario>> 16. Mével, Alex. (2017). Subtitling African American English into French: Can We Do the Right Thing? Oxford: Peter Lang.<<www.peterlang.com/view/product/47023>> 17. Díaz Cintas, Jorge & Kristijan Nikolić. (eds). (2017). Fast-Forwarding with Audiovisual Translation. Bristol: Multilingual Matters.<<www.multilingual-matters.com/display.asp?K=9781783099368>> 18. Taibi, Mustapha. (ed.). (2017). Translating for the Community. Bristol: Multilingual Matters.<<www.multilingual-matters.com/display.asp?isb= 9781783099122>> 19. Borodo, Michał. (2017). Translation, Globalization and Younger Audiences. The Situation in Poland. Oxford: Peter Lang.<<www.peterlang.com/view/product/81485>> 20. Reframing Realities through Translation Cambridge Scholars Publishing<<https://cambridgescholarsblog.wordpress.com/2017/07/28/call-for-papers-reframing-realities-through-translation>> 21. Gansel, Mireille. 2017. Translation as Transhumance. London: Les Fugitives<<www.lesfugitives.com/books/#/translation-as-transhumance>> 22. Goźdź-Roszkowski, S. and G. Pontrandolfo. (eds). (2018). Phraseology in Legal and Institutional Settings. A Corpus-based Interdisciplinary Perspective. London: Routledge<<www.routledge.com/Phraseology-in-Legal-and-Institutional-Settings-A-Corpus-based-Interdisciplinary/Roszkowski-Pontrandolfo/p/book/9781138214361>> 23. Deckert, Mikołaj. (ed.). (2017). Audiovisual Translation – Research and Use. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang.<<www.peterlang.com/view/product/80659>> 24. Castro, Olga; Sergi Mainer & Svetlana Page. (eds). (2017). Self-Translation and Power: Negotiating Identities in European Multilingual Contexts. London: Palgrave Macmillan.www.palgrave.com/gb/book/9781137507808 25. Gonzalo Claros, M. (2017). Cómo traducir y redactar textos científicos en español. Barcelona: Fundación Dr. Antonio Esteve.<<www.esteve.org/cuaderno-traducir-textos-cientificos>> 26. Tian, Chuanmao & Feng Wang. (2017).Translation and Culture. Beijing: China Social Sciences Press.<<http://product.dangdang.com/25164476.html>> 27. Malamatidou, Sofia. (2018). Corpus Triangulation: Combining Data and Methods in Corpus-Based Translation Studies. London: Routledge.<<www.routledge.com/Corpus-Triangulation-Combining-Data-and-=Methods-in-Corpus-Based-Translation/Malamatidou/p/book/9781138948501>> 28. Jakobsen, Arnt L. and Bartolomé Mesa-Lao. (eds). (2017). Translation in Transition: Between Translation, Cognition and Technology. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.<<https://benjamins.com/#catalog/books/btl.133>> 29. Santaemilia, José. (ed.). (2017). Traducir para la igualdad sexual / Translating for Sexual Equality. Granada: Comares.<<www.editorialcomares.com/TV/articulo/3198-Traducir_para_la_igualdad_sexual.html>> 30. Levine, Suzanne Jill & Katie Lateef-Jan. (eds). (2018). Untranslatability Goes Global. London: Routledge.<<www.routledge.com/Untranslatability-Goes-Global/Levine-Lateef-Jan/p/book/9781138744301>> 31. Baer, Brian J. & Klaus Kindle. (eds). (2017). Queering Translation, Translating the Queer. Theory, Practice, Activism. New York: Routledge.<<www.routledge.com/Queering-Translation-Translating-the-Queer-Theory-Practice-Activism/Baer-Kaindl/p/book/9781138201699>> 32. Survey: The translation of political terminology<<https://goo.gl/forms/w2SQ2nnl3AkpcRNq2>> 33. Estudio de encuesta sobre la traducción y la interpretación en México 2017<<http://italiamorayta.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/09/ENCUESTAS.pdf>> 34. Beseghi, Micòl. (2017). Multilingual Films in Translation: A Sociolinguistic and Intercultural Study of Diasporic Films. Oxford: Peter Lang.<<www.peterlang.com/view/product/78842>> 35. Vidal Claramonte, María Carmen África. (2017). Dile que le he escrito un blues: del texto como partitura a la partitura como traducción en la literatura latinoamericana. Madrid: Iberoamericana.<<www.iberoamericana-vervuert.es/FichaLibro.aspx?P1=104515>> 36. Figueira, Dorothy M. & Mohan, Chandra. (eds.). (2017). Literary Culture and Translation. New Aspects of Comparative Literature. Delhi: Primus Books. ISBN: 978-93-84082-51-2.<<www.primusbooks.com>> 37. Tomiche, Anne. (ed.). (2017). Le Comparatisme comme aproche critique / Comparative Literature as a Critical Approach. Tome IV: Traduction et transfers / Translation and Transferts. París: Classiques Garnier. ISBN: 978-2-406-06533-3. 2) REVISTAS / JOURNALS 1. Call for papers: The Translator, special issue on Translation and Development, 2019. Contact: jmarais@ufs.ac.za 2. Call for papers: Applied Language LearningContact: jiaying.howard@dliflc.edu<<www.dliflc.edu/resources/publications/applied-language-learning>> 3. Panace@: Revista de Medicina, Lenguaje y Traducción; special issue on “La comunicación escrita para pacientes”, vol. 44<<www.tremedica.org/panacea/PanaceaActual.htm>> 4. mTm, issue 9<<www.mtmjournal.gr/default.asp?catid=435>> 5. Asia Pacific Translation and Intercultural Studies, Volume 4 Issue 3 (November 2017)<<http://explore.tandfonline.com/cfp/ah/aptis>>, <<www.tandfonline.com/rtis>> 6. Call for papers: The Journal of Translation Studies, special issue on Translation and Social Engagement in the Digital AgeContact: Sang-Bin Lee, sblee0110@naver.com 7. Current Trends in Translation Teaching and Learning E<<www.cttl.org>> 8. Translation and Interpreting Studies, 15 (1), Special issue on The Ethics of Non-Professional Translation and Interpreting in Public Services and Legal Settings<<www.atisa.org/call-for-papers>> 9. Call for papers: Translation & Interpreting – The International Journal of Translation and Interpreting Research, Special issue on Translation of Questionnaires in Cross-national and Cross-cultural Research<<www.trans-int.org/index.php/transint/announcement/view/19>> 10. Revista Digital de Investigación en Docencia Universitaria (RIDU), Special issue on Pedagogía y didáctica de la traducción y la interpretación<<http://revistas.upc.edu.pe/index.php/docencia/pages/view/announcement>> 11. Translation, Cognition & Behavior<<https://benjamins.com/#catalog/journals/tcb/main>> 12. FITISPos International Journal, vol. 4 (2017)Shedding Light on the Grey Zone: A Comprehensive View on Public Services Interpreting and Translation<<www3.uah.es/fitispos_ij>> 13. Post-Editing in Practice: Process, Product and NetworksSpecial issue of JoSTrans, The Journal of Specialised Translation, 31<<www.jostrans.org/Post-Editing_in_Practice_Jostrans31.pdf>> 14. Call for papers: MonTI 10 (2018), Special issue on Retos actuales y tendencias emergentes en traducción médica<<https://dti.ua.es/es/monti/convocatorias.htm>> 15. Call for papers: trans‐kom Special Issue on Industry 4.0 meets Language and Knowledge Resources.Contact: Georg Löckinger (georg.loeckinger@fh‐wels.at)<<http://trans-kom.eu/index-en.html>> 16. Translaboration: Exploring Collaboration in Translation and Translation in CollaborationSpecial Issue, Target, vol 32(2), 2020.<<www.benjamins.com/series/target/cfp_target_32.pdf>> 17. redit, Revista Electrónica de Didáctica de la Traducción e Interpretación, nº11.<<www.revistas.uma.es/index.php/redit>> 18. Call for papers: InVerbis, special issue on Translating the Margin: Lost Voices in the Aesthetic Discourse, June 2018.Contact: alessandra.rizzo@unipa.it & karen.Seago1@city.ac.uk<<www.unipa.it/dipartimenti/dipartimentoscienzeumanistiche/CFP-Translating-the-margin-Lost-voices-in-the-aesthetic-discourse>> 19. trans-kom, Vol. 10 (1), 2017. <<www.trans-kom.eu>> 20. JoSTrans, The Journal of Specialised Translation, issue 28 (July 2017).<<www.jostrans.org/issue28/issue28_toc.php>> 21. Call for papers: InVerbis, special issue on Translating the Margin: Lost Voices in the Aesthetic Discourse, June 2018.<<www.unipa.it/dipartimenti/scienzeumanistiche/.content/documenti/CFPInverbis.pdf>> 22. Call for papers: TTR, special Issue on Lost and Found in Transcultural and Interlinguistic Translation/La traduction transculturelle et interlinguistique : s’y perdre et s’y retrouver<<http://professeure.umoncton.ca/umcm-merkle_denise/node/30>> 23. Call for proposals for thematic issues:Linguistica Antverpiensia, New Series – Themes in Translation Studies (LANS – TTS)<<https://lans-tts.uantwerpen.be>> 24. Call for papers: trans‑kom, special issue on Didactics for Technology in Translation and InterpretingVol. 11(2), December 2018.Contact: aietimonografia@gmail.com / carmen.valero@uah.es 25. Journal of Languages for Special PurposesVol 22/2, New Perspectives on the Translation of Advertising<<https://ojsspdc.ulpgc.es/ojs/index.php/LFE/issue/view/53>>Vol 23/1, Linguistics, Translation and Teaching in LSP<<https://ojsspdc.ulpgc.es/ojs/index.php/LFE/issue/view/72>> 26. Call for papers: Parallèles, special issue on La littérature belge francophone en traduction (in French), Volume 32(1), 2020.Contact: katrien.lievois@uantwerpen.be & catherine.gravet@umons.ac.be 27. Call for papers: Asia Pacific Translation and Intercultural Studies, Volume 5(1), 2018.<<www.tandfonline.com/rtis>> 28. Target, special issue on Translaboration: Exploring Collaboration in Translation and Translation in Collaboration<<www.benjamins.com/series/target/cfp_target_32.pdf>> 29. Research in Language, special issue on Translation and Cognition: Cases of Asymmetry, Volume 15(2).<<www.degruyter.com/view/j/rela.2017.15.issue-2/issue-files/rela.2017.15.issue-2.xml>> 30. Call for papers: Translation Spaces, special issue on Translation in Non-governmental Organisations, 7(1), 2018.<<www.reading.ac.uk/web/files/modern-languages-and-european-studies/CfP_SI_Translation_Spaces-translation_in_NGOs.pdf>> 31. Call for papers: Translating the Margin: Lost Voices in the Aesthetic Discourse, special issue of InVerbis (2018).<<www.unipa.it/dipartimenti/scienzeumanistiche/CFP-Translating-the-margin-Lost-voices-in-the-aesthetic-discourse>> 32. Call for papers: Translation and Disruption: Global and Local Perspectives, special issue of Revista Tradumàtica (2018).Contact: akiko.sakamoto@port.ac.uk; jonathan.evans@port.ac.uk and olga.torres.hostench@uab.cat 33. Call for papers: JoSTrans. The Journal of Specialised Translation 33 (January 2020), Special Issue on ‘Experimental Research and Cognition in Audiovisual Translation’. Guest editors: Jorge Díaz Cintas & Agnieszka Szarkowska. Deadline for proposals: 19 February 2018<<http://www.jostrans.org/>> 34. Dragoman – Journal of Translation Studies<<www.dragoman-journal.org/books>> 35. Call for papers: Translation Spaces 7(1) 2018, special issue on Translation in Non-governmental Organisations<<www.reading.ac.uk/web/files/modern-languages-and-european-studies/CfP_SI_Translation_Spaces-translation_in_NGOs-public-extended_deadline.pdf>> 36. Call for papers: Public Service Interpreting and Translation and New Technologies Participation through Communication with Technology, special issue of FITISPos International Journal, Vol 5 (2018).Contact: Michaela Albl-Mikasa (albm@zhaw.ch) & Stefanos Vlachopoulos (stefanos@teiep.gr) 37. Sendebar, Vol. 28 (2017)<<http://revistaseug.ugr.es/index.php/sendebar>> 38. Ranzato, Irene. (2016). North and South: British Dialects in Fictional Dialogue, special issue of Status Quaestionis – Language, Text, Culture, 11.<<http://statusquaestionis.uniroma1.it/index.php/statusquaestionis>> 39. Translation Studies 10 (2), special issue on Indirect Translation.<<www.tandfonline.com/toc/rtrs20/current>> 40. Translation & Interpreting – Special issue on Research Methods in Interpreting Studies, Vol 9 (1), 2017. 41. Translation and Translanguaging in Multilingual Contexts, special issue on Between Specialised Texts and Institutional Contexts – Competence and Choice in Legal Translation, edited by V. Dullion, 3 (1), 2017.<<https://benjamins.com/#catalog/journals/ttmc.3.1/toc>> 42. Translation and Performance, 9 (1), 2017<<https://journals.library.ualberta.ca/tc/index.php/TC/issue/view/1879>> 3) CONGRESOS / CONFERENCES 1. ATISA IX: Contexts of Translation and InterpretingUniversity of Wisconsin, Milwaukee, USA, 29 March – 1 April 2018<<www.atisa.org/sites/default/files/CFP_ATISA_2018_FINAL.pdf> 2. V International Translating Voices Translating Regions – Minority Languages, Risks, Disasters and Regional CrisesCentre for Translation Studies (CenTraS) at UCL and Europe House, London, UK, 13-15 December 2017.<<www.ucl.ac.uk/centras/translation-news-and-events/v-translating-voices>> 3. Translation and Health Humanities: The Role of Translated Personal Narratives in the Co-creation of Medical KnowledgeGenealogies of Knowledge I Translating Political and Scientific Thought across Time and Space, University of Manchester, UK7-9 December 2017.<<http://genealogiesofknowledge.net/2017/02/20/call-panel-papers-translation-health-humanities-role-translated-personal-narratives-co-creation-medical-knowledge>> 4. Fourth International Conference on Non-Professional Interpreting and Translation (NPIT4), Stellenbosch University, South Africa, 22-24 May 2018.<<http://conferences.sun.ac.za/index.php/NPIT4/npit4>> 5. I International Conference on Interdisciplinary Approaches for Total Communication: Education, Healthcare and Interpreting within Disability Settings, University of Málaga, Spain, 12-14 December 2017.<<https://ecplusproject.uma.es/cfp-iciatc>> 6. Translation & Minority 2: Freedom and DifferenceUniversity of Ottawa, Canada, 10-11 November 2017.<<https://translationandminority.wordpress.com>> 7. Staging the Literary Translator: Roles, Identities, PersonalitiesUniversity of Vienna, Austria, 17-19 May 2018.<<http://translit2018.univie.ac.at/home>> 8. IATIS 2018 – Translation and Cultural MobilityPanel 9: Translating Development: The Importance of Language(s) in Processes of Social Transformation in Developing CountriesHong Kong, 3-6 July 2018.<<www.iatis.org/index.php/6th-conference-hong-kong-2018/item/1459-panels#Panel09>> 9. Fun for All 5: Translation and Accessibility in Video Games Conference, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain, 7-8 June 2018.<<http://jornades.uab.cat/videogamesaccess>> 10. ACT/Unlimited! 2 Symposium, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain, 6 June 2018.<<http://pagines.uab.cat/act/content/actunlimited-2-symposium>> 11. IATIS 2018 – Translation and Cultural MobilityPANEL 06: Museum Translation: Encounters across Space and TimeHong Kong Baptist University, 3-6 July 2018.<<www.iatis.org/index.php/6th-conference-hong-kong-2018/item/1459-panels#Panel06>> 12. IATIS 2018 – Translation and Cultural Mobility PANEL 12: Advances in Discourse Analysis in Translation Studies: Theoretical Models and Applications Hong Kong Baptist University3-6 July 2018.<<www.iatis.org/index.php/6th-conference-hong-kong-2018/item/1459-panels#Panel12>> 13. Understanding Quality in Media Accessibility, Universidad Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain, 5 June 2018. <<http://pagines.uab.cat/umaq/content/umaq-conference>> 14. Managing Anaphora in Discourse: Towards an Interdisciplinary Approach, University of Grenoble Alpes, France, 5-6 April 2018.<<http://saesfrance.org/4071-2>> 15. Traduire les voix de la nature / Translating the Voices of Nature, Paris, France, 25-26 May 2018.<<www.utu.fi/en/units/hum/units/languages/mts/Documents/CFP.pdf>> 16. IATIS 2018 – Translation and Cultural MobilityPANEL 10: Audiovisual Translation as Cross-cultural Mediation – New Trajectories for Translation and Cultural Mobility?Hong Kong Baptist University, 3-6 July 2018. <<www.iatis.org/index.php/6th-conference-hong-kong-2018/item/1459-panels#Panel10>> 17. The Fourth International Conference on Research into the Didactics of Translation, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain20-22 June 2018.<<http://grupsderecerca.uab.cat/pacte/en/firstcircular>> 18. I Coloquio Internacional Hispanoafricano de Lingüística, Literatura y Traducción. España en contacto con África, su(s) pueblo(s) y su(s= cultura(s) Universidad FHB de Cocody-Abidjan, Costa de Marfil 7-9 March 2018.<<www.afriqana.org/encuentros.php>> 19. Transius Conference 2018, Geneva, Switzerland, 18-20 June 2018.<<http://transius.unige.ch/en/conferences-and-seminars/conferences/18/>> 20. 39th International GERAS Conference - Diachronic Dimensions in Specialised Varieties of English: Implications in Communications, Didactics and Translation Studies, University of Mons, Belgium15-17 March 2018.<<www.geras.fr/index.php/presentation/breves/2-uncategorised/245-cfp-39th-international-geras-conference>> 21. 31st Annual Conference of the Canadian Association for Translation Studies - Translation and Adaptation, University of Regina, Canada, 28-30 May 2018.<<https://linguistlist.org/issues/28/28-3413.html>> 22. 2nd Valencia/Napoli Colloquium on Gender and Translation: Translating/Interpreting LSP through a Gender PerspectiveUniversità di Napoli 'L'Orientale', Italy, 8-9 February 2018.Contact: eleonorafederici@hotmail.com 23. Ninth Annual International Translation Conference: Translation in the Digital Age: From Translation Tools to Shifting Paradigms, Hamad Bin Khalifa’s Translation & Interpreting Institute (TII), Doha, Qatar, 27-28 March 2018.<<www.tii.qa/9th-annual-translation-conference-translation-digital-age-translation-tools-shifting-paradigms>> 24. ACT/Unlimited! 2 Symposium – Quality Training, Quality Service in Accessible Live Events, Barcelona, Spain, 6 June 2018.<<http://pagines.uab.cat/act/content/actunlimited-2-symposium>> 25. Fourth International Conference on Research into the Didactics of Translation, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Spain, 20-22 June 2018.<<http://grupsderecerca.uab.cat/pacte/en/secondcircular2018>> 26. Talking to the World 3. International Conference in T&I Studies – Cognition, Emotion, and Creativity, Newcastle University, UK, 17-18 September 2018.<<www.ncl.ac.uk/sml/news-events/news/item/talkingtotheworld3ticonference.html>> 27. Translation & Interpreting in the Digital Era, Hankuk University of Foreign Studies, Seoul, South Korea, 29-30 January 2018.Contact: itri@hufs.ac.kr 28. 7th META-NET Annual Conference: Towards a Human Language Project, Hotel Le Plaza, Brussels, Belgium, 13-14 November 2017.<<www.meta-net.eu/events/meta-forum-2017>> 4) CURSOS – SEMINARIOS – POSGRADOS / COURSES – SEMINARS – MA PROGRAMMES 1. Certificate / Diploma / Master of Advanced Studies in Interpreter Training (online), FTI, University of Geneva, Switzerland,4 September 2017 - 10 September 2019.<<www.unige.ch/formcont/masit>> 2. Master’s Degree in Legal Translation, Institute of Advanced Legal Studies, London, UK.<<http://ials.sas.ac.uk/study/courses/llm-legal-translation>> 3. Certificat d’Université en Interprétation en contexte juridique : milieu judiciaire et secteur des demandes d’asile, University of Mons, Belgium.<<http://hosting.umons.ac.be/php/centrerusse/agenda/certificat-duniversite-en-interpretation-en-contexte-juridique-milieu-judiciaire-et-secteur-des-demandes-dasile.html>> 4. Online MA in Translation and Interpreting ResearchUniversitat Jaume I, Castellón, Spain.Contact: monzo@uji.es<<www.mastertraduccion.uji.es>> 5. MA in Intercultural Communication, Public Service Interpreting and Translation 2017-2018, University of Alcalá, Madrid, Spain.<<www3.uah.es/master-tisp-uah/introduction-2/introduction>> 6. Research Methods in Translation and Interpreting StudiesUniversity of Geneva, Switzerland.<<www.unige.ch/formcont/researchmethods-distance1>><<www.unige.ch/formcont/researchmethods-distance2>> 7. La Traducción audiovisual y el aprendizaje de lenguas extranjeras, Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia (UNED), Spain, 4 December 2017.<<https://goo.gl/3zpMgY>> 8. Fifth summer school in Chinese-English Translation and Interpretation (CETIP), University of Ottawa, Canada, 23 July – 17 August 2018.<<http://arts.uottawa.ca/translation/summer-programs>> 9. First summer school in Arabic – English Translation and Interpretation (AETP), University of Ottawa, Canada, 23 July – 17 August 2018.<<http://arts.uottawa.ca/translation/summer-programs>> 10. Third summer school in translation pedagogy (TTPP)University of Ottawa, Canada, 23 July – 17 August 2018.<<http://arts.uottawa.ca/translation/summer-programs>> 4) PREMIOS/AWARDS 1. The Warwick Prize for Women in Translation<<http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/cross_fac/womenintranslation>

Abstract:

Teesid: Tartu Ülikooli maailmakirjanduse professori, luuletaja, kirjandusteadlase ja hispaaniakeelse kirjanduse spetsialisti Jüri Talveti tõlketegevuse viljade hulka kuulub luulet ja proosat nii sajandeid vanast Hispaania klassikast kui ka 20. sajandil või tänapäeval romaani keeltes või inglise keeles loodud teostest. Käesolev artikkel keskendub sellele, kuidas professor Talvet on tõlgendanud luule ja poeetika, kuid ka kirjandusajaloo, iseäranis barokk-kirjanduse alaseid küsimusi oma kirjandusteaduslikes esseedes. Vaadeldakse ka tema tõlketegevuse mahtu ja tõlketöö põhimõtteid. Jüri Talvet (born in 1945) is a poet and a scholar of comparative literature, Chair Professor of World Literature at the University of Tartu. His numerous translations of poetry and poetical fiction from the Romance languages and, to a lesser extent, from English, reflect his views on world poetry. Those views are also expressed in his theoretical writings from the years of 1977 to 2015. Having studied English literature as the main subject at the University of Tartu, he early developed an interest in Spanish, in other Iberian languages, and in the Iberoamerican literatures. His translations from that area include works from medieval and early modern literature as well as notable literary achievements from the 20th century and the contemporary era. Talvet’s interpretations of Federico García Lorca and the “Latin American boom” authors are supported by profound insights into the philosophy, aesthetics, and poetics of the 17th century Spanish Baroque literature, known as the literary Golden Age of Spain. The influence which Talvet’s activities have exerted has widened the horizons of Estonia’s literary culture: while in the early 20th century, the previous German, Russian and Finnish leanings were supplemented by orientations to, and translations from, French and Italian literatures, Talvet has helped to enrich the Estonian literary landscape with the mentality and traditions of even more distant language areas, such as Castilian (Spanish), Catalan, Galician, Portuguese, and the Latin American countries. In the section “Quevedo and Góngora” of this article, Talvet’s interpretation of some of the key issues of dispute in the Baroque literature of Spain are studied, based both on his theoretical essays and on his translations of the poetry of Francisco de Quevedo. Talvet has attempted to use the terms of the Baroque philosopher and writer Baltasar Gracián, agudeza, concepto (definable approximately as “conceit” or “wit”) and conceptismo, for the analysis of the late 20th century Estonian poetry. On that background, defnitions of conceptismo and cultismo (the other main school in Spanish Baroque poetry) are offered in this article, with implications that those definitions may have for understanding different styles and methods of poetry in general, and the characteristics of Talvet’s own poems and poetry translations in particular. To escape diffusion in pure sensuality and verbal indulgence, poetry has to rely on concepts as well as images. Talvet’s interpretations of poetry and poetical thinking are found to be close to conceptismo, or with a considerable amount of conceptuality inherent to them. The juxtaposition of paradoxical ideas from different levels of reality, social and psychic, is seen as the essential poetical method that Talvet refers to as he defines, quoting Yuri Lotman, the structural-semantic code of poetry as being “paradigmatic”. In the final section of the article, Talvet’s 23 book-length published translations are listed, including translations from Spanish, Catalan, English and French. The list does not include numerous translations of single poems or cycles of poetry that have appeared in literary journals, nor his contributions to anthologies of poetry, nor the translations from his native Estonian into a foreign language, such as Spanish or English, in which he has participated. His translations encompass lyrical works as well as fiction and plays. Talvet has translated classical European poetry, such as the sonnets of Petrarch and Quevedo and Provençal poems, as well as the rhymed poems of American poets into Estonian with complete metrical correspondence and full rhymes. However, in the latest decades Talvet has expressed scepticism in the sense and feasibility of attempting to convey the rhyming complexities of the major European literatures into Estonian, a language with a considerably smaller potential for finding full rhymes. Accordingly, his three translations of Spanish Baroque drama (by Calderón and Tirso de Molina) employ a liberal method of versification. In all his versatile activities as a poet, a translator, and a theorist of poetry, Professor Talvet has shown great devotion to developing and cultivating aesthetic values. A lot of his colleagues and students have benefited from his friendly advice. Thinking of his contributions to Estonia’s literary tradition, one may repeat and paraphrase the sentence that he used for the conclusion of his essay on the Catalan poet Salvador Espriu in 1977: “to write (and to translate) poetry is to work for the benefit of the people.”

