essay about translation studies

Reading in Translation

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Elena Ferrante’s “The Lying Life of Adults”

Essays on Translation

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READING NATALIA GINZBURG
Translators on Books that Should be Translated
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In this section we publish short essays on the art and craft of literary translation, on translation theory, on reading literature in translation, or reports from events on literary translation. Our goal is to introduce new ideas or reflect on old ones, to create a dialogue around issues in literary translation, and to keep you informed about happenings in the world of literary translation.

The Translation Review: Why it Matters and How to do it Right

By Peter-Fray Witzer

How, exactly, can one assess the work a translation does in English, and how does it fit into world literature on the whole? What makes a translation “good,” and who determines what that means? Why is it important to review and appraise translations in our Anglocentric culture? This essay explores the work that reviewers of translations do in the American context, from reviews in mainstream publications to those written for independent specialized outlets. The essay discusses what the work of reviewing a translation entails; what the purpose of the translation review is and what it can achieve in different contexts; and how the practice of reviewing translations can be improved.

A Pervasive Method: On John Taylor’s Approach in Translating Franca Mancinelli’s “All the Eyes that I Have Opened”

By Stefano Bottero

Translated from Italian by John Taylor

Taylor’s translation appears to be a systematic operation—in other words—oriented by his acknowledgment of a philosophically (as well as poetically) coherent nucleus in All the Eyes that I Have Opened , a collection that constitutes one of the most interesting releases of recent contemporary Italian poetry.

The repeated adoption of a translation approach (which admits, in its very constructions, the disarticulation of referential uniqueness), is thus carried out in line with what the Italian poetic voice is itself asserting. To wit: the compromise of one’s own subjectivity as a unified space, as a function of an ontological process that coincides, as the days go by, with what has been lost.

Bringing “The Art of Joy” to English Readers

By Anne Milano Appel

Goliarda Sapienza, born on May 10, 1924, would have been 100 years old last month, but remains ever young, spirited, and determined to win the hearts of her readers. A plaque on the façade of a building at 20 Via Pistone in Catania, where Goliarda lived on the second floor, reads: “Questa casa, la strada, i vicoli, Catania, la terra di Sicilia hanno nutrito il genio narrativo di Goliarda Sapienza” (This house, the street, the passageways, Catania, the land of Sicily nurtured the narrative genius of Goliarda Sapienza.)

I owe L’arte della gioia primarily to Jonathan Galassi at Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Though the translation was actually commissioned by Alexis Kirschbaum at Penguin UK, Galassi had been interested in it for some time, thanks to a scout who warmly promoted it to him.

Translation and Its Present Contexts: On Translating Eudora Welty into Hebrew

By Reut Ben-Yaakov

A year ago, I was relatively new to the United States – living in Durham, North Carolina – when I found a copy of The Collected Stories of Eudora Welty in my neighborhood’s Little Free Library. I did not know Welty, but I took the book with me. I thought reading it could be a good way to get oriented. After reading some of it, I closed the book, but something in that story, “Where is the Voice Coming From?,” asked me to translate it. I didn’t understand why. It is a somewhat problematic story, I thought. I felt uneasy.

Bibikhin’s Task of the Translator: Introducing “On the Problems of Determining the Essence of Translation “

By Margarita Marinova and Anna Alsufieva

Vladimir Veniaminovich Bibikhin (1938-2004) was a Russian philosopher, translator, and philologist. Although the order of these descriptors can vary, what they all have in common is the careful attention to the “word as an event” (after Bakhtin) in their attempt to uncover the ontological foundations of language. This complex issue was the focus of Bibikhin’s thought in general.

During the 1970s and 1980s, he established himself as a prominent translator of the most complex philosophical, theological, and literary texts, and as a widely respected humanitarian scholar of a rare and extensive erudition. Bibikhin’s article we have chosen to present for the first time in English here, “On the Problem of Determining the Essence of Translation,” was written in 1973, but to understand its significance one must go further back in time, to the 1920s and ‘30s.

