A Man of Vision: Dumitru Ciocoi-Pop (1943-2019)

Editor’s Note: On Translation, Interpretation and the Commonwealth of Cultures

<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">It is not a recent discovery in the field of language history that the address pronouns <italic>thou</italic> and <italic>you</italic> were not, in Shakespeare’s time, used indiscriminately. If the speaker did have a choice between the two forms, that choice was by no means random, idiosyncratic or arbitrary, but always dictated by the social, relational or attitudinal context of a speech act. Nonetheless, all 20th-century Romanian translations of <italic>Romeo and Juliet</italic> (and of other Shakespearean plays) – from Haralamb Leca’s rather loose rendering (1907) to Ștefan-Octavian Iosif’s and to Virgil Teodorescu’s more refined versions (1940 and 1984, respectively) – seem to ignore the difference in associative meaning between the two forms, which is sometimes essential for a correct assessment of the relationships between characters. The latest Romanian translation of the play, which we have jointly submitted for publication within the <italic>Shakespeare for the Third Millennium</italic> project (William Shakespeare. <italic>Opere XIII</italic>, 2018) acknowledges the importance of the various associative meanings that the two pronouns carry and strives to restore these meanings to the text, though not without difficulty, given the rather restrictive form of the original, i.e. iambic pentameters, often with strict rhyme schemes. Thus, focusing on the well-known “shared sonnet” as one of the most relevant instances of pronoun alternation in the play, our paper discusses the uses of <italic>you</italic> and <italic>thou</italic> in Early Modern English and sets out to assess how much is lost in 20th-century translations, to show how our own translation restores the associative meanings of the two pronominal forms and finally to exemplify how we managed to overcome translation difficulties entailed by the metrical and stylistic demands of the text.</abstract>

Of “You” and “Thou,” Lips and Pilgrims in the Translation of Romeo and Juliet’s “Shared Sonnet”: A Hands-On Perspective

<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">There are few professions and professionals to be constantly perceived as ambivalent. But for interpreting and interpreters, this seems to be the norm, rather than the exception. On the one hand, there has always been a sense of fascination for these extraordinary people who speak so many languages and have such a wide knowledge of the world. On the other, they have inspired reluctance, distrust or even fear. While literary works sometimes reflect one or the other perception, James Justinian Morier’s <italic>The Adventures of Hajji Baba, of Ispahan, in England</italic> (1828) reflects both and provides us with an insight into the nature and circumstances of the situation. By following the attitude towards the <italic>mehmandar</italic> throughout the novel, the present paper considers a set of <italic>memes</italic> that seem to be still valid today. The reasons this is so relate to features inherent in the profession, the privilege of understanding both sides ‘of the coin’, the power tamper with information, the risk of misunderstanding, etc.</abstract>

A Portrait of the <italic>Mehmandar</italic>: Accompanying Hajji Baba, of Ispahan, to England

<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">Joseph Conrad’s fiction – <italic>Lord Jim</italic> especially – contains several instances of characters struggling with translation, or with foreign languages more generally, or transferring speech or syntactic patterns from one language to another. These features have much to suggest about Conrad’s own multilingual early life and his eventual adoption of English for his writing. They also have wider implications concerning his vision and tactics as a novelist – including his reliance on French fiction, and his regular emphases on cultural difference and on the cognitive and epistemological challenges of communicating experience. These challenges, in turn, initiate or anticipate concerns widely apparent in modernist fiction, indicating stresses in an advancing, globalised modernity which made its innovations so necessary. Appreciating Conrad’s interest in translation elucidates and confirms Fredric Jameson’s judgement of his writing as a key factor in the emergence of modernism in the early twentieth century.</abstract>

“One does what one can (<italic>on fait ce qu’on peut</italic>)”: Joseph Conrad as Translator

<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">Language use is the consequence of certain dynamics in people’s lives. It is obvious that translation implies, even etymologically, movement, mobility, exchange. These phenomena are more topical than ever nowadays, in the age of globalization. In the present essay, I analyze the translation of identities in the work of Oksana Marafioti, a contemporary writer of Roma origins who emigrated from the Soviet Union to the United States of America. Her memoir <italic>American Gypsy</italic> is an effort to trans-late towards a multiple, volatile, fluid identity where the languages spoken by Marafioti lead to belongings and rejections. The author records, in exquisite wording, the painful process of translating from a culture to another culture, from a language to another language.</abstract>

Oksana Marafioti: Translating Identities

<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">In a context where post-colonial translation has emerged as a strong interface between post-colonial studies and translation studies, the present paper examines the case of Salman Rushdie as a post-colonial translator. Drawing on concepts and ideas put forth by the two above-mentioned paradigms, the paper will argue that the strategies used by Rushdie in his attempts to write about the importance of redressing the balance of power and of resisting Orientalising practices are similar to those used by translators of post-colonial literature. The writing of post-colonial literature becomes an act of (re)translation, while translating post-colonial literature should aim at resisting domestication and at creating a target text that remains ‘foreign’ enough for the reader. While there is no doubt that through its post-colonial and global concerns Rushdie’s entire work fits this frame, the analysis will focus only on two works, <italic>Midnight’s Children</italic> and <italic>Two Years, Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights</italic>, since they seem to bracket Rushdie’s efforts in this respect.</abstract>

A Portrait of the Writer as a Translator: Salman Rushdie and the Challenges of Post-colonial Translation

