Concentric: Studies in English Literature and Linguistics
Permanent URI for this collectionhttp://rportal.lib.ntnu.edu.tw/handle/20.500.12235/219
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Item The Hugos and the Translation of Shakespeare into French, Texts and Cultural and Historical Contexts(英語學系, 2021-09-??) Jonathan Locke HartShakespeare did not go easily into French. Voltaire was ambivalent about him as he helped to introduce him into France, especially when he was in exile in England, but he also had reservations about Shakespeare not being neo-classical or, to put it another way, "barbaric." This neo-classical ambivalence also occurred among the English during the Restoration, after 1660, when Charles II returned from France to England and was restored to the throne. John Dryden and Alexander Pope, for instance, were ambivalent about Shakespeare. With Romanticism, Shakespeare became more popular in France, and Victor Hugo and his son, François-Victor Hugo, were instrumental in establishing Shakespeare in France, with the father, the great writer, lending a preface to his son's work and the son undertaking the work of translating Shakespeare systematically in 18 volumes. This article will focus most on the father's preface in the first volume and on the son's translations of the Sonnets in volume 15. The reason for this choice and method is that the pioneering work in the first phases of literary translation needs close examination, what I call the establishment of translation or reputation.Item Issues of Transcultural Mobility in Three Recent French Balcony Scenes(英語學系, 2021-09-??) Stephanie MercierRomeo and Juliet's translation and staging by Olivier Py (2011), Pascal and Antoine Collin and David Bobee (2012), and Éric Ruf, who staged FrançoisVictor Hugo's 1868 version of the play (2016-17), provide a stimulating illustration of recent French translations/adaptations of the Balcony Scene in particular. I examine instances of verbal and non-verbal translation of the canonical texts through such elements such as props, costume, gesture, posture, and the body. They all bring to mind Stephen Greenblatt's concept of "cultural mobility"—first formulated as "cultural transfer" by historians Michel Espagne and Michael Werner in the late 1980s to account for interaction and relations between France and Germany. The scenes particularly seemed to defy previous notions of foreignization or domestication, where the source culture is seen as the "self" and the target culture as the "other," and where the process of domestication tends to erase all "foreignness" from the former. Here, I explorehow just three instances of one of the most iconic scenes in Shakespeare is emblematic of a more general cultural mobility in French theatre, thanks to the choice (or choice not) to incorporate French contextual elements in Gallic productions of Shakespeare. I discuss, through the lens of cultural transfer, how the translations repeat or redefine canonical material, and how they show FrancoBritish stages in contact with one another within the context of contemporary French theatre.Item Song of Ariran and the Question of Translation(英語學系, 2018-09-??) Suk KimA quasi-autobiographical text recounting the lifelong journey of a Korean revolutionary named Kim San (a.k.a. Jang Jirak), Song of Ariran (1941) emains a unique work offering an intimate view of the incessant political strife into which East Asia was thrown in the early twentieth century. The text stands out from many hagiographic works of its genre through the way that its narrator casts his political peregrination—one that takes in nationalism, anarchism, and communism—under a thematic rubric of compulsive failure. One outcome of this avowal of failure is an aporetic logic of narrativity, whereby the text is structured around a desire to invest meaning in experiences that consistently resist such signification. But the theme of failure in Song of Ariran extends beyond its probing of the problematic boundary of life and writing. For in acceding to the offer of a joint literary project with the American journalist Nym Wales (a.k.a. Helen Foster Snow) in the foreign medium of the English language, Kim San in effect raised the question of failure to the text’s formal level by problematizing the idea of translation as a derivative form of linguistic communication. By drawing on Naoki Sakai’s theoretical formulation of translation as “heterolingual address,” my article attempts to show that the significance of a text like Song of Ariran for our time lies not so much in the moral or psychological dimension of its textual content as in its positing of the possibility of a special form of literary readership, which Kim San enacts via the traces of