María Julia Rossi's paper will focus on Argentine translator María Rosa Oliver. Oliver (1898-1977) was a pioneering intellectual who put the time, money and interpersonal connections afforded by her elite social class at the service of international peace. A wheelchair user from the age of ten after a severe case of polio, Oliver, despite cultural prejudice toward disability, participated in the most important intellectual circles of her time and was a driving force in connecting them to an international cultural network. In her translation practice, as well as in her writing, being a woman had a specific and sometimes heavy weight, which she scrutinizes in her personal letters. Rossi’s paper explores how Oliver depicts her role as a translator in her three volume memoir, Mundo, mi casa [World, my house], Mi fe es el hombre [My faith is the man] and La vida cotidiana [The quotidian life], as well as in many of her letters in different archives, to understand how she viewed translation itself as an act of autonomy through which she embodied more fully her reality as a woman.
Marina Mayorski’s paper will examine the role of mourning, despair, and alienation – both in a collective and an individual sense – in the translational practice of Hebrew writer Uri Nissan Gnessin (1879 - 1913). In Hebrew literary historiography, Gnessin is considered one of the forebearers for modernist prose and recognized for his contribution to the efforts of the Hebrew language revival. However, his work is largely seen as apolitical and his substantive translational output remains unexamined. Her study highlights these facets, focusing on how, as an Eastern European Jew at the turn of the twentieth century, Gnessin grappled with questions about Jewish belonging and life in the diaspora. These questions were intertwined with ideas about the aesthetic and the political role of the Hebrew language in the modern world, and the nascent Hebrew literature as deterritorialized, diasporic cultural formations. By analyzing Gnessin’s translation of a story by the Russian author Anton Chekhov alongside his original Hebrew writing, critical essays, and letters, this paper proposes an affective approach to the study of Hebrew translation.
Jean-Christophe Cloutier’s paper will focus on the poetics of translation in Jack Keroauc’s French writings. Born Jean-Louis Kérouac to French Canadian immigrant parents, the man who would grow up to be known as the “King of the Beats” and often regarded as a ‘quintessential American’ was actually a native French speaker who, as his archive reveals, secretly composed multiple French or bilingual texts—only to later self-translate them into English before daring to show the manuscripts to publishers. Cloutier's talk will address how formative Kerouac’s French Canadianness and bilingualism really are to his breakthrough achievements as a new kind of American writer, and how self-translation became his chief therapeutic means of negotiating his lifelong dualism and what he called “that horrible homelessness all French Canadians abroad in America have.” Kerouac’s French works are testaments to the ethics of candor he adopted for his artistic life; they are a repository of his raw emotions in the language of his childhood and as such they move restlessly from pride to shame, from divine joy to desolate despair, and his “record” becomes simultaneously his joy and sorrow. Cloutier’s paper will address how Kerouac’s life on the run transmitted his conflicted heritage onto the page via a therapeutics of self-translation that sought to reconcile the impossibility of living in French via the impossibility of translation itself—and will be further informed by his own experience translating Kerouac’s French novellas into English for The Unknown Kerouac, published by the Library of America.