<abstract xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">One of the more interesting science fiction movies of recent years, at least to Humanities academics, is Denis Villeneuve’s 2016 alien-invasion movie, <italic>Arrival</italic>. It is a film which not only features a Professor of Linguistics as its heroine, but the plot of which is organised around the critical global importance of a multi-million dollar translation project. This essay compares the film with the original novella upon which it was based – Ted Chiang’s “Story of Your Life” (1998) – to examine the role translation plays in both, with the aim of placing this in the context of the crisis in the Humanities which has marked universities over the last few years, and can be linked to a more general crisis in liberal values. While founded upon a time-honoured science fiction scenario the movie also clearly articulates the sense of global peril which is typical of much of the cultural production of our current times, manifested in fears about ecological catastrophe, terrorist attacks, and the anthropocene, etc. Another of its crisis-points is also ‘very 2016’: its ability to use science fiction tropes to express an anxiety about how liberal values are in danger of being overtaken by a self-interested, forceful, intolerant kind of politics. <italic>Arrival</italic> is as much a work of ‘hu-fi’ as it is ‘sci-fi’, that is, ‘Humanities fiction’, a film which uses Chiang’s original novella to convey a message about the restorative potential of ‘Humanities values’ in the face of a new global threat.</abstract>

Humanities Fiction: Translation and ‘Transplanetarity’ in Ted Chiang’s “The Story of Your Life” and Denis Villeneuve’s <italic>Arrival</italic>

What Is World Literature?

Bel Canto

Dolmetscher als literarische Figuren. Von Identitätsverlust, Dilettantismus und Verrat

AHEAD OF PRINT

Volume 41 (2023): Issue 1 (December 2023)

Volume 40 (2023): Issue 1 (June 2023)

Volume 39 (2022): Issue 1 (December 2022)

Volume 38 (2022): Issue 1 (June 2022)

Volume 37 (2021): Issue 1 (December 2021)

Volume 36 (2021): Issue 1 (June 2021)

Volume 35 (2020): Issue 1 (December 2020)

Volume 34 (2020): Issue 1 (June 2020)

Volume 33 (2019): Issue 1 (December 2019)

Volume 32 (2019): Issue 1 (June 2019)

Volume 31 (2018): Issue 1 (December 2018)

Volume 30 (2018): Issue 1 (June 2018)

Volume 29 (2017): Issue 1 (December 2017)

Volume 28 (2017): Issue 1 (June 2017)

Volume 27 (2016): Issue 1 (December 2016)

Volume 26 (2016): Issue 1 (June 2016)

Volume 25 (2015): Issue 1 (December 2015)

Volume 24 (2015): Issue 1 (June 2015)

Volume 23 (2014): Issue 1 (December 2014)

Volume 22 (2014): Issue 1 (August 2014)

Volume 21 (2014): Issue 1 (January 2014)

Volume 20 (2013): Issue 1 (June 2013)

Volume 19 (2012): Issue 2012 (December 2012)

American, British and Canadian Studies

 Publishing House and Owner: Lucian Blaga University of Sibiu, Romania  Founded in 1999 as the journal of the Academic Anglophone Society of Romania, American, British and Canadian Studies is currently published biannually by Lucian Blaga University of Sibiu, under the aegis of the Research Centre for Linguistic, Literary and Cultural Studies at LBUS and the Academic Anglophone Society of Romania. It is an international, peer-reviewed journal that sets out to explore disciplinary developments in Anglophone Studies in the changing environment forged by the intersections of culture, technology and electronic information. Our primary goal is to bring together in productive dialogue scholars conducting advanced research in the theoretical humanities. As well as offering innovative approaches to influential crosscurrents in contemporary thinking, the journal seeks to contribute fresh angles to the academic subject of English and promote shape-changing research across conventional boundaries. By virtue of its dynamic and varied profile and of the intercultural dialogue that it caters for, American, British and Canadian Studies aims to fill a gap in the Romanian academic arena, and function as the first publication to approach Anglophone Studies in a multi-disciplinary perspective. Within the proposed range of diversity, our major scope is to provide close examinations and lucid analyses of the role and future of the academic institutions at the cutting edge of high-tech. With this end in view, we especially invite contributions in the fields of Comparative Literary and Cultural Studies, Postcolonial Theory, Area Studies, Cultural Anthropology, Language and Linguistics, Multimedia and Digital Arts, Translation Studies and related subjects. With its wide subject range, American, British and Canadian Studies aims to become one of the academic community’s premium scholarly resources.  Archiving  Sciendo archives the contents of this journal in Portico - digital long-term preservation service of scholarly books, journals and collections.  Plagiarism Policy  The editorial board is participating in a growing community of Similarity Check System's users in order to ensure that the content published is original and trustworthy. Similarity Check is a medium that allows for comprehensive manuscripts screening, aimed to eliminate plagiarism and provide a high standard and quality peer-review process. 

American, British and Canadian Studies

Volume 32 (2019): Issue 1 (June 2019)

A Man of Vision: Dumitru Ciocoi-Pop (1943-2019)

Editor’s Note: On Translation, Interpretation and the Commonwealth of Cultures

Of “You” and “Thou,” Lips and Pilgrims in the Translation of Romeo and Juliet’s “Shared Sonnet”: A Hands-On Perspective

A Portrait of the Mehmandar: Accompanying Hajji Baba, of Ispahan, to England

“One does what one can (on fait ce qu’on peut)”: Joseph Conrad as Translator

Oksana Marafioti: Translating Identities

A Portrait of the Writer as a Translator: Salman Rushdie and the Challenges of Post-colonial Translation

Humanities Fiction: Translation and ‘Transplanetarity’ in Ted Chiang’s “The Story of Your Life” and Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival

What Is World Literature?

Bel Canto

Dolmetscher als literarische Figuren. Von Identitätsverlust, Dilettantismus und Verrat

Search

All Volumes and Issues in this Journal