Left Perspectives on Aesthetics II: Translation, Modernists, and Communist World Literature

Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description

This panel explores international episodes in the tension between literary modernism, as radical vision and critique of convention from language up, and 20th century Soviet and communist aesthetics as projects of enlightenment and entertainment for the masses. Recent scholarship has begun to reexamine the nature of the literary debates and programs of the Soviet Union and broader 20th-century communist contexts outside the paradigms of repression and dissidence. The Stalinist revision of early Soviet experiment and its confrontation with modernism in the establishment of socialist realism cast a long shadow on left and Marxist aesthetics here, influencing the reception of Soviet authors abroad and Western authors in Communist countries at the time and decades following. And yet, some of our panelists insist, this influence cannot be registered without attention to authors’ and translators’ own active participation in the 1930s reevaluation of modernism. Four windows open onto the varied functions of world literature in the USSR and Eastern Bloc: ideological export that can be repurposed (Mayakovsky in Venezuela); confrontation and revision of the Soviet past (Dos Passos in USSR); laboratory for the poet to work out new modes (Pasternak in Georgia); a means and test of artistic expression given limits to "original" production (Gibbon/Szöllössy in Hungary). We pay special attention here to the use of translation and canons of world literature as technologies for envisioning future liberation across latitudes and longitudes.

Sub Unit

• Literature: 20th Century

Chair

• Elena Ostrovskaya

Papers

• The Future, Elsewhere: Inventing Mayakovsky in Twentieth-Century Venezuela - María Matilde Morales, Harvard U

• Finding Formulas for Socialism: Soviet Transformations of John Dos Passos’ 1919 - Zachary Murphy King, Bilkent U (Turkey)

• A Scots Quair into Skócia lánya: Politics, Publishing and Dialects in the Hungarian Translation of Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s Fiction - Zsuzsanna Varga, U of Glasgow (UK)

Discussant

• Jacob Emery, Indiana U Bloomington