literature Archives

Selected Essays and Dialogues by Gianni Celati

Selected Essays and Dialogues is a collection of translations of Italian writer and filmmaker Gianni Celati’s theoretical and musing work from the late 1960s to the present. Topics range from environmental perception and archaeological conceptions of historical knowledge, to street theatre, writing, photography, cinema and translation. The book provides a framework of key literary, theoretical and artistic movements of the last 50 years, as well as a guide for English-language readers to place Celati’s work in historical, cultural and biographical context, serving to illuminate his books available in English, namely Towards the River’s Mouth, Adventures in Africa, Voices from the Plains and Appearances.

There are various paths to take, tempting readers to wander and become lost in webs of daring thought, drawn ever on by Celati’s fondness for the unexpected ordinary and his bonhomie with others. Indeed, a genial adventurousness can be found within all of Celati’s writings collected here, driven by an affectionate and light-hearted engagement with the surrounding world. Herein is a taste of a seemingly endless series of adventures of the mind and body, always tapped into a lithe sensitivity for an encompassing collective imagination not restricted to the so-called high arts or letters, but very much also engaged with the everyday lives, places and tales we all constantly share.

Paradise from behind the Iron Curtain

Paradise from behind the Iron Curtain provides a detailed survey of the key responses to Milton’s work in Hungarian state socialism. The four decades between 1948 and 1989 saw a radical revision of previous critical and artistic positions and resulted in the emergence of some characteristically Eastern European responses to Milton’s works. Critical and artistic appraisals of Milton’s works in the communist era proved more controversial than receptions of other major Western authors: on the one hand, Milton’s participation in the Civil War earned him the title of a ‘revolutionary hero,’ on the other hand, religious aspects of his works were often disregarded and sometimes proactively suppressed. Ranging through all the genres of Milton’s oeuvre as well as the critical tradition, the book highlights these diverging responses and places them in the wider context of socialist cultural policy.

In addition, the author presents the full Hungarian script of the 1970 theatrical performance of Milton’s Paradise Lost, the first of its kind since the work’s publication, including a parallel English translation, which enables a deeper reflection on Milton’s original theodicy and its possible interpretations in communist Hungary.

Literary Translation in Latin America in the Twenty-First Century

Literary Translation in Latin America in the Twenty-First Century provides an in-depth exploration of the current landscape of literary translation studies and translation practices across Latin America. The unparalleled linguistic diversity of Latin America, with nearly 500 languages spoken, makes translation a vital aspect of daily life, which in turn fosters a dynamic field of literary experimentation, attracting intense scholarly inquiry unique to the region. This rich linguistic mosaic includes the colonial legacies of Spanish and Portuguese; European languages that persist in Brazil, such as East Pomeranian; African languages such as Kimbundu and Yoruba, incorporated into standard Portuguese and used in religious practices; as well as indigenous languages including Quechua and Guarani. Furthermore, in a region where Spanish and Portuguese are predominant, translation is pivotal not only for facilitating internal communication, but also for engaging with global cultures.

This volume argues that translation in Latin America is not only an academic exercise but a vital, everyday practice that facilitates dialogue within the region, as well as with the wider world. It emphasises that the practice of translators, and the methods of scholars are not limited to established theories, but require innovative practices and methods to explore lesser-known traditions, and to merge orthodox studies with the cultural insights of Indigenous peoples.

In the Face of Adversity

In the Face of Adversity explores the dynamics of translating texts that articulate particular notions of adverse circumstances. The chapters illustrate how literary records of often painful experiences and dissenting voices are at risk of being stripped of their authenticity when not carefully handled by the translator; how cultural moments in which the translation of a text that would have otherwise fallen into oblivion instead gave rise to a translator who enabled its preservation while ultimately coming into their own as an author as a result; and how the difficulties the translator faces in intercultural or transnational constellations in which prejudice plays a role endangers projects meant to facilitate mutual understanding.

The authors address translation as a project of making available and preserving a corpus of texts that would otherwise be in danger of becoming censored, misperceived or ignored. They look at translation and adaptation as a project of curating textual models of personal, communal or collective perseverance, and they offer insights into the dynamics of cultural inclusion and exclusion through a series of theoretical frameworks, as well as through a set of concrete case studies drawn from different cultural and historical contexts. The collection also explores some of the venues that artists have pursued by transferring artistic expressions from one medium into another in order to preserve and disseminate important experiences in different cultural settings, media and arts.

Eva – A Novel by Carry van Bruggen

Eva, a 1927 novel by Dutch writer Carry van Bruggen, is an experiment in depicting a woman’s life from girlhood to marriage, and beyond, to sexual freedom and independence. At the same time, the narrative expresses Eva’s dawning sense of self and expanding subjectivity through a stream of consciousness told by a shifting narrator. Burdened all of her life by feelings of shame, at the end of the novel Eva overcomes this legacy of her upbringing and declares that it is ‘bodily desire that makes love acceptable’.

