Uppsala Centre for Russian and Eurasian Studies, Uppsala University
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Translation in Russian Contexts: Transcultural, Translingual and Transdisciplinary Points of Departure An International Conference on Slavic and Translation Studies Uppsala Centre for Russian and Eurasian Studies, Uppsala University 3-7 June 2014 KEYNOTE SPEAKERS Brian James Baer Kent State University, Ohio Brian James Baer is Professor of Russian and Translation Studies at Kent State University, Ohio, and a member of the University’s Institute for Applied Linguistics. He is founding editor of the journal Translation and Interpreting Studies and general editor of the Kent State Scholarly Monograph Series in Translation Studies. He is author of the monograph Other Russias: Homosexuality and the Crisis of Post-Soviet Identity (Palgrave Macmillan 2009), which was selected as a Choice Outstanding Academic Title by the American Library Association in 2011. His most recent publications include the edited volumes Contexts, Subtexts, Pretexts: Literary Translation in Eastern Europe and Russia (Benjamins 2011), No Good without Reward: The Selected Writings of Liubov Krichevskaya (University of Toronto 2011), Russian Writers on Translation: An Anthology (St. Jerome 2013) and a translation of Juri Lotman’s final book-length work, The Unpredictable Workings of Culture (University of Tallinn 2013). Professor Baer is co- editor, with Claudia Angelelli, of Research Methods in Translation and Interpreting Studies, forthcoming from Routledge, and is currently completing a book-length project entitled Reading Between: Translation and the Making of Modern Russian Literature. Keynote address: The Translator’s Biography: Translation, Authorship and the Making of Soviet Subjects Alexandra Borisenko Moscow State University Alexandra Borisenko is Associate Professor at the Department of Philology at Moscow State University. Author of numerous critical and theoretical works on literary history and literary translation, she has also translated many works of British and American literature into Russian, most recently Flaubert’s Parrot by Julian Barnes (jointly with Victor Sonkin). While her earlier work was devoted to issues of literary translation and the “Soviet translation school,” she has later specialized in the detective genre and the Russian reception of nonsense literature. Since 1997, she has, together with Dr. Sonkin, taught a workshop on literary translation. The workshop has resulted in the publication of several books translated by students, including two major anthologies of British and American crime fiction (2009, 2011). Professor Borisenko also teaches a course in theoretical aspects of translation. Keynote address: “The Good Are Always the Merry”: British Children’s Literature in Soviet Russia —1— Katerina Clark Yale University Katerina Clark is Professor of Comparative Literature and of Slavic Languages and Literatures at Yale University, where she is also a member of the Senior Committee for Film Studies Program. Author of the pioneering study The Soviet Novel: History as Ritual (1981; third edition, Indiana University Press 2000), Professor Clark has written extensively on topics of Russian-Soviet culture. Her book Petersburg, Crucible of Cultural Revolution (Harvard University Press 1995) was awarded the Wayne S. Vucinich Prize for the best book of 1995 in Russian, East European or Eurasian Studies. Professor Clark’s latest book, Moscow, the Fourth Rome: Stalinism, Cosmopolitanism and the Evolution of Soviet Culture, 1931–1941 (Harvard University Press 2011), highlights the significance of translation during the peak of Soviet internationalism in the 1930s and the concept of world literature à la Russe as it developed throughout this decade. She also co-authored, with Evgeny Dobrenko, the annotated volume Soviet Culture and Power: A History in Documents, 1917–1953 (Yale University Press 2007). Her monograph Mikhail Bakhtin, co-authored with Michael Holquist (Harvard University Press 1984), has been translated into a range of languages, including Japanese, Italian, Portuguese and Chinese. Keynote address: Translation and Transnationalism Harsha Ram University of California at Berkeley Harsha Ram is Associate Professor of Slavic Languages and Literatures and Comparative Literature at the University of California, Berkeley. He has published extensively on eighteenth-century Russian literature, Russian romanticism and modernism, focusing primarily on the relationship between cultural and political history and the evolution of lyric poetry. His first book, The Imperial Sublime: A Russian Poetics of Empire (University of Wisconsin Press 2003) examines the sublime as a rhetorical category mediating between the imperial state and the development of