Abstract:

Hungarian poet and writer Dezső Kosztolányi edited and translated the first anthology of Chinese classical poetry in the 20th century, entitled Chinese and Japanese Poems, which was published at the end of 1931. But his interest in Chinese culture can be traced back to much earlier, to the first decade of the 20th century. This article takes into consideration all of Kosztolányi’s prose writings, articles and translations related to China, Chinese poetry and also the sources of his knowledge about China, published in Hungarian and in english, German and French, such as the books of H. A. Giles, arthur Waley, richard Wilhelms, Paul Claudel and others. The paper also analyzes the role of anthologies of Chinese poetry in foreign languages that Kosztolányi consulted for his translations into Hungarian. in his writings, he depicted a somewhat idealistic picture of Chinese culture, and in spite of some occasional errors, he was successful in describing some important characteristics of Chinese life of the past, and his writings and translations have had a great influence in Hungary.

Abstract:

The relevance of the problem is explained by the fact the Ukrainian language is arising more and more interest in the world nowadays and it’s quite urgent to analyse its possibilities to translate the well-known English poetry. For those who are interested in poetry in their native language and are studying Ukrainian as a foreign one it is both useful and pleasant to make the analysis of the two languages abilities to create an aspect of intercultural communication. Our investigation is based on Emily Dickinson’s poetic works and their Ukrainian translations made by N. Tuchynska, O. Zuyevsky, M. Gablevych, and O. Hrytsenko. The purpose of the research is to identify the possibilities of the Ukrainian language as a target language in poetic translation and to characterize translation finds and losses. Emily Dickinson’s poetry is characterized by the combination of different verse meters in one poem, the special use of punctuation marks, in particular the frequent use of dashes. E. Dickinson’s poems are also distinguished by such stylistic means and techniques as assonance, alliteration, graphon (in the form of capitalization of individual nouns), paradoxes, epithets, metaphors, etc. Different translators resort to different ways of adequate translation. O. Zuyevskyi prefers contextual substitution, grammatical restructuring of sentences, modulation, concretization and domestication, uses archaic Ukrainian vocabulary in order to compensate for the loss of some original lexical units of the official style of speech. O. Hrytsenko tries to reproduce the original syntactic structure, but, resorting to such translational transformations as grammatical substitution, deletion, contextual substitution, addition, and concretization, he loses key stylistic techniques – the author’s paradox, antonomasia, epithets, irony and satire. Anyway in certain cases, due to the combination of various verse meters, the lack of a clear rhythm and the unjustified use of certain vocabulary, the architecture and compositional structure of the verse text are not preserved. We see the prospects of the investigation in creating practical tasks for the advanced level learners of the Ukrainian language to compare the original and the translated text under consideration. Key words: the Ukrainian language, the English language, poetry, translation.

Abstract:

Introduction When a text is said to be re-appropriated, it is at times unclear to what extent this appropriation is secondary, repeated, new; certainly, the difference between a reiteration and an iteration has more to do with emphasis than any (re)duplication. And at a moment in the development of crime fiction in France when the retranslation of now apparently dated French translations of the works of classic American hardboiled novels (especially those of authors like Dashiell Hammett, whose novels were published in Marcel Duhamel’s Série Noire at Gallimard in the decades following the end of the Second World War) is being undertaken with the ostensible aim of taking the French reader back (closer) to the American original, one may well ask where the emphasis now lies. In what ways, for example, is this new form of re-production, of re-imagining the text, more intimately bound to the original, and thus in itself less ‘original’ than its translated predecessors? Or again, is this more reactionary ‘re-’ in fact really that different from those more radical uses that cleaved the translation from its original text in those early, foundational years of twentieth-century French crime fiction? (Re-)Reading: Critical Theory and Originality My juxtaposition of the terms ‘reactionary’ and ‘radical’, and the attempted play on the auto-antonymy of the verb ‘to cleave’, are designed to prompt a re(-)read of the analysis that so famously took the text away from the author in the late-1960s through to the 1990s, which is to say the critical theory of poststructuralism and deconstruction. Roland Barthes’s work (especially 69–77) appropriated the familiar terms of literary analysis and reversed them, making of them perhaps a re-appropriation in the sense of taking them into new territory: the text, formerly a paper-based platform for the written word, was now a virtual interface between the word and its reader, the new locus of the production of meaning; the work, on the other hand, which had previously pertained to the collective creative imaginings of the author, was now synonymous with the physical writing passed on by the author to the reader. And by ‘passed on’ was meant ‘passed over’, achevé (perfected, terminated, put to death)—completed, then, but only insofar as its finite sequence of words was set; for its meaning was henceforth dependent on its end user. The new textual life that surged from the ‘death of the author’ was therefore always already an afterlife, a ‘living on’, to use Jacques Derrida’s term (Bloom et al. 75–176). It is in this context that the re-reading encouraged by Barthes has always appeared to mark a rupture a teasing of ‘reading’ away from the original series of words and the ‘Meaning’ as intended by the author, if any coherence of intention is possible across the finite sequence of words that constitute the written work. The reader must learn to re-read, Barthes implored, or otherwise be condemned to read the same text everywhere. In this sense, the ‘re-’ prefix marks an active engagement with the text, a reflexivity of the act of reading as an act of transformation. The reader whose consumption of the text is passive, merely digestive, will not transform the words (into meaning); and crucially, that reader will not herself be transformed. For this is the power of reflexive reading—when one reads text as text (and not ‘losing oneself’ in the story) one reconstitutes oneself (or, perhaps, loses control of oneself more fully, more productively); not to do so, is to take an unchanged constant (oneself) into every textual encounter and thus to produce sameness in ostensible difference. One who rereads a text and discovers the same story twice will therefore reread even when reading a text for the first time. The hyphen of the re-read, on the other hand, distances the reader from the text; but it also, of course, conjoins. It marks the virtual space where reading occurs, between the physical text and the reading subject; and at the same time, it links all texts in an intertextual arena, such that the reading experience of any one text is informed by the reading of all texts (whether they be works read by an individual reader or works as yet unencountered). Such a theory of reading appears to shift originality so far from the author’s work as almost to render the term obsolete. But the thing about reflexivity is that it depends on the text itself, to which it always returns. As Barbara Johnson has noted, the critical difference marked by Barthes’s understandings of the text, and his calls to re-read it, is not what differentiates it from other texts—the universality of the intertext and the reading space underlines this; instead, it is what differentiates the text from itself (“Critical Difference” 175). And while Barthes’s work packages this differentiation as a rupture, a wrenching of ownership away from the author to a new owner, the work and text appear less violently opposed in the works of the Yale School deconstructionists. In such works as J. Hillis Miller’s “The Critic as Host” (1977), the hyphenation of the re-read is less marked, with re-reading, as a divergence from the text as something self-founding, self-coinciding, emerging as something inherent in the original text. The cleaving of one from and back into the other takes on, in Miller’s essay, the guise of parasitism: the host, a term that etymologically refers to the owner who invites and the guest who is invited, offers a figure for critical reading that reveals the potential for creative readings of ‘meaning’ (what Miller calls the nihilistic text) inside the transparent ‘Meaning’ of the text, by which we recognise one nonetheless autonomous text from another (the metaphysical text). Framed in such terms, reading is a reaction to text, but also an action of text. I should argue then that any engagement with the original is re-actionary—my caveat being that this hyphenation is a marker of auto-antonymy, a link between the text and otherness. Translation and Originality Questions of a translator’s status and the originality of the translated text remain vexed. For scholars of translation studies like Brian Nelson, the product of literary translation can legitimately be said to have been authored by its translator, its status as literary text being equal to that of the original (3; see also Wilson and Gerber). Such questions are no more or less vexed today, however, than they were in the days when criticism was grappling with translation through the lens of deconstruction. To refer again to the remarkable work of Johnson, Derrida’s theorisation of textual ‘living on’—the way in which text, at its inception, primes itself for re-imagining, by dint of the fundamental différance of the chains of signification that are its DNA—bears all the trappings of self-translation. Johnson uses the term ‘self-différance’ (“Taking Fidelity” 146–47) in this respect and notes how Derrida took on board, and discussed with him, the difficulties that he was causing for his translator even as he was writing the ‘original’ text of his essay. If translation, in this framework, is rendered impossible because of the original’s failure to coincide with itself in a transparently meaningful way, then its practice “releases within each text the subversive forces of its own foreignness” (Johnson, “Taking Fidelity” 148), thereby highlighting the debt owed by Derrida’s notion of textual ‘living on’—in (re-)reading—to Walter Benjamin’s understanding of translation as a mode, its translatability, the way in which it primes itself for translation virtually, irrespective of whether or not it is actually translated (70). In this way, translation is a privileged site of textual auto-differentiation, and translated text can, accordingly, be considered every bit as ‘original’ as its source text—simply more reflexive, more aware of its role as a conduit between the words on the page and the re-imagining that they undergo, by which they come to mean, when they are re-activated by the reader. Emily Apter—albeit in a context that has more specifically to do with the possibilities of comparative literature and the real-world challenges of language in war zones—describes the auto-differentiating nature of translation as “a means of repositioning the subject in the world and in history; a means of rendering self-knowledge foreign to itself; a way of denaturalizing citizens, taking them out of the comfort zone of national space, daily ritual, and pre-given domestic arrangements” (6). In this way, translation is “a significant medium of subject re-formation and political change” (Apter 6). Thus, translation lends itself to crime fiction; for both function as highly reflexive sites of transformation: both provide a reader with a heightened sense of the transformation that she is enacting on the text and that she herself embodies as a reading subject, a subject changed by reading. Crime Fiction, Auto-Differention and Translation As has been noted elsewhere (Rolls), Fredric Jameson made an enigmatic reference to crime fiction’s perceived role as the new Realism as part of his plenary lecture at “Telling Truths: Crime Fiction and National Allegory”, a conference held at the University of Wollongong on 6–8 December 2012. He suggested, notably, that one might imagine an author of Scandi-Noir writing in tandem with her translator. While obvious questions of the massive international marketing machine deployed around this contemporary phenomenon come to mind, and I suspect that this is how Jameson’s comment was generally understood, it is tempting to consider this Scandinavian writing scenario in terms of Derrida’s proleptic considerations of his own translator. In this way, crime fiction’s most telling role, as one of the most widely read contemporary literary forms, is its translatability; its haunting descriptions of place (readers, we tend, perhaps precipitously, to assume, love crime fiction for its national, regional or local situatedness) are thus tensely primed for re-location, for Apter’s ‘subject re-formation’. The idea of ‘the new Realism’ of crime, and especially detective, fiction is predicated on the tightly (self-)policed rules according to which crime fiction operates. The reader appears to enter into an investigation alongside the detective, co-authoring the crime text in real (reading) time, only for authorial power to be asserted in the unveiling scene of the denouement. What masquerades as the ultimately writerly text, in Barthes’s terms, turns out to be the ultimate in transparently meaningful literature when the solution is set in stone by the detective. As such, the crime novel is far more dependent on descriptions of the minutiae of everyday life (in a given place in time) than other forms of fiction, as these provide the clues on which its intricate plot hinges. According to this understanding, crime fiction records history and transcribes national allegories. This is not only a convincing way of understanding crime fiction, but it is also an extremely powerful way of harnessing it for the purposes of cultural history. Claire Gorrara, for example, uses the development of French crime fiction plots over the course of the second half of the twentieth century to map France’s coming to terms with the legacy of the Second World War. This is the national allegory written in real time, as the nation heals and moves on, and this is crime fiction as a reaction to national allegory. My contention here, on the other hand, is that crime fiction, like translation, has at its core an inherent, and reflexive, tendency towards otherness. Indeed, this is because crime fiction, whose origins in transnational (and especially Franco-American) literary exchange have been amply mapped but not, I should argue, extrapolated to their fullest extent, is forged in translation. It is widely considered that when Edgar Allan Poe produced his seminal text “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841) he created modern crime fiction. And yet, this was made possible because the text was translated into French by Charles Baudelaire and met with great success in France, far more so indeed than in its original place of authorship. Its original setting, however, was not America but Paris; its translatability as French text preceded, even summoned, its actualisation in the form of Baudelaire’s translation. Furthermore, the birth of the great armchair detective, the exponent of pure, objective deduction, in the form of C. Auguste Dupin, is itself turned on its head, a priori, because Dupin, in this first Parisian short story, always already off-sets objectivity with subjectivity, ratiocination with a tactile apprehension of the scene of the crime. He even goes as far as to accuse the Parisian Prefect of Police of one-dimensional objectivity. (Dupin undoes himself, debunking the myth of his own characterisation, even as he takes to the stage.) In this way, Poe founded his crime fiction on a fundamental tension; and this tension called out to its translator so powerfully that Baudelaire claimed to be translating his own thoughts, as expressed by Poe, even before he had had a chance to think them (see Rolls and Sitbon). Thus, Poe was Parisian avant la lettre, his crime fiction a model for Baudelaire’s own prose poetry, the new voice of critical modernity in the mid-nineteenth century. If Baudelaire went on to write Paris in the form of Paris Spleen (1869), his famous collection of “little prose poems”, both as it is represented (timelessly, poetically) and as it presents itself (in real time, prosaically) at the same time, it was not only because he was spontaneously creating a new national allegory for France based on its cleaving of itself in the wake of Georges-Eugène Haussmann’s massive programme of urbanisation in Paris in the 1800s; it was also because he was translating Poe’s fictionalisation of Paris in his new crime fiction. Crime fiction was born therefore not only simultaneously in France and America but also in the translation zone between the two, in the self-différance of translation. In this way, while a strong claim can be made that modern French crime fiction is predicated on, and reacts to, the auto-differentiation (of critical modernity, of Paris versus Paris) articulated in Baudelaire’s prose poems and therefore tells the national allegory, it is also the case, and it is this aspect that is all too often overlooked, that crime fiction’s birth in Franco-American translation founded the new French national allegory. Re-imagining America in (French) Crime Fiction Pierre Bayard has done more than any other critic in recent years to debunk the authorial power of the detective in crime fiction, beginning with his re-imagining of the solution to Agatha Christie’s The Murder of Roger Ackroyd and continuing with that of Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles (1998 and 2008, respectively). And yet, even as he has engaged with poststructuralist re-readings of these texts, he has put in place his own solutions, elevating them away from his own initial premise of writerly engagement towards a new metaphysics of “Meaning”, be it ironically or because he has fallen prey himself to the seduction of detectival truth. This reactionary turn, or sting-lessness in the tail, reaches new heights (of irony) in the essay in which he imagines the consequences of liberating novels from their traditional owners and coupling them with new authors (Bayard, Et si les œuvres changeaient d’auteur?). Throughout this essay Bayard systematically prefers the terms “work” and “author” to “text” and “reader”, liberating the text not only from the shackles of traditional notions of authorship but also from the terminological reshuffling of his and others’ critical theory, while at the same time clinging to the necessity for textual meaning to stem from authorship and repackaging what is, in all but terminology, Barthes et al.’s critical theory. Caught up in the bluff and double-bluff of Bayard’s authorial redeployments is a chapter on what is generally considered the greatest work of parody of twentieth-century French crime fiction—Boris Vian’s pseudo-translation of black American author Vernon Sullivan’s novel J’irai cracher sur vos tombes (1946, I Shall Spit on Your Graves). The novel was a best seller in France in 1946, outstripping by far the novels of the Série Noire, whose fame and marketability were predicated on their status as “Translations from the American” and of which it appeared a brazen parody. Bayard’s decision to give credibility to Sullivan as author is at once perverse, because it is clear that he did not exist, and reactionary, because it marks a return to Vian’s original conceit. And yet, it passes for innovative, not (or at least not only) because of Bayard’s brilliance but because of the literary qualities of the original text, which, Bayard argues, must have been written in “American” in order to produce such a powerful description of American society at the time. Bayard’s analysis overlooks (or highlights, if we couch his entire project in a hermeneutics of inversion, based on the deliberate, and ironic, re-reversal of the terms “work” and “text”) two key elements of post-war French crime fiction: the novels of the Série Noire that preceded J’irai cracher sur vos tombes in late 1945 and early 1946 were all written by authors posing as Americans (Peter Cheyney and James Hadley Chase were in fact English) and the translations were deliberately unfaithful both to the original text, which was drastically domesticated, and to any realistic depiction of America. While Anglo-Saxon French Studies has tended to overlook the latter aspect, Frank Lhomeau has highlighted the fact that the America that held sway in the French imaginary (from Liberation through to the 1960s and beyond) was a myth rather than a reality. To take this reasoning one logical, reflexive step further, or in fact less far, the object of Vian’s (highly reflexive) novel, which may better be considered a satire than a parody, can be considered not to be race relations in the United States but the French crime fiction scene in 1946, of which its pseudo-translation (which is to say, a novel not written by an American and not translated) is metonymic (see Vuaille-Barcan, Sitbon and Rolls). (For Isabelle Collombat, “pseudo-translation functions as a mise en abyme of a particular genre” [146, my translation]; this reinforces the idea of a conjunction of translation and crime fiction under the sign of reflexivity.) Re-imagined beneath this wave of colourful translations of would-be American crime novels is a new national allegory for a France emerging from the ruins of German occupation and Allied liberation. The re-imagining of France in the years immediately following the Second World War is therefore not mapped, or imagined again, by crime fiction; rather, the combination of translation and American crime fiction provide the perfect storm for re-creating a national sense of self through the filter of the Other. For what goes for the translator, goes equally for the reader. Conclusion As Johnson notes, “through the foreign language we renew our love-hate intimacy with our mother tongue”; and as such, “in the process of translation from one language to another, the scene of linguistic castration […] is played on center stage, evoking fear and pity and the illusion that all would perhaps have been well if we could simply have stayed at home” (144). This, of course, is just what had happened one hundred years earlier when Baudelaire created a new prose poetics for a new Paris. In order to re-present (both present and represent) Paris, he focused so close on it as to erase it from objective view. And in the same instance of supreme literary creativity, he masked the origins of his own translation praxis: his Paris was also Poe’s, which is to say, an American vision of Paris translated into French by an author who considered his American alter ego to have had his own thoughts in an act of what Bayard would consider anticipatory plagiarism. In this light, his decision to entitle one of the prose poems “Any where out of the world”—in English in the original—can be considered a Derridean reflection on the translation inherent in any original act of literary re-imagination. Paris, crime fiction and translation can thus all be considered privileged sites of re-imagination, which is to say, embodiments of self-différance and “original” acts of re-reading. References Apter, Emily. The Translation Zone: A New Comparative Literature. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2006. Barthes, Roland. Le Bruissem*nt de la langue. Paris: Seuil, 1971. Baudelaire, Charles. Le Spleen de Paris. Trans. Louise Varèse. New York: New Directions, 1970 [1869]. Bayard, Pierre. Qui a tué Roger Ackroyd? Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 1998. ———. L’Affaire du chien des Baskerville. Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 2008. ———. Et si les œuvres changeaient d’auteur? Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 2010. Benjamin, Walter. “The Task of the Translator.” Illuminations. Trans. Harry Zohn. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1968. 69–82. Bloom, Harold, et al. Deconstruction and Criticism. New York: The Seabury Press, 1979. Collombat, Isabelle. “Pseudo-traduction: la mise en scène de l’altérité.” Le Langage et l’Homme 38.1 (2003): 145–56. Gorrara, Claire. French Crime Fiction and the Second World War: Past Crimes, Present Memories. Manchester: Manchester UP, 2012. Johnson, Barbara. “Taking Fidelity Philosophically.” Difference in Translation. Ed. Joseph F. Graham. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1985. 142–48. ———. “The Critical Difference.” Critical Essays on Roland Barthes. Ed. Diana Knight. New York: G.K. Hall, 2000. 174–82. Lhomeau, Frank. “Le roman ‘noir’ à l’américaine.” Temps noir 4 (2000): 5–33. Miller, J. Hillis. “The Critic as Host.” Critical Inquiry 3.3 (1977): 439–47. Nelson, Brian. “Preface: Translation Lost and Found.” Australian Journal of French Studies 47.1 (2010): 3–7. Poe, Edgar Allan. “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.” Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe. New York: Vintage Books, [1841]1975. 141–68. Rolls, Alistair. “Editor’s Letter: The Undecidable Lightness of Writing Crime.” The Australasian Journal of Popular Culture 3.1 (2014): 3–8. Rolls, Alistair, and Clara Sitbon. “‘Traduit de l’américain’ from Poe to the Série Noire: Baudelaire’s Greatest Hoax?” Modern and Contemporary France 21.1 (2013): 37–53. Vuaille-Barcan, Marie-Laure, Clara Sitbon, and Alistair Rolls. “Jeux textuels et paratextuels dans J’irai cracher sur vos tombes: au-delà du canular.” Romance Studies 32.1 (2014): 16–26. Wilson, Rita, and Leah Gerber, eds. Creative Constraints: Translation and Authorship. Melbourne: Monash UP, 2012.

Abstract:

This article reads Antjie Krog’s volume of poetry Mede-wete and its English version Synapse (both published in 2014) against the background of Rebecca Walkowitz’s proposal that the future of comparative literature will entail what she calls ‘foreign reading’. In her contribution to the American Association of Comparative Literature’s 2015 report on the state of the discipline of comparative literature (http://stateofthediscipline.acla.org) Walkowitz argues that literary texts increasingly enter the world in different languages and that this requires readings that move away from the idea that literary texts ‘belong’ to a single language, that explore the diverse ways in which they are read in different languages and that acknowledges that literary texts exist in the space created by a language’s relationship to other languages. This article takes Walkowitz’s observations as the vantage point for a discussion of the ways in which Krog’s volume (1) foreignises the Afrikaans language in order to become part of an interconnected whole; (2) urges readers, critics and literary practitioners to move beyond the confines of language-based literary systems; and (3) forces them to engage in a variety of different readings, including partial readings and collaborative readings, in order to become embedded in a larger community

Abstract:

Johannes Aaviku ilukirjanduslikud tõlked täitsid tema jaoks eelkõige rahvuskeele uuendamise rolli, seetõttu jäid originaali stiil ning autori väljendusvahendid tema enda keeleuuenduste taustal tagaplaanile. Ent tõlgitavate teoste valik oli tingitud eluloolistest ning kultuurilis-ideelistest teguritest, mille rekonstrueerimine ongi siinse artikli uurimisobjektiks. Eesti ja vene kultuuri vahekorra spetsiifika 20. sajandi esimesel veerandil tingis Aaviku pöördumise nimelt vene kirjanduse retseptsiooni poole. Nagu artiklis näidatud, oli see komplitseeritud seostes tolleaegse kultuuri ja poliitilise olukorraga Eestis. This article examines Johannes Aavik’s relationship with Russian literature as a translator and as a reader. It provides a description of the general traits of Aavik’s literary translations: for Aavik, they served primarily as a tool for the renewal of his first language – Estonian, so he was less concerned with the style and poetics of the originals than with his own linguistic innovations. However, his selection of texts for translation was conditioned by biographical, cultural and ideological factors, which this article attempts to reconstruct. The specific relevance of the relationship of the Estonian and Russian cultures in the first quarter of the 20th century prompted Aavik to choose Russian literature. As the article demonstrates, this had complex ties with the cultural and political situation in Estonia at the time. Aavik was highly critical of Estonian literature’s contemporary status and considered renewal of the literature to be one of the tasks of linguistic renewal. He was certain that his linguistic work and translations would set Estonian literature on the right path and contribute to the development of national self-consciousness. As part of Aavik’s linguistic utopia, he published the book series “Hirmu ja õuduse jutud” (Tales of Fear and Terror, 1914–1928) which included translations from various literatures, including Russian. Aavik became familiar with Russian culture at the time of Estonia’s forced Russification when all schools had to adopt Russian as the language of instruction. After a short period of studying ancient languages at the University of Tartu, Aavik was obliged to continue his education at the Nizhyn Pedagogical Institute (Ukraine), which did not contribute to the development of his interest in Russian culture. To the contrary: in those years and in those following, he was most interested in French and Finnish culture, although he was also familiar with both classic and contemporary (modernist) Russian literature. After Estonia gained independence in 1920, the time arrived for a re-assessment of the national intelligentsia’s relationship with Russian culture. Aavik was consumed by his project of large-scale renewal of the Estonian language, and he saw literature in general as a tool for the promotion of his ideas. He loved thrillers and assumed that these would attract a mass readership – thus, he chose works by authors such as E. T. A. Hoffmann, Friedrich Schiller, Gustav Meyrink, Ambrose Bierce, Arthur Conan Doyle, Guy de Maupassant, Prosper Mérimée, Auguste Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, Juhani Aho and Rodolf Toepffer for translation and publication in the “Tales of Fear and Horror” series. The Russian authors included in the series were primarily classics such as Alexander Pushkin, Nikolay Gogol, Mikhail Lermontov, Ivan Turgenev, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and Aleksei Kuprin, but the texts chosen were not those traditionally represented in school curricula. The majority of the translations were done not by Aavik himself, but rather by his students (he taught at a school for several years), while Aavik was responsible for choosing the texts, editing the translations as per the programme of “linguistic renewal”, and preparing afterwords and commentaries. This article examines in closer detail a translation made by Aavik himself and, in part, by his former classmate, the priest Vladimir Paivel – several fragments from Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s novel Crime and Punishment. It argues that Aavik’s translation does not fit into the classification of “domestication vs. foreignization” in translation, as the translator was mostly concerned with the linguistic and stylistic aspects of the Estonian text, not with the original. In the process of translation, the “language machine” (as Aavik termed it) reworked foreign material, making it “its own” – a part of its own mechanism. Thus, the national origin of literary material became a factor of little importance. This is especially notable in view of the fact that Aavik considered literature to have a direct link with political processes. He held the opinion that the level and main vectors of literary development served as indicators of the status of national sentiment and directly influenced the political life of the nation. The article provides numerous examples of such judgements which are first and foremost based on Russian material. Aavik saw a direct link between the work of Dostoyevsky and the formation of revolutionary sentiments in Russia, and between Russian modernist poetry and the social explosion in the late 1910s. It can be claimed that he considered Russian “literature-centredness” to be among the causes of the revolution. However, this did not keep Aavik from holding Ivan Turgenev’s literary work in the highest regard, and he even worked on translations of Turgenev in Tallinn during the Soviet occupation in 1942–1943, as well as in his later years of emigration in Sweden.

