CFP: ALTA conference, Oct. 2004, Las Vegas

[Sibelan E S Forrester]

27th Annual ALTA Conference
October 27-30, 2004
Las Vegas, Nevada

Session Organizer: Anna Barker

anna-barker at uiowa.edu


"The Word in Language is Half Someone Else's: Translator as the
"Other" Author in Russian Literature."

As Mikhail Bakhtin pointed out in his Discourse and the Novel, "the
word in language is half someone else's." No other field proves this
to be the case more than the field of translation studies. Be it Ivan
Turgenev, Constance Garnett, Boris Pasternak or Vladimir Nabokov, all
of these translators became active contributors to the "afterlife" of
the books they "exported" out of Russia or brought into the Russian
literary environment. The re-creation of a literary text involves
both a distantiation from the language and culture of the original
and a simultaneous bridging of the two texts which occurs, according
to Walter Benjamin, because of the essential "kinship" between
languages. Does this kinship extend to the author and the translator?
Does the author/translator relationship acquire a singular intensity
in the Russian context? This session will focus on the role of the
translator in the Russian literary tradition, both past and present.
Papers on the reception and dissemination of Russian literature in
the West are also welcome.

Deadline for paper/panel proposals is JULY 1.

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