AustLit

Increasingly, it seems that overseas rights and translation contracts are initiated by publishers and their scouts at events such as the Frankfurt and London trade fairs. Are these commercial arrangements similar throughout the world or do they vary from one culture to another? As if confirming Lawrence Venuti's claim for the translator's 'invisibility', there is, to date, no systematic, empirically-informed account of this translation zone in Australian literary scholarship.

This part of Resourceful Reading aims to answer some of these research questions by populating the metaphor of the 'translation zone' with real data.

Professor Dixon has argued for the value of thinking about Australian writing as belonging not just to the nation but also to an expanded field in which national literatures come into being in complex and competitive relations between what Pascale Casanova calls the literary province and world literary space. Central to the cultural economy of this expanded field is the role of the translator, so often rendered invisible, as Venuti has observed.

Australian writers and Australian literature have never been confined to the boundaries of the nation, but are implicated in what Emily Apter calls the translation zone, which she describes as a broad intellectual topography that is neither the property of a single nation, nor an amorphous condition associated with postnationalism, but rather a zone of critical engagement that connects the 'L' and the 'N' of transLation and transNation. Literary influences, intellectual formations, careers in writing, and the processes of editing, publication, translation, reception and reputation-making take place both within and beyond the nation, and in more than one language.

A resourceful reading approach

Apter's 'translation zone' is of course a spatial metaphor. But to understand how that space operates we need to move beyond close reading. A resourceful reading approach can begin to populate Apter's metaphoric space with real data. Thus, this project employs the following interrogatory framework to pursue these lines of investigation:

• What might a transnational practice of Australian literary criticism that aimed to overcome the translator's invisibility look like?
• What kinds of research questions would it ask?
• What kinds of data and readings would we need to develop a transnational perspective, to see Australian literature in the translation zone?
• Is there a single translation zone, or are there as many translation zones beyond Australian literature as there are other languages and translators?
• Beyond English, does the reputation of an Australian book or writer spread from one foreign language to another, or are they siloed, communicating back through English?
• Is the impact of successive translations cumulative throughout a writer's oeuvre, or is each translation a new beginning?
• How important are paratextual phenomena and events?
• How important is the agency of the author and translator in relation to other personnel, including authors' and publishers' agents, publishers, editors, and publishers' scouts, in commissioning translations?

Project Outcomes

The book chapter, 'Australian Literature in the Translation Zone: Robert Dessaix and David Malouf', is an exploration of some of these questions.