Translating Fictions

Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description

Since the mid-1990s, the “fictional turn” in Translation Studies has recognized that problems and theories of translation can be tested in fictional narratives. Each of the papers on this panel examines fictional texts as privileged spaces for working through theories of language, interpretation, mediation, and authorship. In “Fictional Translators and Their Discontents,” Brian Kim will draw on late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century literary portrayals of translators to explore implicit comparisons between translations and literary fictions. In “Foreign Improvements”: Tolstoy’s “Lucerne” as a Second Translation of Sterne,” Elizabeth F. Geballe argues that Tolstoy’s incomplete 1851 translation of Laurence Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy (1768) was only the first draft of a translation project that culminated in his problematic short story “Lucerne” (1857). In “Bad Translations: Talking Down to the Narod in Tolstoy’s Fiction,” David Herman considers a range of conversations in which an aristocratic seeker protagonist discovers how to live from an episodic character from the narod. Because of the seekers’ attempts to preserve autonomy in face of the universal “All,” these become scenes of non-translation, directed toward educated readers. And in “Losing the Words: Translation and Transfiguration in Merezhkovsky’s Leonardo da Vinci,” Chloë Kitzinger considers the novel’s obsession with the mutual translatability of languages and faiths. Via both acts and omissions of translation, this multilingual narrative tests Russian as a medium for the alchemical artistic project of life-creation [zhiznetvorchestvo]. Taken together, these papers explore how literary texts translate, and theorize translation, within their own borders.

Sub Unit

• Literature: 19th Century

Chair

• Carol Apollonio, Duke U

Papers

• 'Foreign Improvements': Tolstoy’s 'Lucerne' as a Second Translation of Sterne - Elizabeth Frances Geballe, Indiana U Bloomington

• Bad Translations: Talking Down to the Narod in Tolstoy’s Fiction - David M.B.L. Herman, U of Virginia

• Losing the Words: Translation and Transfiguration in Merezhkovsky’s Leonardo da Vinci - Chloe Kitzinger, Rutgers, The State U of New Jersey

Discussant

• Brian James Baer, Kent State U