Multilingual Currents in Literature, Translation, and Culture

Gilmour, Rachael; Steinitz, Tamar

doi:10.4324/9781315651675

Cited by 6 publications

(1 citation statement)

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“…Travelling across spatiotemporal barriers is possible through translation. If the translation is of poetry as well as literature, it becomes more complicated (Gilmour & Steinitz, 2017). As is well known, poetic language differs from prose in two ways: first, it employs poetic deviations, which are employed in addition to metre and rhythm.…”

Section: Translating Poetrymentioning

confidence: 99%

Translation of Poetry: A Study of Translatability of Pragmatic and Cultural Elements

Al-Kadery

2024

WJEL

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Poetry is a genre that states more in a few words because much of it is cultural content that is assumed to be comprehended by the reader(s). This very characteristic of poetry of being rooted in cultural ethos makes its translation complex and even "untranslatable." Imr-ul-Qais’s Muallaqa is an Arabic classic which has been a symbol of the shared Arab identity, values, and magnanimity. In addition to its unsurpassed poetic brilliance, it is an epitome of the culture of the pre-Islamic Arab world. There are many translations of this masterpiece into English, though each is unique in terms of interpretations, liberties, and constraints. This study examines three prominent translations of Imr-ul-Qais's Muallaqa by Arberry, Johnson, and Mumayiz with reference to Venuti's (1995) dichotomy of domestication and foreignization. The aim is to identify translators’ strategies in tackling the translational challenges, as well as the implications thereof, in order to bridge the linguistic and cultural divide as well as if and what is the nature of the loss of meaning in the process. Results showed that Arberry aims for a poetic rendition in blank verse, focusing on semantic and syntactic fidelity rather than rhyme and meter. Johnson employed transposition and modulation, resulting in a more prosaic translation that lacks the Arabic ethos. Both translators leaned towards domestication, prioritizing English comprehension over retaining the original sentiment. Mumayiz, a native speaker of Arabic, provides a more rhythmic translation, with greater effort to provide English readers with insights into the original text, hence leant more on foreignization than domesticaion.

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Section: Translating Poetrymentioning

confidence: 99%

Translation of Poetry: A Study of Translatability of Pragmatic and Cultural Elements

Al-Kadery

2024

WJEL

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Annual Bibliography Of Commonwealth Literature 2017

Parashkevova¹

2018

The Journal of Commonwealth Literature

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Translation, material cultures and questions of genreTwo overlapping sets of themes stand out in the bibliographies from 2017: one concerning language, translation and bi-, multi-, poly-and trans-lingualism and the other print and material cultures, book histories, publishing, circulation, genre and "literary value." Works listed in this issue reflect and respond to the role of English or French as hegemonic languages in containing and sanctioning a range of "other," "minor," indigenous languages or vernaculars and their oratures/literatures in the manner of an omniscient narrative that frames and mediates the "foreign talk," "accents" or idiolects of characters as deviations from its own normativity for a dominant linguistic community of "native speakers," in the process erasing its own origin. We have inherited, as David Gramling reminds us in The Invention of Monolingualism (2016), the early modern idea of "'a' language, whose essence inhered in its promise to know everything, say everything, and translate everything" (Gramling, 2016: 2). Such a desire for linguistic mastery is reflected in the "enumerative modality" of colonialism setting out to identify, label and control local languages and their speakers. It continues to inform processes of "naming, misnaming, consolidation, marketing and reproduction" in the publishing, translation, academic research or host nation language teaching industries and the concomitant "thickening of citizenship around language competence and use". Further, monolingualism appears capable of extending its repertoire by impersonating notions of multilingualism in the marketing of World Literature, as Graham Huggan has shown in The Postcolonial Exotic (Huggan, 2001), or varieties of "multilingual upskilling" promoted by the neoliberal state as "models for global success and competitiveness" (ibid: 12, 250).An interesting collection from the East and Central Africa listings that demonstrates the historical interconnectedness of these issues is the bilingual Guidance (Uwongozi) by Sheikh Al-Amin Mazrui: Selections from the First Swahili Islamic Newspaper: A Swahili-English Edition (Kresse, 2017). A polemical conduct book of "guidance" and socio-political critique, this volume brings together essays from the early 1930s free weekly Swahili pamphlet, Sahifa, penned by the Islamic reformist scholar Sheikh Al-Amin Mazrui in the height of British colonial rule in East Africa. It testifies to the intermingling of languages in the region and the power relations which inform the contact that English has had with Swahili and Arabic. As Kai Kresse explains in his 811271J CL0010.

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An ocean of languages? Multilingualism in Arundhati Roy’sThe Ministry of Utmost Happiness

Neumann

2021

The Journal of Commonwealth Literature

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The article examines the multilingual poetics of Arundhati Roy’s novel The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, focusing on the historically strained relations between English and India’s other languages. As a contribution to the project of “unforgetting English” (Walkowitz, 2015), the close reading of Roy’s novel reveals how English is construed and posited as a language within India’s multilingual environment. The use of English in Roy’s novel is tinged with a peculiar ambivalence: while it is marked as an alien language that is inimical to India’s linguistic plurality, English nevertheless serves as a literary and linguistic mediator that makes possible the encounter between different Indian languages in the first place. My article argues that the novel’s uneasy multilingualism navigates the possibilities (and impossibilities) of producing a literature that espouses ex-centric and small worlds in the hyper-central language of English.

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Multilingual Currents in Literature, Translation, and Culture

Cited by 6 publications

References 0 publications

Translation of Poetry: A Study of Translatability of Pragmatic and Cultural Elements

Translation of Poetry: A Study of Translatability of Pragmatic and Cultural Elements

Annual Bibliography Of Commonwealth Literature 2017

An ocean of languages? Multilingualism in Arundhati Roy’sThe Ministry of Utmost Happiness

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