Translating, Transfering, Transforming: Investigations in the history and theory of translatorial practices.
An International Workshop at the University of Bergen, LLE, organized by the research group “Contemporary Aesthetics”
Hovedinnhold
Although they are rare, some translations aspire to be more than just a stylistic exercise or a means of communicating between cultures. Seeking new or forgotten linguistic possibilities, playing with transference between languages or intervening in current discursive conditions, such translations often carry ruthless, sometimes violent traits. Michel Foucault therefore described the role of the translator as a confrontational, almost militant one, alluding to Walter Benjamin's The Task of the Translator – translation is less advocacy than protest. When the aim is not to conceal the Babylonian confusion of languages, but rather, as the poet and translator Uljana Wolf once phrased it, to “alienate, stutter and miswrite conventional language patterns”, the target language is rarely left untouched. Translation can therefore become a promise of transformation, whereby the damage done to one‘s own language coincides with creative renewal.
This workshop will focus on innovative and experimental episodes from the history of literature and translation, highlighting examples that explore such interventionist modes.
Programme:
13.00-13.15: Welcome and Introduction
13.15-14.15: John David Crosby (NTNU, Trondheim): Translation History as Literary History: Nynorsk Literature's Debt to the Foreign
14.45-15.45: Wolfgang Hottner (UiB, Bergen): Translating punctuation: On Jon Fosse’s Adorno or what was ‘Scandinavian Theory’?
16.00-17.00: Judith Kasper (Goethe Universität, Frankfurt a.M.): Hermeneutics and spiritual connection. On the translation of M. NourbeSe Philips Zong!