desire Archives

Ethics and Aesthetics of Translation

Ethics and Aesthetics of Translation engages with translation, in both theory and practice, as part of an interrogation of ethical as well as political thought in the work of three bilingual European authors: Bernardo Atxaga, Milan Kundera and Jorge Semprún. In approaching the work of these authors, the book draws upon the approaches to translation offered by Benjamin, Derrida, Ricœur and Deleuze to highlight a broad set of ethical questions, focused upon the limitations of the monolingual and the democratic possibilities of linguistic plurality; upon our innate desire to translate difference into similarity; and upon the ways in which translation responds to the challenges of individual and collective remembrance.

Each chapter explores these interlingual but also intercultural, interrelational and interdisciplinary issues, mapping a journey of translation that begins in the impact of translation upon the work of each author, continues into moments of linguistic translation, untranslatability and mistranslation within their texts and ultimately becomes an exploration of social, political and affective (un)translatability. In these journeys, the creative and critical potential of translation emerges as a potent, often violent, but always illuminating, vision of the possibilities of differentiation and connection, generation and memory, in temporal, linguistic, cultural and political terms.

Cécile Sauvage

This book offers a creative critical approach to translating the poetry of French writer, Cécile Sauvage (1883–1927). Sauvage was a remarkable poet who wrote of pregnancy, maternity, the self, sex and death, yet the story of her reception across the last century is a sequence of versions, as different readers and editors reworked Sauvage’s corpus to create new images of the poet. This book presents itself as the latest versioning of Sauvage, using the creative critical framework to challenge the traditionally strict separation between translation and commentary, between practice and theory. Figuring the literary translator as a fan, this approach makes the case for understanding translation as a participatory, possessive practice, and argues for Sauvage’s importance from the starting point of the personal.

Cécile Sauvage: Translation as desiring practice makes a wide-ranging selection of Sauvage’s poetry available in English for the first time and draws upon the poet’s recently discovered manuscripts and correspondence. It brings translation into interdisciplinary conversation with topics such as fan studies, genetic criticism and literary genre. Ultimately, it advocates for creativity in translation and a reappraisal of scholarly modes of working, arguing on behalf of rigorous scholarship that is unafraid to confess the desiring and subjective position from which it operates.

Poetics and Politics of Islamic Imaginaries

Poetics and Politics of Islamic Imaginaries shows how narratives of culture, masculinist restoration and revolutionary spirit drive, connect and reinvent different forms of politics in Muslim majority countries. The book moves beyond Eurocentric and positivist approaches to political formations. Instead, it sees these formations as evolving in specific temporalities and contexts.

Gathering scholars in sociology, political science, anthropology, cultural studies, and social and legal history, the volume takes a decolonial approach to stimulate debate on the parallels and differences between various Islamic movements and their claims on the past, present and future. Through a comparative approach that spans scholarship from Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Iran, Syria, Pakistan, India and China, readers gain a clearer understanding of the ways that contemporary Muslim societies understand, renegotiate and reconfigure the presumed tension between imagination and reality.

With a rise in new forms of identity politics, right and left populisms, and a myriad of global crises, this volume is a timely exploration of how contemporary Islamic politics are bound to other socio-political imaginaries: nationalism, masculinity and revolution.