Abstract:

Diaspora This article looks at diaspora through the transformations of an established public service broadcaster, the BBC World Service, by considering some of the findings of the AHRC-funded Tuning In: Contact Zones at the BBC World Service, which is part of the Diasporas, Migration and Identities program. Tuning In has six themes, each of which focuses upon the role of the BBC WS: The Politics of Translation, Diasporic Nationhood, Religious Transnationalism, Sport across Diasporas, Migrating Music and Drama for Development. The World Service, which was until 2011 funded by the Foreign Office, was set up to cater for the British diaspora and had the specific remit of transmitting ideas about Britishness to its audiences overseas. Tuning In demonstrates interrelationships between the global and the local in the diasporic contact zone of the BBC World Service, which has provided a mediated home for the worldwide British diaspora since its inception in 1932. The local and the global have merged, elided, and separated at different times and in different spaces in the changing story of the BBC (Briggs). The BBC WS is both local and global with activities that present Britishness both at home and abroad. The service has, however, come a long way since its early days as the Empire Service. Audiences for the World Service’s 31 foreign language services, radio, television, and Internet facilities include substantive non-British/English-speaking constituencies, rendering it a contact zone for the exploration of ideas and political opportunities on a truly transnational scale. This heterogeneous body of exilic, refugee intellectuals, writers, and artists now operates alongside an ongoing expression of Britishness in all its diverse reconfiguration. This includes the residual voice of empire and its patriarchal paternalism, the embrace of more recent expressions of neoliberalism as well as traditional values of impartiality and objectivism and, in the case of the arts, elements of bohemianism and creative innovation. The World Service might have begun as a communication system for the British ex-pat diaspora, but its role has changed along with the changing relationship between Britain and its colonial past. In the terrain of sport, for example, cricket, the “game of empire,” has shifted from Britain to the Indian subcontinent (Guha) with the rise of “Twenty 20” and the Indian Premier League (IPL); summed up in Ashis Nandy’s claim that “cricket is an Indian game accidentally discovered by the English” (Nandy viii). English county cricket dominated the airways of the World Service well into the latter half of the twentieth century, but the audiences of the service have demanded a response to social and cultural change and the service has responded. Sport can thus be seen to have offered a democratic space in which new diasporic relations can be forged as well as one in which colonial and patriarchal values are maintained. The BBC WS today is part of a network through which non-British diasporic peoples can reconnect with their home countries via the service, as well as an online forum for debate across the globe. In many regions of the world, it continues to be the single most trusted source of information at times of crisis and disaster because of its traditions of impartiality and objectivity, even though (as noted in the article on Al-Jazeera in this special issue) this view is hotly contested. The principles of objectivity and impartiality are central to the BBC WS, which may seem paradoxical since it is funded by the Commonwealth and Foreign office, and its origins lie in empire and colonial discourse. Archive material researched by our project demonstrates the specifically ideological role of what was first called the Empire Service. The language of empire was deployed in this early programming, and there is an explicit expression of an ideological purpose (Hill). For example, at the Imperial Conference in 1930, the service was supported in terms of its political powers of “strengthening ties” between parts of the empire. This view comes from a speech by John Reith, the BBC’s first Director General, which was broadcast when the service opened. In this speech, broadcasting is identified as having come to involve a “connecting and co-ordinating link between the scattered parts of the British Empire” (Reith). Local British values are transmitted across the globe. Through the service, empire and nation are reinstated through the routine broadcasting of cyclical events, the importance of which Scannell and Cardiff describe as follows: Nothing so well illustrates the noiseless manner in which the BBC became perhaps the central agent of national culture as its cyclical role; the cyclical production year in year out, of an orderly, regular progression of festivities, rituals and celebrations—major and minor, civic and sacred—that mark the unfolding of the broadcast year. (278; italics in the original) State occasions and big moments, including those directly concerned with governance and affairs of state, and those which focused upon sport and religion, were a big part in these “noiseless” cycles, and became key elements in the making of Britishness across the globe. The BBC is “noiseless” because the timetable is assumed and taken for granted as not only what is but what should be. However, the BBC WS has been and has had to be responsive to major shifts in global and local—and, indeed, glocal—power geometries that have led to spatial transformations, notably in the reconfiguration of the service in the era of postcolonialism. Some of these massive changes have involved the large-scale movement of people and a concomitant rethinking of diaspora as a concept. Empire, like nation, operates as an “imagined community,” too big to be grasped by individuals (Anderson), as well as a material actuality. The dynamics of identification are rarely linear and there are inconsistencies and disruptions: even when the voice is officially that of empire, the practice of the World Service is much more diverse, nuanced, and dialogical. The BBC WS challenges boundaries through the connectivities of communication and through different ways of belonging and, similarly, through a problematisation of concepts like attachment and detachment; this is most notable in the way in which programming has adapted to new diasporic audiences and in the reworkings of spatiality in the shift from empire to diversity via multiculturalism. There are tensions between diaspora and multiculturalism that are apparent in a discussion of broadcasting and communication networks. Diaspora has been distinguished by mobility and hybridity (Clifford, Hall, Bhaba, Gilroy) and it has been argued that the adjectival use of diasporic offers more opportunity for fluidity and transformation (Clifford). The concept of diaspora, as it has been used to explain the fluidity and mobility of diasporic identifications, can challenge more stabilised, “classic” understandings of diaspora (Chivallon). A hybrid version of diaspora might sit uneasily with a strong sense of belonging and with the idea that the broadcast media offer a multicultural space in which each voice can be heard and a wide range of cultures are present. Tuning In engaged with ways of rethinking the BBC’s relationship to diaspora in the twenty-first century in a number of ways: for example, in the intersection of discursive regimes of representation; in the status of public service broadcasting; vis-à-vis the consequences of diverse diasporic audiences; through the role of cultural intermediaries such as journalists and writers; and via global economic and political materialities (Gillespie, Webb and Baumann). Tuning In thus provided a multi-themed and methodologically diverse exploration of how the BBC WS is itself a series of spaces which are constitutive of the transformation of diasporic identifications. Exploring the part played by the BBC WS in changing and continuing social flows and networks involves, first, reconfiguring what is understood by transnationalism, diaspora, and postcolonial relationalities: in particular, attending to how these transform as well as sometimes reinstate colonial and patriarchal discourses and practices, thus bringing together different dimensions of the local and the global. Tuning In ranges across different fields, embracing cultural, social, and political areas of experience as represented in broadcasting coverage. These fields illustrate the educative role of the BBC and the World Service that is also linked to its particular version of impartiality; just as The Archers was set up to provide information and guidance through a narrative of everyday life to rural communities and farmers after the Second World War, so the Afghan version plays an “edutainment” role (Skuse) where entertainment also serves an educational, public service information role. Indeed, the use of soap opera genre such as The Archers as a vehicle for humanitarian and health information has been very successful over the past decade, with the “edutainment” genre becoming a feature of the World Service’s broadcasting in places such as Rwanda, Somalia, Nigeria, India, Nepal, Burma, Afghanistan, and Cambodia. In a genre that has been promoted by the World Service Trust, the charitable arm of the BBC WS uses drama formats to build transnational production relationships with media professionals and to strengthen creative capacities to undertake behaviour change through communication work. Such programming, which is in the tradition of the BBC WS, draws upon the service’s expertise and exhibits both an ideological commitment to progressive social intervention and a paternalist approach drawing upon colonialist legacies. Nowadays, however, the BBC WS can be considered a diasporic contact zone, providing sites of transnational intra-diasporic contact as well as cross-cultural encounters, spaces for cross-diasporic creativity and representation, and a forum for cross-cultural dialogue and potentially cosmopolitan translations (Pratt, Clifford). These activities are, however, still marked by historically forged asymmetric power relations, notably of colonialism, imperialism, and globalisation, as well as still being dominated by hegemonic masculinity in many parts of the service, which thus represent sites of contestation, conflict, and transgression. Conversely, diasporic identities are themselves co-shaped by media representations (Sreberny). The diasporic contact zone is a relational space in which diasporic identities are made and remade and contested. Tuning In employed a diverse range of methods to analyse the part played by the BBC WS in changing and continuing social and cultural flows, networks, and reconfigurations of transnationalisms and diaspora, as well as reinstating colonial, patriarchal practices. The research deconstructed some assumptions and conditions of class-based elitism, colonialism, and patriarchy through a range of strategies. Texts are, of course, central to this work, with the BBC Archives at Caversham (near Reading) representing the starting point for many researchers. The archive is a rich source of material for researchers which carries a vast range of data including fragile memos written on scraps of paper: a very local source of global communications. Other textual material occupies the less locatable cyberspace, for example in the case of Have Your Say exchanges on the Web. People also featured in the project, through the media, in cyberspace, and physical encounters, all of which demonstrate the diverse modes of connection that have been established. Researchers worked with the BBC WS in a variety of ways, not only through interviews and ethnographic approaches, such as participant observation and witness seminars, but also through exchanges between the service, its practitioners, and the researchers (for example, through broadcasts where the project provided the content and the ideas and researchers have been part of programs that have gone out on the BBC WS (Goldblatt, Webb), bringing together people who work for the BBC and Tuning In researchers). On this point, it should be remembered that Bush House is, itself, a diasporic space which, from its geographical location in the Strand in London, has brought together diasporic people from around the globe to establish international communication networks, and has thus become the focus and locus of some of our research. What we have understood by the term “diasporic space” in this context includes both the materialities of architecture and cyberspace which is the site of digital diasporas (Anderssen) and, indeed, the virtual exchanges featured on “Have Your Say,” the online feedback site (Tuning In). Living the Glocal The BBC WS offers a mode of communication and a series of networks that are spatially located both in the UK, through the material presence of Bush House, and abroad, through the diasporic communities constituting contemporary audiences. The service may have been set up to provide news and entertainment for the British diaspora abroad, but the transformation of the UK into a multi-ethnic society “at home,” alongside its commitment to, and the servicing of, no less than 32 countries abroad, demonstrates a new mission and a new balance of power. Different diasporic communities, such as multi-ethnic Londoners, and local and British Muslims in the north of England, demonstrate the dynamics and ambivalences of what is meant by “diaspora” today. For example, the BBC and the WS play an ambiguous role in the lives of UK Muslim communities with Pakistani connections, where consumers of the international news can feel that the BBC is complicit in the conflation of Muslims with terrorists. Engaging Diaspora Audiences demonstrated the diversity of audience reception in a climate of marginalisation, often bordering on moral panic, and showed how diasporic audiences often use Al-Jazeera or Pakistani and Urdu channels, which are seen to take up more sympathetic political positions. It seems, however, that more egalitarian conversations are becoming possible through the channels of the WS. The participation of local people in the BBC WS global project is seen, for example, as in the popular “Witness Seminars” that have both a current focus and one that is projected into the future, as in the case of the “2012 Generation” (that is, the young people who come of age in 2012, the year of the London Olympics). The Witness Seminars demonstrate the recuperation of past political and social events such as “Bangladesh in 1971” (Tuning In), “The Cold War seminar” (Tuning In) and “Diasporic Nationhood” (the cultural movements reiterated and recovered in the “Literary Lives” project (Gillespie, Baumann and Zinik). Indeed, the WS’s current focus on the “2012 Generation,” including an event in which 27 young people (each of whom speaks one of the WS languages) were invited to an open day at Bush House in 2009, vividly illustrates how things have changed. Whereas in 1948 (the last occasion when the Olympic Games were held in London), the world came to London, it is arguable that, in 2012, in contemporary multi-ethnic Britain, the world is already here (Webb). This enterprise has the advantage of giving voice to the present rather than filtering the present through the legacies of colonialism that remain a problem for the Witness Seminars more generally. The democratising possibilities of sport, as well as the restrictions of its globalising elements, are well represented by Tuning In (Woodward). Sport has, of course become more globalised, especially through the development of Internet and satellite technologies (Giulianotti) but it retains powerful local affiliations and identifications. At all levels and in diverse places, there are strong attachments to local and national teams that are constitutive of communities, including diasporic and multi-ethnic communities. Sport is both typical and distinctive of the BBC World Service; something that is part of a wider picture but also an area of experience with a life of its own. Our “Sport across Diasporas” project has thus explored some of the routes the World Service has travelled in its engagement with sport in order to provide some understanding of the legacy of empire and patriarchy, as well as engaging with the multiplicities of change in the reconstruction of Britishness. Here, it is important to recognise that what began as “BBC Sport” evolved into “World Service Sport.” Coverage of the world’s biggest sporting events was established through the 1930s to the 1960s in the development of the BBC WS. However, it is not only the global dimensions of sporting events that have been assumed; so too are national identifications. There is no question that the superiority of British/English sport is naturalised through its dominance of the BBC WS airways, but the possibilities of reinterpretation and re-accommodation have also been made possible. There has, indeed, been a changing place of sport in the BBC WS, which can only be understood with reference to wider changes in the relationship between broadcasting and sport, and demonstrates the powerful synchronies between social, political, technological, economic, and cultural factors, notably those that make up the media–sport–commerce nexus that drives so much of the trajectory of contemporary sport. Diasporic audiences shape the schedule as much as what is broadcast. There is no single voice of the BBC in sport. The BBC archive demonstrates a variety of narratives through the development and transformation of the World Service’s sports broadcasting. There are, however, silences: notably those involving women. Sport is still a patriarchal field. However, the imperial genealogies of sport are inextricably entwined with the social, political, and cultural changes taking place in the wider world. There is no detectable linear narrative but rather a series of tensions and contradictions that are reflected and reconfigured in the texts in which deliberations are made. In sport broadcasting, the relationship of the BBC WS with its listeners is, in many instances, genuinely dialogic: for example, through “Have Your Say” websites and internet forums, and some of the actors in these dialogic exchanges are the broadcasters themselves. The history of the BBC and the World Service is one which manifests a degree of autonomy and some spontaneity on the part of journalists and broadcasters. For example, in the case of the BBC WS African sports program, Fast Track (2009), many of the broadcasters interviewed report being able to cover material not technically within their brief; news journalists are able to engage with sporting events and sports journalists have covered social and political news (Woodward). Sometimes this is a matter of taking the initiative or simply of being in the right place at the right time, although this affords an agency to journalists which is increasingly unlikely in the twenty-first century. The Politics of Translation: Words and Music The World Service has played a key role as a cultural broker in the political arena through what could be construed as “educational broadcasting” via the wider terrain of the arts: for example, literature, drama, poetry, and music. Over the years, Bush House has been a home-from-home for poets: internationalists, translators from classical and modern languages, and bohemians; a constituency that, for all its cosmopolitanism, was predominantly white and male in the early days. For example, in the 1930s and 1940s, Louis MacNeice was commissioning editor and surrounded by a friendship network of salaried poets, such as W. H. Auden, Dylan Thomas, C. Day Lewis, and Stephen Spender, who wrote and performed their work for the WS. The foreign language departments of the BBC WS, meanwhile, hired émigrés and exiles from their countries’ educated elites to do similar work. The biannual, book-format journal Modern Poetry in Translation (MPT), which was founded in 1965 by Daniel Weissbort and Ted Hughes, included a dedication in Weissbort’s final issue (MPT 22, 2003) to “Poets at Bush House.” This volume amounts to a celebration of the BBC WS and its creative culture, which extended beyond the confines of broadcasting spaces. The reminiscences in “Poets at Bush House” suggest an institutional culture of informal connections and a fluidity of local exchanges that is resonant of the fluidity of the flows and networks of diaspora (Cheesman). Music, too, has distinctive characteristics that mark out this terrain on the broadcast schedule and in the culture of the BBC WS. Music is differentiated from language-centred genres, making it a particularly powerful medium of cross-cultural exchange. Music is portable and yet is marked by a cultural rootedness that may impede translation and interpretation. Music also carries ambiguities as a marker of status across borders, and it combines aesthetic intensity and diffuseness. The Migrating Music project demonstrated BBC WS mediation of music and identity flows (Toynbee). In the production and scheduling notes, issues of migration and diaspora are often addressed directly in the programming of music, while the movement of peoples is a leitmotif in all programs in which music is played and discussed. Music genres are mobile, diasporic, and can be constitutive of Paul Gilroy’s “Black Atlantic” (Gilroy), which foregrounds the itinerary of West African music to the Caribbean via the Middle Passage, cross-fertilising with European traditions in the Americas to produce blues and other hybrid forms, and the journey of these forms to Europe. The Migrating Music project focused upon the role of the BBC WS as narrator of the Black Atlantic story and of South Asian cross-over music, from bhangra to filmi, which can be situated among the South Asian diaspora in east and south Africa as well as the Caribbean where they now interact with reggae, calypso, Rapso, and Popso. The transversal flows of music and lyrics encompasses the lived experience of the different diasporas that are accommodated in the BBC WS schedules: for example, they keep alive the connection between the Irish “at home” and in the diaspora through programs featuring traditional music, further demonstrating the interconnections between local and global attachments as well as points of disconnection and contradiction. Textual analysis—including discourse analysis of presenters’ speech, program trailers and dialogue and the BBC’s own construction of “world music”—has revealed that the BBC WS itself performs a constitutive role in keeping alive these traditions. Music, too, has a range of emotional affects which are manifest in the semiotic analyses that have been conducted of recordings and performances. Further, the creative personnel who are involved in music programming, including musicians, play their own role in this ongoing process of musical migration. Once again, the networks of people involved as practitioners become central to the processes and systems through which diasporic audiences are re-produced and engaged. Conclusion The BBC WS can claim to be a global and local cultural intermediary not only because the service was set up to engage with the British diaspora in an international context but because the service, today, is demonstrably a voice that is continually negotiating multi-ethnic audiences both in the UK and across the world. At best, the World Service is a dynamic facilitator of conversations within and across diasporas: ideas are relocated, translated, and travel in different directions. The “local” of a British broadcasting service, established to promote British values across the globe, has been transformed, both through its engagements with an increasingly diverse set of diasporic audiences and through the transformations in how diasporas themselves self-define and operate. On the BBC WS, demographic, social, and cultural changes mean that the global is now to be found in the local of the UK and any simplistic separation of local and global is no longer tenable. The educative role once adopted by the BBC, and then the World Service, nevertheless still persists in other contexts (“from Ambridge to Afghanistan”), and clearly the WS still treads a dangerous path between the paternalism and patriarchy of its colonial past and its responsiveness to change. In spite of competition from television, satellite, and Internet technologies which challenge the BBC’s former hegemony, the BBC World Service continues to be a dynamic space for (re)creating and (re)instating diasporic audiences: audiences, texts, and broadcasters intersect with social, economic, political, and cultural forces. The monologic “voice of empire” has been countered and translated into the language of diversity and while, at times, the relationship between continuity and change may be seen to exist in awkward tension, it is clear that the Corporation is adapting to the needs of its twenty-first century audience. ReferencesAnderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities, Reflections of the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 1983. Anderssen, Matilda. “Digital Diasporas.” 2010. 30 Nov. 2010 ‹http://www8.open.ac.uk/researchprojects/diasporas/cross-research/digital-diasporas›. Bhabha, Homi. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge, 1994. Briggs, Asa. A History of Broadcasting in the United Kingdom, Volume II: The Golden Age of Wireless. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1995. Cheesman, Tom. “Poetries On and Off Air.” 2010. 30 Nov. 2010 ‹http://www8.open.ac.uk/researchprojects/diasporas/cross-research/bush-house-cultures›. Chivallon, Christine. “Beyond Gilroy’s Black Atlantic: The Experience of the African Diaspora.” Diaspora 11.3 (2002): 359–82. Clifford, James. Routes: Travel and Translation in the Late Twentieth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997. Fast Track. BBC, 2009. 30 Nov. 2010 ‹http://www.bbc.co.uk/worldservice/sport/2009/03/000000_fast_track.shtml›. Gillespie, Marie, Alban Webb, and Gerd Baumann (eds.). “The BBC World Service 1932–2007: Broadcasting Britishness Abroad.” Special Issue. The Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television 28.4 (Oct. 2008). Gillespie, Marie, Gerd Baumann, and Zinovy Zinik. “Poets at Bush House.” 2010. 30 Nov. 2010 ‹http://www8.open.ac.uk/researchprojects/diasporas/about›. Gilroy, Paul. Black Atlantic. MA: Harvard UP, 1993. Giulianotti, Richard. Sport: A Critical Sociology. Cambridge: Polity, 2005. Goldblatt, David. “The Cricket Revolution.” 2009. 30 Nov. 2010 ‹http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p0036ww9›. Guha, Ramachandra. A Corner of a Foreign Field: The Indian History of an English Game. London: Picador, 2002. Hall, Stuart. “Cultural Identity and Diaspora.” Identity: Community, Culture, Difference. Ed. Jonathan Rutherford. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1990, 223–37. Hill, Andrew. “The BBC Empire Service: The Voice, the Discourse of the Master and Ventriloquism.” South Asian Diaspora 2.1 (2010): 25–38. Hollis, Robert, Norma Rinsler, and Daniel Weissbort. “Poets at Bush House: The BBC World Service.” Modern Poetry in Translation 22 (2003). Nandy, Ashis. The Tao of Cricket: On Games of Destiny and the Destiny of Games. New Delhi: Oxford UP, 1989. Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. London: Routledge, 1992. Reith, John. “Opening of the Empire Service.” In “Empire Service Policy 1932-1933”, E4/6: 19 Dec. 1932. 30 Nov. 2010 ‹http://www.open.ac.uk/socialsciences/diasporas/research.htm›. Scannell, Paddy, and David Cardiff. A Social History of British Broadcasting, 1922-1938. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1991. Skuse, Andrew. “Drama for Development.” 2010. 30 Nov. 2010 ‹http://www8.open.ac.uk/researchprojects/diasporas/core-research/drama-for-development›. Sreberny, Annabelle. “The BBC World Service and the Greater Middle East: Comparisons, Contrasts, Conflicts.” Guest ed. Annabelle Sreberny, Marie Gillespie, Gerd Baumann. Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication 3.2 (2010). Toynbee, Jason. “Migrating Music.” 2010. 30 Nov. 2010 ‹http://www8.open.ac.uk/researchprojects/diasporas/core-research/migrating-music›. Tuning In. 30 Nov. 2010 ‹http://www.open.ac.uk/socialsciences/diasporas/index.htm›. Webb, Alban. “Cold War Diplomacy.” 2010. 30 Nov. 2010 ‹http://www8.open.ac.uk/researchprojects/diasporas/projects/cold-war-politics-and-bbc-world-service›. Woodward, Kath. Embodied Sporting Practices. Regulating and Regulatory Bodies. Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.

