Abstracts: ALA 2022-Chicago

Abstract

AbstractsALA 2022-Chicago Adam Fales Melville's Authorship Throughout his career, Herman Melville offered diverse characterizations of authorial personae. For Melville, authorship is a "ditcher's work," whereby the author "dig[s] in [his] soul for the fine gold of genius." It's also a practice of architecture that leaves "the crane still standing upon the top of the uncompleted tower." Literature can be a kind of weapon that the author aims at a reading public, "every canto a twenty-four-pound shot." The list goes on, but as generations of feminist scholars have shown, Melville's authorial labor was also deeply unequal, relying on the uncompensated and unrecognized work of the women in his life. Over the past two centuries, the author has been differently characterized as a tormented genius, a commercial failure, a grieving father, an abusive husband, a poet who wrote novels, a novelist who wrote poems, and in the words of one contemporary reviewer: "HERMAN MELVILLE CRAZY." Considering all this, it's unclear whether Melville's authorship should be understood as one thing—or even as the work of one person. This panel provided new approaches to studying Melville and the question of authorship, focusing on two aspects of his authorial representations. Two of our panelists turned to Melville's Spanish-language intertexts, with Maria H. Barrera-Agarwal uncovering a previously overlooked and unpublished Spanish translation of Typee. Leah Leone Anderson turns to a later interlocutor of Melville, studying the shifts in meaning that take place in Jorge Luis Borges's own translation of "Bartleby, the Scrivener." The other half of our panel took up one of Melville's novels most preoccupied by the presentation of [End Page 147] the author: Pierre; or, the Ambiguities. Timothy Morris traces Melville's complex play of identification and representation across his depictions of authorship. Samantha O'Connor turns not to the character of Pierre but to the character of Isabel as Melville's authorial figure in the novel, tracing her depiction as a "poisonous muse," which she historicizes alongside criminal cases of the period. Across these various papers, Melville's authorial figurations are multilingual, multigendered, and never straightforward. _______ Imaginary Authorship: The Unknown First Translator of Typee into Spanish Maria H. Barrera-Agarwal Independent Scholar The process of translating Herman Melville's works into Spanish was arduous and belated. The first publication of one of his works—unsurprisingly, Moby-Dick—occurred only in 1940, almost ninety years after the book had appeared in English. Typee would be rendered two years later, in 1942, and Benito Cereno in 1943. The reasons for these late editions run parallel to Melville's authorial fame in the English-speaking world: without wide prominence and critical approval, it was rare for a nineteenth-century author to be translated into Spanish. In Melville's case, even when posthumous celebrity finally arrived, the difficulties created by the specialized language he used in his fiction added to the delay, as well to the contrasting readability of the versions published. This paper unveils for the first time the existence of the earliest translator of Melville into Spanish. A Spaniard and a contemporary of Melville, the translator was a man eminently suited to the task: he was a polyglot, knew English exceedingly well, and had full command of nautical nomenclature, having worked as a seaman and become an erudite in sea-related subjects. He chose Typee as the book to render into Spanish, and he likely achieved the task within the three decades subsequent to the original publication of the book. Despite these facts, his translation was never published, and his close circle of friends believed that he used the name of Herman Melville as a pseudonym, a façade for the creation of a book they fully ascribed to his imagination. _______ Borges Translates "Bartleby": From Moral Allegory to Fantastic Narrative Leah Leone Anderson John Jay University As one of the twentieth century's major innovators of unreliable narration in fiction, and a champion for irreverent translation practices that privilege translators' own artistic sensibilities, Jorge Luis Borges is the last author one would expect to make a narrator more reliable. Yet in his translation [End Page 148...