scholarly journals Dis-contenting Khayyam in the Context of Comparative Literature: An Invitation to Translating Rubaiyat with a Focal Shift from Content to Form

2019 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 24
Author(s):  
Sajad Soleymani Yazdi
Keyword(s):  
Comparative Literature ◽  
Translation Studies ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
Cultural Hegemony ◽  
European Perspective ◽  
Focus On Form ◽  
Home Culture ◽  
English Translations ◽  
Focal Shift

Since its conception in France in 1877, Comparative Literature, always subject to a critique of Eurocentrism, has been in a state of perpetual crisis. In “The Old/New Question of Comparison in Literary Studies: A Post-European Perspective” (2004), Ray Chow argued for a Post-European perspective in which comparatists begin with the home culture and look outwards to the European cultures, contrary to the dominant approach of doing just otherwise. Missing in Chow’s argument is the position of translation in this post-European perspective. In the 14 years between 2004 and 2018, the grandiose claims of comparative literature have been problematized and addressed; the lay of the land, however, remains predominantly Eurocentric, as it still focuses on content disproportionately. In this paper, through a study of English translations of Khayyam’s Rubaiyat, and taking Chow’s argument further, I argue that with its commitment to transfer the form of a text as much as the content, translation studies can further help comparative literature to distance itself from Europe. To exemplify the implication of this, I suggest that a translation of Khayyam’s Rubaiyat from Farsi to English would be more faithful to the original if its translations were to focus on the poem’s form rather than the content. I argue that translating with a focus on form would foreignize Khayyam’s poetry, hence an act of resistance against cultural hegemony.

scholarly journals Does Cognition Translate?

Poetics Today ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 41 (2) ◽  
pp. 243-259
Author(s):  
Karin Kukkonen
Keyword(s):  
Comparative Literature ◽  
World Literature ◽  
Predictive Processing ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
Future Research ◽  
Contemporary Novel ◽  
English Translations ◽  
French And English ◽  
Worldwide Phenomenon ◽  
Cognitive Literary Studies

Comparative literature and cognitive literary studies both consider literature as a worldwide phenomenon. The move toward world literature in comparative literature made salient the issue of reading some texts in translation, and world literature turned its attention to whether texts are entirely translatable and how center and periphery in the “world republic of literature” are organized around languages that are predominantly translated (or translated into). This article proposes that cognitive literary studies and comparative literature could enter into conversation around the topic of language differences and translation. For cognitive literary studies, the approaches of predictive processing and embodied cognition have in recent years developed the conceptual means to include these differences in our discussions without falling back on the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. Language shapes thought, but it does so in a flexible exchange between verbal markers and language-created contexts. The author models this exchange for literary texts by means of salient verbal markers that indicate plot events and outlines possible shared avenues of future research for cognitive literary studies and comparative literature along these lines. The examples discussed are the Finnish national epic Kalevala, its French and English translations, and the contemporary novel Sankarit by Johanna Sinisalo.

The world in Auerbach’s mouth: Weltliteratur after philhellenism

2019 ◽  
Vol 11 (4) ◽  
pp. 427-452
Author(s):  
Mathura Umachandran
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Comparative Literature ◽  
Human Activity ◽  
World Literature ◽  
Translation Studies ◽  
Complex Structures ◽  
Intercultural Understanding ◽  
The World

Abstract We live in an age of globalized and globalizing phenomena: the contemporary agenda of academic inquiry takes in ‘networks’, ‘connectivity’, and other modes of articulating complex structures of human activity. In Comparative Literature and beyond, the idea of world literature has borne the weight of idealist intercultural understanding, the hopes of translation studies, and the anxieties around the failure of communication. Erich Auerbach offers a touchstone in the conceptual genealogy of world literature (Weltliteratur). This article illuminates how Auerbach’s Weltliteratur is predicated on a polemic with German philhellenism, tracked through Auerbach’s declaration that his idea is ‘ungoethisch’. Auerbach’s revisions to Weltliteratur constituted a strategy to render it a historicist concept. Since Auerbach’s notion of historicism was itself derived from nineteenth-century German humanism, this essay argues that Auerbach was attempting to go with Goethe beyond Goethe. Finally, this essay assesses how successful Auerbach’s decoupling of Weltliteratur from universalism, under the sign of Goethe and the Greeks. I suggest that Weltliteratur is still a pertinent concept today because of Auerbach’s intervention to install historicist and dialectical resources therein.