Abstract:

For seven months in 1999/2000, six-year old Cuban Elián González was embroiled in a family feud plotted along rival national and ideological lines, and relayed televisually as soap opera across the planet. In Miami, apparitions of the Virgin Mary were reported after Elián’s arrival; adherents of Afro-Cuban santería similarly regarded Elián as divinely touched. In Cuba, Elián’s “kidnapping” briefly reinvigorated a torpid revolutionary project. He was hailed by Fidel Castro as the symbolic descendant of José Martí and Che Guevara, and of the patriotic rigour they embodied. Cubans massed to demand his return. In the U.S.A., Elián’s case was arbitrated at every level of the juridical system. The “Save Elián” campaign generated widespread debate about godless versus godly family values, the contours of the American Dream, and consumerist excess. By the end of 2000 Elián had generated the second largest volume of TV news coverage to that date in U.S. history, surpassed only by the O. J. Simpson case (Fasulo). After Fidel Castro, and perhaps the geriatric music ensemble manufactured by Ry Cooder, the Buena Vista Social Club, Elián became the most famous Cuban of our era. Elián also emerged as the unlikeliest of popular-cultural icons, the focus and subject of cyber-sites, books, films, talk-back radio programs, art exhibits, murals, statues, documentaries, a South Park episode, poetry, songs, t-shirts, posters, newspaper editorials in dozens of languages, demonstrations, speeches, political cartoons, letters, legal writs, U.S. Congress records, opinion polls, prayers, and, on both sides of the Florida Strait, museums consecrated in his memory. Confronted by Elián’s extraordinary renown and historical impact, John Carlos Rowe suggests that the Elián story confirms the need for a post-national and transdisciplinary American Studies, one whose practitioners “will have to be attentive to the strange intersections of politics, law, mass media, popular folklore, literary rhetoric, history, and economics that allow such events to be understood.” (204). I share Rowe’s reading of Elián’s story and the clear challenges it presents to analysis of “America,” to which I would add “Cuba” as well. But Elián’s story is also significant for the ways it challenges critical understandings of fame and its construction. No longer, to paraphrase Leo Braudy (566), definable as an accidental hostage of the mass-mediated eye, Elián’s fame has no certain relation to the child at its discursive centre. Elián’s story is not about an individuated, conscious, performing, desiring, and ambivalently rewarded ego. Elián was never what P. David Marshall calls “part of the public sphere, essentially an actor or, … a player” in it (19). The living/breathing Elián is absent from what I call the virtualizing drives that famously reproduced him. As a result of this virtualization, while one Elián now attends school in Cuba, many other Eliáns continue to populate myriad popular-cultural texts and to proliferate away from the states that tried to contain him. According to Jerry Everard, “States are above all cultural artefacts” that emerge, virtually, “as information produced by and through practices of signification,” as bits, bites, networks, and flows (7). All of us, he claims, reside in “virtual states,” in “legal fictions” based on the elusive and contested capacity to generate national identities in an imaginary bounded space (152). Cuba, the origin of Elián, is a virtual case in point. To augment Nicole Stenger’s definition of cyberspace, Cuba, like “Cyberspace, is like Oz — it is, we get there, but it has no location” (53). As a no-place, Cuba emerges in signifying terms as an illusion with the potential to produce and host Cubanness, as well as rival ideals of nation that can be accessed intact, at will, and ready for ideological deployment. Crude dichotomies of antagonism — Cuba/U.S.A., home/exile, democracy/communism, freedom/tyranny, North/South, godlessness/blessedness, consumption/want — characterize the hegemonic struggle over the Cuban nowhere. Split and splintered, hypersensitive and labyrinthine, guarded and hysterical, and always active elsewhere, the Cuban cultural artefact — an “atmospheric depression in history” (Stenger 56) — very much conforms to the logics that guide the appeal, and danger, of cyberspace. Cuba occupies an inexhaustible “ontological time … that can be reintegrated at any time” (Stenger 55), but it is always haunted by the prospect of ontological stalling and proliferation. The cyber-like struggle over reintegration, of course, evokes the Elián González affair, which began on 25 November 1999, when five-year old Elián set foot on U.S. soil, and ended on 28 June 2000, when Elián, age six, returned to Cuba with his father. Elián left one Cuba and found himself in another Cuba, in the U.S.A., each national claimant asserting virtuously that its other was a no-place and therefore illegitimate. For many exiles, Elián’s arrival in Miami confirmed that Castro’s Cuba is on the point of collapse and hence on the virtual verge of reintegration into the democratic fold as determined by the true upholders of the nation, the exile community. It was also argued that Elián’s biological father could never be the boy’s true father because he was a mere emasculated puppet of Castro himself. The Cuban state, then, had forfeited its claims to generate and host Cubanness. Succoured by this logic, the “Save Elián” campaign began, with organizations like the Cuban American National Foundation (CANF) bankrolling protests, leaflet and poster production, and official “Elián” websites, providing financial assistance to and arranging employment for some of Elián’s Miami relatives, lobbying the U.S. Congress and the Florida legislature, and contributing funds to the legal challenges on behalf of Elián at state and federal levels. (Founded in 1981, the CANF is the largest and most powerful Cuban exile organization, and one that regards itself as the virtual government-in-waiting. CANF emerged with the backing of the Reagan administration and the C.I.A. as a “private sector initiative” to support U.S. efforts against its long-time ideological adversary across the Florida Strait [Arboleya 224-5].) While the “Save Elián” campaign failed, the result of a Cuban American misreading of public opinion and overestimation of the community’s lobbying power with the Clinton administration, the struggle continues in cyberspace. CANF.net.org registers its central role in this intense period with silence; but many of the “Save Elián” websites constructed after November 1999 continue to function as sad memento moris of Elián’s shipwreck in U.S. virtual space. (The CANF website does provide links to articles and opinion pieces about Elián from the U.S. media, but its own editorializing on the Elián affair has disappeared. Two keys to this silence were the election of George W. Bush, and the events of 11 Sep. 2001, which have enabled a revision of the Elián saga as a mere temporary setback on the Cuban-exile historical horizon. Indeed, since 9/11, the CANF website has altered the terms of its campaign against Castro, posting photos of Castro with Arab leaders and implicating him in a world-wide web of terrorism. Elián’s return to Cuba may thus be viewed retrospectively as an act that galvanized Cuban-exile support for the Republican Party and their disdain for the Democratic rival, and this support became pivotal in the Republican electoral victory in Florida and in the U.S.A. as a whole.) For many months after Elián’s return to Cuba, the official Liberty for Elián site, established in April 2000, was urging visitors to make a donation, volunteer for the Save Elián taskforce, send email petitions, and “invite a friend to help Elián.” (Since I last accessed “Liberty for Elián” in March 2004 it has become a gambling site.) Another site, Elian’s Home Page, still implores visitors to pray for Elián. Some of the links no longer function, and imperatives to “Click here” lead to that dead zone called “URL not found on this server.” A similar stalling of the exile aspirations invested in Elián is evident on most remaining Elián websites, official and unofficial, the latter including The Sad Saga of Elian Gonzalez, which exhorts “Cuban Exiles! Now You Can Save Elián!” In these sites, a U.S. resident Elián lives on as an archival curiosity, a sign of pathos, and a reminder of what was, for a time, a Cuban-exile PR disaster. If such cybersites confirm the shipwrecked coordinates of Elián’s fame, the “Save Elián” campaign also provided a focus for unrestrained criticism of the Cuban exile community’s imbrication in U.S. foreign policy initiatives and its embrace of American Dream logics. Within weeks of Elián’s arrival in Florida, cyberspace was hosting myriad Eliáns on sites unbeholden to Cuban-U.S. antagonisms, thus consolidating Elián’s function as a disputed icon of virtualized celebrity and focus for parody. A sense of this carnivalesque proliferation can be gained from the many doctored versions of the now iconic photograph of Elián’s seizure by the INS. Still posted, the jpegs and flashes — Elián and Michael Jackson, Elián and Homer Simpson, Elián and Darth Vader, among others (these and other doctored versions are archived on Hypercenter.com) — confirm the extraordinary domestication of Elián in local pop-cultural terms that also resonate as parodies of U.S. consumerist and voyeuristic excess. Indeed, the parodic responses to Elián’s fame set the virtual tone in cyberspace where ostensibly serious sites can themselves be approached as send ups. One example is Lois Rodden’s Astrodatabank, which, since early 2000, has asked visitors to assist in interpreting Elián’s astrological chart in order to confirm whether or not he will remain in the U.S.A. To this end the site provides Elián’s astro-biography and birth chart — a Sagittarius with a Virgo moon, Elián’s planetary alignments form a bucket — and conveys such information as “To the people of Little Havana [Miami], Elian has achieved mystical status as a ‘miracle child.’” (An aside: Elián and I share the same birthday.) Elián’s virtual reputation for divinely sanctioned “blessedness” within a Cuban exile-meets-American Dream typology provided Tom Tomorrow with the target in his 31 January 2000, cartoon, This Modern World, on Salon.com. Here, six-year old Arkansas resident Allen Consalis loses his mother on the New York subway. His relatives decide to take care of him since “New York has much more to offer him than Arkansas! I mean get real!” A custody battle ensues in which Allan’s heavily Arkansas-accented father requires translation, and the case inspires heated debate: “can we really condemn him to a life in Arkansas?” The cartoon ends with the relatives tempting Allan with the delights offered by the Disney Store, a sign of Elián’s contested insertion into an American Dreamscape that not only promises an endless supply of consumer goods but provides a purportedly safe venue for the alternative Cuban nation. The illusory virtuality of that nation also animates a futuristic scenario, written in Spanish by Camilo Hernández, and circulated via email in May 2000. In this text, Elián sparks a corporate battle between Firestone and Goodyear to claim credit for his inner-tubed survival. Cuban Americans regard Elián as the Messiah come to lead them to the promised land. His ability to walk on water is scientifically tested: he sinks and has to be rescued again. In the ensuing custody battle, Cuban state-run demonstrations allow mothers of lesbians and of children who fail maths to have their say on Elián. Andrew Lloyd Weber wins awards for “Elián the Musical,” and for the film version, Madonna plays the role of the dolphin that saved Elián. Laws are enacted to punish people who mispronounce “Elián” but these do not help Elián’s family. All legal avenues exhausted, the entire exile community moves to Canada, and then to North Dakota where a full-scale replica of Cuba has been built. Visa problems spark another migration; the exiles are welcomed by Israel, thus inspiring a new Intifada that impels their return to the U.S.A. Things settle down by 2014, when Elián, his wife and daughter celebrate his 21st birthday as guests of the Kennedys. The text ends in 2062, when the great-great-grandson of Ry Cooder encounters an elderly Elián in Wyoming, thus providing Elián with his second fifteen minutes of fame. Hernández’s text confirms the impatience with which the Cuban-exile community was regarded by other U.S. Latino sectors, and exemplifies the loss of control over Elián experienced by both sides in the righteous Cuban “moral crusade” to save or repatriate Elián (Fernández xv). (Many Chicanos, for example, were angered at Cuban-exile arguments that Elián should remain in the U.S.A. when, in 1999 alone, 8,000 Mexican children were repatriated to Mexico (Ramos 126), statistical confirmation of the favored status that Cubans enjoy, and Mexicans do not, vis-à-vis U.S. immigration policy. Tom Tomorrow’s cartoon and Camilo Hernández’s email text are part of what I call the “What-if?” sub-genre of Elián representations. Another example is “If Elián Gonzalez was Jewish,” archived on Lori’s Mishmash Humor page, in which Eliat Ginsburg is rescued after floating on a giant matzoh in the Florida Strait, and his Florida relatives fight to prevent his return to Israel, where “he had no freedom, no rights, no tennis lessons”.) Nonetheless, that “moral crusade” has continued in the Cuban state. During the custody battle, Elián was virtualized into a hero of national sovereignty, an embodied fix for a revolutionary project in strain due to the U.S. embargo, the collapse of Soviet socialism, and the symbolic threat posed by the virtual Cuban nation-in-waiting in Florida. Indeed, for the Castro regime, the exile wing of the national family is virtual precisely because it conveniently overlooks two facts: the continued survival of the Cuban state itself; and the exile community’s forty-plus-year slide into permanent U.S. residency as one migrant sector among many. Such rhetoric has not faded since Elián’s return. On December 5, 2003, Castro visited Cárdenas for Elián’s tenth birthday celebration and a quick tour of the Museo a la batalla de ideas (Museum for the Battle of Ideas), the museum dedicated to Elián’s “victory” over U.S. imperialism and opened by Castro on July 14, 2001. At Elián’s school Castro gave a speech in which he recalled the struggle to save “that little boy, whose absence caused everyone, and the whole people of Cuba, so much sorrow and such determination to struggle.” The conflation of Cuban state rhetoric and an Elián mnemonic in Cárdenas is repeated in Havana’s “Plaza de Elián,” or more formally Tribuna Anti-imperialista José Martí, where a statue of José Martí, the nineteenth-century Cuban nationalist, holds Elián in his arms while pointing to Florida. Meanwhile, in Little Havana, Miami, a sun-faded set of photographs and hand-painted signs, which insist God will save Elián yet, hang along the front fence of the house — now also a museum and site of pilgrimage — where Elián once lived in a state of siege. While Elián’s centrality in a struggle between virtuality and virtue continues on both sides of the Florida Strait, the Cuban nowhere could not contain Elián. During his U.S. sojourn many commentators noted that his travails were relayed in serial fashion to an international audience that also claimed intimate knowledge of the boy. Coming after the O.J. Simpson saga and the Clinton-Lewinsky affair, the Elián story confirmed journalist Rick Kushman’s identification of a ceaseless, restless U.S. media attention shift from one story to the next, generating an “übercoverage” that engulfs the country “in mini-hysteria” (Calvert 107). But In Elián’s case, the voyeuristic media-machine attained unprecedented intensity because it met and worked with the virtualities of the Cuban nowhere, part of it in the U.S.A. Thus, a transnational surfeit of Elián-narrative options was guaranteed for participants, audiences and commentators alike, wherever they resided. In Cuba, Elián was hailed as the child-hero of the Revolution. In Miami he was a savior sent by God, the proof supplied by the dolphins that saved him from sharks, and the Virgins who appeared in Little Havana after his arrival (De La Torre 3-5). Along the U.S.A.-Mexico border in 2000, Elián’s name was given to hundreds of Mexican babies whose parents thought the gesture would guarantee their sons a U.S. future. Day by day, Elián’s story was propelled across the globe by melodramatic plot devices familiar to viewers of soap opera: doubtful paternities; familial crimes; identity secrets and their revelation; conflicts of good over evil; the reuniting of long-lost relatives; and the operations of chance and its attendant “hand of Destiny, arcane and vaguely supernatural, transcending probability of doubt” (Welsh 22). Those devices were also favored by the amateur author, whose narratives confirm that the delirious parameters of cyberspace are easily matched in the worldly text. In Michael John’s self-published “history,” Betrayal of Elian Gonzalez, Elián is cast as the victim of a conspiracy traceable back to the hydra-headed monster of Castro-Clinton and the world media: “Elian’s case was MANIPULATED to achieve THEIR OVER-ALL AGENDA. Only time will bear that out” (143). His book is now out of print, and the last time I looked (August 2004) one copy was being offered on Amazon.com for US$186.30 (original price, $9.95). Guyana-born, Canadian-resident Frank Senauth’s eccentric novel, A Cry for Help: The Fantastic Adventures of Elian Gonzalez, joins his other ventures into vanity publishing: To Save the Titanic from Disaster I and II; To Save Flight 608 From Disaster; A Wish to Die – A Will to Live; A Time to Live, A Time to Die; and A Day of Terror: The Sagas of 11th September, 2001. In A Cry for Help, Rachel, a white witch and student of writing, travels back in time in order to save Elián’s mother and her fellow travelers from drowning in the Florida Strait. As Senauth says, “I was only able to write this dramatic story because of my gift for seeing things as they really are and sharing my mystic imagination with you the public” (25). As such texts confirm, Elián González is an aberrant addition to the traditional U.S.-sponsored celebrity roll-call. He had no ontological capacity to take advantage of, intervene in, comment on, or be known outside, the parallel narrative universe into which he was cast and remade. He was cast adrift as a mere proper name that impelled numerous authors to supply the boy with the biography he purportedly lacked. Resident of an “atmospheric depression in history” (Stenger 56), Elián was battled over by virtualized national rivals, mass-mediated, and laid bare for endless signification. Even before his return to Cuba, one commentator noted that Elián had been consumed, denied corporeality, and condemned to “live out his life in hyper-space” (Buzachero). That space includes the infamous episode of South Park from May 2000, in which Kenny, simulating Elián, is killed off as per the show’s episodic protocols. Symptomatic of Elián’s narrative dispersal, the Kenny-Elián simulation keeps on living and dying whenever the episode is re-broadcast on TV sets across the world. Appropriated and relocated to strange and estranging narrative terrain, one Elián now lives out his multiple existences in the Cuban-U.S. “atmosphere in history,” and the Elián icon continues to proliferate virtually anywhere. References Arboleya, Jesús. The Cuban Counter-Revolution. Trans. Rafael Betancourt. Research in International Studies, Latin America Series no. 33. Athens, OH: Ohio Center for International Studies, 2000. Braudy, Leo. The Frenzy of Renown: Fame and Its History. New York and Oxford: Oxford UP, 1986. Buzachero, Chris. “Elian Gonzalez in Hyper-Space.” Ctheory.net 24 May 2000. 19 Aug. 2004: http://www.ctheory.net/text_file.asp?pick=222>. Calvert, Clay. Voyeur Nation: Media, Privacy, and Peering in Modern Culture. Boulder: Westview, 2000. Castro, Fidel. “Speech Given by Fidel Castro, at the Ceremony Marking the Birthday of Elian Gonzalez and the Fourth Anniversary of the Battle of Ideas, Held at ‘Marcello Salado’ Primary School in Cardenas, Matanzas on December 5, 2003.” 15 Aug. 2004 http://www.revolutionarycommunist.org.uk/fidel_castro3.htm>. Cuban American National Foundation. Official Website. 2004. 20 Aug. 2004 http://www.canf.org/2004/principal-ingles.htm>. De La Torre, Miguel A. La Lucha For Cuba: Religion and Politics on the Streets of Miami. Berkeley: U of California P, 2003. “Elian Jokes.” Hypercenter.com 2000. 19 Aug. 2004 http://www.hypercenter.com/jokes/elian/index.shtml>. “Elian’s Home Page.” 2000. 19 Aug. 2004 http://elian.8k.com>. Everard, Jerry. Virtual States: The Internet and the Boundaries of the Nation-State. London and New York, Routledge, 2000. Fernández, Damián J. Cuba and the Politics of Passion. Austin: U of Texas P, 2000. Hernández, Camilo. “Cronología de Elián.” E-mail. 2000. Received 6 May 2000. “If Elian Gonzalez Was Jewish.” Lori’s Mishmash Humor Page. 2000. 10 Aug. 2004 http://www.geocities.com/CollegePark/6174/jokes/if-elian-was-jewish.htm>. John, Michael. Betrayal of Elian Gonzalez. MaxGo, 2000. “Liberty for Elián.” Official Save Elián Website 2000. June 2003 http://www.libertyforelian.org>. Marshall, P. David. Celebrity and Power: Fame in Contemporary Culture. Minneapolis and London: U of Minnesota P, 1997. Ramos, Jorge. La otra cara de América: Historias de los inmigrantes latinoamericanos que están cambiando a Estados Unidos. México, DF: Grijalbo, 2000. Rodden, Lois. “Elian Gonzalez.” Astrodatabank 2000. 20 Aug. 2004 http://www.astrodatabank.com/NM/GonzalezElian.htm>. Rowe, John Carlos. 2002. The New American Studies. Minneapolis and London: U of Minnesota P, 2002. “The Sad Saga of Elian Gonzalez.” July 2004. 19 Aug. 2004 http://www.revlu.com/Elian.html>. Senauth, Frank. A Cry for Help: The Fantastic Adventures of Elian Gonzalez. Victoria, Canada: Trafford, 2000. Stenger, Nicole. “Mind Is a Leaking Rainbow.” Cyberspace: First Steps. Ed. Michael Benedikt. Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 1991. 49-58. Welsh, Alexander. George Eliot and Blackmail. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1985. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Allatson, Paul. "The Virtualization of Elián González." M/C Journal 7.5 (2004). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0411/16-allatson.php>. APA Style Allatson, P. (Nov. 2004) "The Virtualization of Elián González," M/C Journal, 7(5). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0411/16-allatson.php>.

Abstract:

The effects of translation have been felt in the development of most languages, but it is particularly marked in English language and literature, where it is a highly charged topic because of its fundamental connection with colonial expansion. Britain shaped a "national" literary identity through borrowing from other languages and infected and inflected other languages and literatures in the course of cultural migrations that occurred in Europe since at least the medieval period onward. As Stephen Greenblatt points out in his essay, "Racial Memory and Literary History," the discovery that English is a "mixed, impure, and constantly shifting medium" is not a new one, citing the preface to the first etymological dictionary in English, published in 1689, in which its author describes English as a hybrid tongue: a Composition of most, if not all the Languages of Europe; especially of the Belgick or Low-Dutch, Saxon, Teutonic or High-Dutch, Cambro-British or Welsh, French, Spanish, Italian, and Latin; and now and then of the Old and Modern Danish, and Ancient High-Dutch; also of the Greek, Hebrew, Arabick, Chaldee, Syriack, and Turcick. ((Skinner A3v-A4r, in Greenblatt 52) The "English" literary canon has translated material at its heart; there is the Bible, for instance, and classical works in Greek, which are read and discussed in translation by many who study them. Beowulf is a translation that has been canonized as one of the "original" texts of English literature, and Shakespeare was inspired by translations. Consider, for instance, Greenblatt's description of The Comedy of Errors, where a "Plautine character from a Sicilian city, finding himself in the market square of a city in Asia Minor, invokes Arctic shamanism – and all this had to make sense to a mixed audience in a commercial theater in London" (58), and there is a strong sense of the global cultural discourse that has been translated into a "national" and international canon of literature in English. English as a language and as a literature, however, has not been contained by national boundaries for some time, and in fact is now more comfortably conceived in the plural, or as uncountable, like a multidirectional flow. English has therefore been translated from solid, settled, and certain representations of Anglo-Celtic culture in the singular to a plurality of shifting, hybrid productions and performances which illuminate the tension implicit in cultural exchange. Translation has become a popular trope used by critics to describe that interaction within literatures defined by language rather than nation, and as a mutable and mutual process of reading and reinscription which illuminates relationships of power. The most obvious power relationship that translation represents, of course, is that between the so-called original and the translation; between the creativity of the author and the derivation of the translator. In The Translator's Invisibility (1995), Lawrence Venuti suggests that there is a prevailing conception of the author as a free and unconstrained individual who partially shapes the relationship: "the author freely expresses his thoughts and feelings in writing, which is thus viewed as an original and transparent self-representation, unmediated by transindividual determinants (linguistic, cultural, social) that might complicate authorial individuality" (6). The translation then can only be defined as an inferior representation, "derivative, fake, potentially a false copy" (7) and the translator as performing the translation in the manner of an actor manipulating lines written by someone else: "translators playact as authors, and translations pass for original texts" (7). The transparent translation and the invisibility of the translator, Venuti argues can be seen as "a mystification of troubling proportions, an amazingly successful concealment of the multiple determinants and effects of English-language translation, the multiple hierarchies and exclusions in which it is implicated" (16). That is, translation exerts its own power in constructing identities and representing difference, in addition to the power derived from the "original" text, which, in fact, the translation may resist. Recognition of this power suggests that traditional Western representations of translation as an echo or copy, a slave toiling on the plantation or seductive belle infidèle, each with its clear affinity to sexual and colonial conquest, attempts to deny translation the possibility of its own power and the assertion of its own creative identity. However, the establishment of an alternative power arrangement exists because translations can "masquerade as originals" (Chamberlain 67) and infiltrate and subvert literary systems in disguise. As Susan Stewart contends in Crimes of Writing: Problems in the Containment of Representation, if we "begin with the relation between authority and writing practices rather than with an assumption of authorial originality, we arrive at a quite different sense of history" (9) and, indeed, a different sense of literary creativity. This remainder of this paper will focus on Nicole Brossard's Le désert mauve and Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient, to exemlify how a translator may flaunts her creativity, and allow the cultural position of the translator vis à vis language, history, or gender to be critically exposed by the text itself. Québécoise feminist writer Nicole Brossard's 1987 novel, Le désert mauve [Mauve Desert], is perhaps the most striking example of how a translator foregrounds the creative process of reading and re-writing. Brossard constructed her novel by becoming her own reader and asking questions, imagining dialogues between the characters she had already created. This "interactive discourse" shaped the text, which is a dialogue between two versions of a story, and between two writers, one of whom is an active reader, a translator. Le désert mauve is a structural triptych, consisting of Laure Angstelle's novel, Le désert mauve, and Mauve l'horizon, a translation of Angstelle's book by Maude Laures. In the space between the two sites of writing, the translator imagines the possibilities of the text she has read, "re-imagining the characters' lives, the objects, the dialogue" (Interview, 23 April 96). Between the versions of the desert story, she creates a fluid dimension of désir, or desire, a "space to swim with the words" (Interview). Brossard has said that "before the idea of the novel had definitely shaped itself," she knew that it would be in a "hot place, where the weather, la température, would be almost unbearable: people would be sweating; the light would be difficult" (Mauve Desert: A CD-ROM Translation). That site became the desert of the American southwest with its beauty and danger, its timelessness and history, and its decadent traces of Western civilization in the litter of old bottles and abandoned, rusting cars. The author imagined the desert through the images and words of books she read about the desert, appropriating the flowers and cacti that excited her through their names, seduced her through language. Maude Laures, the translator within Brossard's novel, finds the desert as a dimension of her reading, too: "a space, a landscape, an enigma entered with each reading" (133). From her first readings of a novel she has discovered in a used bookshop, Laures, confronts the "the issue of control. Who owns the meaning of the black marks on the page, the writer or the reader?" (Godard 115), and decides the book will belong to her, "and that she can do everything because she has fallen in love with the book, and therefore she's taken possession of the book, the author, the characters, the desert" (Interview). The translator is fascinated by Mélanie, the 15-year-old narrator, who drives her mother's car across the desert, and who has been captivated by the voice and beauty of the geometrician, Angela Parkins, imagining dialogues between these two characters as they linger in the motel parking lot. But she is unwilling to imagine words with l'homme long (longman), who composes beautiful equations that cause explosions in the desert, recites Sanskrit poems, and thumbs through p*rno in his hotel room. Le désert mauve was an attempt by Brossard to translate from French to French, but the descriptions of the desert landscape – the saguaro, senita, ocotillos, and arroyo—show Spanish to be the language of the desert. In her translation, Maude Laures increases the code switching and adds more Spanish phrases to her text, and Japanese, too, to magnify the echo of nuclear destruction that resonates in l'homme long's equations. She also renames the character l'homme oblong (O'blongman) to increase the dimension of danger he represents. Linking the desert through language with nuclear testing gives it a "semantic density," as Nicholis Entrikin calls it, that extends far beyond the geographical location to recognize the events embedded in that space through associative memory. L'homme long is certainly linked through language to J Robert Oppenheimer, the director of the original atomic bomb project in Los Alamos, New Mexico and his reference to the Bhagavad Gita after seeing the effects of the atomic bomb: "I/am/become Death—now we are all sons of bitches" (17). The translator distances herself by a translating Death/I /am/death—I'm a sonofabitch" (173). The desert imagined by Laure Angstelle seduces the reader, Maude Laures, and her translation project creates a trajectory which links the heat and light of the desert with the cold and harsh reflective glare of sunlit snow in wintry Montréal, where the "misleading reflections" of the desert's white light is subject to the translator's gaze. Laures leans into the desert peopled with geometricians and scientists and lesbians living under poisonous clouds of smoke that stop time, and tilts her translation in another direction. In the final chapter of Laure Angstelle's novel, Mélanie had danced in the arms of Angela Parkins, only to find she had run out of time: Angela is shot (perhaps by l'homme long) and falls to the dance floor. Maudes Laures is constrained by the story and by reality, but translates "There was no more time" into "One more time," allowing the lovers' dance to continue for at least another breath, room for another ending. Brossard has asserted that, like lesbian desire or the translator, the desert was located in the background of our thoughts. Ondaatje's novel, The English Patient (1992), locates the translator in the desert, linking a profession and a place which have both witnessed an averting of Western eyes, both used in linguistic and imperial enterprises that operate under conditions of camouflage. Linked also by association is the war in the Sahara and the nuclear bombs dropped on Japan. As in Brossard, the desert here is a destination reached by reading, how "history enters us" through maps and language. Almásy, "the English patient," knew the desert before he had been there, "knew when Alexander had traversed it in an earlier age, for this cause or that greed" (18). Books in code also serve to guide spies and armies across the desert, and like a book, the desert is "crowded with the world" (285), while it is "raped by war and shelled as if it were just sand" (257). Here the translator is representative of a writing that moves between positions and continually questions its place in history. Translators and explorers write themselves out of a text, rendering themselves invisible and erasing traces of their emotions, their doubts, beliefs, and loves, in order to produce a "neutral" text, much in the way that colonialism empties land of human traces in order to claim it, or the way technology is airbrushed out of the desert in order to conceal "the secret of the deserts from Unweinat to Hiroshima" (295). Almásy the translator, the spy, whose identity is always a subject of speculation, knows how the eye can be fooled as it reads a text in disguise; floating on a raft of morphine, he rewrites the monotone of history in different modes, inserting between the terse lines of commentary a counternarrative of love illumined by "the communal book of moonlight" (261), which translates lives and gives them new meaning. The translator's creativity stems from a collaboration and a love for the text; to deny the translation process its creative credibility is synonymous in The English Patient with the denial of any desire that may violate the social rules of the game of love by unfairly demanding fidelity. If seas move away to leave shifting desert sands, why should lovers not drift, or translations? Ultimately, we are all communal translations, says Ondaatje's novel, of the shifting relationship between histories and personal identities. "We are not owned or monogamous in our taste or experience" (261). This representation of the translator resists the view of identity "which attempts to recover an immutable origin, a fixed and eternal representation of itself" (Ashcroft 4) by its insistence that we are transformed in and by our versions of reality, just as we are by our readings of fiction. The translators represented in Brossard and Ondaatje suggest that the process of translation is a creative one, which acknowledges influence, contradictory currents, and choice its heart. The complexity of the choices a translator makes and the mulitiplicity of positions from which she may write suggest a process of translation that is neither transparent nor complete. Rather than the ubiquitous notion of the translator as "a servant an invisible hand mechanically turning the word of one language into another" (Godard 91), the translator creatively 'forges in the smithy of the soul' a version of story that is a complex "working model of inclusive consciousness" (Heaney 8) that seeks to loosen another tongue and another reading in an eccentric literary version of oral storytelling. References Ashcroft, Bill. Post-Colonial Transformation. London and New York: Routledge, 2001. Brossard, Nicole. Le désert mauve. Montréal: l'Hexagone, 1987. Mauve Desert. Trans. Susanne Lotbinière-Harwood. Toronto: Coach House Press, 1990. Brossard, Nicole. Personal Interview. With Beverley Curran and Mitoko Hirabayashi, Montreal, April 1996. Chamberlain, Lori. "Gender and the Metaphorics of Translation." Reinventing Translation. Lawrence Venuti, Ed. 57-73. Godard, Barbara. "Translating (With) the Speculum." Traduction, Terminologie, Rédaction 4 (2) 1991: 85-121. Greenblatt, Stephen. "Racial Memory and Literary History." PMLA 116 (1), January 2001: 48-63. Heaney, Seamus. "The Redress of Poetry." The Redress of Poetry: Oxford Lectures. London, Boston: Faber and Faber, 1995. 1-16. Jenik, Adriene. Mauve Desert: A CD-ROM Translation. Los Angeles: Shifting Horizon Productions, 1997. Ondaatje, Michael. The English Patient. Toronto: Vintage Books, 1993. Stewart, Susan. Crimes of Writing: Problems in the Containment of Representation. New York, Oxford: Oxford UP, 1991. Venuti, Lawrence. The Translator's Invisibility: A History of Translation. London, New York: Routledge, 1995.

