Programme
9.30 – 9.45: Welcome and coffee
9.45 – 10.00: Opening words
10.00 – 12.00: Translation and resistance
10.00: In search of resistance (Eva Wissenburg, in Dutch)
10.20: Translation as resistance and resistance to translate: Translation agents and policy in Spain and Latin America (Guillermo Sanz Gallego, in English)
10.40: Translating resistance: The Holocaust correspondence of Mrs. Sword (Bettina Brandt, in English)
11.00: Resisting translations: Big details in Norwegian translations of Patrick Modiano’s work (Geir Uvsløkk, in English)
11.20: Discussie
12.00 – 13.30: Lunch
13.30 – 15.00: Transcultural writing as a form of resistance
13u30: L’ « effet de traduction » dans l’écriture transculturelle comme forme de résistance au « monolinguisme de l’autre » (Myriam Geiser, in French)
13u50: Emancipation or capitulation: Edgar Caïro’s Temekoe/Kopzorg (Kim Andringa, in Dutch)
14u10: Traduction et résistance chez Laura Alcoba : Raconter la violence politique et l’exil entre la France et l’Argentine (Claudia Jünke, in French)
14u30: Discussie
16.00 – 20.00: Emeritus celebration followed by reception
Abstracts
Kim Andringa
Emancipation or Capitulation: Edgar Cairo’s Temekoe/Kopzorg
The Surinamese writer Edgar Cairo (1948-2000) debuted in 1969 with an autobiographical novel written in Sranan Tongo, Temekoe. Ten years later, he rewrote and translated this text into Surinamese Dutch as Temekoe/Kopzorg, 1979; creating another Dutch version some ten years later, Kopzorg (1988). This talk aims to take a closer look at the successive versions of the book (especially the last two), and to scrutinise the processes and strategies of self-translation and rewriting. In doing so, I hope to say more about Edgar Cairo’s motives and his personal development as a postcolonial author as they emerge from this text-in-motion. Is his incremental approach (one could almost speak of a progressive translation) towards Dutch a form of capitulation to the readership, and a break with the revolutionary ideal, as the author seems to indicate in an interview in 1974? Or is language employed as a means of emancipation that he appropriates; as a cornerstone of a “buffer culture for minorities” (Cairo, 1981)? I will call on some paratextual elements to add detail to this picture.
Kim Andringa (Sorbonne University) read French language and literature in Nijmegen and obtained a PhD in comparative literature at the Sorbonne. She taught at the Dutch department of the Sorbonne for several years, subsequently spent seven years as a university lecturer in translation (French to Dutch and Dutch to French) at the University of Liège, and returned to the Sorbonne as a lecturer in Dutch literature and translation two years ago. She is also active as a literary translator from French to Dutch and from Dutch to French. Her research interests are in postcolonial literature and in relations between Dutch and French literature, especially the circulation and reception of translations.
Bettina Brandt
Translating Resistance: The Holocaust Correspondence of Mrs. Sword
What can German letters from the late 1930s and early 1940s, found in an American attic ten years ago, tell us about the daily life of the Jewish elderly in Vienna after the Anschluss? What obstacles did the translator face when deciphering this transatlantic family correspondence for the American descendants of the Viennese letter-writer who herself had perished in the Holocaust? The fragile, handwritten letters penned by a seventy-year-old woman with a disability from a highly assimilated Jewish Viennese family no longer spoke for themselves. They needed to be transcribed, deciphered, interpreted, and contextualized. Furthermore, the letter-writer, like all who found themselves trapped in Nazi Vienna, had been unable to communicate directly about the increasing danger in which she found herself. To outwit and resist the postal censors, she used a family code to describe her ever-changing and increasingly dangerous situation to her daughter and grandchildren in exile. The Viennese woman, who wrote these letters to America, was murdered in Terezín in the summer of 1942. The recipient of these letters, her daughter who had fled to the USA with her husband and twin daughters in 1939, died almost thirty years ago. One of these Viennese twins, born in 1931, had asked me to translate the letters since she no longer spoke German. She also did not remember much about her family’s experience in Nazi Vienna since once they arrived in the United States the European past was seldom addressed. As translator of these letters I had to solve many riddles. In addition, I conducted extensive archival research in half a dozen archives. Eventually, these letters revealed multigenerational Jewish responses to the annexation of Austria, the forced migration that immediately followed, and the contours of the daily life of the elderly Jews who were unable to flee from Nazi Vienna and were eventually murdered.
