Made in Canada, Read in Spain: Essays on the Translation and Circulation of English-Canadian Literature

The history and reception of translations of modern and contemporary Chinese literature in Spain form the basis of the discussion in this article. Eighty-four translations of modern and contemporary Chinese literature were published in Spain – either in Spanish or in Catalan – between 1949 and 2010. Using this under-researched corpus as a starting-point, this article explores two interrelated premises: the marginalisation of modern and contemporary Chinese literature in Spain and the mediation of its Spanish reception by Anglophone and Francophone literary systems. To do so, the study investigates the history of translations, pays attention to the evolution of types of translation (direct and indirect), and uses concrete examples from paratexts (back covers and prefaces) and translation reviews. After a discussion of the predominance of indirect translations, three recurring motifs inferred from an analysis of the paratexts and reviews are presented: (a) a preference for documentary value, (b) an insistence on difference and (c) an emphasis on politics and trauma (censorship, dissidence and the Cultural Revolution). In addition, I demonstrate the connections between these recurring motifs in the Spanish reception of Chinese literature in relation to European orientalism and area studies. Ultimately, the recent history of translations of modern and contemporary Chinese literature in Spain helps us to reflect on the complexity and hierarchical nature of literary exchanges on a global scale.

Reviewed by: Literary Translation and the Making of Originals by Karen Emmerich Emily Wilson (bio) Karen Emmerich, Literary Translation and the Making of Originals. New York: Bloomsbury. 2017. Pp. 224. 6 illustrations. Paper $26.95. Thanks to the labors of scholars in translation studies, a discipline that has existed in the academy since the 1970s and has done a great deal to advance scholarly understanding of the theory, history, and practice of translation, scholars in the field are now entirely familiar with the fact that translation is always an interpretative act, and that there are a number of very different ways that a translation can legitimately respond to an original text. Karen Emmerich’s brilliant new book argues that we need to consider the instability of the “original text” (3), as well as that of translations. We tend to imagine originals as “categorically richer texts than translations” (2) and discuss translation as if it always began with an entirely stable source text to hand. Emmerich persuasively deconstructs this set of assumptions, showing how originals themselves can be—or, she suggests, are always—also creations, formed qua originals only once derivative texts such as translations make them so. Her starting point is her own experience of being asked to translate a Greek novel by Vassilis Vassilikos, Γλαύκος Θρασάκης (Glafkos Thrassakis, 1979), titled in her translation as The Few Things I Know about Glafkos Thrassakis (2002). According to the terms of her contract, Emmerich was required to provide a “ ‘faithful rendition into idiomatic English’ ” of this novel that would “ ‘neither omit anything from the original text nor add anything to it, other than such modest changes as are necessary in the translation into English’ ” (3). But the contract also specified that Emmerich’s manuscript would be “ ‘approximately 500 pages in length’ ” (3). This combination of requirements posed a rather obvious difficulty, since the two most recent Greek editions of the novel were both more than 750 pages long. Moreover, the novel had gone through several radical revisions by the author, who was still in the process of revising it and himself described it as “ ‘a work in progress’ ” (6, quoting Vassilikos). The author and translator met in a hotel bar to solve the problem of how to create a 500-page text for the English translation; in the end, the author tore out a [End Page 179] “chunk of roughly 150 pages” (6). Since this new “original” was still a good hundred pages too long, Emmerich pared it down as she worked on the translation, checking each cut with the author, who showed surprisingly little interest in her work, but subsequently produced yet another revised version, prompted by Emmerich’s reductions. The “original” from which Emmerich translated was thus “an utterly unique object” (6)—and, in fact, it did not entirely exist—since there was and is no text of the novel that is exactly equivalent to her translation. This hilarious and thought-provoking case is clearly in certain respects an outlier; most translators are not required to abridge the work from which they translate. But Emmerich argues that there are far more cases than we tend to acknowledge in which the “original” or the “source” is itself unstable. She claims that this example is “extreme but not exceptional,” since with all “originals,” relative to translations, “textual instability is there, whether or not we are aware of it” (8). She makes this important argument through a rich, varied series of case studies. Her ultimate goal is to invite readers, critics, and scholars to be “able to let go of the rhetoric and ideology of faithfulness,” and instead to understand translation as a “further textual extension of an already unstable literary work” (14), inviting a more capacious understanding of what translation is and can be. Emmerich’s chapters range across an impressively diverse array of studies. She is to be commended for her willingness to step far outside her central professional area in Modern Greek literature. The first chapter is an overview of the earliest textual reconstructions and translations of the Epic of Gilgamesh, a set of stories dating from the third millennium BCE that survives in fragmentary inscriptions in cuneiform, first deciphered in the...

