I am orga­niz­ing a panel on the trans­la­tion of non-Western lit­er­a­tures for the North­east Mod­ern Lan­guage Association’s annual con­fer­ence, which will be held in Mon­tréal, April 7 – 11. Here is the call for papers. Please send pro­pos­als to me at richard.newman at ncc dot edu.

Non-Western Lit­er­a­tures in Translation

The act of lit­er­ary trans­la­tion raises by def­i­n­i­tion the ques­tion of how the tar­get cul­ture frames the lan­guage and cul­ture of the text to be trans­lated. This issue, often unex­am­ined, can deter­mine not only which texts from which lan­guages are cho­sen for trans­la­tion, but also what the rela­tion­ship between the trans­la­tion and the orig­i­nal text is under­stood to be. Nine­teenth cen­tury British and Amer­i­can trans­la­tors of clas­si­cal Iran­ian poetry, for exam­ple, often por­trayed them­selves quite explic­itly as improv­ing on what they under­stood to be the “ori­en­tal” defects of the poets they were work­ing with. This stance finds its roots in British colo­nial rule of India, where Per­sian was the lan­guage of the Moghul courts, and the idea that, if only the British could under­stand Per­sian and the psy­chol­ogy it embod­ied, they could make them­selves more effec­tive colo­nial rulers. The his­tory of the trans­la­tion into Eng­lish of other non-Western lit­er­a­tures – includ­ing those we now con­sider West­ern, like clas­si­cal Greek – is fraught with sim­i­lar kinds of bias, as are con­tem­po­rary assump­tions about the value non-Western lit­er­a­tures hold for us. Keep­ing in mind the fact that less than 3% of all the books pub­lished in the United States in any given year are lit­er­ary trans­la­tions, and the fact that pub­lish­ing at all lev­els is a busi­ness that both cre­ates and responds to its mar­ket, this panel seeks to exam­ine the issues con­fronting the trans­la­tion of non-Western lit­er­a­tures, from clas­si­cal to con­tem­po­rary, into Eng­lish. While we would like the empha­sis to be on lan­guages that are not already com­monly trans­lated (Japan­ese and Chi­nese, among oth­ers), we wel­come pro­pos­als con­cern­ing any non-Western lan­guage. We encour­age a vari­ety of per­spec­tives – from authors of texts that have been trans­lated (or texts in search of a trans­la­tion), trans­la­tors, schol­ars, pub­lish­ers – and would pre­fer to have papers address­ing a range of time peri­ods. Top­ics might include the lin­guis­tic and cul­tural chal­lenges of trans­lat­ing non-Western lan­guages, what we learn from the his­tory of the trans­la­tion of a given work or body of work, trans­la­tion suc­cess sto­ries, the chal­lenges of pub­lish­ing lit­er­ary trans­la­tions of non-Western lan­guages, or why a given work or body of work deserves more atten­tion – schol­arly and oth­er­wise – than it has been given. We also look for­ward to being sur­prised by ideas that have not occurred to us.