On the Problem of Determining the Essence of Translation

By Vladimir Bibikhin . Translated from Russian by Margarita Marinova

To the extent to which translation is a new re-play, a re-shaping of the given material according to the universal language rules, it is, in principle, just as independent as the original. It is simply that same original, only re-cast in a new form, and continuing to live in that new form. The original appears to be original only outwardly, in a temporal sense. In essence, that is, in its relation to the possibilities of human speech, it is not more original than the translation.

The original is lost, imprisoned in its private form. Translatability rescues it from those constraints. It reveals the fundamental, even if only potential opportunity of the original to exist in any form. Translatability shows that while the original may have been written in Japanese or Abkhazian, it was also first written in the universal human language. But, having liberated the original from its individual form, the translator now must breathe into it a new life in his native speech, recognizing and affirming in the process the universality of his own native tongue.

Against Camouflage: Jozefina Komporaly on Translating from Hungarian Melinda Mátyus’ “MyLifeandMyLife”

By Jozefina Komporaly

Melinda Mátyus’ novel in verse MyLifeandMyLife is one of the most original pieces of experimental fiction published in Hungarian in recent years. The book’s protagonist is desperately in love with a mysterious male figure, and this emotional dependency not only leads her to give up her agency but also gradually paves the way to her suffocation and ultimate demise. Melinda Mátyus writes in bold and deeply touching ways about contemporary women and her protagonists examine womanhood in a variety of manifestations and configurations.

This is the first translation of Mátyus’ work in a foreign language and it comes in a bilingual edition, with the original Hungarian following Jozefina Komporaly’s English translation. We are grateful to Ugly Duckling Presse for allowing us to publish here Komporaly’s translator’s note in which she discusses Mátyus’ unique sense of grammar and syntax, and her own approach to translating it.

The Afterlives of Natalia Ginzburg’s “The Road to the City”

By Stiliana Milkova Rousseva

Natalia Ginzburg wrote The Road to the City (La strada che va in città) in the fall of 1941, during a time of persecution, hardship, and deprivation. The previous year her husband Leone Ginzburg, a prominent intellectual and anti-fascist activist, had been confined to internal exile in the remote village of Pizzoli in the Abruzzo region. Natalia and their children had left their home in Turin and joined him in October 1940, forging a family and professional life in exile, despite the difficult conditions of their everyday reality.

The Road to the City came out in 1942, under the pseudonym “Alessandra Tornimparte,” which Ginzburg used to evade Mussolini’s antiracial law restricting Jews from publishing. This novella was her first longer work, and it already contained the salient features of her poetics: stylistic economy and understatement, simplicity of diction, psychology constructed through details and actions, and a topographic imagination with the road and the city as its organizing figures.

Toward a Speculative Poetics of Translation: Janine Beichman’s Translation from Japanese of Ishigaki Rin’s “This Overflowing Light”

By James Garza

Over a career spanning decades, Ishigaki Rin (1920-2004) forged a poetry of keen moral discernment and wry self-discovery. On the one hand, her work was democratic in its language and outlook, premised on the possibility of liberation from the strictures of poverty and repressive social institutions. But it was also grounded in the absurdities of the everyday and the domestic, with a propensity for sharp turns into darkness. While this picture is not wrong, Janine Beichman argues in This Overflowing Light: Selected Poems (Isobar Press, 2022), it needs an update to recover several vital aspects of her poetics. In the volume’s artful and engaging introduction, Beichman calls our attention to several correspondences with contemporary poetics: first, there is the speculative orientation of Ishigaki’s work, capable of uncanny leaps in spatial and temporal perspective. Then there is its under-explored connection to eco-critical thought. And finally there is its playful but intense awareness of the agentive role of fantasy and imagination in constructing ‘real life.’

Always Against: On Translating the Punk Rock Lyrics of Egor Letov

By Katie Frevert

During the second half of the 1980s, the liberalizing reforms of perestroika ushered in a renaissance period for the Soviet Union’s nascent rock scene. Bands that had gotten their start in underground apartment concerts could court mainstream success at rock clubs in the western Russian centers of Leningrad, Moscow, and Sverdlovsk under the watchful eye of state security. If the music of the degenerate West could not be eradicated, they reasoned, the KGB could curtail its harmful influence by supervising concerts, ensuring that politically dubious or stylistically unorthodox groups remained in the margins.

