Turn In Fiction Research Articles

The interpreter’s professional and metaphorical (in)visibility in fiction: an analysis on Suki Kim’s the interpreter

ABSTRACT Translation and translators in fiction have attracted increasing attention in the last two decades, paving the way for ‘a fictional turn’ and ‘transfiction’. Within these frameworks, the present study examines a fictional interpreter in Suki Kim’s novel, The Interpreter, to outline its professional and metaphorical implications for the translator’s (in)visibility through examples from the protagonist’s professional and private life. It considers Claudia Angelelli’s and Lawrence Venuti’s notions of the interpreter’s and translator’s invisibility, respectively, to shed light on the protagonist’s portrayal as an invisible interpreter in the novel. It also takes into account equivalence dichotomies and Lori Chamberlain’s gender translation theory to delve into the impact and traces of these theoretical stances on the protagonist’s understanding of her role as an interpreter in society, in her institution and a woman in her family. The analysis results suggest that while society and institutions expect the protagonist to act as an invisible bridge between two parties, different personal experiences in interpreting missions and family relations drive her towards taking some ethical decisions thanks to her professional position, which, in return, gradually increases her visibility in her professional and private life.

Trendy Monsters: The Nazis, the Perpetrator Turn, and Popular Culture

Trendy Monsters: The Nazis, the Perpetrator Turn, and Popular Culture

Foundlings and Fictional Form: Eliza Haywood mothers Tom Jones

ABSTRACT The conventional view of Eliza Haywood's later career has been that she followed the new 'moral' turn in fiction in the 1740s, of which Samuel Richardson and Henry Fielding were the chief exponents. However, Fielding's plot in Tom Jones (1748-9) can be shown to be inspired and influenced by Haywood's The Fortunate Foundlings (1744) and Life's Progress through the Passions: Or, the Adventures of Natura (1748). Fielding's dialogue with the reader in Tom Jones, one of the novel's most distinctive features, is modelled on Haywood's dialogue with the reader in The Female Spectator (1744-46). Haywood's and Fielding's works are both politically engaged and both serve partisan causes. They share constructions of gender and sexuality but differ sharply on the issues of courtship and marriage. For Fielding the possible power given to women in the courtship plot of salon romances must be averted, and for him, as a Whig in the Puritan tradition, marriage represents the ideal end-goal. Haywood is sceptical about the possibility of happy marriages for women, and she favours continental and Tory traditions.

Dragomans Gaining Footing: Translators as Usurpers in Two Stories by Rodolfo Walsh and Moacyr Scliar

Abstract: Fictional texts focusing on translators and translation have proliferated in world literature during the last fifty years. Thanks to the recent and commonly named “fictional turn” in Translation Studies, fictional translators have been studied and analyzed much more and made ever more visible. This visibility serves to consider translators not as mere interlingual photocopiers but as social beings that operate in particular sociocultural contexts. Two stories from Latin America, “Notas al pie” (Footnotes) by Rodolfo Walsh (1967) and “Notas ao pe da pagina” (Footnotes) by Moacyr Scliar (1995), introduce translators who are uncomfortable with having to occupy a second-rate space. The fictional translators’ footnotes utilize whole pages (effectively taking over in each of the stories) and usurp a space that is conventionally assigned only to writers/authors of a text. The translators in these stories have found a way to use these explanatory comments to their advantage. Since footnotes are often not well-received by many readers, who consider them temporary interruptions and/or a nuisance, they are usually kept to a minimum. Our fictional translators, however, increase the size and number of footnotes dramatically. The clear-cut hierarchical relationships between writer/author and translator are reversed in these stories to unveil the struggle for power that exists between the figures of author and translator. Both stories can also serve as pedagogical tools to discuss the exciting world of Translation Studies.