Abstract:

Hors d’oeuvre The popularity of cookbooks and culinary television shows in the last few years has been the origin of all sorts of new phenomena, such as literature crossing the bridge from cookbooks to such subgenres as food memoirs and culinary travelogues, or the discovery of new food cultures and food vocabulary. We can now cook the Basque menestra following the recipe of the famous blogger and cookbook author, Aran Goayaga, or try our hand at the Chinese soup tangyuan from Leslie Li’s Daughter of Heaven regardless of where we live. But how well does food translate across languages and cultures? I know what to expect from menestra as I am familiar with the Italian minestrone, which was introduced into the western dialects of Slovene as mineštra. But when reading about tangyuan, there is no mental image, much less a taste imprint, accompanying the word. Language and food are closely linked, if for nothing else, for the fact that the mouth is instrumental in both. For language, the oral cavity is the means of expression, for food it is the means for reception and tasting. It is like an intersection where language and food meet. When we reminisce about a favourite childhood dish or food, we can virtually taste it only by saying the word. The senses, supported by emotions, are a powerful tool, a reliable memory. It is for this reason that sometimes emotions are more easily expressed through food than with words, such as Tita’s longing and desperation in Laura Esquivel’s Like Water for Chocolate. It is perhaps because of this inability to truly verbalise the wonder and deliciousness of food that when translating food between different languages and cultures, meanings and tastes can become unclear or lost. Appetiser In less exact culinary genres, such as food memoirs, difficult translations can be tackled by using approximate and roundabout descriptions. “Metaphors are very plentiful, evocative, and useful in food memoirs. They are often created to explain exotic foods and culinary practices in terms that are more familiar to [...] readers” (Waxman 373). Similarly, in an interview about multiculturalism and identity, Homi Bhabha suggests that “all forms of culture are in some ways related to each other” and thus translatable (Rutherford 209–10). However, Bhabha is also referring to metaphors, myths, and symbols. Food, however, is a very particular ingredient of culture that cannot be always expressed with metaphors when translated. Cookbooks require an exact terminology; metaphors are of little help when a soufflé collapses or steaks end up overdone. Yet despite cultural, ethnic, religious, and other differences, there are certain concepts, such as beauty, that can be almost universally appreciated. Kant’s notion of “common sense“ explains what enables us to comprehend and appreciate beauty. By this universal communicability Kant “means that humans all must have a kind of sensing ability which operates the same way” (Burnham). This sensing ability could easily be expanded onto the beauty (and deliciousness) of food. After all, just as everyone can appreciate the magnificence of a Renoir, they can enjoy the satisfying mix of spices and herbs in a steak tartare, regardless of their mother tongue. And yet, when food is transformed into a written recipe and the language becomes a barrier, the opportunity for misunderstanding becomes greater. Walter Benjamin maintains that in translation, “the transfer can never be total [...] Even when all the surface content has been extracted and transmitted, the primary concern of the genuine translator remains elusive. Unlike the words of the original, it is not translatable, because the relationship between content and language is quite different in the original and the translation” (19). Furthermore, translation “implies adapting the meaning of a proposition, enabling it to pass from one code to another” (Bourriaud 30). If translation means adaptation, then in the process we lose the nuances of dishes that differ from one village to the next, not to mention from one nation to another at the other end of the world. And with this, we can lose subtle “insights into cultures” (Waxman 364). Brett Jocelyn Epstein, a translator and editor of a number of cookbooks, enumerates several issues that cause trouble when translating culinary texts, among them the availability of ingredients, different cuts of meats, measurements, and the kitchen equipment. While all are of equal importance for the translation of a text, let us focus on the difficulties that can arise when translating the ingredients that can sometimes be essential for a dish but difficult to find in a foreign country. Epstein emphasizes that simply substituting an ingredient with a more easily obtainable one is not an appropriate solution if this is repeated throughout a cookbook for recipe after recipe, ingredient after ingredient. There are limits to the changes a translator can make in a text; limits that turn one dish into an entirely new fare with a host of new ingredients. Instead, Epstein suggests keeping the original ingredients, but adding a list of possible substitutes. National Dish Let us have a look at an edible example. In France, crème fraîche is a naturally fermented thick cream, but the version sold in the UK is fermented by adding sour cream, buttermilk, or yoghurt. In North Wales it is known as “croghurt“ (a portmanteau word for “cream and yoghurt“) (Ayto 103). Crème fraîche, although slightly sour with pH of about 4.5, is not sour cream, but in many countries sour cream is used as a substitute because the French version is unobtainable. On the contrary, in Italy, it is near impossible to find sour cream. There is no tradition of using it in Italian cuisine, and it is mostly immigrants from other countries, such as Ukrainians, Poles, or Slovenians, who use it in their cooking. Panna acida or panna agra, as sour cream is known in Italy, is being imported and only sold in selected shops. As another example, the Swedes use filmjölk and gräddfil which are most often translated as yoghurt and cultivated buttermilk respectively, although these translations are mere approximations. Filmjölk may resemble yoghurt in consistency but it is fermented by different bacteria that give it a less sour taste. Gräddfil is a little thicker than yoghurt and also not as sour. Then there are kefir, piimä, kumis, lassi, ayran, and clabber, to mention just a few related, but different, products. How do such untranslatable ingredients affect the final outcome? Crêpes with fruit and sour cream are not quite the same as with crème fraîche; sour cream lacks the creaminess of the crème and has a tangier taste. Worse still, sour cream can curdle when added to a soup and heated, while crème fraîche does not. It is evident then, that culinary translation affects more than just words. This is not, however, only a matter for chefs and cooks to consider; it is also an issue when an author wants to share traditional dishes with readers of other nationalities and especially when the core ingredients of their (or their country’s) signature dishes are not available globally. I am not here referring only to such unusual ingredients as the honeypot ants used in bush tucker. Some foods, despite the logistics accessibility of every nook and cranny of our world, are sometimes still difficult or impossible to obtain outside their place of origin simply for the lack of a high enough demand. Is it, then, better to stick to the original ingredients and keep the integrity of the recipe, or is it better to adapt the dish to another culture or let it exist between cultures? Would we rather our recipe remain a “wannabe dish” because readers are unable to find the ingredients for it, or would we prefer for them to enjoy an approximation of our creation? Linguist, anthropologist, and renowned chef, Rick Bayless, tackles the translation of food the same way he would translate languages. He introduced countless Mexican dishes into the North American cuisine through his award-winning Mexican restaurants, cookbooks, and his television show Mexico–One Plate at a Time. He looks at the issue of translation not solely from the point of view of the original cuisine, but also from the perspective of the target audience. “You have to really understand both cultures. Not just the words, not just the ingredients or the dishes out of context, but you have to understand it on a much broader perspective” (Translating Food). He is trying to present traditional Mexican dishes in a way that will make them “understandable“ in the American context. Bayless maintains that “people will cook a dish exactly the way it's done in the host culture,” but that makes it “this sort of relic that’s not understandable” in the target culture’s context. Or as German writer and poet, Rudolf Pannwitz, stated, “our translations, even the best ones, proceed from a wrong premise. They want to turn Hindi, Greek, English into German instead of turning German into Hindi, Greek, English” (qtd. in Benjamin 22). The more ingredients, the more complex the situation becomes, and sometimes a dish is near impossible to translate because of its cultural specificity. Mostly, such names of dishes are kept in the original, like polenta, sushi, or the already mentioned tangyuan. But particularly smaller nations, with subsequently smaller languages, feel the need to make their dishes more recognisable. For example, certain Slovenian dishes, such as idrijski žlikrofi, are registered as a traditional speciality (TSG) at the European Commission but even as such they often have poor recognisability. The same is true of other typical Slovenian dishes; while well known and appreciated at home, they are often quite unknown outside the country’s borders. Consequently, to reach higher recognisability, we often over-translate. Fig. 1. The Making of idrijski žlikrofi. 2013. The Author. An example of this is a Slovenian dessert whose established name in English is the “Prekmurian layer cake“ (a layered cake with apples, poppy seeds, cottage cheese and walnuts from the Prekmurje region, a region across the river Mura). However, it happens quite often that you will receive a decidedly different translation if you ask a waiter in a restaurant or people on the street what prekmurska gibanica is. Someone at some point literally translated it as the “over Mura moving cake“ (gibanica contains the morpheme gib- meaning “movement, motion“, hence “moving cake“, although it has nothing to do with moving). The wrong translation is probably mentioned more often than the correct one and it is so nonsensical that it has been preserved as a running joke, while some still think it is a correct translation. Another quandary for the translator is the existence of words that denote different dishes in one language. Within hundred kilometres of my hometown, the name fancelj refers to three different culinary delights. We use it to denote an omelette-like dish of beaten eggs with yarrow, lemon balm or other herbs occasionally added to it. In the upper Soča valley, it is known to denote doughnuts. Further to the south, fancelj stands for deep-fried buns similar to what the French call pets-de-nonne (literally “nun’s farts“). Similarly, in Swedish, the terms kaka and tårta quite often overlap in their usage and thus cause confusion when being translated into English (as cake and torte, and sometimes even as cookie, depending on the type of pastry in the original recipe). If one is not familiar with such dialectal distinctions or cultural peculiarities, it is difficult to avoid mistranslations. Such delicate translations also include the Turkish coffee that becomes Greek coffee in Greek bars, French toast that is called pain perdu in France, or Russian salad, called salade russe by the French, but French salad by Slovenians (and salat oliv’e by the Russians). Furthermore, if you order à la mode in France, you will be served beef braised with vegetables. In the US, however, you can only order à la mode for dessert as it means an apple pie or similar dessert served with ice cream (Ayto). These examples are often due to disagreements and misconceptions about who created a certain dish, and wrong usage can cause resentment among the (presumably) wronged parties. Sometimes, delicious bits of information get lost in translation. A Slovenian dialectal word knedelj is usually translated into English as dumpling, a neat and straightforward translation. But in the original word knedelj that was borrowed from the German knödel, related to kneten (Snoj 209), one can detect traces of Proto-Germanic knedanan that developed through Old Saxon knedan into Old English cnedan and today’s knead (Online Etymology Dictionary). The two words, one English and the other dialectal Slovene, originate in the same ancient expression. But I suppose only linguists would find this information worth mulling over for a few seconds before tucking into a wholesome serving of plum dumplings. Considering the aforementioned difficulties of culinary translation, it is not surprising that certain words are often simply left in the original. This is especially true of Italian dishes, such as types of pasta, or certain Asian fares (for more on translating Chinese dishes see Mu 2010). Consequently, many are now familiar with calzone, bento, farfalle, sashimi, zucchini, and zabaglione (the latter of which is also known as sabayon, zabaione, and zabajone). Even once the words find their place in their adoptive language and the users become wholly familiarised with their meaning and thus the problem of translation is avoided, another difficulty arises—that of adapting the word (morphologically) to the new language. Pine nuts in American English are also called pignoli, a word borrowed from Italian. There seems to be considerable confusion as to the plural form of the word in its English usage. Pignoli, originally a plural form of pignolo, “hovers between singular and plural in English”, where subsequently two other plural forms have appeared—pignolia and pignolis (Ayto 277). Dessert For readers, getting to know about other cultures’s foods and their preparation can be very enriching for gaining an understanding of both those particular cultures and, in turn, their own (Waxman), but for writers and translators of cookbooks, food memoirs, culinary travelogues, and other such culturally and culinary specific genres (and especially those from smaller countries), translating food expressions can be challenging. There is no simple rule that helps translate every expression or ingredient. Translations must be carried out on a case-to-case basis, sometimes compromising the food, sometimes the translation. Similarly, as more and more people become nomads in the 21st century, immigrating for economic or political reasons, family, or simply for fun, in the same way food too is becoming a “portable practice” (Bourriaud 33) that crosses boundaries, cultures, and languages. Due to this, food is taking on a new role; its functions “both unifying and divisive” (Waxman 366). The culinary translator’s task should be to translate in such a way that the divisive effect is minimised as much as possible and yet the text retains its cultural flavour. This is difficult, and requires knowledge of both the source and target languages and cultures, but ultimately it can be done. Food and language are like a pair of tango dancers—caught in a passionate embrace, but bickering constantly nonetheless, their tastes too dissimilar. Or, as Isabel Allende suggests, to seduce a lover one needs both food and words: “language is also aphrodisiac in regard to food; commenting on the dishes, their flavours and perfumes, is a sensual exercise for which we have a vast vocabulary filled with wit, metaphors, references, humour, word games, and subtleties” (106). But to seduce with words, we must first taste the food. Perhaps translators and authors of culinary texts are not all accomplished cooks, but it is of great help if they can prepare and taste the dishes and ingredients that they are attempting to adapt to new cultures and environments. References Allende, Isabel. Aphrodite, A Memoir of the Senses. New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 1998. Ayto, John. The Diner’s Dictionary: Word Origins of Food & Drink. UK: Oxford UP, 2012. Benjamin, Walter. “The Task of the Translator.” The Translation Studies Reader. Ed. Lawrence Venuti. London: Routledge, 2004. 15–25. Bourriaud, Nicolas. The Radicant. New York: Lukas & Sternberg, 2010. Burnham, Douglas. “Kant’s Aesthetics.” Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy 30 Jun. 2005. 7 Apr. 2013 ‹http://www.iep.utm.edu/kantaest›. Epstein, Brett Jocelyn. “What’s Cooking: Translating Food.” Translation Journal, 13.3 (2009). 11 Mar. 2013 ‹http://www.bokorlang.com/journal/49cooking.htm›. Esquivel, Laura. Like Water for Chocolate. USA: Transworld Publishers, 1989. Goayaga, Aran. Small Plates & Sweet Treats: My Family’s Journey to Gluten-free Cooking. New York: Little, Brown & Company, 2012. Li, Leslie. Daughter of Heaven: A Memoir of Earthly Recipes. New York: Arcade, 2005. Mu, John Congjun. “English Translation of Chinese Dish Names.” Translation Journal 14.4 (Oct. 2010). 8 Apr. 2013 ‹http://www.translationjournal.net/journal/54dishes.htm›. Online Etymology Dictionary. 12 Feb. 2013 ‹http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?term=knead&allowed_in_frame=0›. Rutherford, Jonathan. “The Third Space: Interview with Homi Bhabha.” Identity: Community, Culture, Difference. Ed. Jonathan Rutherford. London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1990. 207–221. Snoj, Marko. Slovenski etimološki slovar. Ljubljana: Modrijan založba, 2009. “Translating Food.” Visual Thesaurus 23 May 2007. 11 Mar. 2013 ‹https://www.visualthesaurus.com/cm/wc/translating-food›. Waxman, Barbara Frey. “Food Memoirs: What They Are, Why They Are Popular, and Why They Belong in the Literature Classroom.” College English 70.4 (2008): 363–82.

Abstract:

