AustLit

'This edition takes a wide understanding of translation, exploring not only translation practices, but also the ways in which translation can be an impetus for thinking and creating for both poets and translators. The edition explores the practice of translation as an encounter with other cultures or as a collaborative act; it unravels the cross disciplinary associations made when taking words into transit; it investigates the journey into the self as one’s own languages interact and pull against each other.' (Publication abstract)

'The majority of Japanese poetry currently reaches a limited readership outside of Japan. As a result, many contemporary Japanese poets are searching for ways to have their poems translated into English and published in English-language journals. Achieving satisfactory translation results, however, is considerably more complicated than switching words from one language into another and scholarship on the subject of translating Japanese poetry is often vexed. This scholarship frequently traverses much of the same ground as the debate about Japanese prose translation where, depending on their approach, translators may be labelled ‘literalists’ or ‘libertines’. This paper argues that co-translating Japanese poetry may be as much about sharing ideas and ideologies as about lineation, cadence or word choice. Co-translating Japanese poetry has the power to build cross-cultural understandings and to explore and promote ways of understanding Japanese identity. We argue that while translation is often undertaken by the translators in their country of residence, the experience of genius loci and undertaking co-translation in situ may best accommodate such a cross-cultural synergy.

'This paper draws on our collective experiences in a series of translation workshops at Meiji University. These were organised by Rina Kikuchi, a literary scholar and translator from Japan. Among other Australian poets and scholars, Paul Hetherington and Cassandra Atherton were paired with Japanese poets for co-translation purposes. They co-translated Japanese poetry into English and had their own poems translated into Japanese with the assistance of Kikuchi who acted as the lynchpin for the workshops. The experience was celebrated in a series of poetry readings in Tokyo and Nara. Significantly, although neither Hetherington nor Atherton is fluent in Japanese, they found the process of co-translation to include what one may call an attentive cosmopolitanism, incorporating respect and understanding for different cultural assumptions and poetic ideas.' (Publication abstract) 

'Multilingual poetry, which weaves together multiple languages, necessarily straddles multiple cultural contexts. This raises the question of how poets who write multilingually negotiate and deploy their cultural knowledges, who they write for, and how their audiences receive them. Using Suresh Canagarajah’s Negotiation Model to examine poets’ linguistic choices, including whether and when to provide translations, and Mendieta-Lombardo and Cintron’s adaptation of the Myers-Scotton Markedness Model to consider audience and context, this paper will examine examples of contemporary bilingual and multilingual poetry published in Australia and Canada to identify the many conversations and negotiations that must take place between language-cultures as well as between multilingual poets and audiences for these poems to ‘work’.' (Publication abstract)

'Translation theorist Laurence Venuti has written how a translator, in “a Romantic transcendence” can lose “his national self through a strong identification with a cultural other.” TS Reader, 20) Australian twentieth-century poet James McAuley’s reading and translation of the early twentieth-century Austrian poet Georg Trakl presents a significant literary encounter. Cosmopolitan by nature, McAuley, as a young poet, had been drawn to, and translated, the German language lyric poet Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926). Few of McAuley’s translations of Trakl are included in his Collected Poems(1971 and 1994); they appear in a separate posthumous collection (1982) and in his essay “The Poetry of Georg Trakl” (1975). This article offers a literary appreciation of McAuley’s translations and his commentary on Trakl’s imagery, prosody, symbolism and world view which McAuley described, borrowing Baudelaire’s term, as “a landscape of the soul.” It considers the hypothesis of translation as travel. Drawing on Harold Bloom’s theory of influence it examines McAuley’s encounter with Trakl in his late work, translations and poetic dedication (“Trakl: Salzburg,” 1976) written after visiting Salzburg in 1973. A comparatist approach traces Trakl’s influence, the discovery of affinities or parallel paths with the earlier poet who might be considered, in Bloomian terms, to be McAuley’s “gnostic double.” ' (Publication abstract)    

'If, as Walter Benjamin suggests, a translation must 'lovingly and in detail incorporate the original's mode of signification', translating is an act of creation predicated upon transference – a rewriting that entails a relationship with the other. This is in accordance with Benjamin's proposition that the translator must allow her language to be powerfully affected by the foreign tongue. But what if the foreign tongue is one’s mother tongue? This performative paper explores what is at stake in the act of autotranslation when a writer returns to her mother tongue. I will use my own practice to identify what is recovered in this act, namely, a voice, a word, a letter threaded through the fabric of language. I ask why this act produces a linguistic and subjective destabilisation that opens up translinguistic play and suggest that autotranslation consists of a creation in each language with its own interferences, rhythms and affects. Though the theoretical frame of my investigation touches upon linguistic and translation studies, this paper is essentially underpinned by psychoanalytic concepts and concerns itself with experiential knowledge.' (Publication abstract)