This current study reports the findings of sociolinguistic research investigating the place of the voseo in the Spanish language curriculum in the United States. The study describes the results of questionnaire responses from 177 US Spanish teachers and survey responses from 560 US college students of Spanish. Both instruments sought to identify the presence or absence of vos, the second person singular pronoun, in Spanish language textbooks and instruction and the respondents' understanding of the voseo vis-a-vis grammatically and culturally appropriate usage. The results indicate that the voseo is simply not included in texts, not taught by the teachers, and not learned by the students. Given that up to two-thirds of the Latin American population are denoted as voseo users, the profession should address this gap in Spanish language instruction. The article concludes with recommendations for curriculum, instruction, and professional development to facilitate the inclusion of the voseo in the Spanish curriculum in the United States.

La literatura brasilena traducida en Espana ocupa un puesto muy discreto en el ranking de las literaturas mas traducidas al espanol. A excepcion de Jorge Amado, y, sobre todo, de Paulo Coelho, los autores brasilenos apenas son conocidos en nuestro pais. En un analisis de las causas de esta invisibilidad, barajamos variables como la difi- cultad de verter al espanol el exotismo y las sutilezas del lenguaje literario brasileno, la falta de una politica cultural de exportacion en el sistema de origen y el poco espacio dedicado a la promocion de la literatura brasilena en Espana. De la mano de Nelida Pinon y Guimaraes Rosa, revisaremos algunas de las caracteristicas de la traduccion del portugues brasileiro al espanol. Ademas de presentar la cartografia de las letras brasilenas en Espana, abordaremos las dinamicas actuales adoptadas desde Brasil y Espana para el desarrollo de politicas concretas de apoyo y difusion de la literatura y cultura brasilenas.

Contrastive rhetoricians working on L2 writing are often unfamiliar with the theories and research of scholars in translation studies. Publications on translation studies give little or no attention to describing the translation strategies of translators, with a focus on the influence of their L1 on the language they produce. This descriptive qualitative study anchored on Nida’s Translation Theory employed stylistic, lexico-semantic, and grammatical analyses of the stylistic devices employed by poets across nine language cultures to reveal the translation strategies employed by translators and to establish the type of equivalence manifested in the translated texts. The corpus consists of 27 poems written in Bahasa Indonesia, Hiligaynon, Tagalog (Malayo-Polynesian languages), French, Italian, Spanish (Romance languages), German, Icelandic, and Norwegian (Germanic Languages), translated into English. Stylistic analysis reveals that original texts and English translations share the same devices, suggesting that stylistic devices do not get lost in translation. Lexico-semantic and grammatical analyses showed that translators of Malayo-Polynesian languages employed idiomatic translation as a compensatory strategy, producing English translations that manifest Dynamic Equivalence or transparency; translators of Romance languages resorted to synonymous substitution or literal translation, suggesting Formal Equivalence or fidelity; and translators of Germanic languages used a combination of idiomatic and literal translation strategies, with noticeable preference for Dynamic Equivalence, evidenced by the prevalence of metaphorical translations as compensatory strategy. Implications on the intricate relationship between culture and language in the translation process were drawn based on the findings. Keywords: translation strategy, dynamic equivalence, formal equivalence, translation theory, transparency, fidelity

In this article I approach literary translators’ associations in the context of late twentieth century Spain through the theoretical lens of Bourdieu’s sociology of literature. I argue that one important function of the activism that these organizations promoted was the social construction of literary translation as a form of literature in its own right. In this article I present multiple instances of how translators made use of the communicative spaces that their associations created (round tables, publications, conferences, interviews, etc.) to publicly represent translation as a kind of creation which can be largely autonomous from economic as well as scholarly considerations, and which presents three traits that are specific to literature. These traits are self-referentiality, ability to create its own object, and a structure defined by a heteronomous and an autonomous pole. This sociological approach to a largely understudied dimension of translators’ collective action invites us to revise the notion that literary translators’ associations function as professional bodies that, for the most part, fail to protect the interests of their members.

