The Necessities and Dangers of Translation: Brazilian Literature on a Global Stage

2018 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-24
Author(s):  
Krista Brune
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
World Literature ◽  
English Language ◽  
Contemporary Literature ◽  
Discursive Construction ◽  
Brazilian Literature ◽  
Global Circulation ◽  
Nineteenth And Twentieth Centuries ◽  
Translation Grants

This article examines how translation helped to establish Brazil as a tropical site of desire for foreign audiences in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and how translations of contemporary literature often struggle to break free from this established dynamic. By studying the discursive construction of a modern Brazil in the nineteenth century and the practices of translation in contemporary Brazilian literature, I contend that the insertion of Brazil into realms of world literature often depends upon acts of representation and translation that frame the nation and its peoples as exotic. Analysing the Brazilian government's recent translation grants and contemporary English-language anthologies of Brazilian literature reveals a tendency to translate either an exotic Brazil marked by violence and poverty or a global Brazil inhabited by cosmopolitan characters. The piece concludes by reflecting on how a politics of untranslatability could transform the translation and global circulation of Brazilian literature.

Farming for the Few

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marko Marinčič
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
World Literature ◽  
Self Sufficiency ◽  
Metrical Pattern ◽  
Point Of Departure

The point of departure for this chapter is a little known work by Jožef Šubic, whose translation of Virgil’s Georgics, published in 1863, although largely unknown outside scholarly circles, nonetheless offers an important background to the Slovenian school of translation of Greek and Latin texts and of classics in general. Marinčič argues that this text, written in a hybrid metrical pattern, is by no means a literary masterpiece, but it is a groundbreaking work reflecting the contemporary debates concerning the use of classical metrical forms and implicitly opposing the Romantic ideology of agricultural self-sufficiency, which, in the course of the nineteenth century, resulted in a widespread prejudice against translation of world literature.

The Novel in English in Malaya and Singapore to 1950

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tamara Wagner
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
East Asia ◽  
English Language ◽  
Joseph Conrad ◽  
Civil Servant ◽  
Civil Servants ◽  
East India Company ◽  
South East Asia ◽  
The Novel ◽  
English East India Company

This chapter looks at the representations of the former British Straits Settlements in English fiction from 1819 to 1950, discussing both British literary works that are located in South East Asia and English-language novels from Singapore and Malaysia. Although over the centuries, Europeans of various nationalities had located, intermarried, and established unique cultures throughout the region, writing in the English language at first remained confined to travel accounts, histories, and some largely anecdotal fiction, mostly by civil servants. English East India Company employees wrote about the region, often weaving anecdotal sketches into their historical, geographical, and cultural descriptions. Civil servant Hugh Clifford and Joseph Conrad are the two most prominent writers of fiction set in the British Straits Settlements during the nineteenth century; they also epitomize two opposing camps in representing the region.

Local Color, World-System; or, American Realism at the Periphery

2019 ◽  
pp. 99-118
Author(s):  
Mark Storey
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Rural Communities ◽  
World Literature ◽  
World Economy ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Sarah Orne Jewett ◽  
Local Color ◽  
The Core ◽  
Hamlin Garland ◽  
Peripheral Position

This chapter employs recent approaches to the study of world literature to offer a new reading of nineteenth-century American regionalism. The huge body of texts usually included in the regional or “local-color” genre often take rural communities as both subject matter and foregrounded setting, communities that are held in a structurally “peripheral” position within the combined and uneven world economy of the late nineteenth century. This chapter argues that such a position is registered in the genre’s distinctive oscillation between realist and “irrealist” literary modes—between the professionalized and ascendant cultural standard of the core and the persistence of nonrealist generic devices and registers. Calling on two of the genre’s quintessential representatives, Hamlin Garland and Sarah Orne Jewett, the chapter ultimately makes a case for reading local-color writing as a form of (semi)peripheral realism within world literature’s expanded geographical and temporal horizons.

The Well-Mannered Auditor

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
James Deaville
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
English Language ◽  
The Self ◽  
Modern World ◽  
Music Making ◽  
Social Events ◽  
Drawing Room ◽  
The Way

The chapter explores the way English-language etiquette books from the nineteenth century prescribe accepted behavior for upwardly mobile members of the bourgeoisie. This advice extended to social events known today as “salons” that were conducted in the domestic drawing room or parlor, where guests would perform musical selections for the enjoyment of other guests. The audience for such informal music making was expected to listen attentively, in keeping with the (self-) disciplining of the bourgeois body that such regulations represented in the nineteenth century. Yet even as the modern world became noisier and aurally more confusing, so, too, did contemporary social events, which led authors to become stricter in their disciplining of the audience at these drawing room performances. Nevertheless, hosts and guests could not avoid the growing “crisis of attention” pervading this mode of entertainment, which would lead to the modern habit of inattentive listening.

