Memory in Translation: Gender, Poetry, and Politics

Session Submission Type: Panel

Brief Description

By examining poetry translation as a site where personal and collective memories are negotiated, preserved and transformed, our panel advances our understanding of how literary practices participate in broader cultural and political processes of remembering and forgetting. Our focus on gender illuminates how translation has served – and continues to serve – as a vehicle for recovering and transmitting experiences and perspectives that dominant historiographies have marginalised or erased. Through our diverse case studies, we investigate how translators navigate the delicate balance between preservation and reinvention when working with poetry that embodies gendered and queer experiences across cultural and linguistic boundaries. We examine how translation choices reflect power dynamics in cultural memory formation, considering which aspects of gendered experience are remembered, forgotten or reshaped in the translation process.

The geographic and temporal breadth of our research allows us to trace patterns of continuity and rupture in how translation has functioned as both preservation and transformation of memory across generations and borders. By bringing these diverse contexts into conversation, we aim to contribute to ongoing scholarly discussions about translation as a form of resistance, the gendered dimensions of cultural memory and the politics of literary circulation in regions marked by complex imperial and post-imperial dynamics.

Sub Unit

• Linguistics/Language Pedagogy/Translation

Chair

• Benjamin Arenstein, U of Chicago

Papers

• Queering Machine Translation?: Post-Editing Queer Russian Poetry - Matilda Hicklin, U of Bristol (UK)

• Emily Dickinson in the Soviet 1970s: A Revolutionary Poet or The Angel in The House? - Francesca Zuccaro, U of Bristol (UK)

• In Search of a Jewish Pushkin: Samizdat Translation in 1980s Leningrad - Benjamin Arenstein, U of Chicago

Discussant

• Stephanie Sandler, Harvard U