Bettina Brandt is a Teaching Professor of German and Jewish Studies at the Department of Germanic and Slavic Languages and Literatures Faculty at Pennsylvania State. She has received several fellowships for her current manuscript in progress entitled “With Love from Vienna: Austrian Refugees, American Responses, and The Fate of Elderly Jews after the Anschluss”. Her most recent publication related to this manuscript is entitled “From Vienna to the Midwest: Austrian Refugees and Quaker Responses after 1938,” (2022). Earlier articles and book chapters focused on twentieth and twenty-first-century experimental German literature (especially Emine Sevgi Özdamar, Herta Müller, and Yoko Tawada), the historical avant-gardes, multilingualism, and translation studies. She is also co-editor of half a dozen volumes, including Herta Müller. Politics and Aesthetics (2013, with V. Glajar) and China in the German Enlightenment (2016, with D. Purdy), Tales that Touch. Migration, Translation, and Temporality in Twentieth and Twenty-First-Century German Literature and Culture (2022 with Yasemin Yildiz) and Colonialism and Enlightenment: The Legacies of German Race Theories (with D. Purdy). Finally, she translated the first Dutch publication of Yoko Tawada’s German writings entitled De Berghollander (Voetnoot, 2010, with D. Schyns).
Myriam Geiser
L’ « effet de traduction » dans l’écriture transculturelle comme forme de résistance au « monolinguisme de l’autre »
Ma contribution part du constat que l’écriture transculturelle contemporaine, notamment celle d’écrivaines et écrivains issu(e)s de divers univers linguistiques, est souvent empreinte d’un « effet de traduction » perceptible au niveau du fond et de la forme. Il n’est pas rare, d’ailleurs, que les récits introduisent des narratrices/narrateurs ou des personnages qui mènent des réflexions autour de la traduction aussi bien culturelle – selon l’idée de la « traduction entre les cultures » formulée par Marc Crépon (2004) – que linguistique. On peut y voir une forme de posture narrative s’inscrivant en opposition à tout principe de « monolinguisme imposé par l’autre » (Derrida, 1996), et reflétant une situation d’écriture « au-delà du concept de la langue maternelle » (« beyond the concept of the mother tongue »), tel que la définit Yasemin Yildiz (2012). Cette résistance devient notamment un enjeu lors de la transposition de l’écriture translingue et transculturelle dans d’autres univers linguistiques. Dans son essai Des Tours de Babel (1985), Derrida s’interroge : « Comment traduire un texte écrit en plusieurs langues à la fois ? Comment ‘rendre’ l’effet de pluralité ? ». Une telle question convoque l’agentivité du traduire auquel Henri Meschonnic attribue la fonction de « critique des catégories d’identité et d’altérité » (1999), et dont Barbara Cassin dit : « Quand on traduit, […] on ‘désessentialise’ » (2016). Dans un commentaire de la traduction française du roman The Voice de Gabriel Okara, Myriam Suchet observe que « l’effet de traduction produit par le texte d’arrivée » correspond « au travail de palimpseste mis en œuvre dans le texte de départ » (2014). C’est cette double visibilité de l’« effet de traduction » – à la fois dans l’écriture transculturelle et dans sa transposition dans une autre langue – que je souhaite mettre en lumière, à travers quelques exemples germanophones et francophones, comme effet poétique et comme forme de résistance à toute assignation culturelle et identitaire.