Reviewed by: Incomparable Empires: Modernism and the Translation of Spanish and American Literature by Gayle Rogers Brian J. Cope Rogers, Gayle. Incomparable Empires: Modernism and the Translation of Spanish and American Literature. Columbia UP, 2016. Pp. 296. ISBN 978-0-23117-856-3. Literary history, modernismo, and translation comprise the three critical constellations of Incomparable Empires: Modernism and the Translation of Spanish and American Literature. The book presents a series of case studies of authors from Spain and the United States who sustained a marked interest in the literary canon of the opposing empire. The book is predominantly a literary and cultural history sprinkled with close readings and critical commentaries of selected texts that will appeal to scholars wishing to gain a cross-national and comparative perspective on the work of Ezra Pound, Juan Ramón Jiménez, John Dos Passos, Miguel de Unamuno, Ernest Hemingway, Langston Hughes, Richard Wright, and Ilan Stavans. The common thread connecting these authors is their work as translators, and in most cases (but not all), their idiosyncratic cultivation of a translational mode of poeisis that lends distinction and originality to their creative work and aesthetic outlook. Incomparable Empires is divided into three sections, each comprised of two chapters that offer insightful historical panoramas and original textual analyses. Ezra Pound and John Dos Passos constitute the focus of the first section ("American Modernism's Hispanists"), which explores the authors' profound interest in the history and literature of Spain. Rogers effectively [End Page 653] shows that both authors developed critical visions of Spain's imperial legacy that contrasted with the more celebratory visions of prominent US Hispanists like William Dean Howells and Archer Milton Huntington (founder of the Hispanic Society of America). Rogers argues persuasively that the authors' engagement with Spain and US Hispanism helped shape their critical views on the state of US letters and on the rise of US imperialism. The chapter on Pound examines traces of the Cantar de mío Cid in The Spirit of Romance and in a selection of the Cantos, framing the latter as a poeticized translation of the Cid that historicizes, interprets, and revitalizes the medieval text. In contrast, the chapter on Dos Passos discusses the influence of Machado's Campos de Castilla on A Pushcart at the Curb, which contains several lyrical vignettes of rural life in modern Castile. Juan Ramón Jiménez and Miguel de Unamuno comprise the focus of the book's second section ("Spain's American Translations"), which examines the authors' engagement with and translation of US literature. The first chapter discusses Jiménez as an heir to Rubén Darío; his interest in US literature and work as a translator; his exile in the United States and Puerto Rico, where he held several professorships; and his desire to fuse modernismo with US modernism. The chapter contains a close reading of Diario de un recién casado that argues that the poem exhibits characteristics of both modernismo and US modernism that reinforce Jiménez's integrative and cosmopolitan aesthetic philosophy. In contrast, the chapter on Unamuno profiles his work as a translator; maps the theories of translation to which he subscribed or from which he departed; and fleshes out his vision for translation as an engine of reciprocal literary and linguistic innovation. The chapter offers an insightful discussion of Unamuno's affinity for Anglophone literature and his understanding of the United States as a rare historical contact zone for English and Spanish that made possible a poet like Walt Whitman. Rogers argues that Unamuno aspired to chart a new course for Spanish poetry through his translation of Whitman and his literary disciples. Rogers defends this wholly untenable position by inferring too much from Unamuno's professed enthusiasm for Anglophone literature and by projecting too much onto Unamuno's veneration of Whitman and his successors. Nevertheless, the chapter makes a respectable contribution to the scholarship in its careful excavation of Unamuno's innovative philosophy of translation, which, as Rogers elegantly demonstrates, intersects with Pound's signature vision of translation as a method of poeisis. The two chapters comprising the book's third section ("New Genealogies") are related only in their focus on US...

