| The topic of this course, LITERATURE, PARATRANSLATION AND CULTURAL NEGOTIATIONS, is based directly on what happens to be the main agenda of our research group Translation and Paratranslation, which insistently demands that we think of Translation not as a subsidiary discipline seen merely as peripheral activity on the margins of other “relevant”-- cultural, social and political--practices. Rather, translation lies at the heart of many acts of communication and representation (between cultures and within cultures) and at the same time, translations and paratranslations reveals always a particular agency, a certain way of knowing and representing experience thus joining in with other “essential” forms and discourses of epistemology and representation. In this respect, translation as representation is never total, neutral, absolute, but relative, relativized, relativistic, sometimes in an explicit way, others more implicitly. Its contingency being precisely what makes it interesting.The relativistic aspect of translation--culturally, socially, historically, politically determined-- becomes obvious when the same literary texts once it is translated and re-contextualized by different interpretative communities may be invoked to perform radically different functions. |
-The role that translation plays within highly politicised contexts and its connection with censorship, particularly in those cases in which language and literature are part of a state ideology supported by its organic intellectuals--intelligentsia-- (a category that includes thinkers, artists, writers/ critics/ and, of course, translators). In these “sensitive” contexts, the often explicit complicity between language, literature, culture and state challenges the naïf --yet popular-- believe that translation deals only/merely with texts and literary authors, with aesthetic judgements and textual interpretation.
2-The way in which translation becomes an essential mechanism in the formation of images and imaginaries of foreign writers, texts and cultures which in specific circumstances, may undergo significant transformations as they are translated and received by a particular group or national community of with a very specific political/cultural/identitarian agenda.
3-Ultimately if translation can never be “complete” or “transparent” since, apart from intentional manipulation on the translators’ part, language always bears its own vast transforming inter-text of culturally grafted meanings, we would analyse specific case-studies in relation to particular texts in order to consider the linguistic, cultural, and historical contexts in which translation occurs in order to discuss the challenges translators encounter on both the level of style and culture-bound elements in the original. Thus, special attention will be devoted the translation of cultural references, ideological and political implications, puns, songs, rhymes, riddles and metalinguistic commentaries which offer an obvious resistance to be transferred into other languages.
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