Yet in the western Siberian cities of Omsk, Novosibirsk, and Tiumen’, where no such officially sanctioned venues existed, young rockers captivated by Western punk bypassed the censors by remaining underground and creating music openly critical of the Soviet system. The most well-known figure in this emerging punk counterculture was Igor Fёdorovich (“Egor”) Letov (1964-2008), who in 1984 founded the band Grazhdanskaia oborona (Civil Defense)

Julia Kornberg’s “Atomizado Berlín”: Creating a New Reader Across Translation

By Nora Méndez

In this essay, I investigate how Julia Kornberg writes a novel that challenges and subverts this ‘lazy’ reader with stylistic, formal, and thematic innovations, and think about how a translation of her text, though difficult or precisely because of that, has the ability to support and communicate across another language her careful mediation of the demands of the global literary market. In what follows I pay specific attention to how Kornberg utilizes the novel’s topic-choice, ambiguity of context, and inclusion of words in English, French, and other languages, to challenge the reader that the global literary market caters to reclaim their agency and individuality as able and active readers.

Stumbling Through the “Foreign”: A Look at Poupeh Missaghi’s Poetics of Translation

By Anna Learn

Poupeh Missaghi wants you , the reader, to stumble.

In her genre-twisting 2020 novel trans(re)lating house one , the writer and translator declares, “I want you to be disrupted when you arrive here, feel some discomfort, feel out of place” (35). Although trans(re)lating house one is presented to us in English, Missaghi insists that Persian is the true language of its characters and city. The book was ‘translated’ from Persian to English, then, before it was ever written. For this reason, throughout her novel, Missaghi seeks to “acknowledge the Otherness of both the territory and the language to you, make them visible, and celebrate them” (35).

Er asing the Dividing Line: On Christian Bancroft’s “Queering Modernist Translation”

By Conor Bracken

“Translation is having a queer moment,” Christian Bancroft writes in the introduction to his monograph, Queering Modernist Translation (Routledge, 2020). The moment has been a long time coming: both fields, translation and queer studies, were thriving by the turn of the 21 st century, but only over the past ten years have special issues and edited essay collections begun to emerge with some frequency to consider their intersection, and the resulting “expansive ways of imagining the relationships among languages as they relate to the identities, cultures, and societies that produce them” (1). The uninitiated may wonder, what can queer theory offer translation, as a study and practice, aside from ways of uncovering or confronting the gender biases and heteronormativity in and between languages? Much more than that, I can enthusiastically report.

Reading Elena Ferrante in Bulgaria(n)

By Stiliana Milkova

Last year I read Elena Ferrante’s new novel The Lying Life of Adults ( La vita bugiarda degli adulti ) in Bulgarian, in Ivo Yonkov’s translation. It was September 2020, it had just been released by Ferrante’s Bulgarian publisher, Colibri , and I was in Bulgaria myself. I went to Helikon, the largest bookshop in my home town Burgas, and asked for Ferrante’s new novel. The saleswoman quickly showed it to me on the shelf and recommended, since I was interested in Ferrante, that I also buy Nora Roberts’s (or was it Danielle Steel’s?) latest novel. I didn’t argue with her – I just picked up The Lying Life of Adults , paid for it and left. I refrained from telling her that Ferrante’s book was not a romance novel and the bookstore should reconsider its classification. I didn’t tell her that I was a Ferrante expert, that my book Elena Ferrante as World Literature was coming out in a few months, that it was the first scholarly monograph on Ferrante written in English, and by a Bulgarian at that.

Always to Seek: On Reading Russian Literature in Translation

By Brandy Harrison

It all began with youthful audacity. When someone asked me one day, “What are you reading? , ” the answer was War and Peace. There was a pause, a faint flicker of confusion in the face hovering above my own, and then a slower, more tentative second question: “Why . . . are you reading that? ”

I, at seventeen, sitting propped up against my locker in the hallway, didn’t really have an answer. The plain grey hardcover teetering against my knees looked as thick and heavy as a brick (he said), and why would anyone want to read some novel about the . . . Russians . . . during the – what was it, again? The Napoleonic Wars? What was the point?