Los agentes de la traducción: las ficciones del traductor como relatos de mercado

Based on the Fictional Turn of Translation studies framework, this article focuses on three novels with translators as protagonists, highlighting translation’s critical and metaphorical potential as literary theme. El traductor by Salvador Benesdra, El testamento de O’Jaral by Marcelo Cohen, and La ciudad ausente by Ricardo Piglia were written in Argentina during the 1990s and they shed light on a deteriorating publishing market where translators play a fundamental role but hold a vulnerable position where their jobs are endangered. Translation is therefore thematized as a monetary transaction enabling the relation between translation and the market, and where mistranslation is practiced as a subversion and resistance tool. The translator’s fictions analyzed here dismantle ideas of an unscathed globalization and revise translation’s part in keeping the illusion of a successful communication.

The Narrative Turn in Fiction and Theory: The Crisis and Return of Storytelling from Robbe-Grillet to Tournier

The Narrative Turn in Fiction and Theory: The Crisis and Return of Storytelling from Robbe-Grillet to Tournier

Translators and (their) authors in the fictional turn

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The Narrative Turn in Fiction and Theory: The Crisis and Return of Storytelling from Robbe-Grillet to Tournier

The Narrative Turn in Fiction and Theory: The Crisis and Return of Storytelling from Robbe-Grillet to Tournier

Fictorians: Historians who ‘lie’ about the past, and like it

Debates about history and fiction tend to pitch novelist against historian in a battle over who owns or best represents the past. This article posits that things are not quite so dichotomous: novelists write non-fiction histories, and historians even sometimes write novels. In fact, these latter seem, anecdotally, to be increasing in number in recent decades. The author approached some of these historians to find out why they have turned to writing fictionalised versions of the past to complement, or sometimes replace, their non-fiction publications. For the sake of clarity, in the article I have playfully dubbed the historians who write historical fiction as ‘fictorians’. The article considers their responses within wider discussions about history and fiction, and reflects briefly upon the meaning of this ‘fictional turn’ for the future of the history discipline.

Of Monsters and Parricides: The Politics of Textual Reproduction

This article examines the narrative mobilization of gendered and biogenetic metaphors of translation in two contemporary novels that feature translators as protagonists: El congreso de literatura (1999) by César Aira (Argentina) and Borges e os orangotangos eternos (2000) by Luis Fernando Verissimo (Brazil). Situating my analysis at the intersection of the “fictional turn” of Translation Studies and the rich history of writing on and through translation in Latin America, I analyze an attempt to clone Carlos Fuentes gone awry in the first text and the Oedipal and hermeneutic violence that characterizes the second to argue that, by means of their explicit engagement of the translational trope of textual reproduction, these contemporary writers challenge centrist models of cultural geopolitics and posit ludic, nonhierarchical models of reciprocal influence in their stead.

On fictional turns, fictionalizing twists and the invention of the Americas

In his 2008 book, Translation and Identity in the Americas, Edwin Gentzler proposed a “fictional turn” to refer to translation in connection with the construction of identity in the Americas, a highly positive view of the role played by this activity since the arrival of the Europeans. This paper proposes a “fictionalizing twist,” that is, a complementary approach that would attest to the less positive use of translation in the relation between Europe and the Americas on the one hand, and among European nations on the other. Thus, I examine how translation and Translation Studies have contributed to create certain negative images of translators and nations, a tendency that can still be traced nowadays. First, I discuss the views on the indigenous interpreter Malinche and her part in the conquest of Mexico. Then I move on to examine the ideological manipulation of texts to promote antagonistic national identities within the European context at the time. Finally, it is argued that both the fictional turn and the fictionalizing twist need to be considered as an integral part of the identity-construction process in the Americas and in Europe.

Representations of translators in popular culture

The “fictional turn” in translation studies has acknowledged the fact that translators/interpreters have been moved from behind the curtain to center stage. Whether this is a result of poststructuralist or postcolonial scholarship, the fact remains that translators/interpreters now figure as protagonists in film, theater, and especially popular literature. Does this “promotion” reflect a change of status? How are translators portrayed? How is their habitus portrayed? What function do they serve? Has there been a change in their portrayal/function in the last thirty years? Does the change reflect the different approach/es to the “hybrid” in this period? Has the “death of the author” theory and the promotion of translators/interpreters to the status of “authorship” changed their self-image? This essay is an attempt at answering these questions, diachronically and synchronically, with the help of various literary texts from the 1970s on.