Science Fiction in Translation: Perspectives on the Global Theory and Practice of Translation ed. by Ian Campbell

Abstract

Reviewed by: Science Fiction in Translation: Perspectives on the Global Theory and Practice of Translation ed. by Ian Campbell Lorenzo Andolfatto Triangulating SF in Translation. Ian Campbell, ed. Science Fiction in Translation: Perspectives on the Global Theory and Practice of Translation. Palgrave Macmillan, studies in global science fiction, 2021. xvii+359 pp. £109.99 hc, £87.50 ebk. Tackling science fiction in translation from a global perspective is a daunting endeavor. On the one and obvious hand, any single volume will always fall short in tracking the many translation flows connecting literary lineages worldwide; on the other and more pernicious one, English-language scholarship on this topic will tend to veer toward English as its main frame of reference, reinforcing from the standpoint of theory what sf scholar Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Jr. describes as English’s “Grand Central Bottleneck” stifling non-Anglophone authors from reaching global audiences. These concerns inform and, more importantly, are challenged by the essays collected in Science Fiction in Translation, a much welcome intervention at the generative intersection between sf and translation. An organic consensus emerges from the sixteen chapters presented in this book: that the relation between sf and translation extends well beyond the contingency of the translational exchange—the rendition of sf stories from one language to another. As Rachel Cordasco states in the opening chapter, these are fields connected “in the terms of transformation that they share” (19), one unfolding between the poles of estrangement and cognition, the other between foreignization and domestication. The terms are indeed transferable: informed by the linguistic invention of the novum, sf fabulation can be considered as a narrative process of translation through which what is estranging is rendered back into cognizable terms; similarly, the foreign text presents itself to the translator as an estranging novum, persisting as such, albeit domesticated to varying degrees, in the target reader’s experience. As editor Ian Campbell further remarks, both sf and translation generate “remainders”: in one case, the foreignness of the translated text, whose “sharp edges” poke through the translator’s efforts (Campbell, 5–6); in the other, the reader’s familiar assumptions, to which the estranging effect of the sf text remains anchored. Finally, whereas sf has been historically used by European writers to “either glorify or critique colonialism,” as Erin Twohig notes in her chapter on “Speculative Orientalism” (139), translation has been similarly mobilized in support of the “operative viewpoint” of the colonizer (as argued in Alexis Brooks de Vita’s “The Clockwork Chrysalis” [292]) as well as “a form of resistance against ethnocentrism and racism, cultural narcissism and imperialism, in the interests of democratic geopolitical relations” (Lawrence Venuti qtd. in Sara Martín’s “Militant Translation” 41). The essays collected here develop around these junctures, presenting a variety of approaches to translation that include close reading, applied linguistics, formalist analysis, gender deconstruction, and postcolonial critique, as well as case studies spanning from French, Catalan, Spanish, Swedish, Russian, and Hungarian to Arabic, Bengali, and Chinese. The breadth of this spectrum foregrounds translation, not only in its “linguistic transformative sense,” but also as a process of “cultural transaction” (Suparno Banerjee, “Ghosts, Aliens, and Machines” 265), [End Page 121] whose instantiations—as Virginia L. Conn brilliantly shows in her analysis of Wang Jinkang’s “The Reincarnated Giant” [Zhuansheng de juren, 2005/tr. 2018]—are often symptoms of shifting national identities, global postcolonial repositionings, and embodied “hierarch[ies] of worth” (230). In both senses, the genre of sf, intertwined as it is with the project of imperial modernity, presents a most productive frame of reference for examining the multiple tensions underlying transcultural literary exchange. As many of this book’s contributions show, beneath the unspoken claims or aspirations of universality upon which these processes rely, they resist ethnocentric assumptions that manifest themselves in translation as domesticating strategies of “invisibility” and “hypertextuality” (Amélie Lespillette, “Philip K. Dick in French” 146), obfuscation (R.B. Lemberg’s “Ungendering the English Translation of the Strugatskys’ The Snail on the Slope), and “cross-cultural erasure” (Brooks de Vita 295); at the level of sf representation we find discourses of othering (Twohig), technoorientalism (Yen Ooi, “Translating the Chinese Monster in Waste Tide”), and pathological nationalism (Conn...