Review of Castellano-Ortolà (2024): Agencies in Feminist Translator Studies: Barbara Godard and the Crossroads of Literature in Canada

Contrary to what might be expected, a Canadian literature in Spanish translation already exists and, expectedly, Margaret Atwood is one of the most translated writers. All her novels except Life Before Man, as well as three of her collections of short stories and three of her poetry collections have been translated into Spanish. Her work has received excellent reviews in Spain which have also praised her translators. This essay focuses on my own experience translating Atwood’s poetry–her collection Power Politics (Juegos de poder, 2000)–into Spanish, in an approach which compares my own project of translation or “projet-de-traduction,” as formulated by Antoine Berman, with that of the other translations of her poetry into Spanish. Being a university teacher and a researcher in Canadian literature, and not a specialist in Translation Studies, my approach is necessarily pragmatic and not theoretical. Bearing in mind Barbara Folkart’s contention that poetry is a cognitive activity and the multiplicity of interpretations that the poems offer, in which the feminist one is prominent, I tried to produce a translation which was as close as possible to the original characteristics of Atwood’s poetry in its tone, lineation and imagistic dimension. The first steps were the stylistic analysis, which resulted in a rhetorical study of the poems, and then the review of the existing criticism about the poems. The main problems which arose during the translation were related to the political and feminist connotations of the poems. If the political context is crucial in Power Politics, the cultural background is vital in The Journals of Susanna Moodie, although it has been erased in its Spanish version (Los diarios de Susanna Moodie, 1991, by Lidia Taillefer and Álvaro García). This is not an unusual phenomenon, since translation consists in an often insurmountable paradox which is formulated in the lines by Margaret Atwood quoted in the title of this article: trying to formulate the same idea in two languages which function differently and have completely different cultural contexts.

The Creative launcher is an International, high quality, Peer-Reviewed open access journal which publishes articles in all areas of English language and literature. The main objective of the Journal is to discuss global prospects and innovations concerning major issues of literature, to publish new analyses and the studies of African American Literature, American Literature, Art, Aesthetics, Myth, Culture and Folklore, British Literature, Canadian Literature, Children’s Literature, Commonwealth Literature, Comparative Literature, Cultural Studies, Cyber Literature, Dalit Literature, Diaspora Studies, Disability Studies, Disaster Literature, English Language Teaching, Gender Studies, Post-Colonial Literature, Indian Literature in English, Pakistan English Literature, SAARC Literature, Linguistics, Science Fiction and Cultural Analysis and Translation Studies and Literature and theory of literature. The Journal seeks to stimulate the initiation of new research and ideas in English literature for the purpose of integration and interaction of international specialists in the development of literature as interdisciplinary knowledge. It particularly welcomes articles on research in various fields of English Literature and language. The journal encourages critical rigour, fresh insights and creative writing skills to its readers and writers. Research articles from all areas of English Literature, English Language Teaching, Short-Essays, Book-Reviews, Interviews, Poems, Short-Stories, Translated Works and Monologues etc. are entertained in this journal. The highest priority is given to research reports that are specifically written for English Literature and its allied areas. The audience is primarily researchers and academicians in various fields concerning English Literature and Language. It has received a wide range of audiences and readers throughout the world.

Agencies in Feminist Translator Studies: Barbara Godard and the Crossroads of Literature in Canada

In recent years Canada has achieved international recognition not only for its prize-winning writers (Margaret Atwood, Michael Ondaatje, Yann Martel, Carol Shields), but also for innovation and leadership in Translation Studies, which has emerged as a relatively new but increasingly vibrant field of scholarly research and publication in our country. In order to facilitate the dissemination and exchange of information about Canadian Literary Translation Studies and foster an increasingly collaborative and international research process, researchers at the Université de Sherbrooke in Sherbrooke, Quebec, Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, British Columbia, and Concordia University in Montreal, Quebec, have established an online bibliographic database of theoretical and critical writing on literary translation in Canada as part of the larger Bibliography of Comparative Studies in Canadian, Québec and Foreign Literatures/Bibliographie d’études comparées des littératures canadienne, québécoise et étrangères . This paper outlines the background of this web-based project and the procedures set in place, as well as the inevitable challenges that may well resonate with other translation bibliographies.

