Translation and Interpreting Studies. The Journal of the American Translation and Interpreting Studies Association - Volume 11, Issue 3, 2016

Reflections of three sorts on the relations between translators and authors: autobiographical, polemical, and historical. The autobiographical reflections focus on the relation between the author and the German novelist Jeannette Lander and between the author and the German-Jewish philosopher Franz Rosenzweig. The polemical reflections call into question the notion that the translation is of less value than the original, the translator a lesser writer than the author. The historical reflections focus on the history of translating Yiddish into English in America.

This article aims to provide an overview of the intricate overlap of agent roles that characterized the production process of a popular bilingual work — Le chanteur de rues bruxellois/The Brusselsche straatzanger [The Brussels Street Singer] — which circulated in the Belgian capital between 1897 and 1899. By reassembling the micro-networks around the production process of The Brussels Street Singer, this study shows how the interaction and interference of different actors and agent roles led to the creation of a fundamentally hybrid work, one that allows for a better understanding of the Belgian literary configuration at the turn of the twentieth century.

The postmodern novella Matsunoe no ki (The Matsunoe family; or, Branches of the Pine, 2012) by the Japanese writer EnJoe Toh falls within the category of what Thomas Beebee (2012) calls “transmesis,” here taking the specific form of a metafictional and metanarrative exploration of author-translator relationships. One feature that distinguishes this instance of transmesis is that the fictional author and translator both take on each of these roles, thereby blurring the boundaries between writing and translating. In addition, a brain injury leads to a dissociation between the cognitive functions of reading and writing in one of the protagonists, resulting in effect in three distinct personas. This further complicates this representation of author-translator relationships and highlights the separate but interrelated components within and across the processes of writing and translating.

Based on the diachronic and international study of American Modernism and its translation into Spanish, this article aims to analyze the complementary role of poet-translators as a double link in the global literary system. On the one hand, when translating other authors, poet-translators introduce them to a new audience. On the other hand, their translations complement their own poetic creations. While translating poetry, poet-translators assimilate the original poet’s style and images, which will later filter in their own poetic works. But, at the same time, these literary agents — consciously or unconsciously — introduce their own style marks into their translations. In order to illustrate the analysis, those people whose role as poet-translators stands out have been chosen among all the translators of Modernist poets into Spanish. Added to this discussion is commentary on some examples of Modernist poets who were also translators, including Yvor Winters, Marianne Moore, Langston Hughes, Hilda Doolittle, and Ezra Pound.

The article investigates the ambivalent role of translation as a means of radical social and cultural change in a totalitarian situation such as the earlier Sovietization of Estonia after WWII. Translation becomes, on the one hand, an empowered and dominant activity in the establishment of the new ideological and cultural values; but it functions, at the same time, as a disempowering and marginalizing kind of writing to which writers suspicious to the new regime and silenced as authors are now confined. An original combination of Jacques Rancière’s notion of “distribution of the sensible” [partage du sensible] and Michel Foucault’s understanding of the “author-function,” is adopted in the article to describe all this as a process of deauthorization, thus unraveling the relation between authorial agency and political authority, the rationale behind hegemonic discursive attitudes toward different literary activities within a given social order, and political interventions in literature and culture under totalitarian rule.

This article aims to contribute to the history of Canadian official translators by looking at three activist translators who were also published writers in post-confederation nineteenth-century Canada. All three francophone official translators “exiled” to Ottawa, the newly designated capital of the young confederation, were actively engaged in creating francophone spaces in and from which they could promote French-Canadian cultures and the French language. Refusing to submit passively to Anglo-dominated government authorship and to the increasingly anglicized Canadian landscape, they coordinated their efforts to carve out a distinct and distinctive place for Canadian francophones. Their weapon of choice in confronting Anglo-Canadian hegemony was authorship. From historical narrative, to novels, caustic songs and nationalist poetry, their writings nurtured pride in the shared history of French-Canadians from different backgrounds — despite the traumatic Grand Dérangement and Conquête — and generated hope for the future of their nation(s).

This article focuses on the personal and direct relationships between translators and authors in the digital age. It presents the conclusions of a qualitative study, based on personal interviews with three leading Israeli translators of fantasy literature for young readers from English to Hebrew; on recorded and filmed interviews of these translators and authors; on collections of open and closed internet chats of several fantasy translators; and on internet forum messages and personal e-mails from the archives of the three main interviewees. The findings illustrate the new realm of professionalism and personal relationships among authors and their translators and add the digital view to studies about the relationship between translators and authors.