Translation, Voice, and Identity: A Symposium
Thursday 9 October, 2025 @ 5–8 pm
CO.AS.IT (Italian Assistance Association)
199 Faraday Street, Carlton
Translation plays a vital role in promoting cultural exchange; but in that role, it is sometimes subject to constraining and distorting forces. Speakers will present papers examining how translation shapes and reshapes “voice” and “identity”.
Frances Egan
(Re)translating Colette: reflections on gender and performance
How does Colette sound – look? – in 21st-century English? A shapeshifter herself, Colette took to the stage and wrote autofiction avant la lettre. Her work and persona have been reimagined countless times: through previous translations, as well as through performances by figures from Algerian-born Polaire to Keira Knightley and the anonymous dancer on the cover of my forthcoming translation. In this talk, I reflect on inhabiting Colette’s world and interpreting her voice anew in my translation of La Vagabonde (OUP, September 2025), with particular attention to shifting notions of feminism, gender, embodiment, and identity.
Frances Egan is a translator and lecturer in the School of Languages, Literatures, Cultures and Linguistics at Monash University. She has published widely on representations of gender, culture and feminism in the French and Francophone context.
Marko Pavlyshyn
The Translation Front: Reflections à propos of Russia’s Invasion of Ukraine
In a war that is essentially about the right of a culture and a national identity to exist, what role can, should, and does literary translation play? I make observations about trends in the publication of mainly English-language translations of Ukrainian literary works since 2014 and especially since 24 February 2022; I remark on translators’ and publishers’ motivations and choices as they offer Ukrainian works to their readerships; and I speculate about the potential efficacy (or otherwise) of translation as a vehicle for influencing public attitudes to Ukraine and the war.
Marko Pavlyshyn is Emeritus Professor in the Mykola Zerov Centre for Ukrainian Studies in Monash University’s School of Languages, Literatures, Cultures and Linguistics. His research specialisations include modern and contemporary Ukrainian literature, post-colonial approaches to the study of Slavic literatures and cultures, and issues of culture and national identity. He was the founding President of the Ukrainian Studies Association of Australia.
Stephen Regan
At the Green Bar: Ciaran Carson’s Irish French Sonnets
In 1998, the Irish poet Ciaran Carson published a remarkable set of translations of late nineteenth-century French Symbolist and Decadent poetry with unmistakably Irish nuances and allusions. Attracted by the twelve-syllable line characteristic of the French sonnet, Carson composed The Alexandrine Plan, a book of bold and provocative versions of poems by Charles Baudelaire, Stéphane Mallarmé and Arthur Rimbaud. This paper will look closely at the stylistic versatility and ingenuity with which Carson crosses the French sonnet with old Irish poetic forms such as the aisling. It will argue that Carson’s translations effectively retain the yearning isolation and confessional candour of their Symbolist precursors, while also enjoying liberties of expression and ostentatiously declaring their Irishness.
Stephen Regan is a Research Associate in English and Theatre Studies at the University of Melbourne. His publications include Irish Writing: An Anthology of Irish Literature in English 1789-1939 (Oxford, 2004) and The Sonnet (Oxford, 2019). His essays on modern poetry have appeared in The Cambridge History of English Poetry (2010), The Cambridge Companion to Twentieth-Century English Poetry (2008), and The Oxford Handbook of Modern Irish Poetry (2012). He is co-editor, with Andrew Motion, of the Penguin Book of Elegy (2023).
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