Found in Translation: Paradigms, Process, Poetry

Keynotes in London
Cultural Turn in Translation Studies

Professor Susan Bassnett, University of Warwick

15th May 2004, 10:30-16:00

The Centre hosted this colloquium, for which a draft programme and further details are available on this page. Please note that registration details and more information are available from Dr Jan Parker (jan.parker@open.ac.uk)

DRAFT Programme

Panel themes

Translation positives
(Panel Leader, Prof Lorna Hardwick, Humanities Higher Education Research Group, OU)

• Prof Richard Whitaker, Capetown (Iliad in/and South African language translations) Reception, Postcolonialism, Cultural Resistance
• Dr Nick Lowe, Royal Holloway, University of London
• Dr Emily Greenwood, St Andrews
• Prof Lorna Hardwick, Humanities Higher Education Research Group, OU
  Intercultural Metaphors
• Dr Alison Phipps, Glasgow

Poetry and Thought Between Cultures
(Panel Leader, Dr Aleka Lianeri, Cambridge)

• Poetry - Prof David Hopkins, Prof of Poetry, Bristol; Editor of the Oxford History of Literary Translation
• Prof Jonathan Monroe, Dept of Comparative Literature, Cornell
• David Constantine, Dept of Modern Languages, Oxford
• Holocaust Records - Dr Piotr Kuhiwczak, Director, Centre for Translation and Comparative Cultural Studies, Warwick
• Jiddish Novels - Making Their Own - Dr Sherman, Oriental Studies, Oxford
• Prof Theo Hermans, University College London
• Classic Simplicity in 18th Literature - Dr Fred Parker, Cambridge
• The Classic and Thought - Dr Aleka Lianeri, Cambridge

Identity and Translation; Voice across Genre
(Panel Leader Dr Colleen McKenna, University College London)

• Multimedia - Dr Colleen McKenna, University College London
• Page to (ROH) Stage - Dr Greg Dart, University College London
• Dialogue, Persona - Simon Bayly, Roehampton, University of Surrey
• [Women's] Journals and Identity - Cinthia Gannett, Loyola, Baltimore
• Film - Dr P Michelakis, Bristol

Academic Tribes, Writing and Identity
(Panel Leader Dr Jan Parker, Humanities Higher Education Research Group, OU)

• Prof Ron Barnett, Institute of Education, University of London
• Dr Mary Huber, Senior Scholar, Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, Ca
• Sally Mitchell, Thinking Writing, Queen Mary, University of London
• Dr Jan Parker, Humanities Higher Education Research Group, OU

Found in Translation: Paradigms, Identity, Poetry

Translation Studies’ paradigms are a constellation of models from the classical, Renaissance and ‘Augustan’ past and postmodern, postcolonial, post 9/11 future; drawn from and feeding into literary and intercultural studies, hermeneutics, cultural linguistics and ethnography.

Translation is both process and product; it is also a multiply resonant metaphor of cultural interaction and metonym of the play of text on text…

The metaphors used of translation are illuminating: translation as mirror, handmaid, crutch; the profession a craft, a science; the process ‘creative fire’, divine inspiration, the mantle passing from poet to disseminator or the machine-like generation of equivalence; those who practise it traitors (traduttore traditore), pimps or parasites (imitatio aemulatio)…. or gardeners coaxing new blooms to spring from dead stock (Tony Harrison)…

The metaphors testify to the richness but also the difficulty of analysing the many foci of cultural exchange. All those who practise, who produce ‘translations’ of any sort have to situate themselves within competing paradigms and often negative imagery of their work.

And whereas those exploring the variety and richness of intercultural dialogue tend to use ‘translation’ as active and generative, stressing what can be ‘found in translation’, the history of Translation Studies is full of images of loss: of poetry, of identity, of creative voice. A recent autobiography, like the famous definition of poetry, was entitled ‘Lost in Translation’.

Those who work with and those who work on models of translation; those who translate as those who use translation, come up against competing paradigms and conflicting metaphors. All could be pardoned for thinking that identity – of translator as well as translated – is like Eva Hoffmann’s ‘lost in translation’. Yet in the midst of such, translators have to find a voice and find an identity. As have those, such as those invited to the colloquium, who use translation and translation models to enrich, enliven and liberate their disciplines and their writing.

It is hoped that in bringing together those valuing translation (both literary and intercultural) in writing, in teaching and in performance - those who create in and through translation - new positive models will be generated. Such models may liberate the hermeneutic disciplines’ constricting self image and suggest to literary and cultural studies a new valuing of the interpenetrating movements, continuities and sparks – of friction and of ignition - between texts and between cultures. And as cultural studies and ethnography become ever more critical of the readings they produce of the cultural texts they study, such models may offer precise new ways of thinking about such widespread concerns as integrity, alterity, propriety, identity, voice.

In this two stage colloquium it is hoped that new directions emerge that inform translation, literary and cultural studies – out of dialogue in the UK, presentation in Cornell and publication internationally.

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