This book sheds light on the translations of renowned semiotician, essayist, and author Ilan Stavans, elucidating the ways in which they exemplify the migrant experience and translation as the interactions of living and writing in intercultural and interlinguistic spaces. While much has been written on Stavans’ work as a writer, there has been little to date on his work as a translator, subversive in their translations of Western classics such as Don Quixote and Hamlet into Spanglish. In Stavans’ experiences as a writer and translator between languages and cultures, Vidal locates the ways in which writers and translators who have experienced migratory crises, marginalization, and exclusion adopt a hybrid, polydirectional, and multivocal approach to language seen as a threat to the status quo. The volume highlights how the case of Ilan Stavans uncovers unique insights into how migrant writers’ nonstandard use of language creates worlds predicated on deterritorialization and in-between spaces which more accurately reflect the nuances of the lived experiences of migrants. This book will be of particular interest to students and scholars in translation studies, literary translation, and Latinx literature.

Introduction. Today, simile as a stylistic device attracts the attention of scholars in translation studies, since similes convey the figurative information of the source text and, consequently, their adequate rendering contributes to the creation of an adequate translation of the whole poetic work taking into account its imagery as a key to understanding the author’s worldview. The translator should strive to preserve the image of the source text in translation by using the means of expressiveness which is one of the most complex problems in the theory of translation from English into Ukrainian.Purpose. The purpose of the article is to highlight the peculiarities of similes as a means of representing the author’s worldview and to determine the specificity of their rendering in Ukrainian translations of modern English poetry.Methods. The methodology of the research includes the use of methods of analysis and synthesis for determining the theoretical background of the study; contextual analysis for the selection of illustrative material; lexical, stylistic, and pragmatic analysis as a means of determining the imagery of simile and its transferred meaning in the poem; as well as the methodsof translation analysis in determining the specifics of rendering similes in translation.Results. Simile is a linguistic and stylistic means at the same time; it is a complex system of multifaceted means of expression: morphological, syntactic, lexical, and word-forming, representing the author’s vision of reality through the correlation of objects and phenomena. Figurative comparison (simile), unlike logic one, captures one of the most distinctive features of an object or phenomenon, sometimes unexpected, and makes it the main one ignoring all others. In the works of modern English poets, similes are unexpected, “fresh”, i.e. the authors striveto create new ways to embody their worldview. Rendering such similes is extremely important for understanding the author’s worldview, so the most significant transformations occur in the sphere of lexical units’ meanings and are represented by differentiation and modulation, as well as addition,omission, and total rearrangement.Conclusions. The research reveals that, most often, similes in contemporary English poetry are rendered in Ukrainian translations by using transformations that modify their semantic content. This conclusion confirms that the semantics is the basis for rendering similes in translation.

The article examines Ray Bradbury’s unique literary voice through his novel Dandelion Wine and focuses on analysing the recreation of expressive syntax in the translation done by V. Mytrofanov. The theoretical basis from Ukrainian and foreign scholars in translation studies, stylistics, and linguistics served as a framework for employing contrastive analysis, statistical evaluation, and descriptive methods to assess the adequacy of translation in preserving Ray Bradbury’s hypersyntax. The article reveals the results of the research involving 585 examples of syntactical stylistic devices, investigates their functioning and the regularities and peculiarities of their recreation, and presents a statistical analysis based on device classification. The paper’s novelty lies in identifying stylistic peculiarities of R. Bradbury’s literary expressiveness, tracing relevant components of the text, and recreating them, which is crucially important for adequate translation. The research findings contribute to translation studies, contrastive syntax, and stylistics, offering insights for further research into stylistic devices at the level of sentence, paragraph, or stylistic whole, as well as a basis for looking at expressiveness as a systemic phenomenon. This research highlights the intricacies of Bradbury’s prose and sheds light on translation strategies for tackling stylistic nuances, ultimately enriching the discourse on literary translation and stylistic analysis.