The need to sustain and/or create a collective identity is regularly seen as one of the cultural priorities of diasporic peoples and this, in turn, depends upon the existence of a uniquely diasporic form of communication and connection with the country of origin. Today, digital media technologies provide easy information recording and retrieval, and mobile IT networks allow global accessibility and participation in the redefinition of identities. Vis-à-vis our understanding of the proximity and connectivity associated with globalisation, the role of ICTs cannot be underestimated and is clearly more than a simple instrument for the expression of a pre-existing diasporic identity. Indeed, the concept of “e-diaspora” is gaining popularity. Consequently, research into the role of ICTs in the lives of diasporic peoples contributes to a definition of the concept of diaspora, understood here as the result of the dispersal of all members of a nation in several countries. In this context, I will demonstrate how members of the Bulgarian diaspora negotiate not only their identities but also their identifications through one of the most popular community websites, Facebook. My methodology consists of the active observation of Bulgarian users belonging to the diaspora, the participation in groups and forums on Facebook, and the analysis of discourses produced online. This research was conducted for the first time between 1 August 2008 and 31 May 2009 through the largest 20 (of 195) Bulgarian groups on the French version of Facebook and 40 (of over 500) on the English one. It is important to note that the public considered to be predominantly involved in Facebook is a young audience in the age group of 18-35 years. Therefore, this article is focused on two generations of Bulgarian immigrants: mostly recent young and second-generation migrants. The observed users are therefore members of the Bulgarian diaspora who have little or no experience of communism, who don’t feel the weight of the past, and who have grown up as free and often cosmopolitan citizens. Communist hegemony in Bulgaria began on 9 September 1944, when the army and the communist militiamen deposed the country’s government and handed power over to an anti-fascist coalition. During the following decades, Bulgaria became the perfect Soviet satellite and the imposed Stalinist model led to sharp curtailing of the economic and social contacts with the free world beyond the Iron Curtain. In 1989, the fall of the Berlin Wall marked the end of the communist era and the political and economic structures that supported it. Identity, Internet, and Diaspora Through the work of Mead, Todorov, and boyd it is possible to conceptualise the subject in terms of both of internal and external social identity (Mead, Todorov, boyd). In this article, I will focus, in particular, on social and national identities as expressions of the process of sharing stories, experiences, and understanding between individuals. In this respect, the phenomenon of Facebook is especially well placed to mediate between identifications which, according to Freud, facilitate the plural subjectivities and the establishment of an emotional network of mutual bonds between the individual and the group (Freud). This research also draws on Goffman who, from a sociological point of view, demystifies the representation of the Self by developing a dramaturgical theory (Goffman), whereby identity is constructed through the "roles" that people play on the social scene. Social life is a vast stage where the actors are required to adhere to certain socially acceptable rituals and guidelines. It means that we can consider the presentation of Self, or Others, as a facade or a construction of socially accepted features. Among all the ICTs, the Internet is, by far, the medium most likely to facilitate free expression of identity through a multitude of possible actions and community interactions. Personal and national memories circulate in the transnational space of the Internet and are reshaped when framed from specific circ*mstances such as those raised by the migration process. In an age of globalisation marked by the proliferation of population movements, instant communication, and cultural exchanges across geographic boundaries, the phenomenon of the diaspora has caught the attention of a growing number of scholars. I shall be working with Robin Cohen’s definition of diaspora which highlights the following common features: (1) dispersal from an original homeland; (2) the expansion from a homeland in search of work; (3) a collective memory and myth about the homeland; (4) an idealisation of the supposed ancestral homeland; (5) a return movement; (6) a strong ethnic group consciousness sustained over a long time; (7) a troubled relationship with host societies; (8) a sense of solidarity with co-ethnic members in other countries; and (9) the possibility of a distinctive creative, enriching life in tolerant host countries (Cohen). Following on this earlier work on the ways in which diasporas give rise to new forms of subjectivity, the concept of “e-diaspora” is now rapidly gaining in popularity. The complex association between diasporic groups and ICTs has led to a concept of e-diasporas that actively utilise ICTs to achieve community-specific goals, and that have become critical for the formation and sustenance of an exilic community for migrant groups around the globe (Srinivasan and Pyati). Diaspora and the Digital Age Anderson points out two key features of the Internet: first, it is a heterogeneous electronic medium, with hardly perceptible contours, and is in a state of constant development; second, it is a repository of “imagined communities” without geographical or legal legitimacy, whose members will probably never meet (Anderson). Unlike “real” communities, where people have physical interactions, in the imagined communities, individuals do not have face-to-face communication and daily contact, but they nonetheless feel a strong emotional attachment to the nation. The Internet not only opens new opportunities to gain greater visibility and strengthen the sense of belonging to community, but it also contributes to the emergence of a transnational public sphere where the communities scattered in various locations freely exchange their views and ideas without fear of restrictions or censorship from traditional media (Appadurai, Bernal). As a result, the Web becomes a virtual diasporic space which opens up, to those who have left their country, a new means of confrontation and social participation. Within this new diasporic space, migrants are bound in their disparate geographical locations by a common vision or myth about the homeland (Karim). Thanks to the Internet, the computer has become a primary technological intermediary between virtual networks, bringing its members closer in a “global village” where everyone is immediately connected to others. Thus, today’s diasporas are not the diaspora of previous generations in that the migration is experienced and negotiated very differently: people in one country are now able to continue to participate actively in another country. In this context, the arrival of community sites has increased the capacity of users to create a network on the Internet, to rediscover lost links, and strengthen new ones. Unlike offline communities, which may weaken once their members have left the physical space, online communities that are no longer limited by the requirement of physical presence in the common space have the capacity to endure. Identity Strategies of New Generations of Bulgarian Migrants It is very difficult to quantify migration to or from Bulgaria. Existing data is not only partial and limited but, in some cases, give an inaccurate view of migration from Bulgaria (Soultanova). Informal data confirm that one million Bulgarians, around 15 per cent of Bulgaria’s entire population (7,620,238 inhabitants in 2007), are now scattered around the world (National Statistical Institute of Bulgaria). The Bulgarian migrant is caught in a system of redefinition of identity through the duration of his or her relocation. Emigrating from a country like Bulgaria implies a high number of contingencies. Bulgarians’ self-identification is relative to the inferiority complex of a poor country which has a great deal to do to catch up with its neighbours. Before the accession of Bulgaria to the European Union, the country was often associated with what have been called “Third World countries” and seen as a source of crime and social problems. Members of the Bulgarian diaspora faced daily prejudice due to the bad reputation of their country of origin, though the extent of the hostility depended upon the “host” nation (Marcheva). Geographically, Bulgaria is one of the most eastern countries in Europe, the last to enter the European Union, and its image abroad has not facilitated the integration of the Bulgarian diaspora. The differences between Bulgarian migrants and the “host society” perpetuate a sentiment of marginality that is now countered with an online appeal for national identity markers and shared experiences. Facebook: The Ultimate Social Network The Growing Popularity of Facebook With more than 500 million active members, Facebook is the most visited website in the world. In June 2007, Facebook experienced a record annual increase of 270 per cent of connections in one year (source: comScore World Metrix). More than 70 translations of the site are available to date, including the Bulgarian version. What makes it unique is that Facebook positively encourages identity games. Moreover, Facebook provides the symbolic building blocks with which to build a collective identity through shared forms of discourse and ways of thinking. People are desperate to make a good impression on the Internet: that is why they spend so much time managing their online identity. One of the most important aspects of Facebook is that it enables users to control and manage their image, leaving the choice of how their profile appears on the pages of others a matter of personal preference at any given time. Despite some limitations, we will see that Facebook offers the Bulgarian community abroad the possibility of an intense and ongoing interaction with fellow nationals, including the opportunity to assert and develop a complex new national/transnational identity. Facebook Experiences of the Bulgarian Diaspora Created in the United States in 2004 and extended to use in Europe two or three years later, Facebook was quickly adopted by members of the Bulgarian diaspora. Here, it is very important to note that, although the Internet per se has enabled Bulgarians across the globe to introduce Cyrillic script into the public arena, it is definitely Facebook that has made digital Cyrillic visible. Early in computer history, keyboards with the Cyrillic alphabet simply did not exist. Thus, Bulgarians were forced to translate their language into Latin script. Today, almost all members of the Bulgarian population who own a computer use a keyboard that combines the two alphabets, Latin and Cyrillic, and this allows alternation between the two. This is not the case for the majority of Bulgarians living abroad who are forced to use a keyboard specific to their country of residence. Thus, Bulgarians online have adopted a hybrid code to speak and communicate. Since foreign keyboards are not equipped with the same consonants and vowels that exist in the Bulgarian language, they use the Latin letters that best suit the Bulgarian phonetic. Several possible interpretations of these “encoded” texts exist which become another way for the Bulgarian migrants to distinguish and assert themselves. One of these encoded scripts is supplemented by figures. For example, the number “6” written in Bulgarian “шест” is applied to represent the Bulgarian letter “ш.” Bulgarian immigrants therefore employ very specific codes of communication that enhance the feeling of belonging to a community that shares the same language, which is often incomprehensible to others. As the ultimate social networking website, Facebook brings together Bulgarians from all over the world and offers them a space to preserve online memorials and digital archives. As a result, the Bulgarian diaspora privileges this website in order to manage the strong links between its members. Indeed, within months of coming into online existence, Facebook established itself as a powerful social phenomenon for the Bulgarian diaspora and, very soon, a virtual map of the Bulgarian diaspora was formed. It should be noted, however, that this mapping was focused on the new generation of Bulgarian migrants more familiar with the Internet and most likely to travel. By identifying the presence of online groups by country or city, I was able to locate the most active Bulgarian communities: “Bulgarians in UK” (524 members), “Bulgarians in Chicago” (436 members), “Bulgarians studying in the UK” (346 members), “Bulgarians in America” (333 members), “Bulgarians in the USA” (314 members), “Bulgarians in Montreal” (249 members), “Bulgarians in Munich” (241 members), and so on. These figures are based on the “Groups” Application of Facebook as updated in February 2010. Through those groups, a symbolic diasporic geography is imagined and communicated: the digital “border crossing,” as well as the real one, becomes a major identity resource. Thus, Bulgarian users of Facebook are connecting from the four corners of the globe in order to rebuild family links and to participate virtually in the marriages, births, and lives of their families. It sometimes seems that the whole country has an appointment on Facebook, and that all the photos and stories of Bulgarians are more or less accessible to the community in general. Among its virtual initiatives, Facebook has made available to its users an effective mobilising tool, the Causes, which is used as a virtual noticeboard for activities and ideas circulating in “real life.” The members of the Bulgarian diaspora choose to adhere to different “causes” that may be local, national, or global, and that are complementary to the civic and socially responsible side of the identity they have chosen to construct online. Acting as a virtual realm in which distinct and overlapping trajectories coexist, Facebook thus enables users to articulate different stories and meanings and to foster a democratic imaginary about both the past and the future. Facebook encourages diasporas to produce new initiatives to revive or create collective memories and common values. Through photos and videos, scenes of everyday life are celebrated and manipulated as tools to reconstruct, reconcile, and display a part of the history and the identity of the migrant. By combating the feelings of disorientation, the consciousness of sharing the same national background and culture facilitates dialogue and neutralises the anxiety and loneliness of Bulgarian migrants. When cultural differences become more acute, the sense of isolation increases and this encourages migrants to look for company and solidarity online. As the number of immigrants connected and visible on Facebook gets larger, so the use of the Internet heightens their sense of a substantial collective identity. This is especially important for migrants during the early years of relocation when their sense of identity is most fragile. It can therefore be argued that, through the Internet, some Bulgarian migrants are replacing alienating face-to-face contact with virtual friends and enjoying the feeling of reassurance and belonging to a transnational community of compatriots. In this sense, Facebook is a propitious ground for the establishment of the three identity strategies defined by Herzfeld: cultural intimacy (or self-stereotypes); structural nostalgia (the evocation of a time when everything was going better); and the social poetic (the strategies aiming to retrieve a particular advantage and turn it into a permanent condition). In this way, the willingness to remain continuously in virtual contact with other Bulgarians often reveals a desire to return to the place of birth. Nostalgia and outsourcing of such sentiments help migrants to cope with feelings of frustration and disappointment. I observed that it is just after their return from summer holidays spent in Bulgaria that members of the Bulgarian diaspora are most active on the Bulgarian forums and pages on Facebook. The “return tourism” (Fourcade) during the summer or for the winter holidays seems to be a central theme in the forums on Facebook and an important source of emotional refuelling. Tensions between identities can also lead to creative formulations through Facebook’s pages. Thus, the group “You know you’re a Bulgarian when...”, which enjoys very active participation from the Bulgarian diaspora, is a space where everyone is invited to share, through a single sentence, some fact of everyday life with which all Bulgarians can identify. With humour and self-irony, this Facebook page demonstrates what is distinctive about being Bulgarian but also highlights frustration with certain prejudices and stereotypes. Frequently these profiles are characterised by seemingly “glocal” features. The same Bulgarian user could define himself as a Parisian, adhering to the group “You know you’re from Paris when...”, but also a native of a Bulgarian town (“You know you’re from Varna when...”). At the same time, he is an architect (“All architects on Facebook”), supporting the candidacy of Barack Obama, a fan of Japanese manga (“maNga”), of a French actor, an American cinema director, or Indian food. He joins a cause to save a wild beach on the Black Sea coast (“We love camping: Gradina Smokinia and Arapia”) and protests virtually against the slaughter of dolphins in the Faroe Islands (“World shame”). One month, the individual could identify as Bulgarian, but next month he might choose to locate himself in the country in which he is now resident. Thus, Facebook creates a virtual territory without borders for the cosmopolitan subject (Negroponte) and this confirms the premise that the Internet does not lead to the convergence of cultures, but rather confirms the opportunities for diversification and pluralism through multiple social and national affiliations. Facebook must therefore be seen as an advantageous space for the representation and interpretation of identity and for performance and digital existence. Bulgarian migrants bring together elements of their offline lives in order to construct, online, entirely new composite identities. The Bulgarians we have studied as part of this research almost never use pseudonyms and do not seem to feel the need to hide their material identities. This suggests that they are mature people who value their status as migrants of Bulgarian origin and who feel confident in presenting their natal identities rather than hiding behind a false name. Starting from this material social/national identity, which is revealed through the display of surname with a Slavic consonance, members of the Bulgarian diaspora choose to manage their complex virtual identities online. Conclusion Far from their homeland, beset with feelings of insecurity and alienation as well as daily experiences of social and cultural exclusion (much of it stemming from an ongoing prejudice towards citizens from ex-communist countries), it is no wonder that migrants from Bulgaria find relief in meeting up with compatriots in front of their screens. Although some migrants assume their Bulgarian identity as a mixture of different cultures and are trying to rethink and continuously negotiate their cultural practices (often through the display of contradictory feelings and identifications), others identify with an imagined community and enjoy drawing boundaries between what is “Bulgarian” and what is not. The indispensable daily visit to Facebook is clearly a means of forging an ongoing sense of belonging to the Bulgarian community scattered across the globe. Facebook makes possible the double presence of Bulgarian immigrants both here and there and facilitates the ongoing processes of identity construction that depend, more and more, upon new media. In this respect, the role that Facebook plays in the life of the Bulgarian diaspora may be seen as a facet of an increasingly dynamic transnational world in which interactive media may be seen to contribute creatively to the formation of collective identities and the deformation of monolithic cultures. References Anderson, Benedict. L’Imaginaire National: Réflexions sur l’Origine et l’Essor du Nationalisme. Paris: La Découverte, 1983. Appadurai, Ajun. Après le Colonialisme: Les Conséquences Culturelles de la Globalisation. Paris: Payot, 2001. Bernal, Victoria. “Diaspora, Cyberspace and Political Imagination: The Eritrean Diaspora Online.” Global Network 6 (2006): 161-79. boyd, danah. “Social Network Sites: Public, Private, or What?” Knowledge Tree (May 2007). Cohen, Robin. Global Diasporas: An Introduction. London: University College London Press. 1997. Goffman, Erving. La Présentation de Soi. Paris: Editions de Minuit, Collection Le Sens Commun, 1973. Fourcade, Marie-Blanche. “De l’Arménie au Québec: Itinéraires de Souvenirs Touristiques.” Ethnologies 27.1 (2005): 245-76. Freud, Sigmund. “Psychologie des Foules et Analyses du Moi.” Essais de Psychanalyse. Paris: Petite Bibliothèque Payot, 2001 (1921). Herzfeld, Michael. Intimité Culturelle. Presse de l’Université de Laval, 2008. Karim, Karim-Haiderali. The Media of Diaspora. Oxford: Routledge, 2003. Marcheva, Marta. “Bulgarian Diaspora and the Media Treatment of Bulgaria in the French, Italian and North American Press (1992–2007).” Unpublished PhD dissertation. Paris: University Panthéon – Assas Paris 2, 2010. Mead, George Herbert. L’Esprit, le Soi et la Société. Paris: PUF, 2006. Negroponte, Nicholas. Being Digital. Vintage, 2005. Soultanova, Ralitza. “Les Migrations Multiples de la Population Bulgare.” Actes du Dolloque «La France et les Migrants des Balkans: Un État des Lieux.” Paris: Courrier des Balkans, 2005. Srinivasan, Ramesh, and Ajit Pyati. “Diasporic Information Environments: Reframing Immigrant-Focused Information Research.” Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 58.12 (2007): 1734-44. Todorov, Tzvetan. Nous et les Autres: La Réflexion Française sur la Diversité Humaine. Paris: Seuil, 1989.

Abstract:

Reviewing Melissa Lucashenko’s Mullumbimby (2013), Eve Vincent notes that it shares with Keri Hulme’s The Bone People (1984) one significant feature: “a glossary of Indigenous words.” Working with various forms of the term “abroad”, this article surveys the debate The Bone People ignited around the relative merits of such a glossary in texts written predominantly in English, the colonizing language. At stake here is the development of a post-colonial community that incorporates Indigenous identity and otherness (Maori or Aboriginal) with the historical legacy of the English/Indigenous-language multi-lingualism of multi-cultural Australia and New Zealand. I argue that the terms of this debate have remained static since 1984 and that this creates a problem for post-colonial theory. Specifically, the debate has favoured a binary either/or approach, whereby either the Indigenous language or English has been empowered with authority over the text’s linguistic, historical, cultural and political territory. Given that the significations of “abroad” include a travelling encounter with overseas places and the notion of being widely scattered or dispersed, the term has value for an investigation into how post-colonialism as a historical circ*mstance is mediated and transformed within literature. Post-colonial literature is a response to the “homeland” encounter with a foreign “abroad” that creates particular wide scatterings or dispersals of writing within literary texts.In 1989, Maryanne Dever wrote that “some critics have viewed [The Bone People’s] glossary as a direct denial of otherness. … It can be argued, however, that the glossary is in fact a further way of asserting that otherness” (24). Dever is responding to Simon During, who wrote in 1985 that “by translating the Maori words into English [the glossary allows] them no otherness within its Europeanising apparatus” (During 374). Dever continues: “[The glossary] is a considered statement of the very separateness of the Maori language. In this way, the text inverts the conventional sense of privileging, the glossary forming the key into a restricted or privileged form of knowledge” (24). Dever’s language is telling: “direct denial of otherness,” “asserting that otherness,” and “the very separateness of the Maori language,” reinforce a binary way of thinking that is reproduced by Vincent in 2013 (24).This binary hinders a considered engagement with post-colonial difference because it produces hierarchal outcomes. For Toril Moi, “binary oppositions are heavily imbricated in the patriarchal value system: each opposition can be analysed as a hierarchy where the ‘feminine’ side is always seen as the negative, powerless instance” (104). Inspired by Elizabeth M. DeLoughrey’s concept of “tidalectics”, my article argues that the neologism “glossary islands” provides a more productive way of thinking about the power relations of the relationship of glossaries of Indigenous words to Hulme’s and Lucashenko’s mainly English-language, post-colonial novels. Resisting a binary either/or approach, “glossary islands” engages with the inevitable intermingling of languages of post-colonial and multi-cultural nations and holds value for a new methodological approach to the glossary as an element of post-colonial (islandic) literature.Both The Bone People and Mullumbimby employ female protagonists (Kerewin Holmes and Jo Breen respectively) to explore how family issues resolve into an assertion of place-based community for people othered by enduring colonial forces. Difficult loves and difficult children provide opportunities for tension and uneasy resolution in each text. In Hulme’s novel, Kerewin resists the romantic advances of Joe Gillayley to the end, without ever entirely rejecting him. Similarly, in Mullumbimby, Jo and Twoboy Jackson conduct a vacillating relationship, though one that ultimately steadies. The Bone People tells of an autistic child, Simon P. Gillayley, while Mullumbimby thematises a difficult mother-daughter relationship in its narration of single-mother Jo’s struggles with Ellen. Furthermore, employing realist and magic realist techniques, both novels present family and love as allegories of post-colonial community, thereby exemplifying Stephen Slemon’s thesis that “the real social relations of post-colonial cultures appear, through the mediation of the text’s language of narration, in the thematic dimension of the post-colonial magic realist work” (12).Each text also shows how post-colonial literature always engages with the “abroad” by virtue of the post-colonial relationship of the indigenous “homeland” to the colonial “imported abroad”. DeLoughrey characterises this post-colonial relationship to the “abroad” by a “homeland” as a “tidalectics”, meaning “a dynamic and shifting relationship between land and sea that allows island literatures to be engaged in their spatial and historical complexity” (2-3). The Bone People and Mullumbimby are examples of island literatures for their geographic setting. But DeLoughrey does not compress “tidalectics” to such a reductionist definition. The term itself is as “dynamic and shifting” as what it signifies, and available for diverse post-colonial redeployments (DeLoughrey 2).The margin of land and sea that DeLoughrey foregrounds as constitutive of “tidalectics” is imaginatively re-expressed in both The Bone People and Mullumbimby. Lucashenko’s novel is set in the Byron Bay hinterland, and the text is replete with teasing references to “tidalectics”. For example, “Jo knew that the water she watched was endlessly cycling upriver and down, travelling constantly between the saltwater and the fresh” (Lucashenko 260-61). The writing, however, frequently exceeds a literal “tidalectics”: “Everything in the world was shapeshifting around her, every moment of every day. Nothing remained as it was” (Lucashenko 261).Significantly, Jo is no passive figure at the centre of such “shapeshifting”. She actively takes advantage of the “dynamic and shifting” interplay between elemental presences of her geographical circ*mstances (DeLoughrey 2). It is while “resting her back against the granite and bronze directional marker that was the last material evidence of humanity between Ocean Shores and New Zealand,” that Jo achieves her major epiphany as a character (Lucashenko 261). “Her eyelids sagged wearily. … Jo groaned aloud, exhausted by her ignorance and the unending demands being made on her to exceed it. The temptation to fall asleep in the sun, and leave these demands far behind, began to take her over. … No. We need answers” (Lucashenko 263). The “tidalectics” of her epiphany is telling: the “silence then splintered” (262) and “momentarily the wrens became, not birds, but mere dark movement” (263). The effect is dramatic: “The hairs on Jo’s arms goosepimpled. Her breathing grew fast” (263). “With an unspoken curse for her own obtuseness”, Jo becomes freshly decisive (264). Thus, a “tidalectics” is not a mere geographic backdrop. Rather, a “dynamic and shifting” landscape—a metamorphosis—energizes Jo’s identity in Mullumbimby. In the “homeland”/“abroad” flux of “tidalectics”, post-colonial community germinates.The geography of The Bone People is also a “tidalectics”, as demonstrated, for instance, by chapter five’s title: “Spring Tide, Neap Tide, Ebb Tide, Flood” (Hulme 202). Hulme’s novel contains literally hundreds of such passages that dramatise the margin of land and sea as “dynamic and shifting” (DeLoughrey 2). Again: “She’s standing on the orangegold shingle, arms akimbo, drinking the beach in, absorbing sea and spindrift, breathing it into her dusty memory. It’s all here, alive and salt and roaring and real. The vast cold ocean and the surf breaking five yards away and the warm knowledge of home just up the shore” (163). Like the protagonist of Mullumbimby, Kerewin Holmes is an energised subject at the margin of land and sea. Geography as “tidalectics” is activated in the construction of character identity. Kerewin involves her surroundings with her sense of self, as constituted through memory, in a fashion that enfolds the literal with the metaphorical: memory is “dusty” in the midst of “vast” waters (163).Thus, at least three senses of “abroad” filter through these novels. Firstly, the “abroad” exists in the sense of an abroad-colonizing power retaining influence even in post-colonial times, as elaborated in Simon During’s distinction between the “post-colonised” and the “post-colonisers” (Simon 460). Secondly, the “abroad” reveals itself in DeLoughrey’s related conceptualisation of “tidalectics” as a specific expression of the “abroad”/“homeland” relationship. Thirdly, the “abroad” is present by virtue of the more general definition it shares with “tidalectics”; for “abroad”, like “tidalectics”, also signifies being widely scattered, at large, ranging freely. There is both denotation and connotation in “tidalectics”, which Lucashenko expresses here: “the world was nothing but water in the air and water in the streams” (82). That is, beyond any “literal littoral” geography, “abroad” is linked to “tidalectics” in this more general sense of being widely scattered, dispersed, ranging freely.The “tidalectics” of Lucashenko’s and Hulme’s novels is also shared across their form because each novel is a complex interweaving of English and the Indigenous language. Here though, we encounter a clear difference between the two novels, which seems related to the predominant genres of the respective texts. In Lucashenko’s largely realist mode of writing, the use of Indigenous words is more transparent to a monolingual English speaker than is Hulme’s use of Maori in her novel, which tends more towards magic realism. A monolingual English speaker can often translate Lucashenko almost automatically, through context, or through an in-text translation of the words worked into the prose. With Hulme, context usually withholds adequate clues to the meaning of the Maori words, nor are any in-text translations of the Maori commonly offered.Leaving aside for now any consideration of their glossaries, each novel presents a different representation of the post-colonial/“abroad” relationship of an Indigenous language to English. Mullumbimby is the more conservative text in this respect. The note prefacing Mullumbimby’s Glossary reads: “In this novel, Jo speaks a mixture of Bundjalung and Yugambeh languages, interspersed with a variety of Aboriginal English terms” (283). However, the Indigenous words often shade quite seamlessly into their English translation, and the “Aboriginal English” Jo speaks is actually not that different from standard English dialogue as found in many contemporary Australian novels. If anything, there is only a slight, distinguishing American flavour to Jo’s dialogue. In Mullumbimby, the Indigenous tongue tends to disappear into the text’s dominant language: English.By contrast, The Bone People contains many instances where Maori presents in all its bold strangeness to a monolingual English speaker. My reading experience consisted in running my eyes over the words but not really taking them in, except insofar as they represented a portion of Maori of unknown meaning. I could look up the recondite English words (of which there were many) in my dictionary or online, but it was much harder to conveniently source definitions of the Maori words, especially when they formed larger syntactic units.The situation is reversed, however, when one considers the two glossaries. Mullumbimby’s glossary asserts the difference of the Indigenous language(s) by having no page numbers alongside its Indigenous words (contrast The Bone People’s glossary) and because, despite being titled Glossary as a self-sufficient part of the book, it is not mentioned in any Contents page. One comes across Lucashenko’s glossary, at the end of her novel, quite unexpectedly. Conversely, Hulme’s glossary is clearly referenced on its Contents page, where it is directly described as a “Translation of Maori Words and Phrases” commencing on page 446. Hulme’s glossary appears predictably, and contains page references to all its Maori words or phrases. This contrasts with Lucashenko’s glossary, which follows alphabetical order, rather than the novel’s order. Mullumbimby’s glossary is thus a more assertive textual element than The Bone People’s glossary, which from the Contents page on is more hom*ogenised with the prevailing English text.Surely the various complexities of these two glossaries show the need for a better way of critically engaging with them that does not lead to the re-accentuation of the binary terms in which the scholarly discussion about their genre has been couched so far. Such a methodology needs to be sensitive to the different forms of these glossaries and of others like them in other texts. But some terminological minesweeping is required in order to develop this methodology, for a novel and a glossary are different textual forms and should not be compared like for like. A novel is a work of the imagination in fictional form whereas a glossary is a meta-text that, according to The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary, comprises “a list with explanations, often accompanying a text, of abstruse, obsolete, dialectal, or technical terms.” The failure to take this difference substantially into account explains why the debate around Hulme’s and Lucashenko’s glossaries as instruments of post-colonial language relationships has defaulted, thus far, to a binary approach insensitive to the complexities of linguistic relations in post-colonial and multi-cultural nations. Ignoring the formal difference between novel and glossary patronises a reading that proceeds by reference to binary opposition, and thus hierarchy.By contrast, my approach is to read these glossaries as texts that can be read and interpreted as one might read and interpret the novels they adjoin, and also with close attention to the architecture of their relationship to the novels they accompany. This close reading methodology enables attention to the differences amongst glossaries, as much as to the differences between them and the texts they gloss. One consequence of this is that, as I have shown above, a text might be conservative so far as its novel segment is concerned, yet radical so far as its glossary is concerned (Mullumbimby), or vice versa (The Bone People).To recap, “tidalectics” provides a way of engaging with the post-colonial/“abroad” (linguistic) complexities of island nations and literatures. It denotes “a dynamic and shifting relationship between land and sea that allows island literatures to be engaged in their spatial and historical complexity” (DeLoughrey 2-3). The methodological challenge for my article is to show how “tidalectics” is useful to a consideration of that sub-genre of post-colonial novels containing glossaries. Elizabeth M. DeLoughrey’s unpacking of “tidalectics” considers not just islands but also the colonial relationships of (archetypally mainland European) colonial forces to islands. Referring to the popularity of “desert-island stories” (12), DeLoughrey notes how “Since the colonial expansion of Europe, its literature has increasingly inscribed the island as a reflection of various political, sociological, and colonial practices” (13). Further, “European inscriptions of island topoi have often upheld imperial logic and must be recognized as ideological tools that helped make colonial expansion possible” (13). DeLoughrey also underscores the characteristics of such “desert-island stories” (12), including how accidental colonization of “a desert isle has been a powerful and repeated trope of empire building and of British literature of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries” (13). Shipwrecks are the most common narrative device of such “accidents”.Drawing on the broad continuum of the several significations of “abroad”, one can draw a parallel between the novel-glossary relationship and the mainland-island relationship DeLoughrey outlines. I recall here Stephen Slemon’s suggestion that “the real social relations of post-colonial cultures appear, through the mediation of the text’s language of narration, in the thematic dimension of the post-colonial magic realist work” (12). Adapting Slemon’s approach, one might read the formal (as opposed to thematic) dimension of the glossary in a post-colonial narrative like The Bone People or Mullumbimby as another literary appearance of “the real social relations of post-colonial cultures” (Slemon 12). What’s appearing is the figure of the island in the form of the glossary: hence, my neologism “glossary islands”. These novels are thus not only examples of island novels to be read via “tidalectics”, but of novels with their own islands appended to them, as glossaries, in the “abroad” of their textuality.Thus, rather than seeing a glossary in a binary either/or way as a sign of the (artificial) supremacy of either English or the Indigenous language, one could use the notion of “glossary islands” to more fully engage with the complexities of post-colonialism as expressed in literature. Seen in this light, a glossary (as to The Bone People or Mullumbimby) can be read as an “abroad” through which the novel circulates its own ideas or inventions of post-colonial community. In this view, islands and glossaries are linked through being intensified sites of knowledge, as described by DeLoughrey. Crucially, the entire, complex, novel-glossary relationship needs to be analysed, and it is possible (though space considerations mediate against pursuing this here) that a post-colonial novel’s glossary expresses the (Freudian) unconscious knowledge of the novel itself.Clearly then, there is a deep irony in how what Simon During calls the “Europeanising apparatus” of the glossary itself becomes, in Mullumbimby, an object of colonisation (During 374). (Recall how one comes across the glossary at the end of Lucashenko’s novel unexpectedly—accidentally—as a European might be cast up upon a desert island.) I hazard the suggestion that a post-colonial novel is more radical in its post-colonial politics the more “island-like” its glossary is, because this implies that the “glossary island” is being used to better work out the nature of post-colonial community as expressed and proposed in the novel itself. Here then, again, the seemingly more radical novel linguistically, The Bone People, seems in fact to be less radical than Mullumbimby, given the latter’s more “island-like” glossary. Certainly their prospects for post-colonial community are being worked out on different levels.Working with the various significations of “abroad” that span the macro level of historical circ*mstances and the micro levels of post-colonial literature, this article has introduced a new methodological approach to engaging with Indigenous language glossaries at the end of post-colonial texts written largely in English. This methodology responds to the need to go beyond the binary either/or approach that has characterised the debate in this patch of post-colonial studies so far. A binary view of language relations, I suggest, is debilitating to prospects for post-colonial community in post-colonial, multi-cultural and island nations like Australia and New Zealand, where language flows are multifarious and complex. My proposed methodology, as highlighted in the neologism “glossary islands”, seems to show promise for the (re-)interpretation of Mullumbimby and The Bone People as texts that deal, albeit in different ways, with similar issues of language relations and of community. An “abroad” methodology provides a powerful infrastructure for engagement with domains such as post-colonialism that, as Stephen Slemon indicates, involve the intensive intermingling of the largest geo-historical circ*mstances with the detail, even minutiae, of the textual expression of those circ*mstances, as in literature.ReferencesDeLoughrey, Elizabeth M. Routes and Roots: Navigating Caribbean and Pacific Island Literatures. Honolulu: U of Hawai’i P, 2007.Dever, Maryanne. “Violence as Lingua Franca: Keri Hulme’s The Bone People.” World Literature Written in English 29.2 (1989): 23-35.During, Simon. “Postmodernism or Postcolonialism?” Landfall 39.3 (1985): 366-80.———. “Postmodernism or Post-Colonialism Today.” Postmodernism: A Reader. Ed. Thomas Docherty. New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993. 448-62.Hulme, Keri. The Bone People. London: Pan-Picador, 1986.Lucashenko, Melissa. Mullumbimby. St Lucia, Queensland: U of Queensland P, 2013.Moi, Toril. Sexual/Textual Politics: Feminist Literary Theory. London: Routledge, 1985.Slemon, Stephen. “Magic Realism as Post-Colonial Discourse.” Canadian Literature 116 (Spring 1988): 9-24.The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary. Ed. Lesley Brown. Oxford: Clarendon P, 1993.Vincent, Eve. “Country Matters.” Sydney Review of Books. Sydney: The Writing and Society Research Centre at the University of Western Sydney, 2013. 8 Aug. 2016 <http://sydneyreviewofbooks.com/country-matters/>.

