Erotic Literature in Adaptation and Translation by Johannes D. Kaminski

Abstract

 Reviews rington; he is comprehensive on Ivanhoe but not as incisive as Michael Ragussis’s work on the novel in Figures of Conversion: ‘e Jewish Question’ and English National Identity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press ). e same point holds with Daniel Deronda; here a certain literal-mindedness about circumcision means that Sicher misses Cynthia Chase’s extraordinary ‘e Decomposition of the Elephants : Double-Reading Daniel Deronda’ (PMLA,  (), –). Writing well on Halévy’s opera La Juive (), he could have had more on what Wagner called ‘the Jew in opera’ (to which he refers, p. ): there are fascinating father/daughter relationships in Offenbach’s Tales of Hoffman, for instance. What he says about Orientalism in the nineteenth century is well taken, but does not go further than standard, student-oriented accounts of this. e book is almost silent about psychoanalysis ; that would have questioned Christianity’s hostility to Judaism (a theme for the book, especially for the motif of conversion, with whatever degree of voluntariness involved), and have given another father/daughter relationship: the father of psychoanalysis and Anna Freud. SWPS U W J T Erotic Literature in Adaptation and Translation. Ed. by J D. K. (Transcript, ) Cambridge: Legenda. . x+ pp. £. ISBN –– ––. Beginning life as a short conference held at the University of Cambridge in , Erotic Literature in Adaptation and Translation surveys a capacious archive of erotic cultural production, from the notorious to the niche. Arranged conceptually into twelve chapters spanning three broad categories—text to text, text to image, text to film—this edited volume runs the gamut of transhistorical, cross-cultural translation and adaptation, roving the canon of erotic literature, from the Marquis de Sade to Georges Bataille, Nicholson Baker to E. L. James, to name but a few, as well as exploring film adaptations by Michael Haneke and Patrice Chéreau. is Western focus is tempered by discussions of Japanese ‘national erotics’ during the Heian period, the intertextual ‘erotica-in-erotica’ aesthetic of late imperial Chinese literature , and pornographic cinema in Hong Kong. Ambitious in scope, this is essential reading for anyone contemplating the pitfalls and possibilities of transmitting sexual content across geographical, historical, cultural, and linguistic borders. is broad geographical sweep is both bait and deterrent. e volume is set apart from similar studies by its commitment to non-European translation and adaptation, a point the editor is keen to emphasize. Erotic literature, by dint of its inherent promiscuity, is always already world literature. But this collection is never wholly divested of certain essentializing gestures. (It is worth noting that the selected archive of erotic fiction is male-centric and heteronormative by default, with little repudiation of this jaundiced focus.) ‘“Western” culture must carry on conversation with the other, non-European cultures if it is not to become provincial ’ (p. ), Kaminski warns in the Introduction. If ‘the West’ is monolithic here, the rest remain atomized: singular versus plural. ese ‘other’ cultures—reaching MLR, .,   intelligibility as lack, as non-European—are charged with the duty of liberating the West from its own echo chamber, ‘provincial’ evoking a certain closed-mindedness. Not only is this geographical dichotomy problematic—the Western authors surveyed are almost exclusively white, while the non-European cultures discussed are predominantly East Asian—this statement of intent is also somewhat misleading . Western and non-European cultural productions, although present in the volume as a whole, rarely mingle within single chapters. e exception is Kaminski ’s chapter on audio-erotics, which brings together the work of Goethe and Li Yu, a manœuvre that the author wilfully acknowledges is ‘idiosyncratic’ (p. ). Despite Kaminski’s attempt, the echo chamber remains robust, the ‘conversation’ curtailed. Nevertheless, each chapter is conceptually challenging and theoretically rigorous. Indebted to the ‘cultural turn’ of translation studies, pioneered in the early s by Susan Bassnett, André Lefevere, and Lawrence Venuti among others, the contributors are sensitive to the vicissitudes of cultural values and sexual mores, and to the disfigurement that translation precipitates. What, they ask, is at stake when erotic material is converted, when notions of titillation and taboo remain subjective and culturally constructed? At its most productive, this collection approaches ‘the erotic’ and ‘translation’ as coterminous, an intervention explored only...