scholarly journals Allegories of Poetic Translation in Yves Bonnefoy's 'Dream Stories'

2019 ◽  
Vol 34 (2) ◽  
pp. 393-410
Author(s):  
Patricia Martínez García

Translation is an essential part of Yves Bonnefoy's work. But his originality in this field lies in the critical studies that have regularly accompanied his translations and in his reflection on the act of translation, developed in various essays and interviews. Departing from his conception of translation as a poetic activity, based on the distinction between the ‘translation of meanings’ and the ‘translation of the essence’, we approach the analysis of two poetic short stories, ‘Première ébauche d’une mise en scène d’Hamlet’, and ‘Hamlet en montagne’ included in L’heure présente (2011), which we approach both as ‘translations in a broad sense’, according to the definition proposed by the poet, as a prolongation and deepening of the understanding of the text through poetic writing, and as allegorical fictions of the process of translation.

2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 224-237
Author(s):  
José Suárez

Critical studies about the Macanese and their literature in the former Portuguese colony of Macau have been scant. Novelists like Austin Coates (City of Broken Promises, 1967) from Great Britain and Henrique de Senna Fernandes (A trança feiticeira, 1993) from Macau, as well as short story writers Deolinda da Conceição (Macau) and Maria Ondina Braga (Portugal), depict life in colonial Macau. While the plots of these works display similarities, Coates’s and Braga’s perspectives are filtered through the lenses of European colonialism and Fernandes and da Conceição work through the legacy of coloniality.


Author(s):  
K. M. Dolgov ◽  
E. I. Starikova

The article is concerned with interrelationship of policy and culture, in particular N.Machiavelli's political philosophy and its reflection in some short stories by R.Kipling, one of the most recognized representatives of the British imperial thought. Policy and culture have traditionally been considered almost incompatible spheres of human activity as policy tended to become more and more severe, cynical, "dirty", while culture aspired to develop supreme values and perfect ideals. Sometimes the direct confrontation between policy and religion, policy and morals, policy and law, policy and literature, policy and art in the broad sense of the word could occur. The greatest Renaissance masters - Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Rafael etc. - actively opposed any evil manifestations: evil ideas, evil words, evil doings, expressing in their masterpieces the highest ideals and values. However, these ideals and values drastically diverged from the reality, political and public relations of the time, the "dirty" policy conducted by the rulers of numerous Italian principalities. It is no coincidence that N.Machiavelli develops his new political philosophy aiming not only to create the strong unitary state, but also to overcome this "dirty" policy at least to a certain extent. Therefore, describing the mechanism of the "dirty" policy that opposes high culture, N.Machiavelli introduces a new political philosophy which should be based on the highest ideals and values. As far as literary art is concerned, one can easily see that such world famous novelists as Kipling, Chekhov, Maupassant and many others reflected in their short stories that very longing for highest values and ideals which are almost absent in political doctrines and political practice. The true policy is necessarily based on the true culture and its values and ideals, whereas the true culture is indispensably connected with the true policy.


Author(s):  
John Armstrong

In contrast to the thousands of critical studies of American writing on the Vietnam War, there has been a relative dearth of English-language appraisals of Vietnamese literature of the American War (as it is known in Vietnam). This disparity in understanding partly informs anthropologist Heonik Kwon’s distinction between “the idiom of ghost” often used in American memories of the war and the widespread public belief in war ghosts in Vietnam, whose war dead numbered approximately fifty times that of the American military forces, and whose citizens continued to suffer long after the war due to the most extensive bombing and chemical weapons campaigns in the history of humankind.This paper explores novels (by Bao Ninh and Duong Thu Huong) and short stories by (Le Minh Khue, Ho Anh Thai, Ngo Tu Lap and Phan Hy Dong) from the rich wave of Vietnamese postwar fiction which began to be published and translated in the early 1990s. Through close readings of these works, this study will analyse how local customs of the dead combine with Gothic forms and features – flesh, bones, ghosts and time – to create fictional and memorial resistances to myths and ideologies which have sought to cast the war in more traditional tropes of nationalism and heroism.


2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 26-45
Author(s):  
Sarah J. Adams

Despite their peripheral position in the Atlantic slave trade, authors of the late eighteenth-century German states composed a number of dramas that addressed imperialism and slavery. As Sigrid G. Köhler has argued (2018), these authors aimed to exert political leverage by grounding their plays in the international abolitionist debate. This article explores how a body of intellectual texts resonated in August von Kotzebue's bourgeois melodrama Die Negersklaven (1796). In a sentimental preface, he mentions diverse philosophical, historical and political sources that contributed to the dramatic plot and guaranteed his veracity. Looking specifically at the famous Histoire des deux Indes (1770) by Denis Diderot and Guillaume-Thomas F. Raynal, I will examine the ways in which Kotzebue adapted highbrow abolitionist discourses to the stage in order to convery an anti-slavery ideology to the white European middle classes. Kotzebue seems to ground abolitionism in the bourgeois realm by moulding political texts into specific generic templates such as an elaborate mise-en-scène, the separation and reunion of lost lovers, a fraternal conflict, and the representation of suffering victims and a compassionate white hero.


Author(s):  
Jonathan Evans

The Many Voices of Lydia Davis shows how translation, rewriting and intertextuality are central to the work of Lydia Davis, a major American writer, translator and essayist. Winner of the Man Booker International Prize 2013, Davis writes innovative short stories that question the boundaries of the genre. She is also an important translator of French writers such as Maurice Blanchot, Michel Leiris, Marcel Proust and Gustave Flaubert. Translation and writing go hand-in-hand in Davis’s work. Through a series of readings of Davis’s major translations and her own writing, this book investigates how Davis’s translations and stories relate to each other, finding that they are inextricably interlinked. It explores how Davis uses translation - either as a compositional tool or a plot device - and other instances of rewriting in her stories, demonstrating that translation is central for understanding her prose. Understanding how Davis’s work complicates divisions between translating and other forms of writing highlights the role of translation in literary production, questioning the received perception that translation is less creative than other forms of writing.


Author(s):  
Christopher Rosenmeier

Xu Xu and Wumingshi were among the most widely read authors in China during and after the Second Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945). Despite being an integral part of the Chinese literary scene, their bestselling fiction has, however, been given scant attention in histories of Chinese writing. This book is the first extensive study of Xu Xu and Wumingshi in English or any other Western language and it re-establishes their importance within the popular Chinese literature of the 1940s. Their romantic novels and short stories were often set abroad and featured a wide range of stereotypes, from pirates, spies and patriotic soldiers to ghosts, spirits and exotic women who confounded the mostly cosmopolitan male protagonists. Christopher Rosenmeier’s detailed analysis of these popular novels and short stories shows that such romances broke new ground by incorporating and adapting narrative techniques and themes from the Shanghai modernist writers of the 1930s, notably Shi Zhecun and Mu Shiying. The study thereby contests the view that modernism had little lasting impact on Chinese fiction, and it demonstrates that the popular literature of the 1940s was more innovative than usually imagined, with authors, such as those studied here, successfully crossing the boundaries between the popular and the elite, as well as between romanticism and modernism, in their bestselling works.


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