In recent years, we have witnessed the rapid migration of the field of translation studies from occupying its position as “a backwater of the university” in the 1990s—to cite Lawrence Venuti’s oft-quoted complaint—to becoming a central object of scholarly inquiry in literary and cultural studies and beyond. Even as numerous conferences, symposia, and institutes are organized around the topic of translation, course readings in English literature have not yet come to reflect the same transformative impulse. In diverse ways, the scholars collected in this volume make compelling cases for expanding the repertoire of texts worthy of study in English classrooms to include translations, addressing texts by a wide range of authors and translators including Lord Byron, J.W. von Goethe, S.T. Coleridge, P.C. de Laclos, George Eliot, Sei Shônagon, and Germaine de Staël. Edited and introduced by C.C. Wharram, with essays by Aishah Alshatti, Daniel DeWispelare, Gillian Dow, Lesa Scholl, Valerie Henitiuk, and C.C. Wharram.
Abstract
C.C. Wharram’s “Preface” to this special issue argues that translations call on us to rethink the way we face the planet and its literary history. The essay asks a series of questions pertinent to educators regarding the need for and difficulties in incorporating translated texts into courses designed for literature students.
Abstract
The design of this module is to introduce a new dimension in the literary history of Romanticism that has long been overlooked in our pedagogical practices, and that is the interconnectedness of British Romanticism with German literature. In a course titled Romantic and Victorian Poetry, I pair Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther with the reviews and poetic responses it elicited at the time, especially the “Werther sonnets” written by Charlotte Smith, Anna Seward, and Anne Bannerman.
Abstract
This article suggests that the history of Hebrew-to-English translation before and during the Romantic period can be used to introduce students to translation theories and methodologies more generally. The article describes a strategic rather than exhaustive assortment of primary and secondary texts on the nature, status, and translatability of the Biblical Hebrew language for teachers and scholars.
Abstract
This article focuses on Gillian Dow's experience of teaching Les Liaisons Dangereuses in English translation to monolingual anglophone students of English Literature at the University of Southampton, UK. It describes strategies for introducing foreign texts into the Romantic classroom, and demonstrates how looking across the Channel can improve our understanding of the Romantic-period novel.
Abstract
This paper details the ways in which contemporary translation studies inform graduate-level study of nineteenth-century literature as cultural history. It examines the way ideas of translation, and the powerplay between the original author and the translator, can manifest themselves in other forms of writing, such as editing and reviewing, and also addresses ideas of cultural translation in travel writing and fiction set in the foreign place.
From Pre-Modern Japan to the 21st-Century World: Comparative Translation in the Classroom
Valerie HenitiukAbstract
This essay discusses how serial translations and adaptations can be used pedagogically to enhance a student's understanding of the complexities of textual production, re-production and reception. It draws on the author's research in world literature, specifically with regard to pre-modern Japanese texts. The discussion proposes effective ways to challenge our students' understanding of authorship, stimulate classroom discussion, and foreground the centrality of translational concepts to every act of reading literary works, Romantic or otherwise.
Translation as 'Genre in its own Excess': Germaine de Staël's "On the Spirit of Translation(s)"
C.C. WharramAbstract
Germaine de Staël’s "On the Spirit of Translation(s),” written in 1816 and originally published in Italian translation, allows students to recognize some of the interesting possibilities that translated texts bring to the study of literature, while providing a brief overview of the history of translation in Europe. Staël questions the idea of a “national” literature independent of outside influence. Rather than focusing on what becomes “lost in translation,” Staël highlights many of the advantages to literature and culture that translation offers.