Myriam Geiser (Université Grenoble Alpes) est germaniste et comparatiste, enseignante-chercheuse à l’Université Grenoble Alpes. Elle est membre du laboratoire ILCEA4 (Centre d’études et de recherches allemandes et autrichiennes contemporaines – CERAAC), et membre associé du CIELAM à Aix-Marseille Université. Ses recherches portent sur les concepts d’inter- et transculturalité, sur les littératures et le cinéma de la (post)migration en Europe, sur la traduction culturelle, les esthétiques du plurilinguisme, ainsi que sur les expressions artistiques de la ‘postmémoire’. Elle a publié, entre autres, Der Ort transkultureller Literatur in Deutschland und in Frankreich: Deutsch-türkische und frankomaghrebinische Literatur der Postmigration (2015) et « Komplexe Übertragungsprozesse im Kontext der Postmigration : Eine deutsch-französische Fallstudie am Beispiel von Abschaum von Feridun Zaimoglu und Kiffe kiffe demain von Faïza Guène », in : Übersetzungsprozesse im Kontext von Exil und Postmigration (Stephanie Baumann, Irène Cagneau et Nadine Rentel, eds, 2023).
Claudia Jünke
Traduction et résistance chez Laura Alcoba: Raconter la violence politique et l’exil entre la France et l’Argentine
Ma contribution porte sur les autofictions de l’autrice franco-argentine Laura Alcoba, qui se focalisent sur ses souvenirs d’enfance et d’adolescence, notamment sa vie dans la clandestinité pendant la dernière dictature civico-militaire en Argentine et son arrivée en France, où elle rejoint sa mère exilée, est confrontée à différents défis et découvre la langue française. En abordant deux dimensions pertinentes, je voudrais examiner la connexion entre traduction et résistance dans ces textes littéraires centrés sur la violence politique, l’exil transnational et le bilinguisme: 1) les moments de traduction et résistance à l’intérieur des romans, c’est-à-dire dans l’histoire racontée et le discours narratif (p. ex. l’intraduisibilité des mots espagnols reliés à la violence politique ; l’ambivalence de la traduction lors de l’apprentissage de la langue française ; le rôle d’éléments hétérolingues, non-traduits comme moments d’une résistance textuelle) ; 2) la traduction des textes français d’Alcoba en espagnol (y inclus le rôle des traducteurs comme Leopoldo Brizuela, lui-même un écrivain renommé) et leur réception – assez intéressante et divergente – en France et en Argentine respectivement. Ce dernier aspect nous permet aussi de réfléchir, sur un niveau plus général, sur le caractère ‘résistant’ de la littérature d’écrivain.e.s migrant.e.s, multilingues, transculturel.le.s comme Laura Alcoba.
Claudia Jünke est professeure de littératures et cultures hispanophones et francophones à l’université d’Innsbruck, Autriche. Ses recherches portent sur les littératures et cultures modernes et contemporaines en France, Espagne et Amérique latine et se focalisent sur la mémoire culturelle des passés violents, le lien entre la mémoire et la traduction, les identités culturelles, la narratologie, le film et l’intermédialité. Parmi ses publications les plus récentes est le livre codirigé avec Désirée Schyns : Translating Memories of Violent Pasts. Memory Studies and Translation Studies in Dialogue (Routledge 2024).
Guillermo Sanz Gallego
Translation as resistance and resistance to translate: The influence of resistance on translation agents and policy in Spain and Latin America
The present paper aims at exploring the twofold and changing notion of resistance throughout history, both in Spain and Latin America, and how this metamorphosis has influenced translation in these cultures. In my presentation I intend to discuss how the influence of resistance in translation can be studied from two different perspectives. Therefore, I will provide an overview of cases in which the changing notion of resistance throughout the years has influenced translation agents and policy both in Spain and Latin America.
According to Winfried Fluck, the concept of resistance is frequently associated with discontent with the status quo and a conviction that change is necessary (Fluck 2000). Yet, one must bear in mind that what is understood in Fluck’s definition as ‘status quo’ is a term employed in political discourse to describe a specific power structure that is ideologically sensitive. Accordingly, the alternation of ideologies in power structures provokes a change in the roles of players and translation agents that are related to governments or regimes on the one hand, and to resistance on the other hand. In other words, a dissident publishing house may become a loyalist publishing house after a change of government in a specific country, and vice versa.