Translatology of modern Kazakhstan has actualized the problem of translation of Kazakh literature into worldlanguages. The active process of literary translation has increased the interest of foreign readers in the national culture, creativity, and identity of the Kazakh people. It set a new vector for the research of Kazakh scholars in translation studies. However, owing to the lack of professional translators, direct translation from Kazakh into English has always been problematic, so Kazakh writers’ works were translated indirectly fromRussian into foreign languages. The article presents the problem of defining “indirect translation” by Western, Russian, and Kazakh linguists. Authors consider ways of adapting the direct and indirect translations bycomparing them with the source text of A. Nurpeisov's novel “Songy Paryz”. The paper aims to reveal theways of implementing linguocultural, pragmatic aspects of the original text and strategies for transferring artand pictorial means of the Kazakh language in direct and indirect translations. Experts in linguistics, translation studies, cognitive science, linguocultural studies, and literary criticism will be interested in the researchresults.

While Countess Emilia Pardo Bazán (1851-1921), a successful novelist, an essayist and a champion of women’s rights in Spain, was not a translator of Russian literature (although she was a very talented linguist and translated from many languages into Spanish), she was the first, and without doubt, the greatest popularizer of Russian literature in Spain and later in Spanish America. Through her three public lectures given in Madrid in 1887, which she later published as a book, she gave, first to her audience and then to Spanish readers in general, an excellent overview of Russian culture and literature––and this in a highly original and creative manner. Wherever possible, Pardo Bazán endeavoured to suggest meaningful and relevant links between the Spanish and Russian literatures; she always provided full and clear biographical materials about the Russian writers she was presenting as well as detailed and lively analyses of their works. Sadly, her valuable contribution to this field has been ignored or, at best, it has been defined as of historical interest only. In 2021, the anniversary of her death, not a single commemorative event in Madrid focussed on her outstanding work as cultural intermediary between Spain and Russia. This essay aims to redress this balance somewhat by showing that Pardo Bazán bequeathed to Spanish readers a well-informed and carefully-researched body of critical studies of Russian literature. Additionally, the influence of certain Russian authors on her own fiction, as I suggest, constitutes an important task for future scholars. Almost entirely due to Pardo Bazán’s pioneering work as the major popularizer of Russian literature in Spain, the first wave of direct translations of Russian writers into Spanish began to appear shortly after the publication of her lectures.

Reviewed by: Christian Felix Weiße the Translator: Cultural Transfer and Literary Entrepreneurship in the Enlightenment by Tom Zille Caroline Summers Christian Felix Weiße the Translator: Cultural Transfer and Literary Entrepreneurship in the Enlightenment. By Tom Zille. London: IMLR Research. 2021. xiii+221 pp. £25. ISBN 978–0–85457–273–1. This first monograph from Tom Zille explores the extensive translation output and literary influence of the Enlightenment writer Christian Felix Weiße (1726–1804). It is the first published volume in English on Weiße's work, and it offers a detailed study of his contribution to Anglo-German relations and translation culture in a period that saw the emergence of professional translation and the modern book trade, along with 'the accelerating evolution of the German literary idiom' (p. 7). Zille delivers a carefully researched microhistory, with a focus on substantial analysis of Weiße's unpublished correspondence that generates much to interest book historians, translation scholars, and modern translators. The study is not primarily concerned with theoretical approaches, but Germany's complex intercultural relationships with its European neighbours are explored through a broad focus on the question of cultural transfer. This is a concept that has made some inroads in Translation Studies, including recent work not mentioned by Zille such as Maud Gonne, Klaartje Merrigan, Reine Meylaerts, and Heleen van Gerwen's Transfer Thinking in Translation Studies: Playing with the Black Box of Cultural Transfer (Leuven: Leuven University Press 2020). Weiße's correspondence reveals the complex interests that shape intercultural mediation and offers insights into the newly marketized field of literary translation, for example through his criticism of the 'Raubsucht der Übersetzer' (p. 31) who take great liberties with their texts or demonstrate limited knowledge of the source language. Some space is given to scrutiny of Weiße's own translations, allowing an illustration of his developing translation strategy. Zille explores how Weiße negotiated contemporary debates on translation, navigating binaries of stylistic accuracy versus target-language fluency or equivalent effect versus literalness that continue to preoccupy the field. While Translation Studies scholars may find themselves frustrated by a lack of theoretical context and the seeming self-evidence of comments on the 'success' (or otherwise) of Weiße's translation choices, such textual analysis allows an exploration of the blurred boundaries of the role of the translator, looking at the intersections between Weiße's translation and his original writing to show how translation might shape target-language usage. It is in the two chapters on networks and agency that Weiße's literary entrepreneurship is most compellingly presented. The correspondence reveals a powerful network of cultural influence, and in places the book reads like a Who's Who of eighteenth-century German literature (although Johann Wolfgang von Goethe is conspicuously absent). However, while Weiße enjoyed some illustrious connections, the letters also record the precarity of his various and intersecting roles as translator, writer, publisher, editor, commentator, educator, and literary advocate. The variety of texts he translated reflects an ongoing struggle to reconcile literary prestige with commercial viability, a dilemma that may be just as familiar to literary translators in the present day. The result is a robust portrait of a flesh-and-blood [End Page 273] translator, for whom translation is both a creative endeavour and a material necessity. This is a carefully researched and vivid account of eighteenth-century German culture that reveals the power and position of translators within a developing ecosystem of literary professionalism and intercultural relations. It would have been enriched by fuller engagement with the wider Translation Studies context: Zille acknowledges his focus specifically on translation debates contemporary to Weiße, but it is surprising that there is no nod even towards ideas about foreignization (Friedrich Schleiermacher) or Weltliteratur (Goethe) that would begin to circulate in Germany almost immediately after Weiße's death, or to the ongoing discourse on both these issues that continues to characterize debates in Translation Studies and beyond. There is also certainly more to be said about how Weiße's work maps onto established and more recent theories of translator agency and networks. However, what emerges powerfully from the study is...

