Translation and Autotheory

While the long-established publishing convention of the translator’s note or afterword has asked translators to provide short critical reflections on their practice, there has been a boom over the past decade in standalone first-person accounts of literary translation practice (Briggs, 2017; Kaza, 2017; Croft, 2019; Lahiri, 2022). There are thus far, perhaps, too few texts of this kind to call it a genre, though “the translation memoir” (Polizzotti, 2018; Grass and Robert-Foley, 2023) has been proposed as a possible moniker. Our seminar aims to interrogate the possibilities and limitations of this new genre, and to articulate the critical value that this kind of writing may potentially have for literary scholars, theorists of translation, and translators themselves.

In what ways can these self-reflexive narratives about translation amount to translation theory? How much do they share with traditions of autotheory in terms of feminist, pluralizing, or anticolonial practices? Or are they always, by virtue of being produced in the first person, limited to what Lawrence Venuti has characterized as “impressionistic” and “belletristic” (Venuti, 2023)? In what ways can translation autotheory bring attention to the “impressions” or perspectives or a broader range of translators than what is currently represented in the translation theory canon? Is the “autotheoretical translation memoir,” as Delphine Grass (2023) names the genre, generative precisely because it is provisional, somatic, and non-universalist? Is this kind of personal translation reflection vulnerable to the critiques leveled at other, more-established, genres of autotheory: for instance, that it plays into the dominant capitalist aesthetic that favors a sheen of “immediacy” over the distance and reflection that mediation and “theory” are good for (Kornbluh 2024)? Is there something different about translation (as compared to say nonfiction, or musical performance, or sculpture) that makes collectivity and mediation central to the experience, even if witnessed from the perspective of only one particular translator? What autotheoretical traditions and texts in other languages do translators have particular access to, and how does this guide their self-reflections?

Topics that papers might explore include:

– interrogations of the genre of translation memoir and/or translation diaries (Hahn, 2022), including papers examining specific work(s) in this genre

– ways that translation navigates questions of immediacy and mediation (Kornbluh, 2024)

– creative translation practice as theorizing translation, or the limits to such theorization

– the translation memoir as feminist, queering, antiracist, anti-ableist, pluralizing practice 

– autotheory in a range of cultural and historical backgrounds, languages, and cultural perspectives