The world in Auerbach’s mouth: Weltliteratur after philhellenism

2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (4) ◽  
pp. 427-452
Author(s):  
Mathura Umachandran
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Comparative Literature ◽  
Human Activity ◽  
World Literature ◽  
Translation Studies ◽  
Complex Structures ◽  
Intercultural Understanding ◽  
The World

Abstract We live in an age of globalized and globalizing phenomena: the contemporary agenda of academic inquiry takes in ‘networks’, ‘connectivity’, and other modes of articulating complex structures of human activity. In Comparative Literature and beyond, the idea of world literature has borne the weight of idealist intercultural understanding, the hopes of translation studies, and the anxieties around the failure of communication. Erich Auerbach offers a touchstone in the conceptual genealogy of world literature (Weltliteratur). This article illuminates how Auerbach’s Weltliteratur is predicated on a polemic with German philhellenism, tracked through Auerbach’s declaration that his idea is ‘ungoethisch’. Auerbach’s revisions to Weltliteratur constituted a strategy to render it a historicist concept. Since Auerbach’s notion of historicism was itself derived from nineteenth-century German humanism, this essay argues that Auerbach was attempting to go with Goethe beyond Goethe. Finally, this essay assesses how successful Auerbach’s decoupling of Weltliteratur from universalism, under the sign of Goethe and the Greeks. I suggest that Weltliteratur is still a pertinent concept today because of Auerbach’s intervention to install historicist and dialectical resources therein.

Jewish American Writing and World Literature

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Saul Noam Zaritt
Keyword(s):  
World Literature ◽  
Global Market ◽  
Global Network ◽  
Jewish American ◽  
Global Circulation ◽  
Isaac Bashevis Singer ◽  
The Us ◽  
The World ◽  
Anglo American ◽  
Literature Theory

Jewish American Writing and World Literature studies Jewish American writers’ relationships with the idea of world literature—how they place themselves within its boundaries, outside its purview, or, most often, in constant motion across and beyond its maps and networks. Writers such as Sholem Asch, Jacob Glatstein, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Anna Margolin, Saul Bellow, and Grace Paley all responded to a demand to write beyond local Jewish and American audiences and toward the world, as a global market and as a transnational ideal. At the same time, their work is deeply informed by an intimate connection to Yiddish, a Jewish vernacular with its own global network and institutional ambitions. This book tracks the attempts and failures, through translation, to find a home for Jewish vernacularity in the institution of world literature. Beyond fame and global circulation, world literature holds up the promise of legibility, in which a threatened origin becomes the site for redemptive literary creativity. But this promise inevitably remains unfulfilled, as writers struggle to balance potential universal achievements with untranslatable realities, rendering impossible any complete arrival in the US and in the world. The exploration of the translational uncertainty of Jewish American writing joins postcolonial critiques of US and world literature and challenges Eurocentric and Anglo-American paradigms of literary study. In bringing into conversation the fields of Yiddish studies, American Studies, and world literature theory, the book proposes a new approach to the study of modern Jewish literatures and their implication within global empires of culture.

Prose Poetry

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Hetherington ◽  
Cassandra Atherton
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
William Wordsworth ◽  
English Language ◽  
Literary Form ◽  
Prose Poetry ◽  
Prose Poem ◽  
Prose Poems ◽  
Male And Female ◽  
Key Characteristics ◽  
Anglophone World

This is the first book of its kind — an introduction to the history, development, and features of English-language prose poetry, an increasingly important and popular literary form that is still too little understood and appreciated. The book introduces prose poetry's key characteristics, charts its evolution from the nineteenth-century to the present, and discusses many historical and contemporary prose poems that both demonstrate their great diversity around the Anglophone world and show why they represent some of today's most inventive writing. A prose poem looks like prose but reads like poetry: it lacks the line breaks of other poetic forms but employs poetic techniques, such as internal rhyme, repetition, and compression. The book explains how this form opens new spaces for writers to create riveting works that reshape the resources of prose while redefining the poetic. Discussing prose poetry' s precursors, including William Wordsworth and Walt Whitman, and prose poets such as Charles Simic, Russell Edson, Lydia Davis, and Claudia Rankine, the book pays equal attention to male and female prose poets, documenting women's essential but frequently unacknowledged contributions to the genre. Revealing how prose poetry tests boundaries and challenges conventions to open up new imaginative vistas, this is an essential book for all readers, students, teachers, and writers of prose poetry.

Stranger Fictions

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rebecca C. Johnson
Keyword(s):  
World Literature ◽  
Arab World ◽  
Central Place ◽  
Arabic Literature ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Reading Practices ◽  
Global Circulation ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
History Of ◽  
Modern Arabic

Zaynab, first published in 1913, is widely cited as the first Arabic novel, yet the previous eight decades saw hundreds of novels translated into Arabic from English and French. This vast literary corpus influenced generations of Arab writers but has, until now, been considered a curious footnote in the genre's history. Incorporating these works into the history of the Arabic novel, this book offers a transformative new account of modern Arabic literature, world literature, and the novel. This book rewrites the history of the global circulation of the novel by moving Arabic literature from the margins of comparative literature to its center. Considering the wide range of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century translation practices, the book argues that Arabic translators did far more than copy European works; they authored new versions of them, producing sophisticated theorizations of the genre. These translations and the reading practices they precipitated form the conceptual and practical foundations of Arab literary modernity, necessitating an overhaul of our notions of translation, cultural exchange, and the global. The book shows how translators theorized the Arab world not as Europe's periphery but as an alternative center in a globalized network. It affirms the central place of (mis)translation in both the history of the novel in Arabic and the novel as a transnational form itself.

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