Eva C. Karpinski, Jennifer Henderson, Ian Sowton, and Ray Ellenwood, eds. Trans/acting Culture, Writing, and Memory: Essays in Honour of Barbara Godard. This collection of essays is a thoughtful and generative presentation of the work of Professor Barbara Godard, notably her innovative scholarship in feminist semiotics and translation studies. The chapters engage in the history and practice of Godard's scholarship (Fuller and Forsyth), as well as extend the scholarly interests of her career, paying tribute to Godard as a prolific producer and broker of feminist culture and women's writing in (xi). The text is divided into four parts. Part one highlights Godard's critical feminist interventions into the canon of Canadian Literature, specifically her translations of Quebecois women writers such as Nicole Brossard and her critical writings that brought the diversity of women's writing in Canada into view for a whole generation of Canadian scholars. Pamela McCallum's essay extends Godard's interest in women's writing and translation to the question of cultural memory in her reading of Nancy Huston's The Mark of the Angel, while Karl E. Jirgens takes up Godard's work on the textual and the visual, examining and furthering Godard's theoretical insights into Brossard's Picture Theory. Claudine Potvin also discusses the dialogic mediations of the visual in textual productions of Quebec women writers, Denise Desautels and Louise Warren. Godard's work on language, women's writing, and cultural practices is both discussed and demonstrated by these scholars, who also bring their own exciting insights to the scholarly conversations with Canadian women writers. Part two demonstrates the impact of Godard's work in the 1990s, in particular her studies of cultural institutions, theories of value, and memorializing archival practices. Bringing into view the complexities of cultural location, Moyes and Leclerc's chapter traces the uneven and unequal transactions across Quebec, Arcadia, and English literary publication, Phanuel Antwi politicizes the epistemic frameworks that read the construction of racial difference in literature across regional and provincial cultural maps, Len Findlay attends to the politics of translation in an official bilingual federal government document written for new or prospective Canadian citizens. He pays particular attention to the cultural politics at work in this text and what the linguistic play between and among French/English and Aboriginal, Inuit, Metis languages signifies in terms of sovereignty and state power. …

Made in Canada, Read in Spain is an edited collection of essays on the impact, diffusion, and translation of English Canadian literature in Spain. Given the size of the world’s Spanish-speaking population (some 350 million people) and the importance of the Spanish language in global publishing, it appeals to publishers, cultural agents and translators, as well as to Canadianists and Translation Studies scholars. By analyzing more than 100 sources of online and print reviews, this volume covers a wide-range of areas and offers an ambitious scope that goes from the institutional side of the Spanish-Anglo-Canadian exchange to issues on the insertion of CanLit in the Spanish curriculum; from ‘nation branding’, translation, and circulation of Canadian authors in autonomous communities (such as Catalonia) to the official acknowledgement of  some authors by the Spanish literary system -Margaret Atwood  and Leonard Cohen were awarded the prestigious Prince of Asturias prize in 2008 and 2011, respectively.

The role of Ernest Seton-Thompson as a writer who started the genre of animal short-story and his contribution into the national Canadian literature are discussed in the article. Peculiar features of animal-personages from his short-stories which are close to people were singled out. The peculiarities of the literary translation which aim is to reflect ideas, feelings transforming the author’s images with the help of another language material, the main features that make it different from a classical one were stated. Contemporary scholars who scrutinize this aspect in modern translation studies were found out. The notion of adequacy in the process of a literary text translation, the necessity and strive of the translator to reflect the sense, embodied in artistic images, to preserve genre and style and structural-compositional peculiarities of the original text in the context of comparative analysis of the literary text were noted. The differences between the original text of E.Seton-Thompson’s short-story “The Biography of a Grizzly” and its translation by М.Chukovsky were analyzed in the given article. The translation can be called adequate as some change of content and form of the original text by means of the target language did not impact into general perception of the short-story in its translation. The translator conveys the author’s ideas provoking reader‘s reaction to the story. М.Chukovsky preserved its content, the system of images and the author’s style and plot identity of the original text. Peculiarities of his translation, main structural-grammar and lexical transformations used in the translation were marked. Among the most frequently used transformation techniques actual division of the sentence, grammar changes, change of the sentence parts, concretization, generalization, addition, omission and antonymic translation are noted.