The problem of translation and loss is a cardinal concern in translation studies. Conventional wisdom tells us that translation must necessarily entail loss. However, some translation studies scholars have argued that translation can yield significant originality in the target text. Christiane Nord, for one, argues that literary translators can claim authorial presence by actually causing the source text to “grow” in a way that is quantitative and qualitative. Although Nord’s idea applies mainly to literary translation, it raises questions about how this could apply to translations of other types of creative source texts, such as audio/visual translation. The format of interlingual subtitling between two disparate languages, such as English and Japanese, burdens translation with severe constraints and considerable loss text is taken for granted. But what is lost? Meaning? Nuance? This paper argues that these need not be lost in subtitling. In fact, by applying Nord’s model of source text growth to subtitling, we can see how subtitling produces new value to the source text. Through a close analysis of the Japanese subtitles of the 2007 film, There Will Be Blood, this paper will demonstrate that despite the severe constraints placed on the translation found in film subtitling, subtitles can promote “qualitative growth” by transferring the poetic function of the source text into new configurations in the target text, prompting target text viewers to interpret content in new ways.

The European Dimension in Education (EDE) is a policy promoted by the Council of Europe and the European Union that aims to foster active, critical citizenship based on common democratic values. It is also associated with the idea of promoting better knowledge of the European Union and of the concept of European citizenship. Ever since the policy was initially launched, EU Member States have been trying to add a European dimension to their education systems, although little progress has been made. In this paper, we study the way EDE has been integrated into the Spanish education system. Our research is based on an analysis of the national and regional curricula for Social Sciences (Geography, History) and Citizenship Education in compulsory secondary education, as these are the main subjects within which Spanish students are taught civic education. Results showed few signs of progress in the integration of EDE into the Spanish curriculum. In fact, a regressive trend was observed in some cases. The curriculum has varied a lot over the years in line above all with the ideology of the national government. It has also varied considerably across Spain’s different regions, which play an important role in the inclusion of EDE contents in the curriculum. The inclusion of specific subjects on Citizenship Education has provided a considerable boost to the integration of EDE into the Spanish curriculum. However, EU-related content is usually scarce and is never considered as important as content explaining the Spanish political system, citizenship, geography and history. Our paper concludes that a stronger European focus in the national curriculum would be highly recommended, so as to fully embrace EDE. In addition, a cross-party consensus should be reached on citizenship education and its contents, stressing the important role it can play as a separate subject.