This session explores the relationship between translation and multilingualism from a comparative and world-literature lens. Drawing on the work of Reine Meylaerts, this session approaches translation and multilingualism as inextricably connected. Individual papers focus on range of genres, time periods, languages, and approaches: the hybrid verse and prose of Mā’ohi author Chantal Spitz, to considering Piers Plowman, a fourteenth-century narrative poem whose reception as an early “English” masterpiece belies its pervasive code-switching, to the work of poet Kim Hyesoon who challenges the idea of translation as mere linguistic transformation or cultural mediation and finally Oscar Wilde’s The Ballad of Reading Gaol (BRG), as an important case study not only for considering translation across national borders but also for what it suggests about language differences in the plural.
The first paper focuses on Spitz's Cartes postales which is part of a series of vignettes written in a hybrid of verse and prose, wherein Spitz forces the reader to confront the realities of life in French Polynesia hidden far from the glossy covers of postcards. It is a powerful text written for the francophone Pacific community against the exoticizing gazes of the rest of the world. While the work is primarily in French, the texture of the language undermines classical conventions and linguistic borders in an idiom of resistance that characterizes Spitz’s work. The language reflects the author’s own experience in a (neo)colonial space: the violence of being estranged from an “indigenous” language and the contradiction of writing against the metropole in the language of the colonizer. But it is also important that this text be accessible beyond its own borders to the gazes it implicitly critiques.
The second paper will examine later medieval England as an instructively complex site for exploring the linguistic-political stakes between translation and multilingualism. On the one hand, translation from Latin or French into Middle English has been framed as democratic activism for granting vernacular access to authoritative traditions. On the other, because the modern study of medieval English literature was founded on nostalgia for a literary history in English, recent scholarship appreciates this literature’s interpenetrations with untranslated French and Latin (among other languages) as resistance to monolingualism and anglophone hegemony. However, medieval examples of English translation suggest a way out of this critical bind by demonstrating that translation itself can be a multilingual literary form.
The third paper focuses on the ways Kim Hyesoon rethinks multilingualism and its inevitable tie with translation through reading Kim’s poetry in translation, and further discussing the possibilities of translation as a mode of contamination that resists the hierarchies between languages that emerge from the dominant multicultural ethos and its yet monolingual paradigm upheld in the U.S. Each of these papers in this panel aim to challenge the centrality of monolingualism and ask how multilingualism can be a form of resistance.
The final paper examines Wilde’s The Ballad of Reading Gaol (BRG), originally published in 1898 in English as Wilde’s personal and political manifesto against prison and the death sentence by exploring the range that BRG travelled through its many translations, thus highlighting how a prison poem became recognized in the twentieth century through the many borders it crossed through translation. Looking specifically at Albert Schaeffer’s 1926 German translation of BRG this paper argues that comparison leads not to a primary source but rather reveals differences across languages that may alter, or resist, the poem’s content.
Taking its cue from the Presidential theme, the goal of this panel is to probe how and when multilingualism may pose a challenge to translation? When is multilingualism a form of resistance? To what extent is multilingualism itself a form of activism in the US context?
The session will be divided into 15-18 minute presentations and the speakers will be asked to respect the limited time - this will give us at least 30-40 minutes for discussion and questions from the audience.