Also, the analysis of the concept of resistance allows us to approach translation phenomena from a series of different perspectives that are extremely interesting for the discipline of Translation Studies. In this sense, academic research on this topic may focus on the use of translation as a means of political resistance as explained above, but also on the resistance to translate as a political stance, such as in cases in which multilingualism and non-translation are understood as a feature of cultural identity, and, accordingly, as resistance to a colonial and/or ethnocentric discourse.
Guillermo Sanz Gallego is Professor of Translation Studies at the Vrije Universiteit Brussel (VUB), where he teaches Translation Studies and research methodology, and literary translation, among others. He is member of the CLIC research group (VUB), and of the International James Joyce Foundation. He has co-edited journal issues and published numerous articles and book chapters on Joyce’s studies, on the translation and retranslation of literature and historic texts, as well as on the influence of ideology and censorship in translation. Together with Kris Peeters (University of Antwerp), he coordinates the James Joyce in Translation Centre.
Geir Uvsløkk
Resisting Translations: Big Details in Norwegian Translations of Patrick Modiano’s Work
In 2014, Patrick Modiano was a largely unknown writer in Norway. Rue des boutiques obscures (tr. Mona Lange, 1979), Une jeunesse (tr. Kjell Olaf Jensen, 1982) and Dimanches d’août (tr. Tom Lotherington, 1988) had been translated into Norwegian in the 1970s and 1980s. And then, for 26 years, nothing. One aspect that seemed particularly difficult to “translate”, was the specific, so-called “modianesque” atmosphere that characterizes all the 2014 Nobel laureate’s texts. Since 2014, three new books have been translated into Norwegian: Pour que tu ne te perdes pas dans le quartier (tr. Lotherington, 2015) Dora Bruder (tr. Lotherington, 2019) and Encre sympathique (tr. Lotherington, 2021). In this paper, I will study what Jeroen Vandaele (2024) calls “big details” and “part-whole thinking” in Norwegian translations of Patrick Modiano’s work, with a specific emphasis on the “modianesque” atmosphere and on passages that can be related to the Second World War.
Geir Uvsløkk is associate professor of French literature and area studies at the University of Oslo, Norway, where he leads the research groups “Traveling Texts: Translation and Transnational Reception” and “Cultural Memory Studies”. He has held numerous academic talks and published books and articles on French and francophone literature and culture in Norwegian, English and French (notably the work of Jean Genet, Georges Bataille, Claude Simon, Michel Houellebecq, Virginie Despentes, Patrick Modiano, Lydie Salvayre and Alice Zeniter). He is also a translator and a board member of The Norwegian Non-Fiction Writers and Translators Association.
Eva Wissenburg
In Search of Resistance
Sometimes, as a translator, you hit on a passage in a source text that makes you sad; on words or phrases that sound like the umpteenth echo of something that sounded unpleasant the very first time you heard it; on stereotypical descriptions which become ever more determinative to your worldview the oftener they are repeated. So what do you do as a translator? Do you repeat the cliché in your translation? Then you contribute to the image becoming more deeply ingrained in readers’ minds. But what alternative do you have as a translator who is supposed to reproduce the source text as faithfully as possible?
This is a question I regularly ask myself in my daily practice, and in this talk I want to explore how other translators deal with this kind of situation. Can I find traces of resistance? In the type of textual choice, paratextual commentary, or perhaps micro-resistance at a word level? I will also cite instances from my own translation practice in which I have attempted some form of resistance or, on reflection, maybe should have done so.
Eva Wissenburg is a French-Dutch literary translator and an editorial board member of the translation review Filter, to which she also contributes regularly. She has translated works by Éric Chevillard, Cécile Wajsbrot, Albert Camus and Mathieu Belezi, among others. She also occasionally gives workshops on the theory and practice of literary translation.