lyric form and subjectivity. He is currently completing a book entitled Crossroads Modernity: Aesthetic Modernism and the Russian-Georgian Encounter, on the dialogue between Russian and Georgian modernism around the time of the Russian revolution. Keynote address: Translating Romanticism in the Age of Bardic Nationalism: Zhukovskii, Pushkin and Grigol Orbeliani —2— Maria Tymoczko University of Massachusetts Maria Tymoczko is Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. Her publications include Translation in a Postcolonial Context: Early Irish Literature in English Translation (1999) and Enlarging Translation, Empowering Translators (2007), with Neuroscience and Translation forthcoming. She is editor (with Edwin Gentzler) of Translation and Power (2002) and of Translation, Resistance, Activism (2010). Her articles have appeared in many of the leading journals in Translation Studies and in many anthologies. She currently focuses on theoretical issues about translation and on the ethics and ideology of translation. She has lectured around the world. Keynote address: Integrating Russian Traditions into Translation Studies: Considerations Related to Theory Adrian J. Wanner Pennsylvania State University Adrian Wanner is Professor of Slavic and Comparative Literature at The Pennsylvania State University. Born in Switzerland, he studied French and Russian Philology in Zurich, Paris and Leningrad, and obtained his PhD in Russian Literature from Columbia University in 1992. He has taught at Penn State since 1996. His research interests include the Russian Silver Age, literary relations between Russia and Western Europe, the translation of poetry, utopian studies and genre studies. More recently, he has focused on contemporary diaspora fiction, especially the literature written by Russian-Jewish émigré authors in French, German, English and Hebrew. He has published numerous articles in Slavic and comparative literature journals and is the author of three monographs: Baudelaire in Russia (University Press of Florida 1996), Russian Minimalism: From the Prose Poem to the Anti-Story (Northwestern University Press 2003), and Out of Russia: Fictions of a New Translingual Diaspora (Northwestern University Press 2011). In addition, he has published six editions of Russian, Romanian and Ukrainian poetry in his own German verse translation. His most recent book, published in 2013, is a bilingual Russian-German edition of the poetry of Vladislav Khodasevich. Keynote address: Beyond Nabokov and Brodsky: Russian Self-Translation in the 21st Century —3— PAPER ABSTRACTS Per Ambrosiani Translating the Incomprehensible: Anthony Burgess’ Nadsat Vocabulary in Translation Abstract The Russian-based “nadsat” slang vocabulary used by the main character and narrator of Anthony Burgess’ 1962 novel A Clockwork Orange presents both a theoretical and practical challenge for translation studies: how can more or less incomprehensible source text lexical items be translated into a target text? And in which ways do translations of A Clockwork Orange recreate the literary effects of the “nadsat” vocabulary of the source text? Starting from the traditional foreignization/domestication dichotomy and developing it into a more complex analytical tool, the paper explores the different strategies used by translators of Burgess’ text to recreate the clash between the comprehensible and incomprehensible that is one of the main characteristics of the original text, at least for monolingual readers of the English text who lack knowledge of Russian or other Slavic languages. The analysis focuses on the translation of this linguistically heterogeneous text into Russian, comparing ways of recreating the comprehensibility/incomprehensibility interplay present in the source text. The Russian target texts include translations of A Clockwork Orange by Evgenij Sinel´shchikov and Vladimir Boshniak, both published in 1991, and discusses them in a wider context of translations into other European languages (French, German, Italian, Swedish, etc.). Biography Per Ambrosiani, Professor of Russian at Umeå University, earned his Ph.D. in Slavic languages at Stockholm University in 1992. His main scholarly interests include the linguistic analysis of Slavic manuscripts and early printed books, historical Slavic lexicology, and Slavic onomastics, but Ambrosiani has also published articles within translation studies, where he has tried to problematize the traditional domestication/foreignization dichotomy. Selected publications and conference presentations are available at https://umu.academia.edu/PerAmbrosiani. [email protected] —4— Alexandra Berlina Ostranenie and the Surreal in Translation Abstract We know about the difficulties of translating realia. But what about surrealia? How do elements of surreal estrangement