Carry van Bruggen’s rich and varied language conveys Eva’s experience of the world. Powerful memories of an orthodox Jewish childhood pervade the novel with its fluid sense of time. As Eva puts it, ‘I let these years slip through my fingers like a stream of dry, glinting sand.’

Jane Fenoulhet makes this important modernist novel accessible to English readers for the first time. While it can be described as a becoming-woman of both Eva and her creator, so can the translation be seen as the translator’s own becoming, as Fenoulhet explains in the accompanying commentary, where she also describes the challenges of translating van Bruggen’s dynamic, intense narrative. For Fenoulhet, translation is more a matter of personal engagement with the novel than a matter of word choice and style. In this way, the emotional and intellectual life of the main character is re-enacted through translation.

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.

The Bankruptcy

Set in the early years of the Old Republic after the abolition of slavery, Júlia Lopes de Almeida’s The Bankruptcy depicts the rise and fall of a wealthy coffee exporter against a kaleidoscopic background of glamour, poverty, seduction, and financial speculation. The novel introduces readers to a turbulent period in Brazilian history seething with new ideas about democracy, women’s emancipation, and the role of religion in society. Originally published in 1901, its prescient critiques of financial capitalism and the patriarchal family remain relevant today.

In her lifetime, Júlia Lopes de Almeida was compared to Machado de Assis, the most important Brazilian writer of the nineteenth century. She was also considered for the inaugural list of members of the Brazilian Academy of Letters, but was excluded because of her gender. In the decades after her death, her work was largely forgotten. This publication, a winner of the English PEN award, marks the first novel-length translation of Almeida’s writing into English, including an Introduction to the novel and a Translators’ preface, and accompanies a general rediscovery of her extraordinary body of work in Brazil.

The Correspondence of Jeremy Bentham, Volume 14

This volume, which supplements the main chronological series of The Correspondence of Jeremy Bentham, contains 252 letters written to and from Jeremy Bentham, 19 letters written to and from individuals other than Bentham but containing material of biographical interest, and the will made by Bentham on 17 August 1785. The letters have either never before been published or been only partially published in previous volumes of The Correspondence. A large number of the letters were written by Bentham’s brother Samuel on his journey to Russia and during his sojourn in Russia, covering the years 1779 to 1791. This meticulously researched and richly annotated volume contains much new information of biographical interest and deepens our knowledge of Bentham’s relationship with his family, with the panopticon penitentiary scheme, and with such ‘disciples’ as Étienne Dumont, Henry Bickersteth, and Leicester Stanhope. Of particular interest will be correspondence with Prince Grigory Alexandrovich Potemkin, Sir Samuel Romilly, Jacques Pierre Brissot de Warville, and John Quincy Adams.

The Contemporary Medieval in Practice

Contemporary arts, both practice and methods, offer medieval scholars innovative ways to examine, explore, and re-frame the past. Medievalists offer contemporary studies insights into cultural works of the past that have been made or re-worked in the present. Creative-critical writing invites the adaptation of scholarly style using forms such as the dialogue, short essay, and the poem; these are, the authors argue, appropriate ways to explore innovative pathways from the contemporary to the medieval, and vice versa. Speculative and non-traditional, The Contemporary Medieval in Practice adapts the conventional scholarly essay to reflect its cross-disciplinary, creative subject.

This book ‘does’ Medieval Studies differently by bringing it into relation with the field of contemporary arts and by making ‘practice’, in the sense used by contemporary arts and by creative-critical writing, central to it. Intersecting with a number of urgent critical discourses and cultural practices, such as the study of the environment and the ethics of understanding bodies, identities, and histories, this short, accessible book offers medievalists a distinctive voice in multi-disciplinary, trans-chronological, collaborative conversations about the Humanities. Its subject is early medieval British culture, often termed Anglo-Saxon Studies (c. 500-1100), and its relation with, use of, and re-working in contemporary visual, poetic, and material culture (after 1950).

Medical Humanity and Inhumanity in the German-Speaking World

Medical Humanity and Inhumanity in the German-Speaking World is the first volume dedicated to exploring the interface of medicine, the human and the humane in the German-speaking lands.

The volume tracks the designation and making through medicine of the human and inhuman, and the humane and inhumane, from the Middle Ages to the present day. Eight individual chapters undertake explorations into ways in which theories and practices of medicine in the German-speaking world have come to define the human, and highlight how such theories and practices have consolidated, or undermined, notions of humane behaviour. Cultural analysis is central to this investigation, foregrounding the reflection, refraction and indeed creation of these theories and practices in literature, life-writing and other discourses and media.Contributors bring to bear perspectives from literary studies, film studies, critical theory, cultural studies, history, and the history of medicine and psychiatry. Thus, this collection is historical in the most expansive sense, for it debates not only what historical accounts bring to our understanding of this topic. It encompasses too investigation of life-writing, documentary, and theory and literary works to bring to light elusive, paradoxical, underexplored – yet vital – issues in history and culture.