This theme issue of Cadernos de Tradução takes its title after an international conference that took place on October 30-31, 2014, at the School of Arts and Humanities of the University of Lisbon: Moving Bodies across Transland. This conference was the first output of the then-recently created research project MOV. Moving Bodies: Itineraries and Narratives in Translation hosted by the Centre for Comparative Studies of the same institution.1 1 The research project was funded in 2014, and it has associated an online, open-access database of Portuguese Bibliography of Translation Studies, TradBase (www.tradbase.comparatistas.edu.pt), which was set up as early as 2001. The aim of the conference was to elaborate on the role of translators as moving bodies and translation as a cultural good or product (i.e., translation proper) contextually located or as a metaphor to address a multiplicity of cultural practices and thereby enquire into ideological encounters, asymmetrical exchanges and representations of otherness, in order to understand such movements in, out and across a globalized world where translation flows have become a defining factor: a “transland” (trans- meaning across, beyond, through).
As researchers of the MOV project, we have decided to continue the discussion initiated at the time and expand this locus of inquiry by means of a collection of contributions that examine different kinds of narratives, both written and visual, as produced by moving bodies, i.e. intercultural and multilingual mediators, between and across times, spaces and genres.
The title Moving Bodies across Transland draws attention to three structuring axes of translation, which are the same axes the MOV research project focuses on: agency (bodies, subjective actors), displacement (trans-), and locus (land). “Transland” is a descriptive concept and spatial metaphor on which these forces are concentrated. Not only does the “transland” concept imply an idea of movement, displacement, transportation, dynamics, of crossing borders (either by human subjects or cultural assets), something that is neither confined to a physical or singular space nor to a particular scale of interaction (e.g. centre-periphery), but it is also couched in an idea of gathering and encounter, negotiation and transgression – of languages, literatures, cultures, worldviews, people, Others. Such encounter can take place at the most obvious level of translation as rewriting of a pre-existing text or at the less obvious level of translation as a metaphorical guise for discursive sites of intercultural transactions entailing the same negotiation of expectations and allowing for some kind of epistemological experience. Nomadism and hybridity, for example, not only characterise today’s world as marked by constant displacement and migration, but have a decisive role in many forms of cultural production, leaving aside fixed identities and dichotomies. Seen in this light, the “transland” notion can be aptly used to describe translators’, and other translation-related agents’, field of performance, action, communication, and production that is situated in, across, and beyond borders, thus simultaneously creating and dissolving the boundaries of a circulation network of different types of cultural value.
The ten essays collected in this issue offer cross-disciplinary and comparative approaches to translation flows of various kinds. These original research articles explore case studies and episodes pertaining to the history of translation, especially in Portugal and Brazil and ranging mainly from the end of the 19th century through the 20th century, and show that linguistic, cultural and national identities have hardly been confined to one nation-state but often extrapolate to diasporas and exiles or pervade languages and cultures of migrating communities. The essays throw light on translation mainly as a form of migration (A. Lopes), as language policy (W. Hanes), as dislocation and reshaping of the homeland and citizenship (S. Arnold), as an exilic response towards building solidarity networks and a Portuguese-speaking community (R. Maia), as a complex triangular circulation of books between source culture, former colony and former colonizer (V. Hanes), as power struggle and identity negotiation between periphery and centre(s) (D. Faria), as a linguistic process moving away from ethnocentrism (J. Widman and A. Zavaglia), as an infrastructure of globalization (M. J. Ferro), as an ethical, political and aesthetic response to post-colonial otherness (E. Brugioni), or ethical choice and statement towards otherness (L. Carbonara). Translation processes are conceptualized chiefly in spatial terms (centre and periphery, centre and margins), literature is preferably posited within the much discussed frame of world literature, and special attention is given to how alterity, forms of inclusion, subversion or legitimation are articulated in the target system.
This theme issue opens up with Alexandra Lopes’ “The Poetics of Movement & Translation – The Case of Richard Zimler’s Strawberry Fields Forever”. Lopes proposes addressing literary translation as a culture of remix that can be best theorized under the notion of migration or mobility, highly instrumental to challenge traditional concepts such as originality and creativity, authority and authorship, original and translation, mother tongue and nationality. These theoretical digressions are supported by a case study of a Portuguese translation (Ilha Teresa, 2011) of an unpublished source text: Richard Zimler’s Strawberry Fields Forever, which consists of a first-person narrative of a teenage girl whose family emigrated from Lisbon to Long Island and thereby textualizes difference in migration. Lopes shows how the novel’s circulation and actual translation, complicated by the bilingualism and metalinguistic discussion of the limits of linguistic representation embedded in the novel, illustrate different forms of migration.
In “Representing Alterity in a Post-Colonial Context: Lídia Jorge’s A Costa dos Murmúrios and its English and French Translations”, Dominique Faria offers an insight from post-colonial translation studies in combination with the centre-periphery model into Lídia Jorge’s novel A Costa dos Murmúrios (1988), which revolves around the Portuguese colonial war in Mozambique (1964-1974). In particular, it focuses on how alterity (the colonized) is represented in the novel and reconstructed in translation into more central cultural systems, i.e. the United States and France. Faria identifies the agents and external constraints (perceptions and expectations related to different national literary traditions and histories) involved in both translation processes. The representation of an oppressed otherness via translation is supported by examples depicting the representation of violence and race (skin colour), as well as the translation of culture-specific items.
