An interview with Olga Voronina, translator and co-editor of „Letters to Vera”, by Vladimir Nabokov. On translational culture, Nabokov and migrant identity.

Persistent and futile are the theories of translation. But so are as those of the fantastic or the acts of public piety. From the posturing of a judgmental above or an insidious aside, little of substance has been said about the swarming, sharp work of translation. As if there were a general of translation, not having to whom to delegate the work of difference across the clouds, the sun gets bored upon seeing than everything underneath is the same. To be sure, there is no interesting theory of translation as...   ⇨ Read more

Based on critical theory such as Giorgio Agamben‟s homo sacer and Heidegger‟s thoughts on dwelling and lethe, this article follows the biopolitical movement of destruction in Franz Kafka‟s Die Verwandlung (Metamorphosis) to reveal some of the challenges this contextualization poses to its English translation. Stanley Corngold‟s translation serves as an example for the intricacies that pertain specifically to Kafka‟s language of abjection, words such as the famous Ungeziefer of the first sentence. These...   ⇨ Read more

Lady Precious Stream by Shih-I Hsiung was the first successful West End play by a Chinese playwright. Based on a traditional Chinese opera but with many changes, the play had an enormous appeal to the modern audience in the West. This paper argues that the play is essentially an ingenious re-creation in which Hsiung has undertaken a combination of three roles: translating the original into English; adapting it to the English theatrical practice while maintaining the Chinese convention; and re-writing some of...   ⇨ Read more

Both in Speak, Memory and in Strong Opinions, Nabokov insists on his early proficiency in English, French. This authorial stance makes it easy to believe that the writer's transition to English was easy. And yet, Nabokov's correspondence with publishers and his literary agent, Altagracia de Jannelli, reveals that this conversion was torturous and required extensive support from native speaker editors and translators. The essay documents Nabokov's inner turmoil at the time when he began to explore the British...   ⇨ Read more

Translation Studies has crossed a tumultuous interval of theorization. But has it passed the linguistic limits instituted by a semiotician like Umberto Eco? Wouldn’t be the time to access more courageously the intersemiotic interregnum with its heterogeneous transfer of signs? As it happens in advertising, concrete poetry, tattoos, and stage or filmed version of famous texts? If we have gradually accepted that in the postcolonial and cross-cultural epoch what matters is not consensus, but negotiation and...   ⇨ Read more

This paper aims to shed light on the different aspects of transnationalism and transnational literature in regard to the German cultural space and the so-called (Im)Migrantenliteratur (immigrant literature and migrant literature, respectively). By this approach, the historical context of post-war Germany will prove itself to be of great relevance, especially in studying the sociological consequences brought about by the import of Turkish work force in Germany, the concept of difference and its modes of...   ⇨ Read more

The present essay addresses the ideas of radical translation and radical interpretation advanced by celebrated analytic philosophers such as W. V. O. Quine and D. Davidson, attempting to show their relevance for translation theory and, more broadly, for the corpus of literary theory. I aim to reassess the debate over the translatability or untranslatability of a literary or cultural text, taking it beyond the politics of translation and multicultural studies and placing it within the framework of hermeneutic...   ⇨ Read more

Our study investigates the possible ways of discussing the functions of the identity in fictional work. As point of departure we have chosen the novel Jacob se hotărăște să iubească (Jacob beschließt zu lieben, C.H. Beck, 2011) by Cătălin Dorian Florescu. Identity is multilayered, having being formed and transformed continuously in relation to the ways we are represented or addressed in the cultural systems, as Stuart Hall (1992, 1997) stressed out. The approach is heavily influenced by postcolonial and...   ⇨ Read more

The paper aims at discussing translation as a political and ethical paradigm, as proposed by Bogdan Ghiu and Lawrence Venuti, in the broader context of comparative literature‘s contrarian turn with the Bernheimer and the Saussy reports, as well as in conjunction with anarchism‘s minor literary tradition (in the deleuzian sense). I argue that the translation paradigm and the non-vanguardist anarchist aesthetic are stemming from the same legacy of freedom, both formulating their basic ethical, political and...   ⇨ Read more

The following paper intends to investigate the main junctures and disjunctures of Romanian prose written by women in the first half of the twentieth century from a quantitative perspective. The paper will employ a macroanalysis of both the novels written in this period and the prose written by female writers, in order to establish a pattern in the modernisation and institutionalisation of Romanian literature in the inter-war period, more specifically in the 1930s, the decade that saw the emergence of the main...   ⇨ Read more

As a literary genre, the travel literature was considered a literary hybrid made of several other sub-genres, or a literary sub-species made of the autobiographic writings (Paul Fussell) or of the ethnographic writings (Patrick Holland). Being defined on several axes, such as fiction/non-fiction literature, internal/external travels, poetical/historical form, time/space perspective, the travel writings differ not only in terms of narrative strategies but also in terms of method or purpose of writing. The travel...   ⇨ Read more

The literary domain has suffered several delineations throughout the centuries. No matter if it is perceived from a chronological, theoretical or constitutive perspective, there is a ceaseless readjustment regarding the perception of literature, with its afferent notions, such as the literary canon, translations or its own dynamics. This article outlines one of the major approaches for the literary space, due to David Damrosch, who has made visible the concept of “world literature”. Moreover, this article is an...   ⇨ Read more

This paper aims at explaining the translation process through a psychological perspective, the Cultural Frame Switching paradigm. Psychological studies concerned with the Cultural Frame Switching have proven that bilingualism and multilingualism favour the manifestation of different personalities of the same person, i.e. speaking different languages will lead to displaying different personalities, as a result of the cultural influences acting upon us. Along this line of research, one can expect that a...   ⇨ Read more

This article will analyse the various ways in which opera translations of William Shakespeare‟s works are part of the cultural adaptation process. Using examples from various libretti, from the classical to the Romanian versions, the author claims that these adaptations are actually making Shakespeare more accessible across linguistic and cultural borders.

My paper will discuss the critical grounds that preceded the translation of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy‟s diaries into Romanian, published by Univers Publishing House in 1974 and 1975-1976 respectively, focusing on the Prefaces written by Ion Ianoși. Relying on both historical studies and relevant documents of the 1947-1989 period, I will start by generally describing, on the one hand, the process of the Russian and Soviet translations into post-War Romania and, on the other hand, the Communist regime‟s views and...   ⇨ Read more

Bogdan GHIU, Everything must be translated: the new paradigm [Totul trebuie tradus: noua paradigmă], Cartea Românească, București, ISBN print: 978-973-23-3101-9, 2015, 235 p.