I shrugged with adolescent nonchalance. “I don’t know. It’s interesting.”

Neither Here and There: The Misery and Splendor of (Reverse) Translation*

by Ekaterina Petrova

Translation is a gnarly business. Even more so when you’re doing it the wrong way around.

In Bulgarian, which I translate from, translating into a language that’s not your native tongue is colloquially known as obraten prevod , which literally means “reverse translation.” As an adjective, obraten carries the negative connotation of something abnormal or backward, something that goes against the grain, or something that simply isn’t right.

A Materialist Approach to Translation

By Sophie Drukman-Feldstein

The translator’s sin is that of breaching the mythology which surrounds the individual authorial voice. The literary world erases the translator in order to preserve the liberal ideal of individual genius. And yet this erasure is not a distinctive problem of translation, but rather an expression of the worker’s alienation from the product of their labor. It is in fact the narrative of authorship which is unusual, in that literature is one of the few commodities which, rather than being conceptually distanced from the workers who produce it, is viewed as an extension of that worker’s self. By arguing that translation is art, translation theory abandons the possibility of fighting alienation writ large, and instead pursues for translators the unusual forms of acknowledgement which writers receive.

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Reflections on Translation

Susan Bassnett
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Language: English
Publisher: Multilingual Matters
Main content: 192
Keywords: writings on translation ; essays on translation ; translation studies ; culture studies ; translation of poetry ; literary translation ; translation and humour ; translation and politics ; lost in translation
Published: June 17, 2011
ISBN: 9781847694102

What is Translation Studies?

Definition of translation studies.

Translation Studies is the field of study that deals with the theory, description, and application of translation. Because it examines translation not only as interlingual transfer but also as intercultural communication, it can also be described as an interdiscipline which touches on other diverse fields of knowledge, including comparative literature, cultural studies, gender studies, computer science, history, linguistics, philosophy, rhetoric, and semiotics. Translation Studies is often paired with Interpreting, although the two are distinct fields.

History of Translation Studies

Although translators from the Romans have had much to say about the theory and practice of translation, it was not until the twentieth century that Translation Studies emerged as a formal academic discipline. James S Holmes’ 1972 landmark paper entitled The Name and Nature of Translation Studies was the foundational statement of Translation Studies: it called for the creation of a distinct discipline with its own system of classification.

Translation Studies as an Academic Discipline

Translation Studies entails the systematic examination of translation both as an applied practice and also as a means of understanding the movement and transfer between diverse languages and cultures. Translation Studies deals with the practical experiences of the translator; it also explores from theoretical and methodological perspectives the history and philosophy of translation, as well as current trends in the field. Translation Studies may examine the practices and context of translating texts that are specialist (legal, business, medical, etc.); it also may explore the art of translation as a creative act in literary translation and international marketing. Translation Studies may also explore how issues of culture, power, gender, ethics medium affect the act of translating. The study of these enables students to apply their theoretical understanding to the approaches, techniques, and choices that are used daily as a practicing translator.

What Does Translation Studies Involve?

The study of translation usually includes the analysis of key texts, enabling students to develop an awareness of the problems of understanding and interpretation. It also involves the development of the analytical, practical, evaluative, aesthetic, and expository skills required to address translation problems. Finally, it includes the development of research skills, practical translation skills, and the ability to develop strategies for managing complex linguistic and cultural transactions.

Why Study Translation?

The discipline of translation studies has grown alongside the introduction of university schools and courses, relevant conferences, translation journals, and other translation-related publications.

The skills of translation are becoming ever more important and desirable, as today’s multicultural and multilingual society demands effective, efficient, and empathetic communication between languages and cultures.

Careers in Translation

Translation Studies prepares students for various careers. Some graduates choose to start their own business as a freelance translator. Others become in-house translators or project managers for translation companies or international businesses. There are also roles in such language services industries as international publishing, journalism, public relations, and teaching.

Professionals with significant linguistic backgrounds, as well as translators, linguists, and other language professionals often choose to study a Master of Arts degree or a Ph.D. in Translation Studies. This course of study enables students to develop specialist language skills, research skills, and the credentials required to land more advanced specialist roles in translation, teaching, international business, and media.