ACLA 2006 Annual Meeting: The Human and Its Others

As an outcome of the Babelic curse, translation and its conundrums have often been associated with the limitations of the human condition. As a recurrent symptom of the nostalgia for the possibility of a language that could transcend difference, the sacralization of the original (as that which should remain forever stable and thus repeatable in its sameness) has pushed translation to the margins of scholarship and built a reputation for translators that is frequently associated with the role of an unwelcome, but necessary, traitor. However, in the wake of postmodern thought, which tends to emphasize the transformational vocation of any reading or interpretation, translation is turning into a privileged site for the understanding of the ways in which we appropriate otherness and renegotiate the traffic between the domestic and the foreign. At the same time, we are beginning to evaluate the many ways in which this negotiation inevitably reshapes and redefines cultural products and identities. From this perspective, we plan to examine how the traditional relationship between the so-called original and the translation, or the source and the target languages and cultures, can be rearticulated, and what this rearticulation might teach us about the ways in which translations and translators reinvent and recombine both the domestic and the foreign. In other words, we are interested in looking into some of the consequences of an “ethics of difference” (in Lawrence Venuti’s words) for translation, and invite specialists to send proposals that address these issues either in translation projects or translation theories.

Friday, March 24

Jeffrey Sacks, Columbia University
“Translation’s Threads, or Hebrew as Arabic”
Leo T. H. Chan, Lingnan University, Hong Kong
“Texts in Metamorphosis: Adaptations as Translations in East Asian Literatures”
Lilian Feitosa, University of Massachusetts at Amherst
“Incorporating an Ethics of Difference: Gendering the Study of Translations from Brazilian Literature into English”
Vanessa Cañete Jurado, SUNY Binghamton
“Reinventing the Other: Identity, Culture and Representation in Dario Fo’s Johan Padan”

Saturday, March 25

Ben Van Wyke, SUNY Binghamton
“Devouring Love: The Ambivalent Metaphorics of Haroldo de Campos’s Translation Project”
Valerie Henitiuk, Columbia University
“Swaying Canons of Taste: Translations of Classical Japanese Literature in the West”
Aidan O’Malley, The Humanities Institute of Ireland
“Field Days’s Translation of Irish Identities”
Lauretta Clough, University of Maryland
“A Difference of Ethics”

Sunday, March 26

Rachel Williams, The Pennsylvania State University
“François Villon en anglais: English Translations of the 19th and 20th Centuries”
Christopher Larkosh, University of Connecticut
“Levinas, Dussel and the Futures of Translational Ethics”
Rosemary Arrojo, SUNY Binghamton
“Translation and Impropriety – A Reading of Claude Bleton’s Les nègres du traducteur”