[New publication] Tusaaji: A Translation Review: Volume 6, No. 6, 2018

Tusaaji: A Translation Review: Volume 6, No. 6, 2018

Link to this issue: https://tusaaji.journals.yorku.ca/index.php/tusaaji?fbclid=IwAR14ZpFcRWCm6xX53DnvWcHIcKpgBFi2vIJ1Wbg70pFoJ9b-kXd0pbD37Oo

Note from the Guest Editor, by Şehnaz Tahir Gürçağlar 

Translation is the materialization of webs of relations. Viewed as an event, translation bears the traces of bodies, voices, and experiences. As artifacts, translations are themselves marks of relations because they manifest themselves through language and offer us sites to map those relations. Beyond the text, as a web and in its chaotic, messy nature, translation is a site for agents, institutions, texts and strategies to be brought together “on the same map of culture” so that their relations can be traced “in the form of complex networks” (Tahir Gürçağlar 727). Translations and the surrounding paratexts constitute part of the “translator’s archive” and allow us to trace the presence of the translating subject. The “translator’s archive” is a concept that encompasses a translators’ texts, paratexts, and statements, her body of works—both published and unpublished—i.e. the material traces of a translator. The “translator’s archive” also goes beyond its textual composition to designate “a discursive formation and a dynamic and organic composition […] that is not limited to the archive’s textual materiality but includes translators’ biographies, their practices, the agents involved in the translating event, and the relations among them” (Guzmán 6-7). The translator’s archive can and should be studied from various angles, including linguistic, cultural and sociological analyses, and in that sense it provides a fruitful site for transdisciplinary approaches. This issue of Tusaaji sheds light on the traces of translators that can be found in and through translation. The contributors conceptualize the notion of trace from a variety of perspectives and in a wide range of genres. The issue opens with Marella Feltrin-Morris’ study on deviations from the norm in translators’ prefaces to Dante’s Divine Comedy, where she explores the prefaces as a unique space that may reveal the authentic voices of the translators. Carline Cunha Ramos Quaresma tackles the unique position of Kaká Werá Jecupé, an indigenous author and translator, mediating and leaving multiple traces in the Brazilian cultural context through his books on the ancestral myths of the Guarani people. Ceyda Elgül explores translation and biography writing as homologous acts of representation and traces the subjectivities of two Borges biographers through their books and the paratexts surrounding them. Alexandra Hillinger focuses on the third English translation of the novel Les Anciens Canadiens as the product of the individual initiative of its translator, Jane Brierley, by focusing on both the translator’s preface and the exchanges between her and the Canada Council for the Arts. Sanjukta Banerjee examines French travel accounts of eighteenth-century multilingual India and explores the traces left in them by the very crucial figure of the native translator/interpreter. Finally, Beatrijs Vanacker highlights the historical interplay of gender and translation. She focuses on three eighteenth-century female author/translators who made use of translation and pseudotranslation, and their paratexts to assert their authorship in a largely male dominated literary field.
Finally, the poem “Korku” by the Turkish poet Enis Batur, translated aptly into English by Saliha Paker with the title “Fear”, captures a moment in time, highlighting the visual and poetic traces of conversations among a group of artists and poets in the poet’s memory.

Works Cited
Gürçağlar, Şehnaz Tahir. “Chaos Before Order: Network Maps and Research Design in DTS.” Connecting Translation and Network Studies, special issue of Meta, vol. 52, n.º 4, 2007, pp. 724-743.
Guzmán, María Constanza. “Translation North and South: Composing the Translator’s Archive.” Traduction et conscience sociale/Translation and Social Conscience: Around the Work of Daniel Simeoni, special issue of TTR : traduction, terminology, rédaction, vol. 26, n.º 2, 2013, pp. 171-191.

 

Also in this issue:

Welcome Intrusions: Capturing the Unexpected in Translators’ Prefaces to Dante’s Divine Comedy, by Marella Feltrin-Morris

Abstract: As part of an ongoing research project, this essay examines a number of translators’ prefaces to Dante’s Divine Comedy, summarizing recurring patterns and then focusing on deviations from the norm. The majority of these prefaces tend to follow a script, particularly in the case of retranslations of classical texts, which require an acknowledgment of past translations, a homage to the authority of the source text and a display of the translator’s expertise. However, occasional detours from the predictable constellation of themes deserve closer scrutiny, since they give a more authentic voice to the individuals who engaged with the text in its deepest form, not merely within the confines of a prescriptive formula, but expanding the potential of this unique space towards new avenues of discovery.

A metáfora antropofágica em Todas as vezes que dissemos adeus de Kaká Werá Jecupé, by Carline Cunha Ramos Quaresma

Abstract: As one of the first Indigenous authors in Brazil to record the myths of his own people in book form, Kaká Werá Jecupé occupies a privileged space of enunciation vis-à-vis other writers who have published books about Indigenous verbal arts. His books rescue the ancestral memory of the Guarani people and carry with them the differential of having been written by someone who belongs to this culture. According to Kaká Werá Jecupé, until the publication, in 1994, of the first edition of Todas as vezes que dissemos adeus, Brazilian Indigenous culture had always been presented through the voices of anthropologists, indigenists, or social scientists. In this paper I focus on the resonances in the book of the anthropophagy metaphor—a trace of Indigenous culture drawn by Oswald de Andrade as a political gesture for a discussion of questions of the relationship between self and other. I take it as a point of departure to discuss Kaká Werá Jecupé’s position, living “between two worlds”, and his mission to reveal his age-old tradition to so-called civilization, promoting the opening of a dialogue between cultures.