Abstract:

Anyone contemplating the role of a “hermeneutics of suspicion” in literary and cultural studies must concede that the phrase is rarely used—even by its most devout practitioners, who usually think of themselves engaged in something called “critique.” What, then, are the terminological differences between “critique” and “the hermeneutics of suspicion”? What intellectual worlds do these specific terms conjure up, and how do these worlds converge or diverge? And what is the rationale for preferring one term over the other?The “hermeneutics of suspicion” is a phrase coined by Paul Ricoeur to capture a common spirit that pervades the writings of Marx, Freud, and Nietzsche. In spite of their obvious differences, he argued, these thinkers jointly constitute a “school of suspicion.” That is to say, they share a commitment to unmasking “the lies and illusions of consciousness;” they are the architects of a distinctively modern style of interpretation that circumvents obvious or self-evident meanings in order to draw out less visible and less flattering truths (Ricoeur 356). Ricoeur’s term has sustained an energetic after-life within religious studies, as well as in philosophy, intellectual history, and related fields, yet it never really took hold in literary studies. Why has a field that has devoted so much of its intellectual energy to interrogating, subverting, and defamiliarising found so little use for Ricoeur’s phrase?In general, we can note that hermeneutics remains a path not taken in Anglo-American literary theory. The tradition of hermeneutical thinking is rarely acknowledged (how often do you see Gadamer or Ricoeur taught in a theory survey?), let alone addressed, assimilated, or argued over. Thanks to a lingering aura of teutonic stodginess, not to mention its long-standing links with a tradition of biblical interpretation, hermeneutics was never able to muster the intellectual edginess and high-wattage excitement generated by various forms of poststructuralism. Even the work of Gianni Vattimo, one of the most innovative and prolific of contemporary hermeneutical thinkers, has barely registered in the mainstream of literary and cultural studies. On occasion, to be sure, hermeneutics crops up as a synonym for a discredited model of “depth” interpretation—the dogged pursuit of a hidden true meaning—that has supposedly been superseded by more sophisticated forms of thinking. Thus the ascent of poststructuralism, it is sometimes claimed, signaled a turn away from hermeneutics to deconstruction and genealogy—leading to a focus on surface rather than depth, on structure rather than meaning, on analysis rather than interpretation. The idea of suspicion has fared little better. While Ricoeur’s account of a hermeneutics of suspicion is respectful, even admiring, critics are understandably leery of having their lines of argument reduced to their putative state of mind. The idea of a suspicious hermeneutics can look like an unwarranted personalisation of scholarly work, one that veers uncomfortably close to Harold Bloom’s tirades against the “School of Resentment” and other conservative complaints about literary studies as a hot-bed of paranoia, kill-joy puritanism, petty-minded pique, and defensive scorn. Moreover, the anti-humanist rhetoric of much literary theory—its resolute focus on transpersonal and usually linguistic structures of determination—proved inhospitable to any serious reflections on attitude, disposition, or affective stance.The concept of critique, by contrast, turns out to be marred by none of these disadvantages. An unusually powerful, flexible and charismatic idea, it has rendered itself ubiquitous and indispensable in literary and cultural studies. Critique is widely seen as synonymous with intellectual rigor, theoretical sophistication, and intransigent opposition to the status quo. Drawing a sense of intellectual weightiness from its connections to the canonical tradition of Kant and Marx, it has managed, nonetheless, to retain a cutting-edge sensibility, retooling itself to fit the needs of new fields ranging from postcolonial theory to disability studies. Critique is contagious and charismatic, drawing everything around it into its field of force, marking the boundaries of what counts as serious thought. For many scholars in the humanities, it is not just one good thing but the only conceivable thing. Who would want to be associated with the bad smell of the uncritical? There are five facets of critique (enumerated and briefly discussed below) that characterise its current role in literary and cultural studies and that have rendered critique an exceptionally successful rhetorical-cultural actor. Critique, that is to say, inspires intense attachments, serves as a mediator in numerous networks, permeates disciplines and institutional structures, spawns conferences, essays, courses, and book proposals, and triggers countless imitations, translations, reflections, revisions, and rebuttals (including the present essay). While nurturing a sense of its own marginality, iconoclasm, and outsiderdom, it is also exceptionally effective at attracting disciples, forging alliances, inspiring mimicry, and ensuring its own survival. In “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam?” Bruno Latour remarks that critique has been so successful because it assures us that we are always right—unlike those naïve believers whose fetishes we strive to expose (225–48). At the same time, thanks to its self-reflexivity, the rhetoric of critique is more tormented and self-divided than such a description would suggest; it broods constantly over the shame of its own success, striving to detect signs of its own complicity and to root out all possible evidence of collusion with the status quo.Critique is negative. Critique retains the adversarial force of a suspicious hermeneutics, while purifying it of affective associations by treating negativity as an essentially philosophical or political matter. To engage in critique is to grapple with the oversights, omissions, contradictions, insufficiencies, or evasions in the object one is analysing. Robert Koch writes that “critical discourse, as critical discourse, must never formulate positive statements: it is always ‘negative’ in relation to its object” (531). Critique is characterised by its “againstness,” by its desire to take a hammer, as Latour would say, to the beliefs of others. Faith is to be countered with vigilant skepticism, illusion yields to a sobering disenchantment, the fetish must be defetishised, the dream world stripped of its befuddling powers. However, the negativity of critique is not just a matter of fault-finding, scolding, and censuring. The nay-saying critic all too easily calls to mind the Victorian patriarch, the thin-lipped schoolmarm, the glaring policeman. Negating is tangled up with a long history of legislation, prohibition and interdiction—it can come across as punitive, arrogant, authoritarian, or vitriolic. In consequence, defenders of critique often downplay its associations with outright condemnation. It is less a matter of refuting particular truths than of scrutinising the presumptions and procedures through which truths are established. A preferred idiom is that of “problematising,” of demonstrating the ungroundedness of beliefs rather than denouncing errors. The role of critique is not to castigate, but to complicate, not to engage in ideas’ destruction but to expose their cultural construction. Barbara Johnson, for example, contends that a critique of a theoretical system “is not an examination of its flaws and imperfections” (xv). Rather, “the critique reads backwards from what seems natural, obvious, self-evident, or universal in order to show that these things have their history” and to show that the “start point is not a (natural) given, but a (cultural) construct, usually blind to itself” (Johnson xv–xvi). Yet it seems a tad disingenuous to describe such critique as free of negative judgment and the examination of flaws. Isn’t an implicit criticism being transmitted in Johnson’s claim that a cultural construct is “usually blind to itself”? And the adjectival chain “natural, obvious, self-evident, or universal” strings together some of the most negatively weighted words in contemporary criticism. A posture of detachment, in other words, can readily convey a tacit or implicit judgment, especially when it is used to probe the deep-seated convictions, primordial passions, and heart-felt attachments of others. In this respect, the ongoing skirmishes between ideology critique and poststructuralist critique do not over-ride their commitment to a common ethos: a sharply honed suspicion that goes behind the backs of its interlocutors to retrieve counter-intuitive and uncomplimentary meanings. “You do not know that you are ideologically-driven, historically determined, or culturally constructed,” declares the subject of critique to the object of critique, “but I do!” As Marcelo Dascal points out, the supposedly non-evaluative stance of historical or genealogical argument nevertheless retains a negative or demystifying force in tracing ideas back to causes invisible to the actors themselves (39–62).Critique is secondary. A critique is always a critique of something, a commentary on another argument, idea, or object. Critique does not vaunt its self-sufficiency, independence, and autotelic splendor; it makes no pretense of standing alone. It could not function without something to critique, without another entity to which it reacts. Critique is symbiotic; it does its thinking by responding to the thinking of others. But while secondary, critique is far from subservient. It seeks to wrest from a text a different account than it gives of itself. In doing so, it assumes that it will meet with, and overcome, a resistance. If there were no resistance, if the truth were self-evident and available for all to see, the act of critique would be superfluous. Its goal is not the slavish reconstruction of an original or true meaning but a counter-reading that brings previously unfathomed insights to light. The secondariness of critique is not just a logical matter—critique presumes the existence of a prior object—but also a temporal one. Critique comes after another text; it follows or succeeds another piece of writing. Critique, then, looks backward and, in doing so, it presumes to understand the past better than the past understands itself. Hindsight becomes insight; from our later vantage point, we feel ourselves primed to see better, deeper, further. The belatedness of critique is transformed into a source of iconoclastic strength. Scholars of Greek tragedy or Romantic poetry may mourn their inability to inhabit a vanished world, yet this historical distance is also felt as a productive estrangement that allows critical knowledge to unfold. Whatever the limitations of our perspective, how can we not know more than those who have come before? We moderns leave behind us a trail of errors, finally corrected, like a cloud of ink from a squid, remarks Michel Serres (48). There is, in short, a quality of historical chauvinism built into critique, making it difficult to relinquish a sense of in-built advantage over those lost souls stranded in the past. Critique likes to have the last word. Critique is intellectual. Critique often insists on its difference from everyday practices of criticism and judgment. While criticism evaluates a specific object, according to one definition, “critique is concerned to identify the conditions of possibility under which a domain of objects appears” (Butler 109). Critique is interested in big pictures, cultural frameworks, underlying schema. It is a mode of thought well matched to the library and seminar room, to a rhythm of painstaking inquiry rather than short-term problem-solving. It “slows matters down, requires analysis and reflection, and often raises questions rather than providing answers” (Ruitenberg 348). Critique is thus irresistibly drawn toward self-reflexive thinking. Its domain is that of second-level observation, in which we reflect on the frames, paradigms, and perspectives that form and inform our understanding. Even if objectivity is an illusion, how can critical self-consciousness not trump the available alternatives? This questioning of common sense is also a questioning of common language: self-reflexivity is a matter of form as well as content, requiring the deployment of what Jonathan Culler and Kevin Lamb call “difficult language” that can undermine or “un-write” the discourses that make up our world (1–14). Along similar lines, Paul Bove allies himself with a “tradition that insists upon difficulty, slowness, complex, often dialectical and highly ironic styles,” as an essential antidote to the “prejudices of the current regime of truth: speed, slogans, transparency, and reproducibility” (167). Critique, in short, demands an arduous working over of language, a stoic refusal of the facile phrase and ready-made formula. Yet such programmatic divisions between critique and common sense have the effect of relegating ordinary language to a state of automatic servitude, while condescending to those unschooled in the patois of literary and critical theory. Perhaps it is time to reassess the dog-in-the-manger attitude of a certain style of academic argument—one that assigns to scholars the vantage point of the lucid and vigilant thinker, while refusing to extend this same capacity to those naïve and unreflecting souls of whom they speak.Critique comes from below. Politics and critique are often equated and conflated in literary studies and elsewhere. Critique is iconoclastic in spirit; it rails against authority; it seeks to lay bare the injustices of the law. It is, writes Foucault, the “art of voluntary insubordination, that of reflected intractability” (194). This vision of critique can be traced back to Marx and is cemented in the tradition of critical theory associated with the Frankfurt School. Critique conceives of itself as coming from below, or being situated at the margins; it is the natural ally of excluded groups and subjugated knowledges; it is not just a form of knowledge but a call to action. But who gets to claim the mantle of opposition, and on what grounds? In a well-known essay, Nancy Fraser remarks that critical theory possesses a “partisan though not uncritical identification” with oppositional social movements (97). As underscored by Fraser’s judicious insertion of the phrase “not uncritical,” critique guards its independence and reserves the right to query the actions and attitudes of the oppressed as well as the oppressors. Thus the intellectual’s affiliation with a larger community may collide with a commitment to the ethos of critique, as the object of a more heartfelt attachment. A separation occurs, as Francois Cusset puts it, “between academics questioning the very methods of questioning” and the more immediate concerns of the minority groups with which they are allied (157). One possible strategy for negotiating this tension is to flag one’s solidarity with a general principle of otherness or alterity—often identified with the utopian or disruptive energies of the literary text. This strategy gives critique a shot in the arm, infusing it with a dose of positive energy and ethical substance, yet without being pinned down to the ordinariness of a real-world referent. This deliberate vagueness permits critique to nurture its mistrust of the routines and practices through which the everyday business of the world is conducted, while remaining open to the possibility of a radically different future. Critique in its positive aspects thus remains effectively without content, gesturing toward a horizon that must remain unspecified if it is not to lapse into the same fallen state as the modes of thought that surround it (Fish 446).Critique does not tolerate rivals. Declaring itself uniquely equipped to diagnose the perils and pitfalls of representation, critique often chafes at the presence of other forms of thought. Ruling out the possibility of peaceful co-existence or even mutual indifference, it insists that those who do not embrace its tenets must be denying or disavowing them. In this manner, whatever is different from critique is turned into the photographic negative of critique—evidence of an irrefutable lack or culpable absence. To refuse to be critical is to be uncritical; a judgment whose overtones of naiveté, apathy, complacency, submissiveness, and sheer stupidity seem impossible to shrug off. In short, critique thinks of itself as exceptional. It is not one path, but the only conceivable path. Drew Milne pulls no punches in his programmatic riff on Kant: “to be postcritical is to be uncritical: the critical path alone remains open” (18).The exceptionalist aura of critique often thwarts attempts to get outside its orbit. Sociologist Michael Billig, for example, notes that critique thinks of itself as battling orthodoxy, yet is now the reigning orthodoxy—no longer oppositional, but obligatory, not defamiliarising, but oppressively familiar: “For an increasing number of younger academics,” he remarks, “the critical paradigm is the major paradigm in their academic world” (Billig 292). And in a hard-hitting argument, Talal Asad points out that critique is now a quasi-automatic stance for Western intellectuals, promoting a smugness of tone that can be cruelly dismissive of the deeply felt beliefs and attachments of others. Yet both scholars conclude their arguments by calling for a critique of critique, reinstating the very concept they have so meticulously dismantled. Critique, it seems, is not to be abandoned but intensified; critique is to be replaced by critique squared. The problem with critique, it turns out, is that it is not yet critical enough. The objections to critique are still very much part and parcel of the critique-world; the value of the critical is questioned only to be emphatically reinstated.Why do these protestations against critique end up worshipping at the altar of critique? Why does it seem so exceptionally difficult to conceive of other ways of arguing, reading, and thinking? We may be reminded of Eve Sedgwick’s comments on the mimetic aspect of critical interpretation: its remarkable ability to encourage imitation, repetition, and mimicry, thereby ensuring its own reproduction. It is an efficiently running form of intellectual machinery, modeling a style of thought that is immediately recognisable, widely applicable, and easily teachable. Casting the work of the scholar as a never-ending labour of distancing, deflating, and diagnosing, it rules out the possibility of a different relationship to one’s object. It seems to grow, as Sedgwick puts it, “like a crystal in a hypersaturated solution, blotting out any sense of the possibility of alternative ways of understanding or things to understand” (131).In this context, a change in vocabulary—a redescription, if you will—may turn out to be therapeutic. It will come as no great surprise if I urge a second look at the hermeneutics of suspicion. Ricoeur’s phrase, I suggest, can help guide us through the interpretative tangle of contemporary literary studies. It seizes on two crucial parts of critical argument—its sensibility and its interpretative method—that deserve more careful scrutiny. At the same time, it offers a much-needed antidote to the charisma of critique: the aura of ethical and political exemplarity that burnishes its negativity with a normative glow. Thanks to this halo effect, I’ve suggested, we are encouraged to assume that the only alternative to critique is a full-scale surrender to complacency, quietism, and—in literary studies—the intellectual fluff of aesthetic appreciation. Critique, moreover, presents itself as an essentially disembodied intellectual exercise, an austere, even abstemious practice of unsettling, unmaking, and undermining. Yet contemporary styles of critical argument are affective as well as analytical, conjuring up distinctive dispositions and relations to their object. As Amanda Anderson has pointed out in The Way We Argue Now, literary and cultural theory is saturated with what rhetoricians call ethos—that is to say, imputations of motive, character, or attitude. We need only think of the insouciance associated with Rortyan pragmatism, the bad-boy iconoclasm embraced by some queer theorists, or the fastidious aestheticism that characterises a certain kind of deconstructive reading. Critical languages, in other words, are also orientations, encouraging readers to adopt an affectively tinged stance toward their object. Acknowledging the role of such orientations in critical debate does not invalidate its intellectual components, nor does it presume to peer into, or diagnose, an individual scholar’s state of mind.In a related essay, I scrutinise some of the qualities of a suspicious or critical reading practice: distance rather than closeness; guardedness rather than openness; aggression rather than submission; superiority rather than reverence; attentiveness rather than distraction; exposure rather than tact (215–34). Suspicion, in this sense, constitutes a muted affective state—a curiously non-emotional emotion of morally inflected mistrust—that overlaps with, and builds upon, the stance of detachment that characterises the stance of the professional or expert. That this style of reading proves so alluring has much to do with the gratifications and satisfactions that it offers. Beyond the usual political or philosophical justifications of critique, it also promises the engrossing pleasure of a game-like sparring with the text in which critics deploy inventive skills and innovative strategies to test their wits, best their opponents, and become sharper, shrewder, and more sophisticated players. In this context, the claim that contemporary criticism has moved “beyond” hermeneutics should be treated with a grain of salt, given that, as Stanley Fish points out, “interpretation is the only game in town” (446). To be sure, some critics have backed away from the model of what they call “depth interpretation” associated with Marx and Freud, in which reading is conceived as an act of digging and the critic, like a valiant archaeologist, excavates a resistant terrain in order to retrieve the treasure of hidden meaning. In this model, the text is envisaged as possessing qualities of interiority, concealment, penetrability, and depth; it is an object to be plundered, a puzzle to be solved, a secret message to be deciphered. Instead, poststructuralist critics are drawn to the language of defamiliarising rather than discovery. The text is no longer composed of strata and the critic does not burrow down but stands back. Instead of brushing past surface meanings in pursuit of hidden truth, she dwells in ironic wonder on these surface meanings, seeking to “denaturalise” them through the mercilessness of her gaze. Insight, we might say, is achieved by distancing rather than by digging. Recent surveys of criticism often highlight the rift between these camps, underscoring the differences between the diligent seeker after buried truth and the surface-dwelling ironist. From a Ricoeur-inflected point of view, however, it is their shared investment in a particular ethos—a stance of knowingness, guardedness, suspicion and vigilance—that turns out to be more salient and more striking. Moreover, these approaches are variously engaged in the dance of interpretation, seeking to go beyond the backs of texts or fellow-actors in order to articulate non-obvious and often counter-intuitive truths. In the case of poststructuralism, we can speak of a second-order hermeneutics that is less interested in probing the individual object than the larger frameworks and conditions in which it is embedded. What the critic interprets is no longer a self-contained poem or novel, but a broader logic of discursive structures, reading formations, or power relations. Ricoeur’s phrase, moreover, has the singular advantage of allowing us to by-pass the exceptionalist tendencies of critique: its presumption that whatever is not critique can only be assigned to the ignominious state of the uncritical. As a less prejudicial term, it opens up a larger history of suspicious reading, including traditions of religious questioning and self-scrutiny that bear on current forms of interpretation, but that are occluded by the aggressively secular connotations of critique (Hunter). In this context, Ricoeur’s own account needs to be supplemented and modified to acknowledge this larger cultural history; the hermeneutics of suspicion is not just the brain-child of a few exceptional thinkers, as his argument implies, but a widespread practice of interpretation embedded in more mundane, diffuse and variegated forms of life (Felski 220).Finally, the idea of a suspicious hermeneutics does not invalidate or rule out other interpretative possibilities—ranging from Ricoeur’s own notion of a hermeneutics of trust to more recent coinages such as Sedgwick’s “restorative reading,” Sharon Marcus’s “just reading” or Timothy Bewes’s “generous reading.” Literary studies in France, for example, is currently experiencing a new surge of interest in hermeneutics (redefined as a practice of reinvention rather than exhumation) as well as a reinvigorated phenomenology of reading that elucidates, in rich and fascinating detail, its immersive and affective dimensions (see Citton; Macé). This growing interest in the ethos, aesthetics, and ethics of reading is long overdue. Such an orientation by no means rules out attention to the sociopolitical resonances of texts and their interpretations. It is, however, no longer willing to subordinate such attention to the seductive but sterile dichotomy of the critical versus the uncritical.ReferencesAnderson, Amanda. The Way We Argue Now: A Study in the Cultures of Theory. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2005.Asad, Talal. “Free Speech, Blasphemy, and Secular Criticism.” Is Critique Secular? Blasphemy, Injury, and Free Speech. Ed. Talal Asad, Wendy Brown, Judith Butler, and Saba Mahmood. Berkeley: Townsend Center for the Humanities, 2009. 20–63. Bewes, Timothy. “Reading with the Grain: A New World in Literary Studies.” Differences 21.3 (2010): 1–33.Billig, Michael. “Towards a Critique of the Critical.” Discourse and Society 11.3 (2000): 291–92. Bloom, Harold. The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages. New York: Harcourt Brace, 1994.Bove, Paul. Mastering Discourse: The Politics of Intellectual Culture. Durham: Duke UP, 1992. Butler, Judith. “The Sensibility of Critique: Response to Asad and Mahmood.” Is Critique Secular? Blasphemy, Injury, and Free Speech. Ed. Talal Asad, Wendy Brown, Judith Butler, and Saba Mahmood. Berkeley: Townsend Center for the Humanities, 2009. 101–136.Citton, Yves. Lire, interpréter, actualiser: pourqoi les études littéraires? Paris: Editions Amsterdam, 2007. Culler, Jonathan and Kevin Lamb, “Introduction.” Just Being Difficult? Academic Writing in the Public Arena. Ed. Jonathan Culler and Kevin Lamb. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2003. 1–14. Cusset, Francois. French Theory: How Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, & Co. Transformed the Intellectual Life of the United States. Trans. Jeff Fort. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2008.Dascal, Marcelo. “Critique without Critics?” Science in Context 10.1 (1997): 39–62.Felski, Rita. “Suspicious Minds.” Poetics Today 32.2 (2011): 215–34.Fish, Stanley. Doing What Comes Naturally: Change, Rhetoric, and the Practice of Theory in Literary and Legal Studies. Durham: Duke UP, 1989.Foucault, Michel. “What is Critique?” The Political. Ed. David Ingram. Oxford: Blackwell, 2002. 191–211. Fraser, Nancy. “What’s Critical about Critical Theory? The Case of Habermas and Gender.” New German Critique 35 (1985): 97–131. Hunter, Ian. Rethinking the School: Subjectivity, Bureaucracy, Criticism. New York: St Martin’s Press, 1994.Johnson, Barbara. “Translator’s Introduction.” Jacques Derrida’s Dissemination. London: Continuum, 2004. vii–xxxv. Koch, Robert. “The Critical Gesture in Philosophy.” Iconoclash: Beyond the Image Wars in Science, Religion, and Art. Ed. Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel. Cambridge: MIT, 2002. 524–36. Latour, Bruno. “Why Has Critique Run Out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern.” Critical Inquiry 30 (2004): 225–48.Macé, Marielle. Facons de lire, manières d’être. Paris: Gallimard, 2011. Marcus, Sharon. Between Women: Friendship, Desire, and Marriage in Victorian England. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2007.Milne, Drew. “Introduction: Criticism and/or Critique.” Modern Critical Thought: An Anthology of Theorists Writing on Theorists. Oxford: Blackwell, 2002. 1–22. Ricoeur, Paul. Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation. New Haven: Yale UP, 1970. Ruitenberg, Claudia. “Don’t Fence Me In: The Liberation of Undomesticated Critique.” Journal of the Philosophy of Education 38.3 (2004): 314–50. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, Or, You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay is About You.” Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity. Durham: Duke UP, 2003. 123–52. Serres, Michel and Bruno Latour. Conversations on Science, Culture, and Time. Trans. Roxanne Lapidus. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1995.Vattimo, Gianni. Beyond Interpretation: The Meaning of Hermeneutics for Philosophy. Trans. David Webb. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1997.