incommensurability arising from his collaborative encounter with his American writing partner.Item Untitled(英語學系, 2019-09-??) Angie ChauThis paper arises from a series of class discussions inspired by Shen Congwen’s (沈從文, 1902-88) short story about child marriage, “Xiaoxiao” (蕭蕭, 1929), which is set in the spring of 2018 during an unending series of breaking news stories related to sexual assault and sexual harassment in the workplace. Beginning from the close reading of one seemingly innocuous line in the English translation—“Finally, one day, she let Motley sing his way into her heart, and he made a woman of her”—the paper seeks to address the following questions: How can translational practices inform and revise conventional ways of reading canonical fictional texts, especially in relationship to current conversations about sexual harassment, rape, and the #MeToo movement? What is the pedagogical responsibility of educators teaching literature to address instances of sexual violence, especially in cultural and historical contexts that seem remote from our own? And finally, what is at stake in this rereading of modern Chinese literary classics? Drawing from examples in two frequently studied and taught short stories published in China during the Republican period—Shen Congwen’s “Xiaoxiao” and Mao Dun’s (茅盾, 1896-1981) “Chun can” (春蠶 “Spring Silkworms,” 1932)—I argue that translation in the present moment offers readers a valuable opportunity to re-examine commonly overlooked scenes of sexual ambiguity and abuse, especially in the field of East Asian literature, where many students arrive with a wide range of preconceptions and stereotypes about gender relations.Item On Modernizing the Language of Romeo and Juliet for Finnish Teenagers(英語學系, 2021-09-??) Nely KeinänenThis article examines a recent production of Julia and Romeo at the Finnish National Theater (2018) as an example of innovative linguistic adaptation, accomplished through the use of style variations and a touch of rewriting. While most of the FNT Finnish text is based on Marja-Leena Mikkola's poetic translation (WSOY 2006), the dramaturg Anna Viitala, working closely with the director and actors, added a layer of colloquial, teenage language. Features include tiny insertions, such as vou [wow]," okei [OK], and phrases teens use with each other or to annoy their parents. Sometimes a single poetic line is replaced with a shorter and more colloquial speech, framed by much more poetic text. In a larger piece of rewriting, Romeo and Juliet's shared sonnet is turned into a hilarious poem Romeo is writing on love, drawn in part from Troilus and Cressida. For the most part, these juxtapositions of colloquial language added a comic touch, inviting teenage audience members to relate to the characters. But they were also effectively used to heighten tragedy, as for example in the simple repetition of a Finnish word for hello and goodbye, hei, which Romeo and Juliet awkwardly said to each other when they first met, and which was repeated three more times later in the play at key moments. The analysis points to the significant role stylistic variation can have in theatrical translation and adaptation, and suggests translators think beyond a simple continuum between archaizing and modernizing as strategies for translating historical texts.Item Untitled(英語學系, 2019-09-??) Angie ChauThis paper arises from a series of class discussions inspired by Shen Congwen’s (沈從文, 1902-88) short story about child marriage, “Xiaoxiao” (蕭蕭, 1929), which is set in the spring of 2018 during an unending series of breaking news stories related to sexual assault and sexual harassment in the workplace. Beginning from the close reading of one seemingly innocuous line in the English translation—“Finally, one day, she let Motley sing his way into her heart, and he made a woman of her”—the paper seeks to address the following questions: How can translational practices inform and revise conventional ways of reading canonical fictional texts, especially in relationship to current conversations about sexual harassment, rape, and the #MeToo movement? What is the pedagogical responsibility of educators teaching literature to address instances of sexual violence, especially in cultural and historical contexts that seem remote from our own? And finally, what is at stake in this rereading of modern Chinese literary classics? Drawing from examples in two frequently studied and taught short stories published in China during the Republican period—Shen Congwen’s “Xiaoxiao” and Mao Dun’s (茅盾, 1896-1981) “Chun can” (春蠶 “Spring Silkworms,” 1932)—I argue that translation in the present moment offers readers a valuable opportunity to re-examine commonly overlooked scenes of sexual