Welcome to Paradise

It was a glimpse into Paradise. The sun caught the old town first, its jumble of faded pastels glowing like the gilded ceilings of the Vatican – yellow, pink, rose, white, red, orange, grey and cadmium; medieval plasterwork rising joyously from the silky sea as it had done for more centuries than she could even comprehend....

‘The Night of the Zeppelin’ by Tennessee Williams

This chapter introduces a newly discovered play-fragment by Tennessee Williams, which comprises two separate scenes: the first, eight-page scene is called ‘The Night of the Zeppelin’ and the second, two-page scene is called ‘Armistice’. There are four characters in the play: Katharine Mansfield [sic], John Middleton Murry, D. H. Lawrence, and his wife Frieda Lawrence. The chapter offers a biographical overview of the complex relationship between the two couples, followed by a detailed analysis of the play fragment, which is published here in its entirety for the first time.

‘Nous ne suivons pas la même route’: Flaubertian Objectivity and Mansfield’s Representations of Travel

This chapter offers a reading of Mansfield’s ‘Urewera Notebook’, which features notes on Gustave Flaubert as well as diary entries and vignettes of travelling lone women, to first situate Mansfield’s early aesthetic interests in objectively representing characters in transit. It then argues that Mansfield’s 1915 story ‘An Indiscreet Journey’ is a feminist transposition of the infamous cab ride of Madame Bovary into a French WWI setting. Mansfield’s translation of Flaubertian objectivity and tropes from Madame Bovary to suit her own perspective and context exemplifies how this mode of thematic and aesthetic translation functions as a generative mode of literary production.

‘Ginger Whiskers’ and ‘Glad-Eyes’: Translations of Katherine Mansfield’s Stories into Slovak and Czech

This chapter offers analyses of some translational difficulties the author of this paper, and first translator of Katherine Mansfield’s stories into Slovak, encountered during her work. These difficulties arose due to the closeness of the Slovak and Czech languages, the specificities of Slovak history and its long and still flourishing connections with Czech culture in general and translation in particular. Aloys Skoumal’s long-standing translations of Mansfield into Czech will be discussed as well. The issues touched upon and put into a cultural, historical and linguistic context are mostly the translation of humour, idiolects, names, modes of formal and informal address, as well as of some titles of Mansfield’s short stories.

An Invitation to Dinner

Today when my wife announced that she had invited Miss Fulton to dinner a spark of joy electrocuted me. I was flipping through the letters which had arrived with the morning post when I was startled by my wife’s voice. She had a way of moving as if her feet didn’t touch the ground and could enter a room without sound. This was something I liked about her when we first met, but recently this characteristic had been making me cagey. ‘You don’t mind, do you? Having another guest?’ she asked. I shook my head and circled my arm about her waist. I felt her relaxing and she nuzzled my ear. I had long ago told her that our marriage was going to be more of a friendship, but she still initiated small intimacies....

Poetry

Jan Kemp

Foreign Languages and Mother Tongues: From Exoticism to Cannibalism in Katherine Mansfield’s Short Stories

This chapter discusses the way Katherine Mansfield uses the French language in her short-stories, and specifically in the stories set in France. Mansfield does not only use the French language as a semiological tool but confronts English-speaking readers with a foreign language that constantly interacts with their mother-tongue, imposing on them the Other’s tongue – Derrida’s ‘monolingualism of the Other’. She opens up an in-between space in which the two languages are questioned and unsettled, a process echoing the ‘becoming-other of language’ described by Deleuze. This chapter examines how the tension between English and French reaches a climax in the schizophrenic process at work in ‘Je ne Parle pas français’; language becomes, between the English and the French characters, a ‘cannibal-language’, the aggressive appropriation of the Other through his/her language in order to leave him/her speechless and powerless.

Unshed Tears: Meaning, Trauma and Translation

The repetition compulsion through which the trauma victim attempts at working out his or her neuroses shares similarities with the compulsion to repeat enacted in translation. Translation, like trauma, happens belatedly, looks back at the past of the source text and at the same time looks forward to the future of the translated text. Using an interdisciplinary approach that combines literary, translation and trauma studies, this article presents an analysis of Katherine Mansfield’s ‘Life of Ma Parker’ and of the translational challenges it poses. The author finally suggests a rethinking of translation as a peculiar and unexpected form witnessing that, like trauma, originates where a direct access to meaning seems to be denied.

Parodic Translation: Katherine Mansfield and the ‘Boris Petrovsky’ Pseudonym

This chapter examines the fraudulent ‘translations’ that Mansfield composed under the pseudonym ‘Boris Petrovsky’ for the little magazine Rhythm. Suggesting the possible origins of this imagined name, the article reads these poems within the original material contexts of publication, situating Mansfield’s ‘translations’ within a network of exchange between Rhythm and The New Age. Examining the specific political-historical contexts that inform the poems, the article also highlights Mansfield’s identification with a literary tradition of resistance to imperial hegemony, understanding ‘parodic translation’ as a tactic of critique and subversion. Appreciating these contexts allows us to consider the extent to which Mansfield’s other poetry contributions to Rhythm were shaped by an awareness of the equivalence between the literary canon and the structures of imperialism.

Beau Champ

‘I feel that my love and longing for the external world – I mean the world of nature has suddenly increased a million times – When I think of the little flowers that grow in the grass, and little streams and places where we can lie & look up at the clouds – Oh I simply ache for them.’...