Abstract:

Biology teaches us that organisms adapt—or don’t; sociology claims that people adapt—or don’t. We know that ideas can adapt; sometimes even institutions can adapt. Or not. Various papers in this issue attest in exciting ways to precisely such adaptations and maladaptations. (See, for example, the articles in this issue by Lelia Green, Leesa Bonniface, and Tami McMahon, by Lexey A. Bartlett, and by Debra Ferreday.) Adaptation is a part of nature and culture, but it’s the latter alone that interests me here. (However, see the article by Hutcheon and Bortolotti for a discussion of nature and culture together.) It’s no news to anyone that not only adaptations, but all art is bred of other art, though sometimes artists seem to get carried away. My favourite example of excess of association or attribution can be found in the acknowledgements page to a verse drama called Beatrice Chancy by the self-defined “maximalist” (not minimalist) poet, novelist, librettist, and critic, George Elliot Clarke. His selected list of the incarnations of the story of Beatrice Cenci, a sixteenth-century Italian noblewoman put to death for the murder of her father, includes dramas, romances, chronicles, screenplays, parodies, sculptures, photographs, and operas: dramas by Vincenzo Pieracci (1816), Percy Bysshe Shelley (1819), Juliusz Slowacki (1843), Waldter Landor (1851), Antonin Artaud (1935) and Alberto Moravia (1958); the romances by Francesco Guerrazi (1854), Henri Pierangeli (1933), Philip Lindsay (1940), Frederic Prokosch (1955) and Susanne Kircher (1976); the chronicles by Stendhal (1839), Mary Shelley (1839), Alexandre Dumas, père (1939-40), Robert Browning (1864), Charles Swinburne (1883), Corrado Ricci (1923), Sir Lionel Cust (1929), Kurt Pfister (1946) and Irene Mitchell (1991); the film/screenplay by Bertrand Tavernier and Colo O’Hagan (1988); the parody by Kathy Acker (1993); the sculpture by Harriet Hosmer (1857); the photograph by Julia Ward Cameron (1866); and the operas by Guido Pannain (1942), Berthold Goldschmidt (1951, 1995) and Havergal Brian (1962). (Beatrice Chancy, 152) He concludes the list with: “These creators have dallied with Beatrice Cenci, but I have committed indiscretions” (152). An “intertextual feast”, by Clarke’s own admission, this rewriting of Beatrice’s story—especially Percy Bysshe Shelley’s own verse play, The Cenci—illustrates brilliantly what Northrop Frye offered as the first principle of the production of literature: “literature can only derive its form from itself” (15). But in the last several decades, what has come to be called intertextuality theory has shifted thinking away from looking at this phenomenon from the point of view of authorial influences on the writing of literature (and works like Harold Bloom’s famous study of the Anxiety of Influence) and toward considering our readerly associations with literature, the connections we (not the author) make—as we read. We, the readers, have become “empowered”, as we say, and we’ve become the object of academic study in our own right. Among the many associations we inevitably make, as readers, is with adaptations of the literature we read, be it of Jane Austin novels or Beowulf. Some of us may have seen the 2006 rock opera of Beowulf done by the Irish Repertory Theatre; others await the new Neil Gaiman animated film. Some may have played the Beowulf videogame. I personally plan to miss the upcoming updated version that makes Beowulf into the son of an African explorer. But I did see Sturla Gunnarsson’s Beowulf and Grendel film, and yearned to see the comic opera at the Lincoln Centre Festival in 2006 called Grendel, the Transcendence of the Great Big Bad. I am not really interested in whether these adaptations—all in the last year or so—signify Hollywood’s need for a new “monster of the week” or are just the sign of a desire to cash in on the success of The Lord of the Rings. For all I know they might well act as an ethical reminder of the human in the alien in a time of global strife (see McGee, A4). What interests me is the impact these multiple adaptations can have on the reader of literature as well as on the production of literature. Literature, like painting, is usually thought of as what Nelson Goodman (114) calls a one-stage art form: what we read (like what we see on a canvas) is what is put there by the originating artist. Several major consequences follow from this view. First, the implication is that the work is thus an original and new creation by that artist. However, even the most original of novelists—like Salman Rushdie—are the first to tell you that stories get told and retold over and over. Indeed his controversial novel, The Satanic Verses, takes this as a major theme. Works like the Thousand and One Nights are crucial references in all of his work. As he writes in Haroun and the Sea of Stories: “no story comes from nowhere; new stories are born of old” (86). But illusion of originality is only one of the implications of seeing literature as a one-stage art form. Another is the assumption that what the writer put on paper is what we read. But entire doctoral programs in literary production and book history have been set up to study how this is not the case, in fact. Editors influence, even change, what authors want to write. Designers control how we literally see the work of literature. Beatrice Chancy’s bookend maps of historical Acadia literally frame how we read the historical story of the title’s mixed-race offspring of an African slave and a white slave owner in colonial Nova Scotia in 1801. Media interest or fashion or academic ideological focus may provoke a publisher to foreground in the physical presentation different elements of a text like this—its stress on race, or gender, or sexuality. The fact that its author won Canada’s Governor General’s Award for poetry might mean that the fact that this is a verse play is emphasised. If the book goes into a second edition, will a new preface get added, changing the framework for the reader once again? As Katherine Larson has convincingly shown, the paratextual elements that surround a work of literature like this one become a major site of meaning generation. What if literature were not a one-stage an art form at all? What if it were, rather, what Goodman calls “two-stage” (114)? What if we accept that other artists, other creators, are needed to bring it to life—editors, publishers, and indeed readers? In a very real and literal sense, from our (audience) point of view, there may be no such thing as a one-stage art work. Just as the experience of literature is made possible for readers by the writer, in conjunction with a team of professional and creative people, so, arguably all art needs its audience to be art; the un-interpreted, un-experienced art work is not worth calling art. Goodman resists this move to considering literature a two-stage art, not at all sure that readings are end products the way that performance works are (114). Plays, films, television shows, or operas would be his prime examples of two-stage arts. In each of these, a text (a playtext, a screenplay, a score, a libretto) is moved from page to stage or screen and given life, by an entire team of creative individuals: directors, actors, designers, musicians, and so on. Literary adaptations to the screen or stage are usually considered as yet another form of this kind of transcription or transposition of a written text to a performance medium. But the verbal move from the “book” to the diminutive “libretto” (in Italian, little book or booklet) is indicative of a view that sees adaptation as a step downward, a move away from a primary literary “source”. In fact, an entire negative rhetoric of “infidelity” has developed in both journalistic reviewing and academic discourse about adaptations, and it is a morally loaded rhetoric that I find surprising in its intensity. Here is the wonderfully critical description of that rhetoric by the king of film adaptation critics, Robert Stam: Terms like “infidelity,” “betrayal,” “deformation,” “violation,” “bastardisation,” “vulgarisation,” and “desecration” proliferate in adaptation discourse, each word carrying its specific charge of opprobrium. “Infidelity” carries overtones of Victorian prudishness; “betrayal” evokes ethical perfidy; “bastardisation” connotes illegitimacy; “deformation” implies aesthetic disgust and monstrosity; “violation” calls to mind sexual violence; “vulgarisation” conjures up class degradation; and “desecration” intimates religious sacrilege and blasphemy. (3) I join many others today, like Stam, in challenging the persistence of this fidelity discourse in adaptation studies, thereby providing yet another example of what, in his article here called “The Persistence of Fidelity: Adaptation Theory Today,” John Connor has called the “fidelity reflex”—the call to end an obsession with fidelity as the sole criterion for judging the success of an adaptation. But here I want to come at this same issue of the relation of adaptation to the adapted text from another angle. When considering an adaptation of a literary work, there are other reasons why the literary “source” text might be privileged. Literature has historical priority as an art form, Stam claims, and so in some people’s eyes will always be superior to other forms. But does it actually have priority? What about even earlier performative forms like ritual and song? Or to look forward, instead of back, as Tim Barker urges us to do in his article here, what about the new media’s additions to our repertoire with the advent of electronic technology? How can we retain this hierarchy of artistic forms—with literature inevitably on top—in a world like ours today? How can both the Romantic ideology of original genius and the capitalist notion of individual authorship hold up in the face of the complex reality of the production of literature today (as well as in the past)? (In “Amen to That: Sampling and Adapting the Past”, Steve Collins shows how digital technology has changed the possibilities of musical creativity in adapting/sampling.) Like many other ages before our own, adaptation is rampant today, as director Spike Jonze and screenwriter Charlie Kaufman clearly realised in creating Adaptation, their meta-cinematic illustration-as-send-up film about adaptation. But rarely has a culture denigrated the adapter as a secondary and derivative creator as much as we do the screenwriter today—as Jonze explores with great irony. Michelle McMerrin and Sergio Rizzo helpfully explain in their pieces here that one of the reasons for this is the strength of auteur theory in film criticism. But we live in a world in which works of literature have been turned into more than films. We now have literary adaptations in the forms of interactive new media works and videogames; we have theme parks; and of course, we have the more common television series, radio and stage plays, musicals, dance works, and operas. And, of course, we now have novelisations of films—and they are not given the respect that originary novels are given: it is the adaptation as adaptation that is denigrated, as Deborah Allison shows in “Film/Print: Novelisations and Capricorn One”. Adaptations across media are inevitably fraught, and for complex and multiple reasons. The financing and distribution issues of these widely different media alone inevitably challenge older capitalist models. The need or desire to appeal to a global market has consequences for adaptations of literature, especially with regard to its regional and historical specificities. These particularities are what usually get adapted or “indigenised” for new audiences—be they the particularities of the Spanish gypsy Carmen (see Ioana Furnica, “Subverting the ‘Good, Old Tune’”), those of the Japanese samurai genre (see Kevin P. Eubanks, “Becoming-Samurai: Samurai [Films], Kung-Fu [Flicks] and Hip-Hop [Soundtracks]”), of American hip hop graffiti (see Kara-Jane Lombard, “‘To Us Writers, the Differences Are Obvious’: The Adaptation of Hip Hop Graffiti to an Australian Context”) or of Jane Austen’s fiction (see Suchitra Mathur, “From British ‘Pride’ to Indian ‘Bride’: Mapping the Contours of a Globalised (Post?)Colonialism”). What happens to the literary text that is being adapted, often multiple times? Rather than being displaced by the adaptation (as is often feared), it most frequently gets a new life: new editions of the book appear, with stills from the movie adaptation on its cover. But if I buy and read the book after seeing the movie, I read it differently than I would have before I had seen the film: in effect, the book, not the adaptation, has become the second and even secondary text for me. And as I read, I can only “see” characters as imagined by the director of the film; the cinematic version has taken over, has even colonised, my reader’s imagination. The literary “source” text, in my readerly, experiential terms, becomes the secondary work. It exists on an experiential continuum, in other words, with its adaptations. It may have been created before, but I only came to know it after. What if I have read the literary work first, and then see the movie? In my imagination, I have already cast the characters: I know what Gabriel and Gretta Conroy of James Joyce’s story, “The Dead,” look and sound like—in my imagination, at least. Then along comes John Huston’s lush period piece cinematic adaptation and the director superimposes his vision upon mine; his forcibly replaces mine. But, in this particular case, Huston still arguably needs my imagination, or at least my memory—though he may not have realised it fully in making the film. When, in a central scene in the narrative, Gabriel watches his wife listening, moved, to the singing of the Irish song, “The Lass of Aughrim,” what we see on screen is a concerned, intrigued, but in the end rather blank face: Gabriel doesn’t alter his expression as he listens and watches. His expression may not change—but I know exactly what he is thinking. Huston does not tell us; indeed, without the use of voice-over, he cannot. And since the song itself is important, voice-over is impossible. But I know exactly what he is thinking: I’ve read the book. I fill in the blank, so to speak. Gabriel looks at Gretta and thinks: There was grace and mystery in her attitude as if she were a symbol of something. He asked himself what is a woman standing on the stairs in the shadow, listening to distant music, a symbol of. If he were a painter he would paint her in that attitude. … Distant Music he would call the picture if he were a painter. (210) A few pages later the narrator will tell us: At last she turned towards them and Gabriel saw that there was colour on her cheeks and that her eyes were shining. A sudden tide of joy went leaping out of his heart. (212) This joy, of course, puts him in a very different—disastrously different—state of mind than his wife, who (we later learn) is remembering a young man who sang that song to her when she was a girl—and who died, for love of her. I know this—because I’ve read the book. Watching the movie, I interpret Gabriel’s blank expression in this knowledge. Just as the director’s vision can colonise my visual and aural imagination, so too can I, as reader, supplement the film’s silence with the literary text’s inner knowledge. The question, of course, is: should I have to do so? Because I have read the book, I will. But what if I haven’t read the book? Will I substitute my own ideas, from what I’ve seen in the rest of the film, or from what I’ve experienced in my own life? Filmmakers always have to deal with this problem, of course, since the camera is resolutely externalising, and actors must reveal their inner worlds through bodily gesture or facial expression for the camera to record and for the spectator to witness and comprehend. But film is not only a visual medium: it uses music and sound, and it also uses words—spoken words within the dramatic situation, words overheard on the street, on television, but also voice-over words, spoken by a narrating figure. Stephen Dedalus escapes from Ireland at the end of Joseph Strick’s 1978 adaptation of Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man with the same words as he does in the novel, where they appear as Stephen’s diary entry: Amen. So be it. Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race. … Old father, old artificer, stand me now and ever in good stead. (253) The words from the novel also belong to the film as film, with its very different story, less about an artist than about a young Irishman finally able to escape his family, his religion and his country. What’s deliberately NOT in the movie is the irony of Joyce’s final, benign-looking textual signal to his reader: Dublin, 1904 Trieste, 1914 The first date is the time of Stephen’s leaving Dublin—and the time of his return, as we know from the novel Ulysses, the sequel, if you like, to this novel. The escape was short-lived! Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man has an ironic structure that has primed its readers to expect not escape and triumph but something else. Each chapter of the novel has ended on this kind of personal triumphant high; the next has ironically opened with Stephen mired in the mundane and in failure. Stephen’s final words in both film and novel remind us that he really is an Icarus figure, following his “Old father, old artificer”, his namesake, Daedalus. And Icarus, we recall, takes a tumble. In the novel version, we are reminded that this is the portrait of the artist “as a young man”—later, in 1914, from the distance of Trieste (to which he has escaped) Joyce, writing this story, could take some ironic distance from his earlier persona. There is no such distance in the film version. However, it stands alone, on its own; Joyce’s irony is not appropriate in Strick’s vision. His is a different work, with its own message and its own, considerably more romantic and less ironic power. Literary adaptations are their own things—inspired by, based on an adapted text but something different, something other. I want to argue that these works adapted from literature are now part of our readerly experience of that literature, and for that reason deserve the same attention we give to the literary, and not only the same attention, but also the same respect. I am a literarily trained person. People like me who love words, already love plays, but shouldn’t we also love films—and operas, and musicals, and even videogames? There is no need to denigrate words that are heard (and visualised) in order to privilege words that are read. Works of literature can have afterlives in their adaptations and translations, just as they have pre-lives, in terms of influences and models, as George Eliot Clarke openly allows in those acknowledgements to Beatrice Chancy. I want to return to that Canadian work, because it raises for me many of the issues about adaptation and language that I see at the core of our literary distrust of the move away from the written, printed text. I ended my recent book on adaptation with a brief examination of this work, but I didn’t deal with this particular issue of language. So I want to return to it, as to unfinished business. Clarke is, by the way, clear in the verse drama as well as in articles and interviews that among the many intertexts to Beatrice Chancy, the most important are slave narratives, especially one called Celia, a Slave, and Shelley’s play, The Cenci. Both are stories of mistreated and subordinated women who fight back. Since Clarke himself has written at length about the slave narratives, I’m going to concentrate here on Shelley’s The Cenci. The distance from Shelley’s verse play to Clarke’s verse play is a temporal one, but it is also geographic and ideological one: from the old to the new world, and from a European to what Clarke calls an “Africadian” (African Canadian/African Acadian) perspective. Yet both poets were writing political protest plays against unjust authority and despotic power. And they have both become plays that are more read than performed—a sad fate, according to Clarke, for two works that are so concerned with voice. We know that Shelley sought to calibrate the stylistic registers of his work with various dramatic characters and effects to create a modern “mixed” style that was both a return to the ancients and offered a new drama of great range and flexibility where the expression fits what is being expressed (see Bruhn). His polemic against eighteenth-century European dramatic conventions has been seen as leading the way for realist drama later in the nineteenth century, with what has been called its “mixed style mimesis” (Bruhn) Clarke’s adaptation does not aim for Shelley’s perfect linguistic decorum. It mixes the elevated and the biblical with the idiomatic and the sensual—even the vulgar—the lushly poetic with the coarsely powerful. But perhaps Shelley’s idea of appropriate language fits, after all: Beatrice Chancy is a woman of mixed blood—the child of a slave woman and her slave owner; she has been educated by her white father in a convent school. Sometimes that educated, elevated discourse is heard; at other times, she uses the variety of discourses operative within slave society—from religious to colloquial. But all the time, words count—as in all printed and oral literature. Clarke’s verse drama was given a staged reading in Toronto in 1997, but the story’s, if not the book’s, real second life came when it was used as the basis for an opera libretto. Actually the libretto commission came first (from Queen of Puddings Theatre in Toronto), and Clarke started writing what was to be his first of many opera texts. Constantly frustrated by the art form’s demands for concision, he found himself writing two texts at once—a short libretto and a longer, five-act tragic verse play to be published separately. Since it takes considerably longer to sing than to speak (or read) a line of text, the composer James Rolfe keep asking for cuts—in the name of economy (too many singers), because of clarity of action for audience comprehension, or because of sheer length. Opera audiences have to sit in a theatre for a fixed length of time, unlike readers who can put a book down and return to it later. However, what was never sacrificed to length or to the demands of the music was the language. In fact, the double impact of the powerful mixed language and the equally potent music, increases the impact of the literary text when performed in its operatic adaptation. Here is the verse play version of the scene after Beatrice’s rape by her own father, Francis Chancey: I was black but comely. Don’t glance Upon me. This flesh is crumbling Like proved lies. I’m perfumed, ruddied Carrion. Assassinated. Screams of mucking juncos scrawled Over the chapel and my nerves, A stickiness, as when he finished Maculating my thighs and dress. My eyes seep pus; I can’t walk: the floors Are tizzy, dented by stout mauling. Suddenly I would like poison. The flesh limps from my spine. My inlets crimp. Vultures flutter, ghastly, without meaning. I can see lice swarming the air. … His scythe went shick shick shick and slashed My flowers; they lay, murdered, in heaps. (90) The biblical and the violent meet in the texture of the language. And none of that power gets lost in the opera adaptation, despite cuts and alterations for easier aural comprehension. I was black but comely. Don’t look Upon me: this flesh is dying. I’m perfumed, bleeding carrion, My eyes weep pus, my womb’s sopping With tears; I can hardly walk: the floors Are tizzy, the sick walls tumbling, Crumbling like proved lies. His scythe went shick shick shick and cut My flowers; they lay in heaps, murdered. (95) Clarke has said that he feels the libretto is less “literary” in his words than the verse play, for it removes the lines of French, Latin, Spanish and Italian that pepper the play as part of the author’s critique of the highly educated planter class in Nova Scotia: their education did not guarantee ethical behaviour (“Adaptation” 14). I have not concentrated on the music of the opera, because I wanted to keep the focus on the language. But I should say that the Rolfe’s score is as historically grounded as Clarke’s libretto: it is rooted in African Canadian music (from ring shouts to spirituals to blues) and in Scottish fiddle music and local reels of the time, not to mention bel canto Italian opera. However, the music consciously links black and white traditions in a way that Clarke’s words and story refuse: they remain stubbornly separate, set in deliberate tension with the music’s resolution. Beatrice will murder her father, and, at the very moment that Nova Scotia slaves are liberated, she and her co-conspirators will be hanged for that murder. Unlike the printed verse drama, the shorter opera libretto functions like a screenplay, if you will. It is not so much an autonomous work unto itself, but it points toward a potential enactment or embodiment in performance. Yet, even there, Clarke cannot resist the lure of words—even though they are words that no audience will ever hear. The stage directions for Act 3, scene 2 of the opera read: “The garden. Slaves, sunflowers, stars, sparks” (98). The printed verse play is full of these poetic associative stage directions, suggesting that despite his protestations to the contrary, Clarke may have thought of that version as one meant to be read by the eye. After Beatrice’s rape, the stage directions read: “A violin mopes. Invisible shovelsful of dirt thud upon the scene—as if those present were being buried alive—like ourselves” (91). Our imaginations—and emotions—go to work, assisted by the poet’s associations. There are many such textual helpers—epigraphs, photographs, notes—that we do not have when we watch and listen to the opera. We do have the music, the staged drama, the colours and sounds as well as the words of the text. As Clarke puts the difference: “as a chamber opera, Beatrice Chancy has ascended to television broadcast. But as a closet drama, it play only within the reader’s head” (“Adaptation” 14). Clarke’s work of literature, his verse drama, is a “situated utterance, produced in one medium and in one historical and social context,” to use Robert Stam’s terms. In the opera version, it was transformed into another “equally situated utterance, produced in a different context and relayed through a different medium” (45-6). I want to argue that both are worthy of study and respect by wordsmiths, by people like me. I realise I’ve loaded the dice: here neither the verse play nor the libretto is primary; neither is really the “source” text, for they were written at the same time and by the same person. But for readers and audiences (my focus and interest here), they exist on a continuum—depending on which we happen to experience first. As Ilana Shiloh explores here, the same is true about the short story and film of Memento. I am not alone in wanting to mount a defence of adaptations. Julie Sanders ends her new book called Adaptation and Appropriation with these words: “Adaptation and appropriation … are, endlessly and wonderfully, about seeing things come back to us in as many forms as possible” (160). The storytelling imagination is an adaptive mechanism—whether manifesting itself in print or on stage or on screen. The study of the production of literature should, I would like to argue, include those other forms taken by that storytelling drive. If I can be forgiven a move to the amusing—but still serious—in concluding, Terry Pratchett puts it beautifully in his fantasy story, Witches Abroad: “Stories, great flapping ribbons of shaped space-time, have been blowing and uncoiling around the universe since the beginning of time. And they have evolved. The weakest have died and the strongest have survived and they have grown fat on the retelling.” In biology as in culture, adaptations reign. References Bloom, Harold. The Anxiety of Influence. New York: Oxford University Press, 1975. Bruhn, Mark J. “’Prodigious Mixtures and Confusions Strange’: The Self-Subverting Mixed Style of The Cenci.” Poetics Today 22.4 (2001). Clarke, George Elliott. “Beatrice Chancy: A Libretto in Four Acts.” Canadian Theatre Review 96 (1998): 62-79. ———. Beatrice Chancy. Victoria, BC: Polestar, 1999. ———. “Adaptation: Love or Cannibalism? Some Personal Observations”, unpublished manuscript of article. Frye, Northrop. The Educated Imagination. Toronto: CBC, 1963. Goodman, Nelson. Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols. Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1968. Hutcheon, Linda, and Gary R. Bortolotti. “On the Origin of Adaptations: Rethinking Fidelity Discourse and “Success”—Biologically.” New Literary History. Forthcoming. Joyce, James. Dubliners. 1916. New York: Viking, 1967. ———. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. 1916. Penguin: Harmondsworth, 1960. Larson, Katherine. “Resistance from the Margins in George Elliott Clarke’s Beatrice Chancy.” Canadian Literature 189 (2006): 103-118. McGee, Celia. “Beowulf on Demand.” New York Times, Arts and Leisure. 30 April 2006. A4. Rushdie, Salman. The Satanic Verses. New York: Viking, 1988. ———. Haroun and the Sea of Stories. London: Granta/Penguin, 1990. Sanders, Julie. Adaptation and Appropriation. London and New York: Routledge, 160. Shelley, Percy Bysshe. The Cenci. Ed. George Edward Woodberry. Boston and London: Heath, 1909. Stam, Robert. “Introduction: The Theory and Practice of Adaptation.” Literature and Film: A Guide to the Theory and Practice of Film Adaptation. Oxford: Blackwell, 2005. 1-52. Citation reference for this article MLA Style Hutcheon, Linda. "In Defence of Literary Adaptation as Cultural Production." M/C Journal 10.2 (2007). echo date('d M. Y'); ?> <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0705/01-hutcheon.php>. APA Style Hutcheon, L. (May 2007) "In Defence of Literary Adaptation as Cultural Production," M/C Journal, 10(2). Retrieved echo date('d M. Y'); ?> from <http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0705/01-hutcheon.php>.