Translation as an Internationalist Pragmatics: The Digital Footprint of Foreign Authors in Late Socialist East European Periodicals

• In Event: Provincializing Internationalism: Periodicals, Publishers and Practices IV: Mapping

Abstract

This paper would present a small chronological slice of a larger project being carried out by the Department of Literary Theory at the Institute of Literary Studies in Budapest, in collaboration with several other cultural institutions in the region. We are tracing the digital footprint of foreign authors in East-Central European publishing during periods of increased international influence: the turn of the twentieth century, the interwar period, the early and late socialist periods. Periodicals are not our only source in this project, but one of the most important ones because they reveal a steady stream of cultural agency in editorial decision/making, frequency and scale of translation, and change over time. For this presentation I would select two or three relevant internationalist authors who became well-known in the later socialist period, and trace their appearances in translation across different East European literary fields. While the project seems highly quantitative and data-driven in nature, it will in fact also suggest some interpretive paradigms that we could use in reading these authors in context. The goal of the larger project, hopefully illustrated on a smaller scale in this presentation, is to show how the region came to canonize certain authors who could blend into the socialist landscape but also advance individual translator, editors, and readers' goals of being integrated into a global, intercultural conversation.

Author

• Jessie Labov, Corvinus U (Hungary)