Against Global Literary Studies

2021 ◽  
Vol 0 (0) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jacob Edmond
Keyword(s):  
Comparative Literature ◽  
New Zealand ◽  
World Literature ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
Aotearoa New Zealand ◽  
Institutional Frameworks ◽  
The World

Abstract Literary studies has taken a global turn through such institutional frameworks as global romanticism, global modernism, global anglophone, global postcolonial, global settler studies, world literature, and comparative literature. Though promising an escape from parochialism, nationalism, and Eurocentrism, this turn often looks suspiciously like another version of Anglo-European imperialism. This essay argues that, rather than continue the expansionary line of recent decades, global literary studies must allow other perspectives to draw into question its concepts, practices, and theories, including those associated with the terms literature, discipline, and comparison. As a settler colonial (Pākehā) scholar in Aotearoa New Zealand, I attend particularly to Māori literary scholars from Apirana Ngata, Te Kapunga Matemoana (Koro) Dewes, and Hirini Melbourne to Alice Te Punga Somerville, Tina Makereti, and Arini Loader. Their work highlights the limitedness of global literary studies in its current disciplinary guise. Disciplines remain important when they bring recognition to something previously marginalized, as in the battle to have Māori literature recognized within Pākehā institutions. What institutionalized modes of global literary studies need, however, is not discipline but indiscipline: a recognition of the limits of dominant disciplinary objects, frameworks, and practices, and an openness to other ways of seeing the world.

COMPARATIVE LITERATURE: EAST AND WEST STUDIES

2021 ◽  
Vol 02 (09) ◽  
pp. 8-14
Author(s):  
Aziza Komilovna Akhmedova ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Comparative Literature ◽  
Professional Ethics ◽  
Research Work ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
The Novel ◽  
World Science ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
Aesthetic Ideal ◽  
The Ideal

The article analyzes the results of the research on the representation of the aesthetic ideal through the image of the ideal hero in two national literatures. For research purposes, attention was paid to highlighting the category of the ideal hero as an expression of the author's aesthetic views. In Sinclair Lewis’s “Arrowsmith” and Pirimkul Kodirov's “The Three Roots”, the protagonists artistically reflect the authors' views on truth, virtue, and beauty. In these novels, professional ethics is described as a high noble value. The scientific novelty of the research work includes the following: in the evolution of western and eastern poetic thought, in the context of the novel genre, the skill, common and distinctive aspects of the creation of an ideal hero were revealed by synthesis of effective methods in world science with literary criteria in the history of eastern and western literary studies, in the example of Sinclair Lewis and Pirimkul Kodirov.

Bridge building or armchair traveling? The reception of the English translations of Manuel Rivas and Domingo Villar

2021 ◽  
pp. 93-120
Author(s):  
Laura Linares
Keyword(s):  
Focus Groups ◽  
Textual Analysis ◽  
Translation Studies ◽  
English Translations ◽  
Bridge Building ◽  
Manuel Rivas

The reader of translations has gained increasing attention in Translation Studies in recent years, with more focused studies looking into the reception of translated works either through textual analysis of reviews (Zhao 2009, Bielsa 2013, D’Egidio 2015, Saldanha 2018) or the analysis of interviews and focus groups with real readers (Arnold 2016). The reception of works by anglophone readers, in particular, has raised interest among scholars who wish to understand the expectations and patterns of literary consumption by a hegemonic, central culture. This article explores how Galician writers Manuel Rivas and Domingo Villar’s work is perceived and re-constructed by an anglophone readership through an analysis of professional (press) reviews and semiprofessional (blog) reviews based on the homogenization- eterogenizationexoticismcontinuum posited by Saldanha (2018).

scholarly journals Image in Translated Novels from English into Persian

2016 ◽  
Vol 6 (4) ◽  
pp. 50
Author(s):  
Gholam-Reza Parvizi
Keyword(s):  
Aesthetic Experience ◽  
Translation Studies ◽  
Literary Translation ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
Theoretical Frameworks ◽  
Translation Strategies ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
The Mind

The question of image in literary studies and in recent years in Translation Studies is one of the most problematic innature. In the present study an attempt was made to define the nature of translating linguistic constructions – evokingimages in the mind of reader – in English novels and their rendered versions in Persian translations. In this studyseven types of images (visual, auditory, olfactory, gustatory, tactile, kinesthetic and organic) in two English novelsand their rendered versions in Persian were analyzed based on two theoretical frameworks, the first one is Jiang’sImage-Based Model to Literary Translation (2008) by which the nature of translation of images were examined andthe other is Chesterman’s translation strategies (1997) which help to systematize translation strategies adopted bytranslators in rewriting the images in English novels. The results have shown that in most of the cases the images thatare intended by original author have been changed in the translations, and the aesthetic experience of the ST reader isdifferent from that of the TT reader.

5. The futures of comparative literature

2018 ◽  
pp. 113-122
Author(s):  
Ben Hutchinson
Keyword(s):  
Comparative Literature ◽  
Vital Role ◽  
Aesthetic Education ◽  
Literary Studies ◽  
Life Of The Mind ◽  
The Aesthetic ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Forms Of Knowledge

Comparative literature is both central and marginal to literary studies: central because it draws on almost every discipline in the Humanities; marginal because it is not tied to any single tradition, risking being ignored by all of them. For all its past struggles and present debates, comparative literature has an increasingly central role to play in the Humanities’ future. ‘The futures of comparative literature’ explains that in this age of specialists, generalists continue to play a vital role in shaping and supporting the life of the mind. International, interdisciplinary forms of knowledge remain the very essence of modernity. Now more than ever, the aesthetic education of comparative literature is indispensable.

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