The Biographers’ Encounter with Jorge Luis Borges: Authentic or Total?, by Ceyda Elgül

Abstract: This study sets out from the mutual concerns that biographers and translators face during the process of recreating a source for a new audience. It presents translation and biography writing as analogous forms of rewriting. Both biographers and translators are compelled to overcome the dilemma of the truth of the source vs. the authenticity of the rewrite. This requires them to consider matters such as fluency, (in)visibility, objectivity, fullness, accuracy, and competitiveness. Although each biography and translation offers unique solutions to these matters, they propose themselves as the “total”—exact, transparent, ultimate—representation of the source. Hence the rewriter’s claim to authenticity. Based on this conceptual framework, in this paper I study the biographies Jorge Luis Borges by Jason Wilson and The Man in the Mirror of the Book by James Woodall as “authentic translations” of Jorge Luis Borges that aim to be the “total” English-language version of Jorge Luis Borges’ life story. I discuss the subjectivities the biographers manifest in their works and the way in which each biography seems to present itself as total by highlighting different qualities depending on its biographer’s agency.

Quand la traductrice prend les devants ou la deuxième retraduction des Anciens Canadiens, by Alexandra Hillinger

Abstract: In 1996, Jane Brierley authored Canadians of Old, the third translation of the novel Les Anciens Canadiens written by Philippe Aubert de Gaspé. This translation project was the result of a personal initiative on the part of the translator. Not only had she been passionate about Aubert de Gaspé’s work for years, but she had also previously translated his two other works. In order to carry out her project, she contacted the publishing house Véhicule Press and submitted a grant application to the Canada Council for the Arts. In that sense, Jane Brierley is certainly not an invisible translator: the translation of Les Anciens Canadiens was very much her project. This article sets out to sketch a portrait of this translator and to analyze the context of production and reception of this last translation of the novel. The article examines the preface and scholarly article written by Brierley, as well as the exchanges between the translator and the Canada Council for the Arts. The goal is to explore the translation process in a situation in which the translator is in charge.

Tracing the Local: The Translator-Travellee in French Accounts of India, by Sanjukta Banerjee

Abstract: This paper examines aspects of multilingual India as described in a few eighteenth-century French travel accounts of the subcontinent to underscore the interactional history of representation that the conventions of European travel writing have tended to elide, particularly in the context of the subcontinent. It draws on the notions of fractal and vertical in travel to examine vernacular-Sanskrit relations encountered by the travellers, and to render visible the role of the “translator-travellee” in embedding vernacular knowledge in international discursive networks. Rather than merely questioning the travellers’ often skewed and necessarily partial readings of India’s linguistic plurality, I approach these travel accounts as crucial for understanding the specificity of the region’s multilingualism, one that was largely incommensurable with the typology of language that the accounts seek to establish.

The Gender of Pseudotranslation in the Works of Marie-Jeanne Riccoboni, Mme Beccari and Cornélie Wouters, by Beatrijs Vanacker

Abstract: While authorship recognition was a challenge for all eighteenth-century aspiring writers regardless of their gender, the social position of women was such that public claims of authorship and ownership over a text were even less self-evident in the public sphere. As will be illustrated in this article, female writers especially made extensive use of transfer strategies (such as translation and pseudotranslation) to establish their authorship, thereby turning paratext and narrative into a dynamic maneuvering space. Considered from a gender perspective, the challenge for eighteenth-century female writers was to gradually “invent” themselves, or rather establish a voice of their own. Taking on a different (cultural) persona—even if only on a paratextual level—could provide them with a discursive “platform” from which they could negotiate their way into the literary field. In order to illustrate this gender-specific emancipatory quality of pseudotranslation, as established mainly in their paratexts, the present article proposes a comparative analysis of their forms and functions in the career and oeuvre of three eighteenth-century French women writers, Marie-Jeanne Riccoboni, Mme Beccari and Cornélie de Wouters, who all made extensive use of pseudo-English fiction.

Focus and Scope of the Journal:

In the Inuktitut language, the word tusaaji means “one who listens carefully.” It designates a person who has an exceptional capacity to listen to others. Tusaaji is also the Inuit word for “interpreter/translator”.

Tusaaji: A Translation Review is a space of collective inquiry into translation as the embodiment of larger questions of culture. We investigate translation at intersections across traditions, languages, and fields of knowledge and discourse. Our aim is to entertain a variety of voices in translation with a focus on the Americas.

We understand translation as a complex process of negotiation of meanings, knowledges, and subjectivities. We believe that translation plays a key role in the relationships between subjects and communities and constitutes a site to understand the historicity of cultural contact in contemporary societies. We conceive of translation as a transdisciplinary field in flux within a larger critique about the boundaries among disciplines.

Tusaaji is the online peer-reviewed journal of the Research Group on Translation and Transcultural Contact based in Toronto, at Glendon College (York University). Given its hemispheric focus,Tusaaji invites contributions in the languages of the Americas,both Euro-American and indigenous.

More information is available at: https://tusaaji.journals.yorku.ca/index.php/tusaaji/about