ambiguity and abuse, especially in the field of East Asian literature, where many students arrive with a wide range of preconceptions and stereotypes about gender relations.Item Song of Ariran and the Question of Translation(英語學系, 2018-09-??) Suk KimA quasi-autobiographical text recounting the lifelong journey of a Korean revolutionary named Kim San (a.k.a. Jang Jirak), Song of Ariran (1941) emains a unique work offering an intimate view of the incessant political strife into which East Asia was thrown in the early twentieth century. The text stands out from many hagiographic works of its genre through the way that its narrator casts his political peregrination—one that takes in nationalism, anarchism, and communism—under a thematic rubric of compulsive failure. One outcome of this avowal of failure is an aporetic logic of narrativity, whereby the text is structured around a desire to invest meaning in experiences that consistently resist such signification. But the theme of failure in Song of Ariran extends beyond its probing of the problematic boundary of life and writing. For in acceding to the offer of a joint literary project with the American journalist Nym Wales (a.k.a. Helen Foster Snow) in the foreign medium of the English language, Kim San in effect raised the question of failure to the text’s formal level by problematizing the idea of translation as a derivative form of linguistic communication. By drawing on Naoki Sakai’s theoretical formulation of translation as “heterolingual address,” my article attempts to show that the significance of a text like Song of Ariran for our time lies not so much in the moral or psychological dimension of its textual content as in its positing of the possibility of a special form of literary readership, which Kim San enacts via the traces of incommensurability arising from his collaborative encounter with his American writing partner.Item Invoking the West: Giorgio Agamben’s “Romantic Ideology” and the Civilizational Transference(英語學系, 2014-09-??) Jon SolomonInspired by Giorgio Agamben’s critique of the “Romantic Ideology” that consciously created a tautological equivalency between language and people, this essay is interested in drawing upon elements of the philosopher’s conceptual kit to explore the ways in which his attempt to trace ontological origins recuperates “Romantic ideology” with regard to civilizational difference. We will take as our point of departure the construction of that ambiguous yet ubiquitous civilizational entity, the “West.” In order to tease apart the status of the “West” in Agamben’s work, we will return to the conceptual distinction and historical narrative deployed in one of the philosopher’s earliest works, Language and Death, which plays a seminal role in the development of the author’s later philosophy. Having thus established the moment when the “Romantic Ideology” criticized by Agamben reappears in the form of civilizational transfer, we proceed by way of asking, once again both with and against Agamben, if the “West” might not be seen as a form of translational apparatus such as the concept is critically taken up in the philosopher’s 2006 essay, “What is an Apparatus?” The essay concludes with a reflection on the relation between translation and species difference in the context of the new biospheric colonization that characterizes contemporary capitalism.Item Spectral History: Unsettling Nation Time in "The Last Communist"(英語學系, 2013-03-??) Fiona Lee"The Last Communist" ("Lelaki Komunis Terakhir") traces the biographical narrative of Chin Peng, the exiled Secretary-General of the Communist Party of Malaya who led the armed uprising against the British during the Malayan Emergency. Going against the grain of official history, the film presents the communist-led uprising as contributing to the anti-colonial nationalist struggle. This essay argues that the film's significance lies not merely in its retrieval of a marginalized perspective of national history. Subverting the conventions of the documentary genre, the film eschews interviews or archival footage of its eponymous subject, withholding him from sight to articulate the figure of the spectral communist. Moreover, the film stages scenes of everyday life as a site for conjuring the past in the present, a method of historical knowledge production that constitutes a translation of time. The figuring of a spectral historical subject, as signaled by a visual absence and the summoning of the past in the present, unsettles the linear, chronological time of national history. In doing so, the film not only presents a critique of the national narrative's ideological project of modernity, but conceives of history as a political act of redefining the historical present.