{"title":"<i>Xenitia</i>, the Nation, and Intralingual Translation","authors":"Karen Van Dyck","doi":"10.1632/s0030812923000421","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1632/s0030812923000421","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract Modern Greek poets often imagine interlingual translation as intralingual—that is, as rewording within the same language when two distinct languages are involved. George Seferis and Yannis Ritsos provide two cases, Seferis in translating Ancient Greek poetry and Ritsos in translating Romanian, Czech, and Slovakian poetry. For these poet-translators on opposite sides of the political spectrum, the claim of intralingualism responds to different experiences of exile: Seferis as a refugee from Asia Minor and then as an overseas diplomat, Ritsos as a political prisoner and then as a Communist Party emissary. Intralingual translation assuages xenitia , the pain of not being able to go home, but it also masks interlingual differences that serve other cultural and political functions, whether imagining a national language that continues a valuable cultural past or serving as a transnational vehicle for unifying minor cultures.","PeriodicalId":47559,"journal":{"name":"PMLA-PUBLICATIONS OF THE MODERN LANGUAGE ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135516348","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Thriving on Change: Translation in Brazil","authors":"Vanessa Lopes Lourenço Hanes","doi":"10.1632/s0030812923000743","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1632/s0030812923000743","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":47559,"journal":{"name":"PMLA-PUBLICATIONS OF THE MODERN LANGUAGE ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135516358","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Toward Afrofluency","authors":"Kaiama L. Glover","doi":"10.1632/s0030812923000779","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1632/s0030812923000779","url":null,"abstract":"KAIAMA L. GLOVER is professor of African American studies and French at Yale University. She is the author of A Regarded Self: Caribbean Womanhood and the Ethics of Disorderly Being (Duke UP, 2021) and of Haiti Unbound: A Spiralist Challenge to the Postcolonial Canon (Liverpool UP, 2011), among other publications, and the prizewinning translator of several works of Haitian prose fiction and francophone nonfiction. Her scholarly and translation work has been supported by the Columbia Institute for Ideas and Imagination in Paris, the New York Public Library Cullman Center, the PEN/Heim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Mellon Foundation. She is a regular contributor to the New York Times Book Review and is the cohost of Writing Home: American Voices from the Caribbean. My experience of translation has been, for the most part, unburdened. Translating has not been my principal professional occupation, nor has it beenmy field of study. It has become, however, a singularly integral praxis for me over the last decade—one of the most important expressions of what I do with what I know as a researcher and professor. I came to translation organically. In 2013, the editor of a small independent press commissioned me to translate the Haitian Spiralist author Frankétienne’s 1968 novel Mûr à crever (Ready to Burst) from French into English. I had published the first full-length scholarly monograph on Spiralism three years earlier, and so I welcomed the opportunity to return to Frankétienne’s work and to the worlds it had opened up for me. Taking on the translation aligned entirely with the intention that animated the earlier work I had done on Spiralism: to shed greater light on and encourage a wider readership of Frankétienne’s writing and that of the two other authors I considered in my study. I jumped into that first translation project untrained, unstudied, and guided loosely by a confidence that I knew enough about Haitian literature and was proficient enough in French and in Haitian Creole to do a decent job of it. This was true, for the most part, but the experience ultimately was as much one of learning as of doing. In approaching Ready to Burst as a scholar, I had always left the book intact in a certain kind of way; I entered into public conversation, even debated with it, probing and questioning it in the hopes of excavating its layers. But in every aspect of this critical work, Frankétienne remained always and unequivocally The Author and I remained The Reader. In bringing his novel into the academic arena through carefully chosen fragments, with curated elements spotlighted and mined for the formal and conceptual treasures they contained,","PeriodicalId":47559,"journal":{"name":"PMLA-PUBLICATIONS OF THE MODERN LANGUAGE ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135516325","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Hugo, Translated: The Measures of Modernity in Muḥammad Rūḥī al-Khālidī's Poetics of Comparative Literature","authors":"Shaden M. Tageldin","doi":"10.1632/s0030812923000573","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1632/s0030812923000573","url":null,"abstract":"Abstract In the Ottoman-Palestinian intellectual Muḥammad Rūḥī al-Khālidī's Tārīkh ʿIlm al-Adab ʿind al-Ifranj wa-l-ʿArab, wa-Fīktūr Hūkū (1904, 2nd ed. 1912; History of the Science of Literature among the Europeans and the Arabs, and Victor Hugo ), the figure of Victor Hugo marks the uneven chime and dissonance of select notes in Arabic and French literary epistemes and histories. Tracing Hugo's dictum that poetry inheres not in forms but in ideas to Arab-Islamic antiquity, al-Khālidī incarnates in Hugo the lost “nature” to which a fallen, “artificial” Arabic literature must return. In this regime of comparability, words must be cut to the measure of their meaning, and meter—poetic measure—tuned to the “natural” rhythms of speech. With al-Khālidī's translations of meter across time and language, this essay reads his translations of Hugo's theory and poetry (“Grenade”) to argue that the underlying concept of measure encodes a drive to equate the world's literatures and empires.","PeriodicalId":47559,"journal":{"name":"PMLA-PUBLICATIONS OF THE MODERN LANGUAGE ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135516331","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Translating Gaia: Translation and the More-Than-Human","authors":"Michael Cronin","doi":"10.1632/s0030812923000755","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1632/s0030812923000755","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":47559,"journal":{"name":"PMLA-PUBLICATIONS OF THE