Table Of ContentUntranslatability Goes Global
This collection brings together contributions from translation theorists,
linguists, and literary scholars to promote interdisciplinary dialogue about
untranslatability and its implications within the context of globalization.
The chapters depart from the pragmatics of translation practice and move
on to consider the role of the translator’s voice and the translator as author
in specific literary works. The volume as a whole seeks to study and at times
dramatize the interplay between translation as a creative practice and its
place within the dynamic between local and global, examining case studies
across a wide variety of literary genres and traditions across regions. By
highlighting the complex interface between translation practice and theory,
translator and author, and local and global, this book will be of particular
interest to graduate students and scholars in translation studies and literary
studies.
Suzanne Jill Levine is a leading translator and critic of Latin American litera-
ture, and distinguished professor at the University of California, Santa Bar-
bara, where she directs the Translation Studies doctoral program. Among
her many honors she has received National Endowment for the Arts and
for the Humanities grants, PEN awards, and a Guggenheim Fellowship for
her literary biography of Manuel Puig (FSG, 2000). She is the author of T he
Subversive Scribe: Translating Latin American Fiction and editor of Pen-
guin’s five-volume paperback classics of Borges’s poetry and essays.
Katie Lateef-Jan is a PhD student in Comparative Literature and Transla-
tion Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Her doctoral
research focuses on twentieth-century Latin American literature, specifically
Argentine fantastic fiction. Her translations from the Spanish have appeared
in Review: Literature and Arts of the Americas and Granta: The Magazine
of New Writing.
Routledge Advances in Translation and Interpreting Studies
For a full list of titles in this series, please visit www.routledge.com
19 Critical Translation Studies
Douglas Robinson
20 Feminist Translation Studies
Local and Transnational Perspectives
Edited by Olga Castro and Emek Ergun
21 Studying Scientific Metaphor in Translation
An Inquiry into Cross-Lingual Translation Practices
Mark Shuttleworth
22 Translating Frantz Fanon Across Continents and Languages
Edited by Kathryn Batchelor and Sue-Ann Harding
23 Translation and Public Policy
Interdisciplinary Perspectives and Case Studies
Edited by Gabriel González Núñez and Reine Meylaerts
24 Translationality
Essays in the Translational-Medical Humanities
Douglas Robinson
25 The Changing Role of the Interpreter
Contextualising Norms, Ethics and Quality Standards
Edited by Marta Biagini, Michael S. Boyd and Claudia Monacelli
26 Translation in Russian Contexts
Culture, Politics, Identity
Edited by Brian James Baer and Susanna Witt
27 Untranslatability Goes Global
Edited by Suzanne Jill Levine and Katie Lateef-Jan
Untranslatability
Goes Global
Edited by
Suzanne Jill Levine
and Katie Lateef-Jan
First published 2018
by Routledge
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Contents
1 Preface: The Untranslatable and World Literature 1
SUZANNE JILL LEVINE
2 Pragmatic Translation 10
ALFRED MAC ADAM
3 On Collaborative Translation 18
VAL VINOKUR AND ROSE RÉJOUIS
4 The Self-Translator’s Preface as a Site of Renaissance
Self-Fashioning: Bernardino Gómez Miedes’ Spanish
Reframing of His Latin ‘Mirror for Princes’ 29
RAINIER GRUTMAN
5 From the Rockies to the Amazon: Translating Experimental
Canadian Poetry for a Brazilian Audience 46
ODILE CISNEROS
6 The Way by Lydia’s: A New Translation of Proust 64
DOMINIQUE JULLIEN
7 “what happens letting words dance from one language
to another”: Translating Giovanna Sandri’s c lessidra:
il ritmo delle tracce 77
GUY BENNETT
8 Through the Mirror: Translating Autofiction 90
BÉATRICE MOUSLI
9 Translating Jón l ærði: Between Proto-Journalism
and Baroque Aesthetics 99
VIOLA MIGLIO
vi Contents
10 Leila Aboulela’s The Translator, a Translational Text? 113
NICOLE CÔTÉ
11 Theory, World Literature, and the Problem
of Untranslatability 128
GAUTI KRISTMANNSSON
Contributors 141
Index 144
Illustrations
5.1 Original of Derek Beaulieu’s “statement,” a poetic
manifesto 54
5.2 Translation of Derek Beaulieu’s “statement,” a poetic
manifesto 55
7.1 Two-page spread of Giovanna Sandri’s “creazione illimitata” 79
7.2 Sandri’s typewritten notes stapled to the page proof
of Guy Bennett’s translation, “limitless creation” 79
7.3 Sandri’s original poem “( )” 80
7.4 Sandri’s typewritten notes stapled to the page proof
of Bennett’s translation, “( )” 81
7.5 Sandri’s original poem “mare” 82
7.6 Sandri’s typewritten notes stapled to the page proof
of Bennett’s translation, “sea” 83
7.7 Sandri’s original poem “tra/di” 83
7.8 Sandri’s typewritten notes stapled to the page proof
of Bennett’s translation, “on/of” 84
7.9 Sandri’s original “con i resti” 85
7.10 Sandri’s typewritten notes stapled to the page proof
of Bennett’s translation, “with the rest” 86
1 Preface
The Untranslatable
and World Literature
Suzanne Jill Levine
Untranslatability and World Literature are both terms which mean differ-
ent things to different people. Back in the 1950s, “postformalist” Roman
Jakobson disparaged the concept of untranslatability in the spirit of “every-
thing and nothing” is translatable, and claimed that untranslatability was a
dogma not unlike other forms of censorship reigning over official culture in
the communist Eastern bloc of Europe. Before him, radical modernists like
Joyce and Pound would have told us, if they were to use such an adjective as
a noun, that the “untranslatable” is an opportunity for invention, for mak-
ing it new. Current translation scholars like Lawrence Venuti, a translator
of Italian literature, emphasize that translation as creative interpretation is
the ultimate humanistic task, not only because it keeps literary works alive,
but because it is an interpretive act that varies the form, meaning and effect
of the source text. Is this a different way of saying the same thing? Is trans-
lation theory going in rhetorical circles? The times have changed, but have
they moved forward or backward? The implications of such questions are
certainly part of the motive for undertaking our volume.
Global and globalization are, respectively, a concept and a process which
have come to signify a radical shift, especially since the turn of the current
century. The nature of and relations between individual nations and the
international community as a whole, in an era dominated by postcolonial
and migrational realities, terrorism and eco-disasters, has been transform-
ing from a stable view of what was once considered unquestionably the
West and what predictably constituted the East, or, for that matter, North
and South. And we no longer speak of what was once defined as “devel-
oped” nations (e.g. in Europe or North America) and as the un- or “under-
developed” countries (e.g. in Africa, Asia or South America). Perhaps the
most defining force in this global reality is the “global” marketplace in late
capitalism since the defeat of communism, the last gasp of romantic utopia
turned dystopic nightmare.
Our book addresses recent debates surrounding untranslatability and the
often contradictory implications of this claim within the postcolonial con-
text of globalization, but Untranslatability Goes Global: The Translator’s
Dilemma restricts its inquiry to literary translation—an ideological stance
