Dr Patricia Novillo-Corvalan, from the Department of Comparative Literature, is to give the keynote address at ‘Found in Translation’ a one-day conference for postgraduate students of literature and related disciplines who belong to one of the institutions affiliated with CHASE (Consortium for the Humanities and the Arts South-East England).
The aim of the conference is to explore the broad theme of translation, and it will investigate the ways in which translation is a productive cultural force. Translations may be of tongues, forms, genres, bodies, identities, geographies, histories, and ideas. It will seek to highlight and re-evaluate the crossing of boundaries such as these and to ask what is discovered in the act of translation. How does this process alter what is being translated? What is revealed, renovated, or found in translation?
Patricia’s talk is entitled ‘Translation à la Pierre Menard: From Shakespeare to Bolaño’. Over the last few decades the history of translation has undergone a radical transformation, a shift of focus from translation as ‘loss’ to translation as ‘gain’, from subtraction to accretive addition. This paradigm change largely owes to the advent of the discipline of Translation Studies in the 1970s and, more recently, to emerging theories of World Literature proposed by, among others, the American scholar David Damrosh. Translation therefore invigorates our understanding of literature by constantly renewing, reshaping, and stretching the boundaries of canon formation. Taking as a point of departure Walter Benjamin’s essay ‘The Task of the Translator’ (1923), Patricia will show that path-breaking theories of translation that challenge the superiority of the original and well-worn clichés such as the Italian adage ‘traduttore /traditore’ were formulated as far back as the 1920s and 1930s by European and Latin American writers, including Ezra Pound, Jorge Luis Borges, and Oswald de Andrade. She will then examine specific examples of irreverent translation strategies á la Pierre Menard proposed by Borges, yet applicable to a host of writers such as Shakespeare, Joyce, and Bolaño. Patricia will then conclude with an in-depth discussion of Samuel Beckett’s overlooked translations of Mexican poetry vis-à-vis the cultural context of the Mexican Day of the Dead.
The CHASE consortium was formed to promote excellence in research, postgraduate research training and knowledge exchange in the Arts & Humanities, and comprises the Courtauld Institute of Art, Goldsmiths, University of London, the Open University, and the Universities of East Anglia, Essex, Kent and Sussex.
‘Found in Translation’ will take place on 30 May 2014 at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London. For more information, please see conference blog here: www.foundintranslationconference.wordpress.com
For more information about CHASE, please see the website here: www.chase.ac.uk