MODERN LANGUAGE ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135516334","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"MLA volume 138 issue 3 Cover and Front matter","authors":"","doi":"10.1632/s0030812923000640","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1632/s0030812923000640","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":47559,"journal":{"name":"PMLA-PUBLICATIONS OF THE MODERN LANGUAGE ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135516345","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"“A Creed for the ‘New Negro’” and “A Negro on Etiquet of Caste”","authors":"W. D. Du Bois, M. Patterson","doi":"10.1632/S0030812923000196","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1632/S0030812923000196","url":null,"abstract":"On 13 December 1895, less than three months after Booker T. Washington gave his Atlanta Exposition Address and was hailed as the nation’s first nationally known New Negro, W. E. B. Du Bois published “A Creed for the ‘New Negro.’” At this point in his career, Du Bois, whowas teaching atWilberforce University, had not yet publicly voiced objections to Washington’s worldview and, in fact, had congratulated Washington on his “phenomenal success at Atlanta—it was a word fitly spoken” (Correspondence 39). Before being published in the Iowa State Bystander, Du Bois’s “Creed” first appeared in a now lost issue of the New York Age, whose editor, T. Thomas Fortune, was well known in the early 1890s Black press for his militant campaign against lynching and for civil rights (Thornbrough 117–25). Founded in Des Moines in 1894, the Black-owned, “fighting” Bystander relied on more established Black newspapers for its national coverage (Cotton 1; see 23). By calling his list of principles a “creed,”DuBois appealed to the religiosity and fortitude Black people drew on towithstand escalating degradations and violence within the “nadir” of Jim Crow (see Logan). The first five years of the 1890s witnessed over seven hundred documented lynchings of African Americans, continual efforts to disenfranchise Black voters, and the proliferation of laws segregating transportation and public facilities in southern states, culminating in the Supreme Court decision Plessy v. Ferguson in 1896 (Johnson; Seguin and Rigby). In its emphasis onmoral purity, self-reliance, and “industrial training and cooperation,” as well as its accedence to social segregation, Du Bois’s creed reads like one Washington would endorse. Yet Du Bois, even this early in his career, distinguishes his position fromWashington’s. In addition to industrial education, DuBois emphasized the need for “the cultivation of our best intellectual ability.” He calls for the “founding of a university of the negro,” later realized in the formation of Alexander Crummell’s American Negro Academy (1897), in which Du Bois served aprominent role. Inurging the “preservationofourbest racecharacteristics and products” as expressed inBlackmusic and folklore, he celebrates Black culture in itself rather than as measured by white achievement. Finally,","PeriodicalId":47559,"journal":{"name":"PMLA-PUBLICATIONS OF THE MODERN LANGUAGE ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"88174069","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Return of the Imperial Boomerang in By the Sea and Afterlives","authors":"Nasia Anam","doi":"10.1632/S0030812923000263","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1632/S0030812923000263","url":null,"abstract":"NASIA ANAM is assistant professor of English and the 2022–24 Joe Crowley Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at the University of Nevada, Reno. She is completing a book manuscript entitled “Muslim Heterotopias: Colonial Logics of Space in Literatures of Migration.” Abdulrazak Gurnah’s 2001 novel, By the Sea, begins with the interrogation of a Zanzibari Muslim, Saleh Omar, who arrives with false papers at Gatwick Airport. Having escaped possible imprisonment in Zanzibar, he hides his knowledge of English culture and language, only responding with thewords refugee and asylum to questions about the purpose and circumstances of his travel. A contemporary reader may be inclined to anticipate anti-Islamic insinuations of terrorism from the suspicious border agent—a now routine expectation for manyMuslim travelers. But the events in the novel, publishedmonths before the attacks on the World Trade Center, begin well before the global post-9/11 border regime had become a quotidian aspect of international travel. By the Sea expands outward temporally and spatially from late-twentieth-century Britain to make the astonishing historical connections that distinguish Gurnah’s oeuvre, both in broad temporal sweeps and in minute interpersonal disputes. The hostility with which the border agent responds to Omar’s asylum request indexes a much longer history, reminding us that the twenty-first-century “crises” of mass refugee migration and Islamophobia in the Global North are mired in ideologies and institutions of subjugation whose origins can be traced back through hundreds of years of colonialism. Published two decades later, Gurnah’s most recent novel, Afterlives (2021), offers something of a prehistory of Omar’s predicament in By the Sea. It relates the story of two young Tanzanian soldiers, Hamza and Ilyas, recruited into the German colonial Schutztruppe—the military regiments that operated in the German East African colonies from the late nineteenth century until the end of World War I. Gurnah chronicles Hamza’s and Ilyas’s fates","PeriodicalId":47559,"journal":{"name":"PMLA-PUBLICATIONS OF THE MODERN LANGUAGE ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"91110292","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"MLA volume 138 issue 2 Cover and Front matter","authors":"","doi":"10.1632/s0030812923000299","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1632/s0030812923000299","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":47559,"journal":{"name":"PMLA-PUBLICATIONS OF THE MODERN LANGUAGE ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"75027124","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Aesthetic Bearings – ADDENDUM","authors":"Nan Z. Da","doi":"10.1632/s0030812923000329","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1632/s0030812923000329","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":47559,"journal":{"name":"PMLA-PUBLICATIONS OF THE MODERN LANGUAGE ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.7,"publicationDate":"2023-03-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"77800359","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}