Debate/Panel Discussion
Time:
Translation, Misappropriation, and the Politics of Language: Panel on Translation Issues
Date:
3:00 pm –
5:00 pm
Bailey Library
Andrews Hall
Panel members include Professor Marina Camboni (University of Macerata, Italy), Professor Marta Skwara (University of Szczecin, Poland), Caterina Bernadini (University of Macerata, Italy, and Fulbright Scholar at UNL), Professor Jordan Stump (Modern Languages & Literatures, UNL), and Professor Roland Végsö (English, UNL).
Marco Abel will serve as moderator.
The purpose of this panel is to raise questions about literary studies and how its primary objects—(the production, dissemination, reception, and meaning of) texts—are affected by the act of translation. The impetus behind this panel comes from the discovery that an Italian translation of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass placed the American poet of Democracy in proximity to an emerging fascist ideology in Italy in the early part of the 20th century. One of the panelists, Professor Camboni, will deliver a lecture on Wednesday, January 18, 2012 (5:30 pm, Bailey), in which she discusses this case at greater length. This panel is conceived as an extension of the very concerns that Professor Camboni’s talk will broach: namely, the panel’s premise is that what appears to be a rather mind-boggling misappropriation of Whitman’s poetic language during the age of Italian modernism nevertheless opens up provocative questions about the nature and practice of translation or, put differently, about the politics of language and the language of politics. The panel will consider the ideological implications of translations as well as the very assumptions literary history makes, and holds, about the relative (in)stability of its objects of concern. To engage aspects of these questions, each panelist will be given 10 minutes to offer a position statement, after which the floor will be opened for both discussion among the panelists about their positions and conversation with the audience about the questions raised by the panelists.
Marco Abel will serve as moderator.
The purpose of this panel is to raise questions about literary studies and how its primary objects—(the production, dissemination, reception, and meaning of) texts—are affected by the act of translation. The impetus behind this panel comes from the discovery that an Italian translation of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass placed the American poet of Democracy in proximity to an emerging fascist ideology in Italy in the early part of the 20th century. One of the panelists, Professor Camboni, will deliver a lecture on Wednesday, January 18, 2012 (5:30 pm, Bailey), in which she discusses this case at greater length. This panel is conceived as an extension of the very concerns that Professor Camboni’s talk will broach: namely, the panel’s premise is that what appears to be a rather mind-boggling misappropriation of Whitman’s poetic language during the age of Italian modernism nevertheless opens up provocative questions about the nature and practice of translation or, put differently, about the politics of language and the language of politics. The panel will consider the ideological implications of translations as well as the very assumptions literary history makes, and holds, about the relative (in)stability of its objects of concern. To engage aspects of these questions, each panelist will be given 10 minutes to offer a position statement, after which the floor will be opened for both discussion among the panelists about their positions and conversation with the audience about the questions raised by the panelists.