George Egerton’s Scandinavian Breakthrough

2021 ◽  
pp. 117-163
Author(s):  
Stefano Evangelista

This chapter brings to light George Egerton’s role as a key mediator of Scandinavian literature. In her most famous collections of short stories, Keynotes (1893) and Discords (1894), Egerton used Scandinavian settings in order to portray women’s experience of international mobility, drawing attention to the importance of gender in the construction of cosmopolitan identities. After the success of her early works, Egerton produced pioneering English translations of works by Norwegian future Nobel laureate Knut Hamsun and Swedish decadent Ola Hansson. Egerton practised literary translation as a form of creative collaboration and used it to advocate Friedrich Nietzsche’s philosophy. The chapter concludes with an analysis of Egerton’s involvement in the aborted ‘Northern Light’ series, a venture planned by the influential progressive publisher John Lane in order to bring modern Scandinavian literature to English readers.

Author(s):  
Natal'ya Yu. Gvozdetskaya ◽  

The paper is an attempt to analyze the methods of representing specific features of the language of the Old English poem Beowulf in the Russian literary translation of Vladimir Tikhomirov: alliterative collocations, synonymic groups, compounds and epic variations. These specific features of Old English poetic language are rendered in the translation through the diction of different stylistic coloring – both the high-style, even archaic words as well as the everyday words close to colloquialisms. Following the Old English poet, the translator uses the oral-epic manner of narration, neither reducing it to a limited stylization, nor turning it into an innovative experiment. The translator manages to convey the ability of the Old English poetic language to coin new compounds through creating ‘potential’ words that reveal the ‘open’ character of the Old English synonymic systems. The Russian translation of Beowulf is considered in the context of the history of English translations of the poem as well as studies of Old English and Old Scandinavian literature in Russia.


2017 ◽  
Vol 7 (7) ◽  
pp. 552
Author(s):  
Sadaf Khosroshahi ◽  
Ahmad Sedighi

Translation of mystic terms or metaphors is a very important portion of rendering a text from a source language to a target language, because some of mystic terms do not exist in the target language and this point makes the translation harder. This paper aimed at identifying the translation strategies and procedures used by Darbandi and Davis (1984) in The Conference of the Birds of Attar Neishabouri. To achieve the objectives, Attar’s Persian original work (Shafiei Kadkani, 2010) was read carefully to extract mystical terms.  Then, the translated text by Darbandi, and Davis (1984) was carefully read and the corresponding English translations of Persian mystical term were found.  The original mystical terms and their Persian translation were analyzed based on Van Doorslaer’s (2007) map to find out translation strategies and procedures used by the translators on the one hand and indicate the dominant strategy and procedure in the whole work of translation on the other. The result showed that literal translation strategy (72.41%) was the most frequently used strategy and direct transfer procedure (68.96%) was the most frequently used procedure.  This paper may have some implications in literary translation and help translation instructors and translation trainees as well in translation classes.


Author(s):  
Samantha Yap Choy Wan ◽  
Adeela Abu Bakar ◽  
Mansour Amini ◽  
Shameem Rafik-Galea

The Malay stories of Pelanduk yang Bijak, Peniup Seruling and Seuncang Padi were translated to English, and analysed to identify the translation problems. The procedures were also investigated to find solutions for the problems using translation procedures as the framework for data analysis. After the translation of the stories, the source and target texts were analysed to identify problems and procedures. The findings of the study indicated two types of problems in the Malay-English translations of the stories; structural or semantic problems, and problems arising from cultural differences. Among various translation procedures used in the translations, literal translation was the most common procedure in the translation of the Malay stories. The findings from translations and the analyses in this study could be utilised in translator and interpreter training classrooms. Finding solutions to the translation problems could improve translators’ ability to better theorise while translating, and thus produce “good” translations, particularly in the translation of literary works from Malay to English. This study could have pedagogical significance, as the Malay short stories contain moral lessons by which Malay culture could be further introduced and “exported” to the English-speaking audience through literature.


Author(s):  
Irvin Wolters

This chapter presents an archive-based case study of the Bibliotheca Neerlandica, a project launched in 1955 by the newly established Foundation for the Promotion of the Translation of Dutch Literary Works, which aimed to publish commercial English translations of seventeen volumes of Dutch literature, but ended abruptly in 1969 with the publication of the tenth. Through analysis of the underlying aims, the prevailing culture of literary translation, the choices of text and the notion of a ‘Dutch canon’, the structure and management of the commissioning body and the relationship with the publisher, Heinemann, the chapter provides a nuanced cautionary tale about the use of imaginative literature for cultural diplomacy. The chapter documents the breakdown of the project’s relationship with Heinemann, prompted not only by the publisher’s major commercial difficulties in the period, but also by the quality of the translations, which regularly needed review, revision and correction, and the unsuitability of the texts chosen. It highlights the negative reception of those volumes that were reviewed, which found in the texts precisely the claustrophobic provincialism that the series had been conceived to overcome.


Author(s):  
Andreas Schirmer

In translation, carefully-crafted sentences are exposed to myriad dangers. This is because translators tend to prioritize syntactical fidelity at the expense of sequence, that is, the order of elements insofar as this relates to calculated progression, gradual disclosure of information, and cumulative development of meaning. But if sequence is turned around for the sake of fluency (conforming to the target language’s ostensibly “natural” word order), the reader’s experience changes as well. Through a set of examples drawn from English translations of Korean fiction, this article demonstrates that the common disregard for sequence is tantamount to a neglect of drama and suspense, of narrative perspectivation, of rhetorical sophistication and cognitive effect. But we also see that by favoring functional equivalence over imitation of grammatical dependencies, it is perfectly possible to allow the reader to process all information at a pace that is analogous to that of the original. Our findings provide insights that are of significance for other language pairings as well.


2017 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 46-59
Author(s):  
Gábor Attila Csúr

Abstract The Hungarian literary translator Henrik Hajdu (1890–1969) was one of the most extraordinary persons in the history of translating Scandinavian literature into Hungarian. Aside his activity as a translator from Norwegian and Swedish, Hajdu was also an important promoter of Danish authors of the 19th and 20th century. He held lectures on Nordic culture and literature, wrote reviews in prominent Hungarian journals and maintained regular contact to many of the Scandinavian publishers, writers, dramatists and poets. He translated novels by Henrik Pontoppidan, Martin Andersen Nexø and Sigrid Undset, made an edition of Ibsen's complete works and a great amount of short stories and poems. His oeuvre numbers about a hundred separate publications. This paper focuses on how he contributed to the general acceptance and reception of Danish literary works written between 1850 and 1930 among the Hungarian readers.


1970 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Andrij Saweneć

Why to Retranslate: New Ukrainian Renderings of Polish ProseThe paper focuses on the issue of retranslation perceived as a significant aspect of contemporary practice of literary translation into Ukrainian, exemplified by the cases of the retranslation of short stories by Bruno Schulz and Tadeusz Konwicki’s Minor Apocalypse. The emergence of new translations within a short time encourages questions about the ambitions that drove translators and publishers to present new translations of the previously translated literary works, as well as about the strategies used by translators.KEY WORDS: retranslation, Bruno Schulz, Tadeusz Konwicki, critical reception of translation, Ukrainian literary culture


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