Opting for a discussion between the centre and its margins, Elena Brugioni, in “Writing from other Margins. Difference, Exception, and Translation in the Portuguese-Speaking World: Counterpoints between Literary Representations and Critical Paradigms”, problematizes the so-called “Lusophone literary field” through the lens of translation as a metaphor and also a critical tool that is able to interconnect postcolonial theory, African literary criticism, and Portuguese-language literatures in Africa. Discussion is supported by examples from Mozambican and Angolan literatures, in particular Mia Couto, but also, although to a lesser extent, other writers such as Borges Coelho and Ruy de Carvalho.
In “Domesticação e estrangeirização em duas traduções para o inglês de A Paixão Segundo G.H., de Clarice Lispector”, Julieta Widman and Adriana Zavaglia provide a quantitative approach to the English translation and retranslation of Clarice Lispector’s A Paixão Segundo G.H. (1964). Their purpose is to test Antoine Berman’s “retranslation hypothesis”, according to which the first translation of a literary text tends to be more ethnocentric than the following retranslations. Such a project is carried out by using Francis H. Aubert’s modalities of translation method that allows to infer a text’s tendency towards domestication or foreignization based on a word-level analysis.
Lorena Carbonara extends the discussion to the translation, or non-translation, of culture-bound material in “Language, Silence and Translation in Emanuele Crialese’s Polyglot Migration Film Nuovomondo – Golden Door (2006)”. Carbonara focuses on a cinematic narrative of Italian migration to the New World of America, Crialese’s Nuovomondo – Golden Door (Italy-France, 2006). Her analysis addresses the English subtitled version of the film on DVD and explores the narrative as a site of several interplays that highlight the tension between the Old and the New Worlds, namely between languages (Sicilian and English, English and Italian), within the same language (Italian and the Sicilian dialect), and among languages and silence. Adding to the translation of the power relations between languages within the film by the characters themselves and in the subtitled version is a brief outline of the promotion and distribution policy of the film mainly in Italy and the United States.
Anglo-American imperialism is also dealt with, with regard to other cultural goods, in Maria João Ferro’s “Anglo-Saxon Imperialism through Cultural Goods: Titles Suggested for Young Readers in Portugal”. Ferro takes as object of study the literary works recommended by the national reading plan for 12-15 year olds in Portugal to substantiate the hegemony of English as preferred source language of literary translation, which is symptomatic of the scarce multicultural diversity Portuguese youths are exposed to during the formative years of building their literacy skills.
Speaking of multicultural diversity but in relation to nineteenthcentury mobile, migrant communities of Portuguese exiles in Paris and Rio de Janeiro, Rita Bueno Maia focuses on “translation as response to exile in global cities”. Maia shows through both a contextual and textual analysis how the translation of popular literature, in particular of the picaresque novels, served to establish solidarity networks among Portuguese exiles in Paris, partisans of the overthrown absolutist regime in Portugal, and thereby to create a Portuguese-speaking, yet multilingual, community. The same translations, produced and sold in the global city of Paris, would have served not only the exiles based there, but also those in Brazil especially through the activity of the Portuguese Reading Cabinet.
In “German Literature in Brazil – Writing and Translating between Two Worlds. The Works of Herbert Caro and Ernst Feder as Writing-between-Worlds”, Sonja Arnold brings in two case studies of German literature in Brazilian exile: Herbert Caro and Ernst Feder, who both sought exile in Brazil in the 1930s. Arnold stresses the role of these cultural mediators as subjective bodies with agency by offering a distant reading of their biographical paths and showcasing specific textual items that allow challenging traditional conceptualizations of national philology, literary historiography, and canonization.
Vanessa Hanes’s “Between Continents: Agatha Christie’s Translations as Intercultural Mediators” disturbs the connection between centre and periphery by bringing in the example of Christie’s detective novels that entered the Brazilian literary system with paratextual interferences from other semi-peripheral systems (e.g. Italy) and were then exported to the former colony, Portugal, which adapted them to the European Portuguese linguistic norms and heightened the register. The colonized language served in this case as a mediator and facilitator between the source culture and the Portuguese target culture.
The essays section closes with William Hanes’s “Language and Organizational Culture in the Oswaldo Cruz Institute 1900-1930”, which offers as case study the medical literature produced by an institutional intercultural mediator, the Oswaldo Cruz Institute, and shows how the multilingual language policy followed by the institute allowed the transnational circulation of its knowledge, by means of both personnel and texts, and contributed to its central position in the construction of a field of knowledge, Tropical Medicine. Its language policy illustrates the role of translation in the development of modern science as well as the struggles between various European languages (English, French, German, and Portuguese) to become the lingua franca of scientific knowledge in the early decades of the twentieth century.
This theme issue includes a book review on Aamir R. Mufti’s recently published Forget English! Orientalisms and World Literatures (2016), by Adile Aslan Almond. It revolves around three main areas of ongoing discussion: world literature, orientalism, and post-colonialism, translation being the main channel of knowledge transfer and the groundwork supporting the construction, development, and cross-fertilization of those areas.
By means of an interview conducted in Portuguese, the final section gives voice to a literary translator who is already considered to be the “official” translator of bestselling Japanese author Murakami Haruki into (European) Portuguese, Maria João Lourenço.
Last but not least, the guest editors would like to thank Cadernos de Tradução for welcoming this project, especially Andréia Guerini, Ingrid Bignardi, and Letícia Goellner. Thanks are also due to the reviewers who kindly accepted to join this venture and for their scholarly support.
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1
The research project was funded in 2014, and it has associated an online, open-access database of Portuguese Bibliography of Translation Studies, TradBase (www.tradbase.comparatistas.edu.pt), which was set up as early as 2001.
Publication Dates
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Publication in this collection
Jan-Apr 2017
