Search results
For several years now, James Baldwin’s life, portrait, and work have enjoyed a central place in the public eye. Although social and audiovisual media have made significant contributions to Baldwin’s return to the cultural and political limelight, the circulation of his published writings remains a vital part of the author’s ubiquity. Moreover, since Baldwin’s omnipresence in bookstores transcends an American or even Anglophone context, this international and multilingual circulation contributes to Baldwin’s world literary standing, as befits the self-described “transatlantic commuter.” This article moves beyond the customary approach to Baldwin’s published success by tracing presently circulating European translations of his work. The article examines the historical developments in Baldwin’s European circulation-through-translation from the time of his death (1987) up until the present, including brief discussions of the French, Italian, and West German translations from the 1960s onward. Of special interest are the pioneering and dominant roles that French and Italian publishers have played since the late 1990s, and the acceleration in circulation that took place across the continent in the wake of the films I Am Not Your Negro and If Beale Street Could Talk. The article concludes with a few remarks on the translation strategies of several key publishers in France, Italy, Germany, and Romania.
. ( Hall, 2007 : 151) This chapter examines diaspora as translation – in other words, by using the insights of translation studies, I wish to rethink diaspora theorising. This perspective is different from the two central approaches I identified and critically engaged with in Chapter 1 , namely ‘diaspora as an ideal type’ and ‘diaspora as hybridity
At a time when monolingualist claims for the importance of ‘speaking English’ to the national order continue louder than ever, even as language diversity is increasingly part of contemporary British life, literature becomes a space to consider the terms of linguistic belonging. Bad English examines writers including Tom Leonard, James Kelman, Suhayl Saadi, Raman Mundair, Daljit Nagra, Xiaolu Guo, Leila Aboulela, Brian Chikwava, and Caroline Bergvall, who engage multilingually, experimentally, playfully, and ambivalently with English’s power. Considering their invented vernaculars and mixed idioms, their dramatised scenes of languaging – languages learned or lost, acts of translation, scenes of speaking, the exposure and racialised visibility of accent – it argues for a growing field of contemporary literature in Britain pre-eminently concerned with language’s power dynamics, its aesthetic potentialities, and its prosthetic strangeness. Drawing on insights from applied linguistics and translation studies as well as literary scholarship, Bad English explores contemporary arguments about language in Britain – in debates about citizenship or education, in the media or on Twitter, in Home Office policy and asylum legislation – as well as the ways they are taken up in literature. It uncovers both an antagonistic and a productive interplay between language politics and literary form, tracing writers’ articulation of linguistic alienation and ambivalence, as well as the productivity and making-new of radical language practices. Doing so, it refutes the view that language difference and language politics are somehow irrelevant to contemporary Britain and instead argues for their constitutive centrality to the work of novelists and poets whose inside/outside relationship to English in its institutionalised forms is the generative force of their writing.
George Herbert (1593–1633), the celebrated devotional poet, and his brother Lord Herbert of Cherbury (1583–1648), often described as the father of English deism, are rarely considered together. This collection explores connections between the full range of the brothers’ writings and activities, despite the apparent differences both in what they wrote and in how they lived their lives. More specifically, the volume demonstrates that despite these differences, each conceived of their extended republic of letters as militating against a violent and exclusive catholicity; theirs was a communion in which contention (or disputation) served to develop more dynamic forms of comprehensiveness. Contributors break new ground in manuscript and translation studies (French, Italian, and Latin). The literary, philosophical, and musical production of the Herbert brothers appears here in its full European context, connected as they were with the Sidney clan and its own investment in international Protestantism. The disciplinary boundaries between poetry, philosophy, politics, and theology in modern universities in no way reflect the deep interconnectedness of these pursuits in the seventeenth century. Crossing disciplinary and territorial borders, contributors discuss a variety of texts and media, including poetry, musical practices, autobiography, letters, council literature, orations, philosophy, history, and nascent religious anthropology, all serving as agents of the circulation and construction of transregionally inspired and collective responses to human conflict and violence. We see as never before the profound connections, face-to-face as well as textual, linking early modern British literary culture with the continent.
This book explores the development of Robert Lepage’s distinctive approach to stage direction in the early (1984–94) and middle (1995–2008) stages of his career, arguing that globalisation had a defining effect in shaping his aesthetic and professional trajectory. It combines examination of Lepage’s theatremaking techniques with discussion of his work’s effects on audiences, calling on Lepage’s own statements as well as existing scholarship and critical response. In addition to globalisation theory, the book draws on cinema studies, queer theory, and theories of affect and reception. As such, it offers an unprecedented conceptual framework, drawing together what has previously been a scattered field of research. Each of six chapters treats a particular aspect of globalisation, using this as a means to explore one or more of Lepage’s productions. These aspects include the relationship of the local (in Lepage’s case, his background in Québec) to the global; the place of individual experience within global late modernity; the effects of screen media on human perception; the particular affect of ‘feeling global’; the place of branding in contemporary creative systems; and the relationship of creative industries to neoliberal economies. Making theatre global: Robert Lepage’s original stage productions will be of interest to scholars of contemporary theatre, advanced-level undergraduates with an interest in the application of theoretical approaches to theatrical creation and reception, and arts lovers keen for new perspectives on one of the most talked-about theatre artists of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.
–6. 2 José Ortega y Gasset, ‘The misery and the splendor of translation’, trans. Elizabeth Gamble Miller, in Lawrence Venuti (ed.), The translation studies reader (New York: Routledge, 2000), pp. 49–65, at 50. See also Roman Jakobson, ‘On linguistic aspects of translation’, in Venuti (ed.), Translation studies reader , pp. 113–19, at 118. 3 Piuma, ‘The task of the dystranslator’; see
importantly, translation studies has much insight, from which we can learn, apply and extend our understandings in diaspora studies. I discuss ‘diaspora as translation’ ( Chapter 2 ) together with ‘diaspora as decolonisation’ ( Chapter 3 ). I propose a new and productive way of conceptualising diaspora, drawing from the insights of translation studies to inform understandings of authenticity
conceptual framework with which to approach the material, but also, prompted by its recent application in translation studies (Baker 2006 ), in order to investigate the theory itself, to test its usefulness and robustness when used as a tool for intellectual inquiry. Baker emphasises the centrality of both translation and narrative to issues of violent conflict and power; media representations of violent conflict involving the interplay of narrative
assumption and driver of theory, and perhaps even fetishised. Even the notion of hybridity typically conjures up bio-socially distinct entities coming together – although pureness has rightly been rejected by Gilroy (1993) , for example. This book has resisted the reduction of diaspora to in-betweenness, to gaps or even to hybridity – no matter how cherished. Rather, armed with the insight from translation
, outside the new discipline of Translation Studies, still generally prevail). Translation has long been considered a somewhat disreputable practice, especially with regard to light literature. Moreover, the French interest in the Gothic has tended to exist in the context of English literary studies. The consequence, however, is a tendency to believe that the French experience largely mirrored that of