To give our readers some food for thoughts until the next issue of The AALITRA Review is released, we highlight here some excellent pieces from past volumes. We selected four pieces, all dealing in their different ways with the notion of Global Literature and Translation.
In Volume 3, 2011 David ROBERTS and Brian NELSON argued the study of literature had to be re-embedded in the larger project of “world literature” being a kind of writing that gains, rather than loses, in translation. Translations enable texts to transcend their culture of origin.
In Volume 8, 2014, Peter MORGAN quotes Roberts and Nelson’s view that “Only by deconstructing the linguistic asymmetry of original and translation”, adding that this will make possible for “a post-national literature [to] become transnational”. Morgan concludes we need to revisit “Goethe’s paradigm of world literature as ‘building a bridge’ to the world in two senses: in the sense of opening our eyes to the literature of the world and in the sense of re-connecting to the world of literature.”
In Volume 13, 2017 Kylie DOUST interviews Tim PARKS, renowned Italian to English translator and writer, on the challenges of translating for publishers from different English-speaking countries, and how their expectations shape translations down to the use of verbs and adverbs. It’s a comment on the nuts and bolts of literary translation into today’s lingua franca that is ever more relevant eight years later.
Finally, we spotlight an article in Volume 19, 2023 by Beixi LI and Carol O’SULLIVAN who look at globalization from a very different standpoint: Chinese culture going global. They analyse how Chinese Science-fiction translated into English took the world by storm. More importantly, their research offers a rare, empirical insight on readers’ responses to translations.
We hope you will enjoy (re)discovering these thought-provoking articles.
aalitra.org.au 